The Daily Dose: No Time? Make Time.

Today’s healthy tip: give your time away. Always feeling like you never have enough time in the week to get things done? If so, then today’s tip probably seems a bit out of reach for you, but the reality is that it shouldn’t be. A recent study, in which participants were given an amount of time which they could spend in one of three ways – doing nothing (my choice), spending it on themselves (my second choice), or spend it on others (I would have already planned out how I would spend the time in the first two options, and ignored this one). What the study found, quite interestingly enough, is that those who spent their time on others felt that they had more time now and in the future. “But why?!” you ask? Well, by spending that time on others, the participants felt they had done more with their time – which gave them the feeling that they actually have more time. So go out and spend time on someone (read: Eric Bickel) this weekend!

To the links!

I know I’ve stressed (this is a pun, but you don’t know it yet) that exercise is a great way to relieve stress (see, now the pun is pretty obvious). However, new research has suggested that exercise not only relieves stress, but prevents it from occurring later. Exercise provides you with a shield down the road to prevent stress and anxiety during emotional events, and has the added benefit of immediately relieving you of stress. Pretty good deal, I say.

Brain activity has been known to spike during down time, and the reason behind it has been largely unknown. While some of the activity is certainly necessary (such as breathing, and stuff like that), a lot of the activity during our “resting state” is largely mundane (mine is mostly remembering the dumbest things I’ve ever said). Many think it’s to keep the brain active to respond to stimulation, some say it’s restful noise. One thing’s for sure though – the resting state is important. In fact, taking a break after learning something new can significantly increase your ability to remember it down the road.

In a fit of irony, “medication overuse headaches” are a growing problem. Typically, our first response to a headache is to grab a pain reliever. However, these pain relievers could very well be the cause of our headaches – which has forced England to establish new guidelines for treating headaches (one which involves stabbing yourself, aka “acupuncture”). The best way to fight headaches? Prevent them*.

Congratulations on reading this far!

*It took every bit of my willpower to not write “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of pain relievers” right here.

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