Month: March 2018

6 Things You Can Do To Avoid Midlife Crisis

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If you are entering the mid-years of your life, you’re probably wondering about midlife crisis. After all, it seems pretty common.

Midlife crisis can happen to anyone at anytime. Some people experience it early while others struggle with it in the late stages of their lives.

Now, although common, it doesn’t mean that there’s no way for you to avoid it. Check out the tips below to help you stave off or mitigate a midlife crisis.

Believe that it’s never too late

A lot of people who are in their mid-life years panic when they start to take inventory of the things they wanted to do but never made time for. They feel that it’s too late to make them happen now.

It really isn’t.

You still have time to write a book, climb a mountain, travel the world or learn to do that thing you always wanted to. It may seem a little tough when those around you are younger. However, if you really want to avoid having a crisis, you need to accept that if you really want to do it, your age shouldn’t stop you.

Evaluate your priorities

evaluate priorities

Priorities change over time and for good reasons. It is okay to let go of some dreams and expectations if they no longer appeal to you. You haven’t sold yourself short if you find saving for retirement is more important to you than buying a Porsche.

Accepting that priorities change is important and healthy. Doing so will keep you grounded as you move into the new phases of your life.

Stop waiting for things

Now is the time to do something.

That doesn’t mean you need to be extravagant or do something really bold. It simply means that once you identify what you want or what you want to do, make a plan and get it done.

Putting things on hold or constantly waiting for things to happen can leave you feeling unfulfilled and more anxious.

A word of caution:

Doing the things you want and getting what you want out of life is important, but it needs to be done responsibly. Seek advice as needed so that your choices are good ones.

Deal with your regrets

We all have regrets. It is nearly impossible to get through life without wishing you had or had not done certain things. Take the time to get over them.

Take whatever rational measures that may help– apologize, reconnect and then let them go. Moving on does not make you a bad person.

Cultivate friendships now

If you don’t have a good circle of friends yet, then it’s time to make one.

The worst part of midlife crisis is when people feel like they have no one to turn to.

Friends give you a support system, a sounding board, and the happiness of companionship. Never underestimate the power of friendship.

Get or stay in shape

exercise regularly

Never underestimate the power of health and exercise.

There is no need to explain the benefits of exercise to your body but you may not realize how important exercise is to your mind. Regular exercise keeps your mind sharp and helps to alleviate stress.

Depending on your preferred exercise, it can also provide an avenue for new friendships and achievements.

See Also: 19 Ways to Get Motivated to Exercise

In Conclusion

The second half of your life doesn’t have to be scary, depressing or full of crisis.

Understanding that life has its ups and downs and being prepared for them is important. If you feel like you are headed down the path toward midlife crisis, take a moment to stop and take stock of what you are feeling and why.

Use the tips above to get you through the process. If you don’t feel like you can get back on the right path, seek the help of a professional counselor.

For some people, a midlife crisis can be very complicated. It is possible that you may need help to get through it –a lot of people do.

The post 6 Things You Can Do To Avoid Midlife Crisis appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

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5 Ways to Become More Present Everyday

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5 Ways to Become More Present Everyday

In a world full of distractions, it’s become increasingly important to learn how to detach ourselves from all the surrounding “buzz” and become more present. In fact, we owe it to ourselves to pause once in awhile and take in all that life has to offer.

Do you ever find yourself sitting down to write an email, and then you get a sudden urge to check your Facebook? Scrolling your newsfeed turns into browsing YouTube videos and before you know it, an hour has passed until you finally realize you still haven’t written that email.

We live in such a fast paced world and with all the noise that surrounds us, it’s become quite difficult to stay present.

Most of us are aware of the benefits of paying attention to the world around us. However, when it comes to putting it into practice we don’t know where to begin. If you’re looking for stress reduction, increased productivity, higher quality relationships, and more happiness here are five ways to live in the moment.

Breathe

Stopping to breathe, even for a few moments, allows you to check in with yourself and tap into your intuition. The more you can harness your intuition the more conscious you will become allowing yourself to make clearer decisions. Your breathing is also always in the present moment.

Limit notifications

Technology is an excellent tool when used properly, but it easily becomes distracting. Make it a priority to determine which notifications are important and turn off the rest. An overwhelmed mind is not a present mind.

Step away from the noise

Limiting your notifications is the perfect first step, but imagine yourself away from your devices for an hour. If you’re a millennial like me this might be hard to imagine, but just think for a second, our parents and their parents never had all of these distractions.

Once you get past the need to know what’s going on in everyone else’s life, you allow yourself to focus on what’s going on in yours.

Go outside

When is the last time you really went outside? I’m not talking about walking to and from your car when you leave the office. Think back to your younger years.

Do you remember that sense of joy you felt as a child running your fingers through a patch of grass? Or the feelings of happiness when you tried to make shapes out of clouds. It’s no surprise that connecting with nature can increase your happiness.

Focus on the details

We get so caught up in our response that sometimes we fail to listen. Whether it’s a conversation with a loved one or listening to the birds chirping while sipping your morning coffee focus on the intricacies each situation offers.

The beauty of being present is that when we’re focused on the now, our fears disappear, we can ignore outside distractions, and we make decisions that are based off of what we care about the most.

After overcoming a medical trauma, Gary has been inspiring others to overcome their challenges. For more inspiration and to learn more about his story, visit laughatadversity.com

You’ve read 5 Ways to Become More Present Everyday, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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The Consciousness Deniers

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Some thinkers have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiraled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness.

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REX TILLERSON IS OUT — here are all the casualties of the Trump…

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This is what your smartphone is doing to your brain — and it…

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Famous for its place in space travel history, Canaveral National…

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Famous for its place in space travel history, Canaveral National Seashore in Florida has wonders that are much easier to experience than the walking on the Moon. As high-tech rockets soar into space, sea turtles – one of the oldest animals still living on Earth – nest on a nearby beach. Walking paths lead visitors by more than 1,000 species of plants as exotic birds fly overhead. Mosquito Lagoon harbors an amazing variety of fish, oysters, crabs and shrimp. We also recommend settling in the sand and watching the sunset. Photo by Phillip Lott (www.sharetheexperience.org).

 

Memento Park

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Matt Santos, the protagonist of Mark Sarvas’s compelling second novel, Memento Park, gives himself away on the book’s opening page. “I am aware of my presence in this room,” he says, “of the figure I must appear to cut, my fealty always to my unseen audience.” Matt is a reasonably successful B-list character actor. The room he occupies is in a high-end auction house where, come morning, a recently acquired masterpiece will be put on the block, and he does, in this instance, see his lone audience member, a security guard from a firm called Vigil.

Matt at first misreads the word on the uniform as “Virgil,” and during the long overnight hours the auction house has agreed to let him sit with the painting before its sale, he is ever conscious of his Virgil, addressing himself wordlessly to the stranger, narrating the saga of the painting and how he and it have come to be there. It’s a riveting story — and, in Sarvas’s able hands, artfully told — even if its narrator’s shortcomings, in the end, dull its resonance.

The painting Matt is spending the night with is Budapest Street Scene, by the fictional Jewish Hungarian artist Ervin Kalman, who committed suicide as the Nazis marched into Budapest in 1944. Matt, a second-generation Hungarian American, is told that the artwork has been traced to his family, that authorities believe his Jewish paternal grandfather traded it to a member of the fascist Arrow Cross in exchange for transit papers to London. He is encouraged to submit a claim for the painting, worth several million dollars, with the help of an attorney specializing in restitution.

Matt doesn’t know much beyond the bare outlines of his family’s wartime escape from the Nazis, and having been raised without religion, he doesn’t know much about Judaism, either. But he’s mystified as to why his father, Tibor, always “the schemer, the pursuer of angles,” refuses anything to do with the matter. He is less surprised that his father spurns Matt’s attempts to learn more about the past, as the two have a distant relationship punctuated by explosions of mutual resentment. To Matt’s dismay, Tibor is more at ease with Matt’s beautiful catalog model fiancée, Tracy, than with his own son.

The restitution process becomes complicated when a terminally ill Chicago rabbi submits a competing claim to Budapest Street Scene. Matt and his attorney, Rachel, attempt to uncover the truth of its provenance themselves, a quest that takes them on a momentous trip to Hungary. Rachel is an observant Jew, and Matt finds himself attracted to and awed by her piety. Speaking to her on the phone, he hears in her voice “that mysterious ancient music, notes of faith that I believed could restore me.” His fascination with Rachel leads him to regret his secular upbringing. Stepping inside a synagogue for the first time in decades, he marvels at the sanctuary’s “unexpected familiarity” and grieves for his “denied birthright” as a Jew. “All the years of study and devotion that marked the lives around me,” he laments, “whereas I had nothing to clutch but my blankness.”

That blankness can make Matt a frustrating protagonist. Sarvas, who founded the literary blog The Elegant Variation and whose debut novel, Harry, Revised, was published in 2008, reinforces, throughout the book, the first page’s characterization of Matt as an actor forever inhabiting an imaginary stage: Matt hopes Virgil sees him as an “intense, solitary brooder of unknowable depth.” Of a conversation with Tracy, he says, “I know how to deliver a line with consequence, and I did.” And elsewhere, “my life is merely a script.” Appropriately, Tracy chides him, “I don’t know what you believe in at all, half the time.”

As his reckoning with his heritage pierces his complacency with his great-on-paper Los Angeles life, Matt becomes sulky and self-pitying. He laments that everyone — the doomed Kalman, his devout lawyer, his compassionate fiancée, even his remote father — has a holy spark that “everyone but me, godless Matt Santos, carried God.” He aches for his “lost Jewish childhood,” but it’s not clear that a childhood of religious observance would have filled the hollowness at his core. Sarvas has created a gripping, twisty mystery that deftly tackles big questions — about the weight of history, the intricacies of identity, the often anguished love between parents and children — but its limited protagonist can only grasp at their answers.

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How to Study Effectively: 4 Ways To Study Like An Ivy League Student

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Studying is a crucial skill for students but it’s one that’s not explicitly taught in school. Instead, it’s something you have to figure out on your own. It can be a trial-and-error process to find exactly what works for you.

To help you out, here are a few tips on how to study effectively.

Take Your Notes by Hand

notes writing

Typing on a laptop may be quick but writing out your notes by hand helps you process the information better. Since you can type faster than you write, you can probably jot down almost everything the lecturer is saying.

Writing forces you to choose only the important information. If you take written notes in your class, you’re actually getting a bit of a head start on studying. The same goes if you’re taking notes from a class reading.

Put away your laptop and take out your old spiral-bound notebook. Laptops can be distracting whether you’re in a classroom or inside your dorm. It can tempt you into logging into your social media accounts and checking out your friends’ profiles.

Study At Your Best Time

You may think you’re a master at cramming but you’re retaining a lot less than you think. Cramming is only good for remembering information short-term which you can lose quickly.

This means that if you have to recall the same information for a homework or test, it’s unlikely you’ll remember much of it.

Cramming also usually means giving up sleep so that you can study. This can have a negative impact on your health and memory. You may think you’re doing yourself a favor by choosing to study instead of sleep, but sleep is something that’s necessary for remembering things.

So, pick the right time to study and know when your mind is clearest. Take distractions into consideration, too. If you know you have a chunk of time before your roommate gets back from class and you’re alone, that’s probably a good time for studying.

Make Sure to Test Yourself

Testing yourself throughout your studying process can make information stick better. This method also makes it really clear what information you have to work on before the actual test comes.

If you’re studying solo, try making flashcards. You can also have friends test you out.

 

Eliminate Distractions

studying without distractions

These days we pride ourselves on being able to multitask. Studying while checking texts and social media is pretty common.

However, distractions can definitely hinder your ability to recall information. Studying with no interruptions is the only way to ensure you’re retaining all the information you need.

And that’s not limited to your phone. Having access to the Internet when studying can also be distracting.

As a solution, you can install website blockers. This way, you won’t be tempted to open your social media accounts while you are preparing for an exam.

If your dorm is too noisy, try the library or a study room on campus. If you learn best alone, don’t invite friends to study with you. Make sure you’re setting up an environment that allows you to focus completely on your work.

It’s a lot easier to study like a pro than you might think. Try these methods and make yourself the best student you can be.

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The Barbarism of Alabama’s Botched Execution

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Every new “humane” way of killing—the guillotine, the rope, the chair, the gurney, the gas chamber—turns out, ultimately, to be as shockingly medieval as the last. The task of finding usable veins—in this case, on a cancerous, frail, and prematurely aged body—is now revealed as merely the latest chapter in this ghoulish history. Whatever one’s position on capital punishment, Americans can surely agree that no one should be tortured to death.

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12 Important Life Lessons I Learned The Hard Way

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It’s been a long journey for me to realize what life is about and how to be happy.

After surviving a physically and emotionally abusive stepfather, I became a rebellious teenager. I took things to the extreme. I was deeply involved in drugs and the wrong group of friends.

As a result, it took me 6 years to graduate from college. I was arrested more times than I can count and spent time in drug rehab.

Eventually, I managed to graduate. After that, I studied law and passed the bar.

Now, I own two businesses. I am an advocate of ultra-running, a healthy lifestyle, and inspiring others.

So, how did I turn myself around?

The answer is in these 12 important life lessons.

Everyone Deserves a Second Chance

If it wasn’t for the 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th chances that I have received from others, I would not be where I am today. Sometimes, it takes a few times to catch on so don’t deny others when they ask for a second chance.

Say sorry even if it may not be your fault

say sorry

Although some disagree with this lesson, I find it is always soothing to both parties. If someone is blaming you for something, tell them you’re sorry. That’s all they usually want to hear.

Even if it’s not your fault, you’ll be making the other person feel better when you apologize right away. This can make the world a lot better.

See Also: 5 Ways to Say Sorry

Be thankful

Be grateful for who you are and what you have. Realize how lucky you are and enjoy everything and everyone in your life.

See Also: The Magic of Appreciation: How to Practice Gratitude

Keep an open mind

The world isn’t black and white and easily labeled. Keep an open mind to expand your experiences and enhance your life. Always be open to change because it’s the key to self-improvement.

Chase your fear

This is easier said than done.

If you’re scared to do something or think you won’t be good at it, it’s a sure sign you should be doing it. I learned this with public speaking, quitting my corporate job, and following my heart.

Getting out of your comfort zone is the only way to receive new experiences and reach fulfillment.

The past does not predict the future

If you looked at where I was when I was 17, you could never predict how “well” I would turn out. I was labeled a low-life loser and my life didn’t seem to be getting any better.

However, it slowly started to turn around when I looked inside myself and asked what I wanted and believed I could do.

Take 100% responsibility for your life

Don’t make any excuses for why things aren’t working out for you or why you aren’t where you want to be. You are the only person who is in charge of your life.

Don’t waste a moment blaming others as that’s just a waste of time. If you want to change your life, it’s up to you and no one else.

Laugh

happiness laugh

We are on this earth for a very short time so enjoy it. Laugh and smile as much as possible. It’s the best feeling in the world.

Personally, I wish I could feel uncontrollable laughter constantly. When I’m in that state, nothing else matters.

Keep positive people around you

I can’t stress this enough.

Only people who want the best for you should be in your “group”. If someone is not enhancing your life, drop them immediately. It doesn’t matter if you have known them for 20 years. If they are not bringing you up, they are dragging you down.

Get them out of your life and watch how far you rise. You are better off alone than with a negative person.

Believe in yourself

If you don’t believe in who you are and what you’re capable of, no one else will. Know that you are exactly where you are supposed to be in life. Learn from the situation and know that there is a plan for you and you can do anything you wish. Don’t ever let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Get up early and make your bed

There is so much positive energy in the morning. It consumes me and sets the tone for the day. It’s crazy how I can get so much done before noon.

Don’t forget to make your bed, too. It’s a great feeling to slip into a nicely made bed after a tiring day at work.

Above all, love yourself and be kind to others

We all have a choice in how we treat others. That choice should always be to remain calm in all situation. Be love and kind and watch your world transform.

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