By Adella Klein

Feel like you don’t have as much energy as you used to? Stressed out about things that happen both at work and in your personal life? Want to lose the five extra pounds that have taken up residence on your hips? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may need a lesson in healthy living.

The average person spends two thirds of their life either at work, working at home or thinking about work. The majority of the remaining time is spent sleeping. So what can you do in your waking hours to make sure you’re living the healthiest lifestyle possible? We have the answers:

1. Eliminate Stress. Eliminating undue stress can be one of the hardest things to accomplish in your daily routine. On the other hand, it also has the biggest impact on your life. Ever heard the saying ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’? It’s time to put those words into action. And if you still can’t beat the blues, try lighting some candles and taking a bath, planning a day at the health spa, working out or reading a book. These are all known to be effective measures in relieving stress.

2. Quit Smoking If you’ve taken up the not-so-flattering (not to mention, unhealthy) habit of smoking, we strongly urge you to try quitting. And while we realize that doing so may up your stress levels for a short period of time, the long term effects on your health will be worth it in the end.

3. Eat Healthy. Maintaining a healthy, balanced diet will work wonders for your health and will improve your overall energy. Eating green vegetables, fruit and the appropriate portions of meat and dairy combined with drinking lots of water and milk (to strengthen bones) will not only help you lose those extra pounds but will make you feel like a million bucks as well.

4. Exercise. Working out on a consistent basis will also make you look and feel better. Exercising (whether it’s at a gym or in your home) will increase energy, relieve stress and leave you looking damn good. Who’s going to say no to that?

5. Stay Informed. Health education is a great way to learn about new ways to stay healthy. Watching health channels on television (preferably while running on a treadmill) or reading a health magazine (you know, to relieve some stress) will help make sure you know what’s going on in the industry.

Now that you know the plan, it’s time to put it in action. Good luck - and stay healthy!

Adella Klein is an expert on Healthy Living. When she’s not speaking within the community to promote Women’s Health issues, she’s contributing her knowledge and expertise to OneHealthyLifestyle.com

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By Stanley Hyman

There are many ways to improve your memory. Getting enough sleep, eating right, reducing stress and not abusing drugs or alcohol are important for obvious reasons. However many of the tips I offer in this article are memory assisting (mnemonic) methods that you can employ today.

Concentrate/Pay Attention: Sounds like a no-brainer but for Acquisition or Encoding to take place you must concentrate on what you are trying to remember. Often we are so busy doing something that we are not paying enough attention to encode the information in the first place.

Picture It: Whenever possible create a picture in your mind of what you are trying to remember. Adding a visual sense or image to the information creates more relevance and makes it more likely to get stored.

Make It Relevant: It is easier for Consolidation and Retrieval to take place if the new information is associated with already existing information. Pairing the new information with an image, a joke or even a sound will help.

Use Acronyms: Using the first letter of the words you are trying to remember to make up another word has always been a great way to remember long names or lists of things. For instance the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is NASA, a web log is a BLOG and Information Technology is IT.

Use Acrostics: An Acrostic is text (or a poem) in which the letters (or words) of the Acrostic spell another word. The letters often come at the beginning of the words. For example the Acrostic RANED helps you to remember to: Read A Newsletter Every Day.

Use Rhymes: Who doesn’t remember, Thirty days hath September, April, June and …what was the next one? Rhyming is fun and helps put otherwise mindless or irrelevant information into organized auditory patterns.

“Chunk” Your Information: This means putting information into manageable segments. For example if you want to remember a series of numbers you might turn them into segments of 5 or 7 each. Telephone numbers are mostly 7 digit segments (apart from area codes) so that we can remember them. You can also give them a sort of rhythm as you commit them to memory.

RepeatRepeatRepeat: Repetition is practice and we all know that “practice makes perfect”. Repetition sends the target information through the hippocampus (see previous article) thereby making it more likely to Consolidate or get stored in the brain. ­

Organize It: Organizing information into relevant categories gives it more meaning. A form of organization is a simple outline (like the ones you learned in school) that breaks an idea down into relevant parts. An example might be remembering items on a shopping list in food groups rather than random grocery items.

Make Dramatic Connections: Associating the information you want to remember with different images can help in effectively storing it in your brain for retrieval. For example if you wanted to remember the name, Tom Cruise you might associate him with a cruise ship.

Talking Out Loud: Repeating the information out loud by saying it to yourself or to others creates an opportunity for auditory encoding to take place. Saying it to others is a form of teaching others the information. This is active learning and is very helpful in storing information.

Stanley Hyman, LCSW

http://www.AventuraStressRelief.com

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