Top 10 Reasons to Smile

Smiling is a great way to make yourself stand out while helping your body to function better. Smile to improve your health, your stress level, and your attractiveness. Smiling is just one fun way to live longer read about the others and try as many as you can.

1. Smiling Makes Us Attractive

We are drawn to people who smile. There is an attraction factor. We want to know a smiling person and figure out what is so good. Frowns, scowls and grimaces all push people away -- but a smile draws them in (avoid these smile aging habits to keep your smile looking great).

2. Smiling Changes Our Mood

Next time you are feeling down, try putting on a smile. There's a good chance you mood will change for the better. Smiling can trick the body into helping you change your mood.

3. Smiling Is Contagious

When someone is smiling they lighten up the room, change the moods of others, and make things happier. A smiling person brings happiness with them. Smile lots and you will draw people to you.

4. Smiling Relieves Stress

Stress can really show up in our faces. Smiling helps to prevent us from looking tired, worn down, and overwhelmed. When you are stressed, take time to put on a smile. The stress should be reduced and you'll be better able to take action.

5. Smiling Boosts Your Immune System

Smiling helps the immune system to work better. When you smile, immune function improves possibly because you are more relaxed. Prevent the flu and colds by smiling.

6. Smiling Lowers Your Blood Pressure

When you smile, there is a measurable reduction in your blood pressure. Give it a try if you have a blood pressure monitor at home. Sit for a few minutes, take a reading. Then smile for a minute and take another reading while still smiling. Do you notice a difference?

7. Smiling Releases Endorphins, Natural Pain Killers and Serotonin

Studies have shown that smiling releases endorphins, natural pain killers, and serotonin. Together these three make us feel good. Smiling is a natural drug.

8. Smiling Lifts the Face and Makes You Look Younger

The muscles we use to smile lift the face, making a person appear younger. Don't go for a face lift, just try smiling your way through the day you'll look younger and feel better.

9. Smiling Makes You Seem Successful

Smiling people appear more confident, are more likely to be promoted, and more likely to be approached. Put on a smile at meetings and appointments and people will react to you differently.

10. Smiling Helps You Stay Positive

Try this test: Smile. Now try to think of something negative without losing the smile. It's hard. When we smile our body is sending the rest of us a message that "Life is Good!" Stay away from depression, stress and worry by smiling.

By Mark Stibich

Burnout alert

Feeling overwhelmed, stressed and emotional? Find out if you are heading for a burnout disaster.

Stress is part and parcel of modern life but if you don't manage it properly it has the potential to wreak havoc and may eventually lead to a clinical condition referred to as burnout.

Burnout, explains clinical psychologist, Cecile Gerick, is more than just being tired. "In most cases of burnout the body manifests some or other disease because the mind has been overwhelmed and stressed for a long period of time. This stress build up can happen over months or sometimes even years and the results are feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness. Burnout is a total physical, mental and emotional energy drainer."

Pretoria-based clinical and consulting psychologist, Lerato Mabenge, says when you find that your usual stress coping mechanisms are no longer meeting the demands of your daily life, it is a sign that you are depleted and are at high risk of burning out.

Exhaustion vs burnout

We are all likely to suffer from exhaustion at some point in our lives. But Gerick says, unlike burnout, exhaustion is a physical condition that inadvertently impacts your mental state of mind. "Most driven people suffer from exhaustion because they want to do more than what the body is capable of. In most cases exhaustion is caused by factors such as long working hours, being up at night with a sick child or having an emotionally draining argument. In such instances when the person has enough rest and sleep, preferably over a whole weekend, their energy levels are restored to normal."

Burnout on the other hand is more debilitating and can trigger volatile behaviour. "The main symptom of burnout is constant and unabated fatigue but it is coupled with feelings of worthlessness, lack of acknowledgement at work or at home, anxiety and generally being overwhelmed by life's challenges," explains Gerick.

Burnout candidates

While just about anybody who feels like they're carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders can suffer from burnout, there are some people who are more prone to it. Mabenge says healthcare workers and police officers who have intense and emotionally charged working environments are very susceptible to burnout because of the continually stressful nature of their work. Gerick says in her experience burnout patients are most frequently people with an A-type personality: ambitious, driven, strive too much for perfection and expect everything to be done their way. These personality types she says are more susceptible to burnout because they often feel disappointment that they are not rewarded for their efforts.

Treatment

There is no quick fix when it comes to burnout and treatment is often a multi-pronged approach that involves serious lifestyle changes, such as exercising, changing your diet and intense therapy or counselling. "It is important to get psychological help to enable the brain to form new neurological paths. This adjustment will bring about a different response to the way the person handles situations," says Gerick. Burnout patients, she says, must learn to become pro-active instead of reactive, which results in impulsive behaviour towards challenges and stress that will lead them right back down the burnout route.

Positive self-talk and a positive support structure is an important part of the healing process. It is also important for people in recovery to get fresh air and exercise, and find time and space to recharge their batteries. Depending on your work and your financial situation, this might involve taking a sabbatical or extended sick leave.

No matter what option you choose, remember there is no timeline to treatment and you must be prepared to make time for your recovery.

Acknowledgement: True Love

37 creative ways to de-stress

Your life is boring. The two most exciting things that happened to you this week was an afternoon of sunshine when you had washing on the line and the phone call on Sunday night was not from your mother-in-law.

  

Your social calendar for the immediate future contains two birthday parties for three-year-olds and a PTA meeting. You feel the only time you see other people is when you go to the supermarket or the Laundromat. When you start watching infomercials on morning TV, you should know it's time to do something new.

There are things every one of us should do at least once a year – if only to remind ourselves that we are alive. Remember who you used to be, get a good babysitter – if you need one that is, and let the games begin.

• Go for a long walk in the rain – who cares if your underwear gets soaked?
• Go away for a weekend, but don’t decide on a destination beforehand. Just get in the car and see where it takes you.
• Read all your old love letters.
• Go and watch two movies in one day and have a pizza and some wine in between the two.
• Get up early and watch the sun rise.
• Go to an outdoor symphony concert.
• Phone an old friend you have not spoken to for ages.
• Wear something outrageous and different to what you would usually wear.
• Buy a lottery ticket.
• Reread your three favourite poems and books – preferably in bed or in front of a fire.
• Go for a long walk next to the ocean.
• Swim when it’s raining.
• Buy something you don’t need at all, but would like to have anyway.
• Phone an old boyfriend on his birthday.
• Let the dog sleep under the duvet on a really cold night.
• Talk through the night to someone you really care about and only go to sleep when the birds start chirping.
• Invite the nice new person at work for dinner – don’t just promise to do it.
• Eat oranges and broccoli and chocolate fudge and pizza for supper – just because that’s what you feel like.
• Go and see a play or a live concert.
• Spend an hour on the phone to your best friend gossiping about someone you know, preferably your boss or your mother-in-law.
• Have a picnic.
• Go to a restaurant you have never been to before.
• Go for a massage or aromatherapy.
• Watch the sunset.
• Ask your hairdresser what he/she would like to do with your hair.
• Use some of your hard-earned savings and suddenly decide to go and see your friend in Milan or Dubai, or wherever.
• Learn to let the dishes stand for a day.
• Sign up for singing lessons, dancing lessons, or judo classes, or paper marbling, or live drawing, or writing classes, or Tai Chi.
• Put in a day’s leave and go camping in the wilds or in a nature reserve for a long weekend (no toddlers in nappies allowed on this trip – that’s what grandparents are for).
• Go to a nursery and buy some plants, even if they’re for the balcony of your flat.
• Go to the local tourist information bureau and pretend for one weekend that you are a tourist in your hometown. Visit the museum, climb the mountain, visit a gold mine, or crocodile ranch, or take a township tour.
• Invite ten very dissimilar people to a dinner party. Drink a tranquiliser beforehand.
• Commit one hour a week of your time towards helping others in some way – whether volunteering at a community organisation or visiting your mother’s aunt in an old age home.
• Buy flowers for yourself.
• Go out for the evening and say “Expect me when you see me” as you leave.
• Walk barefoot in wet grass.
• Go out for breakfast.
• Leave the TV off for an hour, day or a week or until it hurts.

Acknowledgement: Susan Erasmus, Health24.com

Ouma se Kombuis

Love Heals

Love’s ointment works on bruised knees as well as broken dreams. Love has the power to heal all conditions of the body and mind. Love’s glow melts its seeming opponents into pure light. Where love is, all is well.

Love is at the centre of every miraculous healing. It lifts the spirit of the bereaved. It penetrates the darkest hallway to reveal the next step. There is no loss, pain, or betrayal that love cannot illuminate. There is no sadness that love cannot soothe.

Always Enough

Sometimes it seems that love is the problem. It can appear that love caused the pain. People we love reject us, or they die, or they become so important to us that we encounter endless types of hurt. It seems that love is scarce and can be taken away at the whim of the beloved. This illusion of the scarcity of love comes closer to describing the cause of the pain. It is the sense of lack that hurts, not the love. The lack is an illusion.

There is always enough love. It is behind every great creation. Love is the canvas that holds up the paint. Love is the page that hosts the words. Love is the day you live into. It is every background, hidden behind every story, colored by every circumstance. Underneath every experience there is a field of love upon which that moment was built. There is always enough love. We simply must find it.

Finding Love

Finding love is different from finding your keys or your eyeglasses when they disappear. And yet, we tend to think of it in the same way. We think love is hiding somewhere. We left it with that person or in that old town or in that dear friend. We tend to think love is located in the person we love and when we lose that person we have lost love. Love is very different from that. Love lives in every moment in every particle of existence. Finding love is more like looking through the paint to the canvas, looking through the situation to the essence.

Try This

Here is an exercise for accessing love regardless of conditions. In order to reap the full benefit from this exercise, first take a moment to look around you at the condition of your life. Notice what kind of presence love occupies in your awareness. Take a neutral glance at your entire situation as if through a wide-angle lens. Without judging or defending, free from praise or blame, simply appreciate the contrasting landscape of your incarnation.

Once you have perused your lifescape, close your eyes and gently settle your awareness on your heart centre right in the middle of your chest. Allow your breathing to become soft and relaxed. With each breath imagine your heart center infused with the gentle presence of love. Imagine this love soothing all hurts, filling all spaces of loss, and brightening all gloom. As the light of love becomes more established in you, realize that this love is always there. It is intrinsic to your nature. It is native to your being. You don’t have to put it there or develop it. It is the canvas of your life. Love is what you are made of.

Expand your awareness to include your whole body and an egg-shaped energy field all around you. Let love’s quiet presence ease into your awareness, permeating your entire field. With each gentle breath, allow yourself to become so soft and peaceful that the love that resides within you can shine through your situation and your thoughts, through your pains and your losses. Become so quiet that you can sense the slightest presence of this beautiful love as it glows through your physical body.

You may want to regularly spend some time revealing the love that you are in this type of meditative process. The benefits of this practice may surprise you. Love heals a scraped elbow as well as a broken heart. And it does something more. It attracts more love.

By Rebbie Straubing

My Beautiful World

Beautiful South Africa

Glorious Food