Using Medicines Wisely
Medicines are important, but they may have risks of side effects that can even be worse than the original condition. Man has always searched for medicines that can cure body ills, and there are now tens of thousands of medicinal drugs available. They are playing important role in the treatment of disease and the relief of human suffering, both physical and mental. However, the one of the biggest problems in health care today is their misuse, whether they are bought over the counter, or provided on a doctor’s prescription.
Read MoreBenefits of Swimming
Swimming is one type of exercise often included in health tips. There are many benefits that you can get from swimming. If you like to swim without a pause for 10 minutes every day, and you divide the time equally between breaststroke, crawl, and backstroke, you would not need to take no other exercise. Swimming is great for the heart and lungs, for mobility of major joints, and for muscle strength.
Breaststroke
Breaststroke is not as demanding as the crawl or backstroke unless swum very fast. Breaststroke is great for all-round exercise and ideal to be used in public pools because of the good forward visibility.
Read MoreMake Sure that You Get Enough Sleep
Whether you are under stress or not, you need to get enough sleep. Without sleep, hallucinations start to occur and after around 10 days with no sleep at all death can become a real threat. On average, a newborn baby spends almost two –thirds of its time asleep, that by the age of 4 or 5 the proportion has dropped to under half and that the average adult sleeps for about 7 hours of the 24 hours.
Some experts believe that adults who regularly sleep more than 7 hours are doing themselves harm because their body processes are becoming too sluggish. However, anything between 4 and 11 hours a night is quite normal. Your lifestyle and constitution are the things that affect how much you should sleep.
The mystery is why we need to sleep. The most acceptable theory at the moment is that input of sense data to the brain has to stop for several hours a day to allow the brain to rationalize, disperse, and store the day’s intake. Imagine how much information the brain takes in during the day. Everything that you see, hear, touch, and smell may stir associations in the subconscious. If all these things are left unsorted, we can describe to condition of the brain just like a mail-sorting office without any staffs.
We are not certain, but the process of rationalization that goes on in the brain seems to be closely related to dreaming, and dreams may represent the process itself. The dreams also likely to be useful to express parts of waking urges that has to be repressed for social or cultural reasons. Erotic fantasy dream is an obvious example. Other dreams are probably prompted by sense data that is too strong to block out, even by sleep. An example of this kind of dream is when we dream of bells when our alarm clock is ringing.
There are several levels of sleep. The levels are shallow, deep, and paradoxical. Shallow sleep is the first stage of sleep. In shallow sleep, breathing is light and the body slows down. People often change position in this sleep stage. Thirty changes or more are normal in one night’s sleep. In deep sleep, the body is thoroughly relaxed, growth hormones are relaxed, and the body replaces dead cells. In paradoxical sleep, the level of relaxation is much the same as in deep sleep but the brain is much more alert. Breathing becomes irregular and the eyes can be seen moving rapidly under the eyelids. It seems that in paradoxical sleep stage the dreaming occurs more profusely. It is in paradoxical sleep also that sexual dreams become prominent. A cycle of shallow-deep-paradoxical sleep normally repeats 4 or 5 times throughout the night. The greatest objection of using sleeping pills (beside the possibility of addiction) is that they appear to derange this pattern and reduce the quantity of paradoxical sleep.
Apparently, babies spend up to 50 percent of their sleeping time in the paradoxical stage, while adults spend around 20 percent.
Read MoreWarming Up Before Sports
Warming up before any kind of exercise can lead to a better performance and will reduce the risk of muscle and heart damage. No matter how fit and well trained you are for a particular sport, you will face the risk of injury if you don’t warm up before doing the sport. Warming up prepares the body for physical activity in three ways. Firstly, the circulation in the coronary system is stimulated so that sufficient and oxygen can be pumped to the heart when the real effort begins. Secondly, the cartilages in the major joints thicken perceptibly, thus improving the strength of the joints and making them less liable to injury. Thirdly, the muscles themselves actually get warmer and increase in elasticity as well as power.
There are inherent dangers in rushing into strenuous physical activity without warming up first. Your body is just not ready to meet the demands you are making on it. At least you are risking a severe cramp, and the very worst is you might have a heart attack from a condition known as myocardial ischemia (inadequate circulation). Of course, we all know that most people don’t warm up before chasing the bus and they are just fine, so you can often be ok without any preparation before exercises, but it is not the best approach.
Nobody knows exactly what causes cramp. It can affect and athlete just as severely as someone who never do exercises. Cramp and stitch are involuntary contractions of a flexer muscle, far beyond that caused by normal movement. There are many remedies for cramp, but there is no scientifically proved cures.
The most common misconception about warming up is that you need to work up a sweat. The fact is, if you limber up to the point of perspiration, you have expended far too much energy and you will not have the full strength for whatever it is you want to do. As a result, you might not be able to perform well. To warm up for any kind of sport, all you need to do is gently raise your pulse rate to between 100 to 110 beats a minute. It will only take a couple of minutes. However, there is a disagreement among athletes about the necessary warming up. But to make it simple, the best way to warm up for a sport is by practicing non-competitively for five or six minutes. This will adequately exercise the muscles that you will use in the game.
After the exercise, you should warm down slowly. This apparent contradiction can be simply explained. When you are active, all the blood vessels of the body open up to help circulation to the muscles, which squeeze blood to the heart. If you stop suddenly and just stand still with vessels still dilated, the heart has difficulty keeping up supply to some areas without the help of the muscles. Gravity drains the blood away from the brain and you might faint. You can see this draining process in action if your ankles swell after playing tennis or during half-time break of a football match.
Read MoreBenefits of Meditation
Meditation has great attractions for a society living on its nerves and subjected to constant change. The popularity of meditation has increased since it was discovered that meditation has great benefits in relieving tension. Meditation is now being used to treat medical conditions such as raised blood pressure, migraine, tension headaches, etc. Among some of the psychological changes observable during meditation are a decrease in respiration rate and in oxygen consumption and a decline in concentration of blood lactate (a chemical that seems to increase when the body is under stress).
The word “meditation” comes from the Latin meditari that means to reflect and to practice. This gives the idea of combining inward-looking thought and awareness of your own mind and body with a regular training process that involves a certain amount of discipline.
Meditation is as old as recorded history in the East. In China and Japan, meditation was closely linked with the religion of Buddhism in its various forms. In Zen Buddhism for example, meditation is aimed at achieving a higher plane of consciousness in which the physical needs are forgotten and man’s spirit perceives essential truth. Many Buddhist monks can slip quickly into a state of serenity and peaceful alertness, and some can even survive burial for several hours. However, the religious content and the emphasis on mental concentration rather than relaxation make these forms of meditation forbidding to regular people.
One type of meditation that has gained popularity is yoga. The word “yoga” is taken from the Sanskrit word that means to bind or yoke together. Yoga has many different forms, each with a different aim. The most popular form of yoga in the West is Hatha yoga. This unisex yoga claims to enable both men and women to gain complete control of mind and body.
Read MoreSoap and Eczema
Researchers discovered that using harsh soaps could be the cause of eczema, rather than just exacerbating the problem. Soap can wipe the natural oils off the skin, and making it vulnerable to irritation and infection. The perfumes contained in soap may also cause some allergic reactions.
People who are suffering from eczema or other dry skin problems should moisturize frequently using a bland and non-perfumed moisturizer in order to create a protective barrier. They should also avoid the foaming agent (sodium lauryl sulphate) that dries the skin.
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