Author: Armin Brott

There’s a lot of talk these days about brain training—exercises you can do to keep your mind sharp and (hopefully) ward off Alzheimer’s and other memory-destroying types of dementia.
But whether your exercises are physical or mental, the muscles you’re working out need time to recover. In other words, getting adequate amounts of downtime is essential. If you don’t, the workouts will become boring and you’ll stop making progress. In still other words, as Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining put it: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
It’s pretty easy to take breaks from physical workouts. But how do you take a break from exercising your brain? After all, most of us need that four pounds of gray and white stuff to be operating at peak capacity while we’re on the job, trying to maintain any kind of personal relationships, or even just deciding which apples to buy at the grocery store.
Learning to power down your brain—also known as meditation—is one of those simple-but-not-easy things. The benefits can be substantial, however. Here are just a few reasons you should think about making meditation a part of your everyday routine (we’ll talk about exactly how to mediate after we’ve got you convinced of the benefits).

It helps you focus and may make you more productive.

A recent study by researchers at Yale University found that meditating slows down activity in a part of the brain that’s associated with mind wandering. Everyone’s mind wanders from time to time, but meditators are better at refocusing their thoughts on what’s important. Since meditation frees your mind from having to focus on anything other than your breathing, when you really do need to home in on something specific, you’ll be ready and able to do so and you’ll be less likely to be distracted.

It reduces stress, anxiety, depression, and panic.

Mind wandering is associated with anxiety, overthinking, depression, and worrying. When meditators feel anxious, they’re often able to use their practice to rein in some of those small obstacles that can become so oppressive. A 2011 study by researchers at Harvard found that people who meditated for eight weeks had a smaller amygdala (the part of the brain that regulates stress, fear, and anxiety). A number of other studies have found that meditation is just as effective as medication in combating depression.

It may change your brain (in some really good ways).

In that same Harvard study, lead researcher Sara Lazar found that 8-week meditators had a larger hippocampus (the part of the brain that regulates memory and learning).
Researchers at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging found that compared to non-meditators, long-term meditators have larger amounts of “gyrification” or folding in a part of the brain called the insula.
“The insula has been suggested to function as a hub for autonomic, affective, and cognitive integration,” said Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the laboratory, in a press release. In other words, gyrification allows the brain to process information more quickly. “Meditators are known to be masters in introspection and awareness as well as emotional control and self-regulation, so the findings make sense that the longer someone has meditated, the higher the degree of folding in the insula.”

It’s heart healthy.

Several studies have found that people who meditate are able to reduce their blood pressure, but that’s just the beginning. Robert Schneider, a professor at the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, did a study of more than 200 men and women who had been diagnosed with heart disease (which put them at risk of having a heart attack or stroke).
The subjects were randomly assigned to either a class about healthy diet and exercise or to a meditation program. The subjects all continued with their normal medical care and medication regimens. Five years into the study, Schneider found that the subjects in the meditation group had a 48 percent reduction in their risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from any other cause.

It may help you lose weight and reduce addictive behavior.

Several studies show that regular meditators are better able to manage emotional eating than non-meditators. Emotional eating (as opposed to eating only when you’re actually hungry) is associated with weight gain and obesity. Since meditation increases activity in the areas of the brain that manage self-control, meditation appears to be very successful in helping people recover from smoking and other addictions.

Okay, so now what?

I’m a pretty skeptical guy, so I instinctively roll my eyes whenever I hear about something that seems to have almost magical benefits. Then I start looking for studies to disprove those claims. There are, of course, some studies that dispute the magnitude of the benefits of meditation, but not that say that meditation is bunk.
More important, I wasn’t able to find a single study that says that meditation is dangerous in any way. Given that there are plenty of upsides and zero downsides, incorporating meditation into an overall program of healthy living seems like a really good idea.
Here’s how.
There are dozens of types of meditation, such as Zen, Transcendental, mindfulness, and others. Most involve focusing on a word, phrase, or object.
But there’s something a lot easier to focus on: your breath. Slowly inhale. Hold your breath for two seconds, then exhale for three seconds. Hold your breath for another two and inhale for three. Repeat for about 20 minutes. Chances are, you won’t get through two cycles before your mind starts heading off in 387 different directions. When that happens, don’t bother to criticize yourself for losing focus—you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. Just slowly and gently refocus on your breathing and start over. With time, you’ll get better and better at ignoring those intrusive thoughts.

The warnings started when I was in junior high (now called middle school). My parents, both of whom were in the first generation of our family to go to college, started warning me that if I didn’t quit fooling around at school and do my homework I might not get a degree. And without a degree, I might not get a job.
Warnings like those wash right off the back of most 11- or 12-year-olds, so I didn’t feel the need to change my behavior. Looking back, I think there was one thing they could have said that would have made me sit up and pay attention: Not getting an education could kill me. That actually happens to be true. Of course, my parents didn’t know that then, and neither did anyone else. But a lot of recent research is finding exactly that.

Causation vs. Correlation

When I first started looking at the studies showing the connection between education, health, and premature death, I thought the whole idea was absurd. I’ve been writing about men’s health for more than a decade, and it’s well known that women outlive men.
But could the simple fact of having a college degree make you healthier or live longer? The answer is yes—and the problem is getting worse. Take a look at the table below, which is from a report by the National Center for Health Statistics called “Health, United States, 2011: With Special Feature on Socioeconomic Status and Health.” As you’ll see, in 1996, a 25-year-old man with a college degree would have expected to live 7 years longer than a guy the same age who didn’t finish high school (for women, that gap was 6 years). Twenty years later, in 2006 (that’s the most recent data available), the man with the degree would expect to outlive the one without the high school diploma by 9 years (8 for women).

Okay, that’s interesting. But how does it work? Well, it turns out that my parents were right. In general, if you’ve got a college degree, you’ll probably get a better-paying job than if you didn’t finish high school. You’ll also probably have better benefits, which makes it more likely that you’d get a regular physical, get age-appropriate health screenings, not smoke, exercise more, and see a doctor if you had some health problem.
Given that education and income go hand in hand, here are two more charts that show the health gap between people with more education or more income and those with less of both.

Michael Grossman of the National Bureau of Economic Research has done extensive research into the connection between education and health and sums it up quite nicely: “Years of formal schooling completed is the most important correlate of good health.”

But could it kill you?

Okay, so not finishing high school and not getting a bachelor’s degree increases the chances that you’ll have some health problems. But does that necessarily translate into increasing the chances that you’ll die? University of Colorado researcher Patrick M. Krueger, along with colleagues from the University of North Carolina and New York University, looked into that question. They analyzed reams of data from the U.S. Census and other sources and estimate that in 2010, 145,243 deaths were attributable to individuals not having graduated high school or earned a GED. Put a little differently, that’s about the same number of deaths that could be saved “if all current smokers had the mortality rates of former smokers,” says Krueger. They also estimated that 110,068 deaths among people who started college but didn’t finish could have been avoided had they gone on to earn their bachelor’s degree.
As a country, nearly 40 percent of us are at risk of dying prematurely. In 2012, 10.7 percent of Americans ages 25-34 didn’t have a high school diploma or a GED, and another 28.5 percent had started college but not finished their degree.
Of course, getting a college degree isn’t magic, and there are plenty of people who dropped out of college or didn’t go at all, including Bill Gates, Rush Limbaugh, Lady Gaga, Mark Zuckerberg, Lebron James and dozens of other athletes, and the creators of WordPress, Mashable, and Tumblr. But those people are the exception. For those of us who are mere mortals, education is really serious stuff.
If you haven’t finished high school, stop reading this and go back to school. If your child hasn’t graduated or seems to be heading toward dropping out, email this article (or print it out if you’re old fashioned enough to own a printer) and help him or her come up with a plan to graduate high school and get at least a bachelor’s degree. Making sure your family is well educated could very well be the best thing you can possibly do for them.

Just about everyone loves a good song. Whether you’re watching The X-Factor, The Voice, or Glee, or singing in a choir, a karaoke bar, the shower, your car, or on stage, there’s something almost magical about the combination of words and music. Actually, it’s more than magical. There’s a growing body of research suggesting that singing—especially in groups—has some very significant and positive physical and psychological benefits. Let’s take a look at some of them.

It’s an auditory pharmacy.

Singing influences levels of several important hormones. It stimulates the release of endorphins, which are associated with feelings of pleasure, and oxytocin (also released during orgasm), which reduces stress and anxiety. It also appears to reduce levels of cortisol and cortisone, which has the effect of reducing stress. Oh, and you don’t have to be a professional singer—or even have any musical talent—to reap these benefits. Researcher Betty A. Bailey and a colleague at the University of Sheffield in England studied a number of choral groups of varying skill levels, including some with no training at all. Their conclusion? Singing “can produce satisfying and therapeutic sensations even when the sound produced by the vocal instrument is of mediocre quality.”
Even audience members can enjoy the benefits. Aaron Williamson, a researcher from the Royal College of Music’s Centre for Performance Science, found that while listening to music, people’s stress hormone levels (cortisol and cortisone) decrease. Listening also leads to “reduced negative mood states” (audience members have fewer feelings of fear, tension, confusion, sadness, and anxiety) and “increased positive mood states” (in other words, they feel more relaxed and connected).

It’s an acoustic gym membership.

A study published in the journal Music Perception found that singers enjoy “positive long-term cardiovascular and pulmonary changes…as singing requires repeated contractions of respiratory muscles.” A number of other studies have documented that since singing is an aerobic activity, it improves circulation, increases oxygen flow, lowers blood pressure, and gives your heart, lungs, and abs a nice workout. Studies at the University of California, Harvard, and Yale have found that choral singers have stronger immune systems and longer lifespans than those who don’t do as much singing.
Compared to a control group of non-singers, those who regularly participated in a chorus made fewer doctor visits and took less prescription and over-the-counter medication.
Singing can also make working out less painful. When I was in Marine Corps boot camp, my drill instructors would lead us in a never-ending repertoire of call-and-response songs about girls, sex, jumping out of planes (sometimes in the same song), and more. The lyrics were moronic, the melodies monotonous (mostly because all the songs had the same one), but those 10- and 15-mile runs went by awfully quickly.

It’s an aural fountain of youth.

Whether you’re young, old, or somewhere in between, singing helps with social bonding, memory, and overall cognitive function.
Bottom line? If you’re feeling stressed, unhappy, or even a little lonely, grab your air microphone and belt out a few tunes. If you can do it with others—even if it’s just a few of your buddies on a road trip—so much the better. But even if you’re all alone, you’ll feel better, get healthier, and possibly live longer.

Most of us have negative reactions to certain sounds, the most famous of which is probably chalk or fingernails on a blackboard. (Interestingly, as chalk and blackboards go the way of the floppy disk, many people are just as bothered by the sound of dry erase markers squeaking on whiteboards.) But there’s a big difference between feeling annoyed by specific sounds and wanting to kill the person making them. If you fit into the latter category, you may have a condition called misophonia, literally the hatred of specific sounds.
Misophonia (sometimes called selective sound sensitivity syndrome) has been around for as long as humans have had ears. But it wasn’t until 2002, when neurologists Pawel and Margaret Jastreboff coined the term, that the scientific community recognized and named this condition.
Arjan Schröder and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam did an exhaustive study of misophonia and found that the most common trigger sounds fall into several categories: eating-related sounds (chewing, lip smacking, gum popping, soup slurping, ice crunching), breathing-related sounds (sniffing, snoring), and repeated sounds (fingers on a keyboard, foot tapping, pen clicking, candy unwrapping).
Misophonia typically starts in the tween years and may affect as much as 20 percent of the population. Early on, reactions to the offending sounds typically start with irritation or disgust, but as the patient gets older, these can quickly morph into anger and physical or emotional aggression (which, unfortunately, some people act on). What also grows with age is the list of trigger sounds.
Almost all misophonia sufferers describe feeling out of control and recognize that their reactions to the trigger sounds are excessive. Interestingly, in most cases people with misophonia experience these reactions only when the sounds are made by other people, not when they’re the ones making them.
Unfortunately, there’s no surefire cure for misophonia. But many misophonics have discovered workarounds, such as avoiding situations where they’re likely to encounter offending sounds. For example, someone who can’t stand the sound of popcorn chomping would probably do well to stay out of movie theaters. Others use earplugs or devices that produce color noise (what we call “white noise” is just sound at a particular frequency that can block out other sounds–some misophonics need a different “color”).
But what do you do when you can’t stand the sound of your wife’s breathing or your child’s sniffling? As you can imagine, misophonia can result in strained relationships and even divorce.
Medical professionals and scientists have had some success with other approaches, including desensitization therapy (gradual exposure to the trigger sound), hypnosis, and cognitive behavioral therapy.
Although misophonia may sound rather dismal, there may be a silver lining: Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois did a study with 100 subjects and found that creativity and intelligence are strongly correlated with the inability to filter out unwanted or irrelevant sounds (what they called “leaky sensory gating”). They point to a number of highly creative people—including Franz Kafka, Charles Darwin, Anton Chekhov, and Marcel Proust—all of whom complained bitterly about noise. According to the study’s lead author, Darya Zabelina, “Creative people with ‘leaky’ sensory gating may have a propensity to deploy attention over a wider focus or a larger range of stimuli.”

It’s no secret that guilt plays havoc with our health. People who feel guilty for extended periods of time are, on average, more depressed, more anxious, more stressed, and have a weaker immune system than those who go through life without the guilt. They’re also more likely to engage in risky, destructive behavior, including self-medicating with drugs and/or alcohol. One of the most powerful producers of guilty feelings is the perception of having disappointed someone. And close to the top of the list of people we might have disappointed are our parents.
Given all that, it would be natural to assume that being a parent’s favorite would produce all sorts of wonderful benefits. But you’d be wrong. In fact, according to a new study, being mom’s favorite may be just as hard on your psychological well-being as being the one who never manages to live up to her expectations or the one who had the most argumentative relationship with her. “There is a cost for those who perceive they are the closest emotionally to their mothers,” wrote Jill Suitor, one of the coauthors of the study and a professor of sociology at Purdue University, “and these children report higher depressive symptoms, as do those who experience the greatest conflict with their mothers or who believe they are the children in whom their mothers are the most disappointed.”
Sound a little counterintuitive, I know, but here’s how it works. There are actually a number of things going on at the same time.
First, there’s the fact that although most mothers would never admit it, they actually do have a favorite child–and kids are quite adept at figuring out where they stand in mom’s eyes relative to their siblings. Favored children often get hassled, teased, made fun of, and excluded by their less-loved siblings. Being on the receiving end of that kind of treatment is depressing. Worse yet, “siblings continued to compare themselves to each other well into middle age,” according to Suitor and her team. And those feelings of depression and unhappiness continue just as long.
Second, there’s the pressure a favorite child feels to take care of Mom as she ages. Because of that pressure and the associated stress, being a caregiver to an aging parent is a known predictor of a variety of negative health effects, including anxiety, depression, premature aging, exhaustion, and an increased mortality rate from all causes.
Interestingly, this study, which was published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, found that the effects of being the favorite (or least favored) child were the same, regardless of whether the child was male or female. And in an effort to correct a clear case of gender bias, the same research team is investigating the effects on children of being favored by (or being a disappointment to) Dad.