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Category Archives: News and Science

Personalized look at a wide range of news and research related to stress, relaxation and health issues of interest to us and our readers.

Complicated Grief May Be Chemically Caused

girl on stairsComplicated grief is the medical term for someone who grieves for months or years after the beloved has died and does not move on with the stages of grief.    The grief is just as strong as when the day their beloved died.   Granted, grief is a very individual process and everyone needs their own span of time to grief.  The kind of grief we’re talking about here is unhealthy grief, when it consumes your life almost like an obsession.  Treating complicated grief is dicey at best.

Now, a UCLA study suggests that there may be a physical and potentially treatable reason for complicated grief.  The complete study was published in the journal NeuroImage.

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Hunger Hormone A Stress-Buster?

985046_tiny_mouseA study concludes that to get happy, go a little hungry.

When you hear the word "hunger", the word "happiness" tends not to spring quickly to mind.  And yet, that seems to be the conclusion of a University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.  Granted, the study was done on mice, so at least if it doesn’t translate completely over to people, we now know one thing that can make a mouse happy.  Either that, or the mice have all gotten together to try and make us hungry so there will be more food for mice.  The study was funded by several organizations, including the National Institute of Health.  As far as we know, none of the organizations have been taken over by mice.

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You’re Doing Better Than Scranton, PA

Abraham_Lincoln_head_on_shoulders_photo_portrait"Things like that just don’t disappear."  — Lackawana County Historical Society President, Mary Moran-Savakinus

Well, apparently things like that DO disappear.  You say you’ve lost the remote again?  Lost your car keys?  Lost your marbles?  Well, don’t be so down on yourself, or assume that you’re getting Alzheimer’s, because the odds are you’ll never loose anything that compares to what the town of Scranton, Pennsylvania lost (which is the setting of the American version of The Office).

They’ve lost their sixteen foot high Abraham Lincoln Memorial.  And they’d really like it back, please.

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America Number 16 In Happiness

fireworksOn this day of America’s "birth", amidst the explosions and the scarfing down of high calorie consumables, you wonder if it all was worth it.  Are we really any happier than the rest of the world?  Well, according to a recent study by the University of Michigan’s World Values Survey, Americans are happier than over 80 countries, but only in 16th place overall in terms of feeling "happy".  But, no matter where you live, for the most part, people around the world have been getting happier in the years 1981 - 2007, the years the survey was conducted. 

Either that, or we know which countries lie the most on surveys about how happy they are.

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Study Claims Road Rage Related to Bumper Stickers

scanner nightmareCome to the Dark Side.  We have cookies.   — Bumper sticker

Nature recently printed a Colorado State University study about how to identify a driver more likely to have road rage.  Don’t look at their hand gestures — look at their bumpers.  If there is even one sticker on the back of that car, then this driver is far more likely to get into a road rage incident than a driver who does not have a bumper sticker.  The study went on to say that it doesn’t matter what the bumper sticker is about. So, potentially, even a "Peace Now" or "Jesus Saves" driver is just as dangerous as "NRA Forever" or "I Hate You" driver. 

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