【推荐1】Fear of missing out or FOMO is “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”. This social anxiety is characterized by “a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing”.     1     One tends to show the concern that he or she might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience, profitable investment or other satisfying events.

Does FOMO make us happy?     2     Researchers have found that FOMO leads us to check social media more frequently, leading to a negative cycle that can be hard to break. FOMO can lead to feelings of depression, loneliness, and boredom. Your mood will be easily influenced by others and your life starts to be controlled by the outside world. What should people do to get rid of FOMO?

Change your focus

Rather than focusing on what you lack, try noticing what you have. You can change your feeling that triggers your FOMO. “Meritocracy (精英) society” is advocated today, but in fact, everyone owns their own success. Try to reduce our screen time, focus on building your own path to success and do what you like.     3    

Keep a journal

It is common to post on social media to keep a record of the fun things you do. However, you may find yourself noticing a little too much about whether people are validating your experiences online. If this is the case, you may try to keep a personal journal of your best memories, either online or on paper.     4     This shift can sometimes help you to get out of the cycle of FOMO.

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You may find yourself seeking a greater connection when you are feeling depressed or anxious, and this is healthy. Feelings of loneliness or exclusion are actually our brain’s way of telling us that we want to seek out greater connections with others and increase our sense of belonging. Rather than trying to connect more with people on social media, why not arrange to meet up with someone in person? Talking with families, making plans with a good friend, or creating a group outing that can help you to shake that feeling that you are missing out. It puts you in the center of the action.

【推荐2】It is easy for many people to catch a cold in the springtime or fall. It makes us wonder if scientists can send a man to the moon, why can’t they find a cure for the common cold? The answer is easy. There are actually hundreds of kinds of cold viruses out there. You never know which one you will get, so there isn’t a cure for each one.

When a virus attacks your body, your body works hard to get rid of it. Blood rushes to your nose and cause a block in it. You feel terrible because you can’t breathe well, but your body is actually eating the virus. Your temperature goes up and you get a fever, but the heat of your body is killing the virus. You also have a runny nose to stop the virus from getting into your cells. You may feel very uncomfortable, but actually your wonderful body is doing everything it can to kill the cold.

Different people do different things to deal with colds. In the United States and some other countries, for example, people might eat chicken soup to make themselves feel better. Some people take hot baths and drink warm liquids. Other people take medicine to stop various symptoms (症状) of colds.

There is one interesting thing to note —some scientists say taking medicines when you have a cold is actually bad for you. The virus stays in you longer because your body doesn’t have a way to fight it and kill it. Bodies can do an amazing job on their own. There is a joke, however, on taking medicine when you have a cold. It goes like this:

It takes about one week to get over a cold if you don’t take medicine, but it takes only seven days to get over a cold if you take medicine.

【推荐3】If you have trouble falling asleep, listen up. You might fall asleep 15 minutes earlier and wake up far less during the night if you put on a pair of socks at bedtime. To understand why, you first need to grasp the relationship between core (核心) body temperature and sleep. During daylight hours, the human body has an average temperature of 37℃. But your core body temperature drops as much as 1.2℃ over one night’s sleep. This gradual decrease is a key part of how we sleep. To put it simply, the faster you can lower your core body temperature, the faster you will fall asleep.

One way that your body controls its temperature is through blood vessels (血管) in the skin. If your body is too hot, your blood vessels widen, pushing the warmer blood nearer the skin’s surface, helping it to cool. If your body is too cold, the opposite happens. Your blood vessels narrow, restricting the flow of blood to the surface.

The soles, the bottom surface of your feet, are one of your body’s most efficient heat exchangers, since they are hairless and less protected than other skin surfaces. Researchers have shown that warming the feet before going to sleep using a warm foot bath or by wearing socks promotes blood vessel widening, which in turn lowers the body’s core temperature faster than going to sleep with cold, bare feet.

Scientists suspect that socked feet have a neurological effect as well. The warm-sensitive neurons (神经元) in the brain become more active when there’s a temperature difference between the body’s core and the feet. Researchers have found that these neurons become more active as we get sleep and slow down as we wake up, so that warming up the feet before bedtime may give warm-sensitive neurons an extra promotion, making you feel sleepier.

In a small study, researchers found that wearing a pair of special “sleeping socks” not only sped up the coming of sleep, but increased overall sleep time by an average of 30 minutes and cut night-time waking times in half. If you’re worried about becoming too warm, look for socks made of natural fibers.

【推荐2】This year’s flu season is pretty scary. To try to minimize the effects, public officials are still urging anyone who hasn’t yet gotten their flu shot to get one as soon as possible. However, even if every single person got a shot in the arm, the vaccine(疫 苗)—with its excellent 36 percent effectiveness—would not prevent everyone from getting infected with the annoying virus. Knowledge is power, so here's what goes on in your body when you come down with the flu.

The influenza virus primarily attacks your nose, throat, and the tubes that lead to your lungs. But the flu is so much more than that. Your muscles ache, your head hurts, and your appetite goes down, among other things. To our surprise, almost all of these symptoms   have   less   to   do   with   the   virus   itself   than   with   your   immune( 免 疫 的)response to them. Unfortunately, the very defense you have in place to get rid of the flu is the reason you feel so painful when you recover.

The virus usually enters through your mouth, typically by way of your hands . But it takes a few days for symptoms to set in. While this process might cause some harm to your nose and throat, it's nothing major, and nothing like the symptoms that typically accompany a bad or even mild case of the flu.

The real fun starts when your immune system begins to fight. Your immune system comes in two parts: the innate system and the adaptive. The innate immune system is essentially an all-purpose tool. As soon as your body senses the presence of any injury or invader , the innate immune system launches into action by producing tiny proteins called cytokines and chemokines. The cytokines reproduce almost immediately and start to attack the virus. This increase in immune cells creates a serious inflammation( 炎 症 ) throughout the body. But the worst is still to come.

Meanwhile, the chemokines work with the adaptive immune system to help create T cells. These cells are a special type of white blood cell that works in a much more specific way: They find the influenza virus, identify what's special about it, and create something unique on their surface that finds and destroys similar invaders.