【推荐2】How to deal with stress

Stress is a negative reaction that the body has to various factors and events. It is often caused by poor health and then leads to various health problems. However, frequent emotional stresses may cause chronic (慢性的) stress.    1    

Introduce sports into your life.

If you are often stressed and not exercising, this is the very sign to start exercising.    2    They think that only a heavyweight gym and a personal trainer are effective. But this is certainly not the case and there are plenty of ways to introduce exercise into your everyday life in an enjoyable way.

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Not many people are able to completely give up a cup of coffee in the morning or a glass of wine after a long day at work, but everything should be taken properly. Get rid of the habit of drinking coffee several times a day and drinking a bit too much with friends at every given opportunity — the result will change your mental and physical state in countless ways.

Observe your sleep patterns.

If flowing a good seeping schedule makes it so easy to avoid stress, then why do so few people do it? It’s simple: people often think they are in good condition and if they manage to get through the day with minimal seep they will repeat this unhealthy behavior. Get into the habit of waking up and going to bed at almost the same time, leaving you feeling well-rested and balanced for the day ahead.    4    

    5    After all, you want to deal with your own problem, you don’t need to become the personal psychologist of every friend and colleague and take on their pains. It is important to remember your mental health is important. By burying yourself in problems and not taking time to yourself, you increase the probability of suffering from negative stress.

【推荐3】One in four of us at some point will experience mental health problems. It is therefore not only possible, but probable that either you or someone will struggle with your mental health at some point in your life.     1     One of these important factors is work. The following is about how you can speak to your boss about how work is affecting your mental health and possible solutions.

Insight, honesty and denial are arguably the biggest barrier that persons must overcome. Before you can have an honest, and transparent conversation with your boss, you need to have that conversation with yourself. Unfortunately, despite progress over recent years in reducing mental health related stigma (羞耻) online, the reality is that stigma continues to thrive. Moreover, far too many of us continue to internalize (内在化) that stigma and direct it towards ourselves.     2    

We need to accept that we might be struggling with our mental health and that work might be contributing to this. We need to educate ourselves about what the signs are of common mental disorders. Are you feeling more depressed or low in mood than usual?     3     Do you experience difficulty in breathing? If so, you might be suffering from a mental health condition, and I would urge you to arrange an appointment with your doctor, who can assess your mental state further and diagnose you.

    4     By this I mean what is your employer’s approach to mental and physical health? Now that you have prepared yourself, it’s time to have that honest, and transparent conversation with your boss.     5     You can explore what options are available including sick leave, phased return to work, and what support services are available. It might be that simple adjustments and adaptations at the workplace will resolve these issues.

【推荐1】Feeling a bit bored? It could be just what you need to produce your best ideas, excite your creativity or simply give your brain a rest.

Nowadays, in the age of round-the-clock entertainment, it’s (technically) trickier to be bored. If the show you’re watching has lost its spark, you can easily amuse yourself on social media without even leaving the sofa. But that’s not necessarily a good thing. Feeling disengaged from the task in hand, or a lack of stimulation (刺激), does have its benefits, according to researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.

Being bored motivates you to search out something less boring to do. For example, if you decide there’s nothing worth watching on TV, you might choose to switch off and take up a new hobby. This, according to researchers, can explain why the lockdowns of the past two years saw a surge (激增) in creativity among people stuck at home from banana-bread-making to picking up a paintbrush for the first time since childhood.

But what about those times when you have no choice but to stick with the boring situation, waiting for a bus, for instance? The good news is that the boredom you’re feeling now could spark your creativity later, says a 2019 study published in the Academy of Management Discoveries journal. People who’d taken part in a bean-sorting task later performed better at coming up with creative ideas than another group who’d been given something more interesting to do first.

Ultimately, don’t take it for granted that there’ll always be something close at hand to entertain us. With boredom, we will not run the risk of becoming boring ourselves.

【推荐3】Did you know many adults sit down for more than nine hours a day? Maybe you’re one of them! Whether it’s working at a desk, sitting motionless in a car, bus or train or lounging on the sofa watching TV, we have a much more sedentary lifestyle than our parents and grandparents did. The question that this raises is just what it is doing to our bodies.

The news isn’t good. A study carried out in the 1950s compared bus drivers with the conductors, who walked around the bus selling tickets. It showed that drivers, who spent many hours sitting at the wheel, were twice as likely to have heart attacks than the more active conductors. In fact, prolonged sitting has been associated with a number of different conditions, even in people who otherwise take regular exercise. If you sit down all day, you burn far fewer calories than someone with a more active job. There are suggestions that its lows your metabolism (新陈代谢) and makes it harder for your body to regulate blood sugar levels increasing the risk of diabetes.

One possible answer to this problem is for desk workers to use standing desks, to spend at least part of their day on their feet. One small study showed that office workers who stood for three hours after lunch had a much smaller increase in blood sugar levels, while another suggested that by standing for three or four hours a day over the period of a year, people would burn as many calories as if they had run ten marathons.

Other experts question this figure and point out that standing all day can also have negative impacts, such as leg or back pain, recommending that if people do want to use standing desks, they should gradually increase the amount of time that they spend on their feet. Crucially, they also point out that there are many alternatives to sitting, and that their impact is unlikely to be the same; walking, for example, burns far more calories than standing.

【推荐1】In the city of Midland, Michigan in the United States sits the Charles, W. Howard(CWH)Santa Claus School. This is not a school that children attend to learn grammar and fractions but one that adults travel to once a year. There, they learn how to play the role of Santa Claus.

For better or worse, Christmas is a profitable business in the modern world, particularly in the US. Therefore, during winter, thousands of people are hired by businesses to put on Santa’s famous red cloak, red hat, and white beard. These Santas will appear at public spaces, where starry-eyed children sit on their knees and dreamily recite their lists of all the wonderful Christmas gifts they desire.

Given this demand, the CWH Santa Claus School is dedicated to training adults to be the best Santa Claus they can be. Started by Charles Howard himself in New York in 1937, the school has a mission to uphold the traditional image and preserve the history of Santa Claus. Meanwhile, it also teaches students how to incorporate their personalities into the role. The school was relocated to a new place in Midland by its current manager, Tom Valent, in 1986. It now offers a three-day crash course every October for aspiring Santa Clauses to learn under the guidance of Valent and other instructors. The curriculum (课程) includes such content as singing, toy production, and even reindeer care.

The CWH Santa School is called the “Harvard of Santa schools”. In addition to being a family-run operation, it recruits (招募) Santa teachers from all over the world to hand down knowledge about how to be the very best Santa Claus.