【推荐3】People spend too much time and effort trying to control anxiety these days. Here are some things you can do to help minimize anxiety’s negative effects.

    1     If you treat anxiety as part of life and part of everyone’s living experience, you can learn to relate it with self-compassion and even with humor. This is a cornerstone of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which has been gaining clinical validation.

ACT guides people to see their unpleasant emotions as just feelings and accept that parts of life are hard. Doctors encourage patients to begin a dialogue with anxious thoughts.     2     Meanwhile, they also keep in mind patients’ personal goals and values. Although anxious thoughts shouldn’t be completely controlled, sufferers can be trained not to allow anxiety to turn them away from what they want to do and who they want to be.

Make lifestyle adjustments.     3     This requires trial and error to get just right. While acceptance is the first and most important step, some lifestyle changes have been proved to take the edge off as well.

Work out regularly. When tiredness and stress leave you more exposed to anxiety, a well-balanced diet and adequate rest are helpful.     4     One research study shows that regular vigorous workouts reduce the likelihood of developing an anxiety disorder over the next five years by 25 percent.

As a specialist, Arthur also shares her experiences on the website, openly discussing her anxiety has transformed her relationship with it. “I’m learning to live in harmony, as much as possible, with this thing that is part of me,” she says. “It’s not always pleasant, but I accept it.     5    ”

【推荐2】Prefer your coffee black? Then you probably like dark, bitter chocolate, according to a new research identifying a genetic basis for those preferences.

If that’s you, then congratulations — you are the lucky genetic winner of a sort that may offer you an advantage toward good health, according to caffeine researcher Marilyn Cornelis. Studies find moderate amounts of black coffee have been shown to lower the risk of certain diseases. But those benefits are likely to be more pronounced if the coffee is free of all of the milks, sugars and other fattening flavorings we tend to add.

In an earlier research, Cornelis and her team discovered that a genetic variant (变体) may contribute to why some people enjoy numerous cups of coffee a day, while others do not. “People with the gene metabolize (新陈代谢) caffeine faster, so the stimulating effects disappear faster, and they need to drink more coffee,” she said. “This could explain why some individuals seem to be fine consuming a lot more coffee relative to someone else who might become very anxious,” she added.

In the new study, Cornelis analyzed more precise types of coffee drinkers, separating black coffee lovers from cream and sugar lovers. “We found coffee drinkers with the genetic variant that reflects a faster metabolism of caffeine prefer bitter, black coffee,” Cornelis said. “We also found the same genetic variant in people who prefer dark chocolate over the milk chocolate.”

Cornelis and her team don’t think the preference has anything to do with the taste of plain black coffee tea. Instead, she said, people with this gene prefer black coffee and tea because they ae the bitter favor with the boost in mental comfort they desire from caffeine. “It’s possible these people are just very sensitive to the effects of caffeine and they also have that learned behavior with other bitter foods.”

Future studies will try to deal with the genetic preference for other bitter foods, Cornelis said, “which are generally linked to more health benefits.”

【推荐3】What do you think of 80s pop music? Do the names George Michael, Madonna and Michael Jackson sound familiar? Well, these are just some of the names that were well-known in the music scene of the 80s and early 90s. The 80s pop music scene was an important step to the popularity (普及) of present-day music. A new wave in the music scene was introduced, which made such music styles as punk rock, rap music and the MTV popular. Although it was an end to the old 60s and 70s styles, it was also the beginning of something big. The popularity of music videos meant that artists now replaced their guitar-based music with visual displays. A new wave of artists came on the scene and the entire industry developed quickly.

The most famous 80s pop music video is Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Introduced in 1982, few people can forget the video not only because of its never-be-foreseen images, but also because of the popularity it received. Think of how 80s pop music changed the lives of people who grew up in the 80s. Ask a young man today to tell you the names of the “New Kids on the Block” and he will start talking about the neighbor kids who just moved in. These are not the answers you might have heard in the 80s. Though today’s young men do not recognize how cool 80s pop music was, most people will always remember it for what it was and these are happy memories they will always love.

Some of the 80s pop music legends (传奇人物) include Madonna, U2, AeroSmith and of course the King of Pop Michael Jackson. Let’s not forget Prince, Tina Turner, Phil Collins and Motown’s Lionel Ritchie. Some of these musicians played music that has stood the test of time. Undoubtedly, the 80s pop music scene will live on for many more years to come.