5 . Five Tips to Manage Stress

With the fast pace of work and home, life can feel overloaded and stressful at times. You may often ask yourself how you should manage stress. Try these five tips to manage stress.

Use guided meditation (冥想). Guided meditation is a great way to distract yourself from the stress of day-to-day life. There are many guided meditations available online.     1    

Practice deep breathing. Deep breathing is a great way to reduce the activation of your sympathetic nervous system.     2     Deep breaths can help inspire your nervous system to rest and digest, which helps reduce the overall stress and anxiety you may be experiencing.

Maintain physical exercise and good nutrition. Physical exercise and nutrition are two important components in how you respond to stress.     3     Physical exercise is proven to be a great stress reliever and also helps to improve your overall quality of life. Nutrition is important because stress can use up certain vitamins. Maintaining proper nutrition not only helps your body feel better, but your mind as well, which allows you to better combat stress.

    4     Spending time online can become stressful, not only by what you might see online, but also because the time might best be spent enjoying visiting with friends, being outside enjoying the weather or reading a great book.

Connect with others.     5     You need to have connections with people to feel supported. Finding a sense of community, whether at work, with an organization or through shared activities, such as organized sports, is important to your well-being.

6 . Four Tutorials for Beginners

A series of textbooks by the renowned British publishing house DK specializes in nonfiction and teaching aids. Main topics: work, leisure, home and life. These are self-explanatory activities for self-study and implementation. The book includes vocabulary, texts and useful audio lessons (through the mobile application and online).

An excellent tutorial is Cutting Edge, which can be purchased in different combinations. The basic tutorial from DVD includes 12 lessons and consists of speaking exercises, video and audio exercises. Topics include global issues and cultural phenomena. The main advantage of this course is the online English laboratory MyEnglishLab, which contains audio and video materials for learning, interactive lessons with the ability to record your own speech which is useful for self-study of the language, while developing pronunciation and speaking skills.

Practice Makes Perfect is a training course with a wide variety of interactive exercises. This textbook is like a large workbook with short lessons and extended hands-on activities for fun. The course includes 53 lessons focused on the study of possessive pronouns, verb tenses, prepositions, 40 exercises to practice pronunciation, tasks for speaking and a graph of achievements. There is an application for a smartphone or PC.

The English Made Easy series of textbooks will be especially useful for those who are better at comprehending visual images. The entire tutorial is based on visual content containing numerous images. Available online, it consists of 20 lessons, at the beginning of which there is a mandatory list of active vocabulary, grammar, phonetic recommendations. Lesson topics: acquaintance, conversations on general topics, shopping, professions and time.

7 . A new research has found that comedy doesn’t just make us feel good—it actually has the power to improve health. A recent study was conducted to test whether or not “laughter therapy (疗法)”could help people who have heart disease.

The study involved 26 adults, with an average age of 64. They all had coronary artery (冠状动脉) disease, which happens when the supply of blood to the heart is held up by plaque (斑块)   that grows in the coronary arteries, the big tubes that send blood to the heart. Over three months, 13 of the adults were asked to watch two-hour-long comedy shows every week. The other 13 were asked to watch two documentary films on serious topics like politics and the Amazon rainforest. Then, the participants were examined by doctors.

The first group that watched comedy showed a big improvement in the amount of oxygen which we breathe in to survive and that the heart could pump around the body. Their arteries also got better at expanding, which meant that more blood could flow through them. There was less plaque in the arteries afterward too, cutting the person’s risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

The study was led by Marco Saffi, a professor at a hospital, who said laughter helps the heart because it releases chemicals in the body called endorphins. They reduce inflammation, which can lead to heart disease, and help the heart relax.

Having a good laugh also reduces levels of stress hormones (荷尔蒙). Stress hormones are the body’s natural alarm system, which kicks in if a person is in a tense situation. They’re great for helping people cope with danger, but they can put a strain on the heart if they stay in a person’s system for too long.

Saffi thinks the results show “laughter therapy” could be used to treat patients at the risk of heart problems. He said, “It does not have to be TV programs——people with heart disease could be invited to comedy evenings or encouraged to enjoy fun evenings with friends and family.”

8 . As a professional life and relationship coach, Allison Cowan has over 21 years of experience in teaching and supporting others to achieve their goals. She has dedicated her career to helping her clients gain power and awareness in their lives.

As a coach, Allison inspires her clients to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. However, her practice has come with its own share of challenges. Expanding her knowledge to meet diverse client needs has involved lots of trial-and-error searching.

Initially, Allison spent a hard time building strong and trustworthy relationships with her clients. She knew trust was critical to finding and retaining clients but was frustrated at how long the trust-building process takes.

Allison soon learned that there was no single right way to coach. To meet her clients’ different needs, she needed to become more efficient at supporting their diverse learning styles. To overcome her challenges as a coach and offer better service, she began looking for ways to customize her coaching solutions.

During her search, Allison realized Positive Psychology is a field with many different goals. “It covers so many areas, including whatever a client may go through,” she recalled. Later, she began using self-reflection tools to help her clients develop self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. She even discovered a way to help clients without a coaching goal find their purposes. She said, “There’s a lot of blame. The more they stay in blame mode, the more angry they are, and they are not able to move forward with acceptance and forgiveness. But we can find solutions in Positive Psychology.”

Whether Allison was helping clients build self-confidence, understand their attachment styles, or reframe their challenges, she quickly found that she was also learning all the time. By completing the homework Allison assigned to them, her clients were also changing. They were more engaged with their coaching and making more significant progress between their sessions. That made Allison proud. She said, “They grow and move forward at a quicker pace. That’s what coaching is about.”

9 . “Chinese civilization is the most fascinating and ________ (more than 5,000 years) in the world,” Frances Wood, a well-known British Sinologist, has said.

Wood studied Chinese at Cambridge University in the 1970s, before traveling ________ in China while studying at Peking University in the Chinese capital, Beijing. After ________ from University of London with a doctor’s degree in Chinese Architecture, she joined the British Library in 1977 and ________ the curator (馆长) of the Chinese collections for more than 30 years, until retired in 2013.

One of her main ________ in the role of curator was to purchase books in Chinese about China, ________ various subjects including humanities and literature.

“It was a wonderful and ________ job,” she says. “It was fascinating to watch China’s expanding number of ________ from the 1970s onward.”

Wood wrote several books related to China, including on Qin Shi Huang, the first ________ of the Qin Dynasty, Marco Polo and the Silk Road. Last month, Wood received a gold ________ from the 16th Special Book Award of China in Beijing for her contributions to ________ Chinese culture.

Wood’s ________ for Chinese culture is reflected in her daily life. The front yard of her house is full of bamboo, and her bookshelf is ________ with Chinese and English books related to China. She keeps numerous gifts given to her by Chinese friends, such as small Peking Opera masks, inkstones, Chinese calligraphy works and paintings.

Referring to her recent role as a ________ in the “Chinese Bridge” language contest held in London for British university students, she says she was ________ by their great enthusiasm in learning Mandarin.

10 . The most obvious dog fetish (迷恋) today is the longing for cuteness. Almost every day you can see adorable pictures of dogs and other animals that will make you smile and say, “How cute!”

It is a cultural phenomenon that the media scholar James Meese calls the “cute economy” which exists primarily on social media, is user-generated, and is heavily dominated by pictures of animals, especially pets. The goal is to generate a positive response, probably followed by a tap on the screen to “like” and “share”. We can click through image after image of cute animals doing cute things, feeling a little boost of good cheer.

The marketing researchers have identified some of the most common categories of cuteness in online pet content: animals doing silly things; animals of extreme size; animals with unusual looks; and animals behaving in ways that seem human-like. Dogs and other animals in the “cute economy” are often further humanized by being dressed in clothing and accessorized (装饰) with hats, jewellery, nail polish and fur dyed a rainbow of colors. Users who post successfully and with some strategies can make money by doing so. Thus, certain dogs have become cuteness celebrities, with millions of devoted followers and paid content from advertisers.

Unfortunately, the price of the “cute economy” comes at a serious cost. The cutest and most popular breeds tend to be those with the most significant risk of health and behavioral problems. Cuteness is often coupled with their discomfort. People are drawn to the cuteness of dogs with extremely foreshortened skulls and extremely short legs and awkwardly long bodies, such as the French bulldog and the corgi.

Actually, there are well-established health issues. We should treat the “cute economy” with caution, like resisting the commodification (商品化) of appearance by opting out of social media channels promoting the “cute economy”. We can also choose not to “like” or “share” images of dogs whose cuteness is linked with discomfort. Although we are biologically attracted to dogs that are super cute, we should be mindful in our “impulses”.