Lisa Find Love

A significant body of scientific research indicates that healthy sleep can have a positive, protective effect on memory.

Studies indicate that sleeping well helps protect the ability to acquire new memories. If you’ve ever tried to cram for a test while short on sleep, you’ve experienced the obstacles that sleep deprivation can have on memory acquisition. Research shows that even a brief lack of sleep can diminish the brain’s capacity to form new memories as part of everyday learning.

Sleep also is important to the ability to recall memories. Research indicates that recall of both short- and long-term memory is impaired by lack of sleep. A sleep-deprived brain is less effective at memory retrieval, while staying well rested can help protect and improve this aspect of memory function.

There is another aspect of the memory process — memory consolidation — that actually occurs during sleep itself. Memory consolidation is the process in which the brain takes new knowledge and converts it to longer-term storage, ready for future recall. Memory consolidation that takes place during sleep not only secures memory for retrieval, but also appears to prepare the brain to accept new information in the next waking day.

Sleep affects different kinds of memory, including both declarative and procedural memories. Declarative memory involves memories related to facts and knowledge, as well as details about individual experiences. Research indicates sleep is critical to the making and storing of declarative memory. Studies also show sleep deprivation and sleep disorders can negatively affect declarative memory.

According to research, the importance of sleep to declarative memory formation exists from the earliest stages of life. Scientists studying memory processing in infants found that babies 6-12 months who took naps at least 30 minutes after learning new behaviors showed better recall than infants who did not sleep.

Procedural memories are task and skill-based memories tied to motor functions and sensory learning. Much of the basic knowledge we need to function on a daily basis — from typing at a computer to driving a car to taking a run at the gym — falls within the category of procedural memory. Procedural memories are often made through repetition and practice, and are recalled without conscious thought. According to research, a routine of high-quality, plentiful sleep is important to motor skill learning and procedural memory.

When you sleep well, you’re making a long-term investment in the health of your memory as you age. Research strongly suggests that high-quality sleep during youth and middle age may help guard against age-related cognitive decline, including problems with memory, many years later. There is also a growing body of scientific evidence that suggests poor quality and insufficient sleep may increase the risks for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Sleep is not the only factor in age-related memory decline, but it appears to be an important one.

When you’re tempted to stay up late for the sake of being productive, keep in mind that you and your memory ultimately will be better served by getting a good night’s sleep. Well rested, you’re more likely to feel better, perform better, and to remember more.

Forgetful woman photo available from Shutterstock

Among images of Syrian refugees in a makeshift camp inside a Budapest train station, “it was the black-and-white photo that grabbed my heart,” writes Omid Safi, director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center and onbeing.org columnist. “A moment of affection, tenderness, and love, in the midst of months of chaos. In their love, their tenderness, and their hope, there is hope for all of us.”

Photograph by Zsíros István

Life in rural America is a bit different than life in the more developed areas. In many small towns, the family doctor is the only physician one ever sees. The concept of seeing a specialist is not something patients are open to. Few doctors are willing to push the issue unless the need is critical. This is the basic premise that nearly destroyed me.

I was in my early 30s when I went to the doctor. I was married with two children. I had a full-time job and was overwhelmed. My father had recently had a series of heart attacks, my son was suffering from migraine headaches and I was terrified because my mother had died of a brain aneurysm. I explained all this to the doctor and told him about the mood swings, crying fits and sleeplessness. This well-meaning general practitioner prescribed me Prozac. In a couple of weeks, I began to feel better.

About a year passed when I suffered a major back injury. The injury resulted in surgery. I lost my job because of the time it would take me to recover, and we could not afford to live on one income. Soon the pain and the depression was more than I could manage, and I went back to my G.P. He gave me pain pills and increased my Prozac. At no time did he suggest that I see a psychologist or psychiatrist for my depression.

The pain pills made me feel good, though I thought they just dulled the pain, and the Prozac was working better. I would take my Prozac daily and throughout the day my mood would be boosted by the opiates. This was my routine for the next four years. There were times when I would slip back and an adjustment of the pain meds and one more adjustment of the Prozac took care of me. In five years’ time, I went from 10 mg of Prozac to 60 mg. I was on a lot of pain medications as well.

The family doctor told me the DEA was beginning to watch the opiates, so he began to wean me back to a lower dose. Of course this brought on panic and anxiety. So he prescribed me Xanax. I was on a train that was headed for derailment but I didn’t know that.

I don’t know what caused it, but I believe it was the Xanax in high doses. I began having seizures. I had one dramatic seizure that caused me to fall into a doorframe, resulting in a head injury. That is how I ended up in the hospital. The doctors were shocked at the amount of drugs I was taking and they immediately put me in a facility to detox me and restore me to an unmedicated patient in order to properly diagnose me.

It took about two weeks to get me to a point where I could leave the facility. Yes, I left depressed. But with the help of a psychiatrist and a physical therapist, I was able to reclaim my life.

I still take Prozac in a moderate dosage. But it is used in conjunction with mental health therapy. I do not blame the general practitioner. I think he was doing what he thought was best. I am simply saying, by not seeing the proper medical professional, I nearly died. If I had it to do again, I would have traveled the hour it would have taken to see a specialist.

Sometimes we have to work for what we want. I am living proof that happiness in a bottle is short-lived.

Country doctor image available from Shutte

There was a time when 'Girl' meant 'Boy,' 'Bully' meant 'Sweetheart,' and 'Fizzle' meant 'Fart.' Let's return there together.

Some call it the happiest photo ever taken. On a fall day in 1950, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt spotted a drum major practicing his high steps on a playing field. “I saw a little boy running after him,” he recalled. “All the faculty children ran after the boy. And I ran after them.” Eisenstaedt snapped the shot on impulse while covering the University of Michigan’s famous marching band for Life magazine.

Life’s director of photography, David Friend, called Drum Major an “ode to joy.” In 1993, President Bill Clinton agreed; when he was offered any Eisenstaedt print as a gift, this is the one he reportedly chose.

Need a little more joy? Here is the happiest country in the world.

Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt from Life Magazine

These insider secrets of skin doctors fight signs of aging overnight so you can rise and shine with glowing skin.

Caught on the road without a proper first aid kit? These common items will help in a pinch.

Even if you eat healthfully, you may fall short of key vitamins and minerals. Sometimes inadequacies have everything to do with diet—and other times they're more linked to medications or lifestyle habits. See if you have any of these nutrient deficiency symptoms, then follow our advice for getting more.

Norman Bates, Jaws, and Freddy Krueger may be the stuff of nightmares—but they were all real.

Follow these tips to achieve a bountiful, colorful garden full of annual flowers.

You can’t make a call or send a text on your cell phone in Green Bank, West Virginia. Wireless Internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth. As you approach the tiny town on a two-lane road that snakes through the Allegheny Mountains, the bars on your cell phone fall like dominoes, and the scan function on the radio ceases to work. The rusted pay phone on the north side of town is the only way for a visitor to reach the rest of the world. It’s a premodern place by design, 
devoid of the gadgets and technologies that define life today.

The reason for the town’s empty airwaves is visible the moment you arrive. It’s the Robert C. Byrd telescope, aka the GBT, a gleaming white, 485-foot-tall behemoth of a dish. 
It’s the largest of its kind in the world and one of nine in Green Bank, all 
of them government owned and 
operated by the National Radio 
Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

The telescopes aren’t the “ocular” kind you’re probably thinking of. They’re radio telescopes, so instead of looking for distant stars, you listen for them. There’s a long line of 
astronomers all over the world who want to use the GBT, a telescope known to be so sensitive that it can pick up the energy equivalent of 
a single snowflake hitting the ground.

Such a highly tuned listening tool needs total technological silence to operate, so in 1958, the Federal Communications Commission established a one-of-a-kind National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area 
encompassing Green Bank where, 
to this day, electromagnetic silence 
is enforced every hour of every day.

Residents who live within a ten-mile radius of the Green Bank observatory are allowed to use landline telephones, wired Internet, and cable televisions, but microwave ovens, wireless Internet routers, and radios are forbidden. You can have a cell phone, but you won’t get a signal.

Lately, because of how much its way of life diverges from the rest of America’s and whom that has attracted, Green Bank (pop. 143) has come to feel smaller than ever. For locals, 
the technology ban is a nuisance. 
For others who come to Green Bank for their health, the town has become a refuge.

A Mysterious Illness

In 2007, Diane Schou, now 66, moved with her husband, Bert, 69, to Green Bank from Cedar Falls, Iowa, 
hoping that living free of technology would relieve her relentless headaches—headaches, she insists, that were caused by signals from a cell phone tower near her home. The Schous are members of a growing community who say they suffer from “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” or EHS, caused by exposure 
to radio frequencies. The symptoms, 
according to sufferers, also include nausea, insomnia, and chest pains.

Mainstream medicine doesn’t 
recognize the syndrome, but Diane and Bert couldn’t be more sure. After her declining health forced her to give up her job as an agricultural scientist, the couple drove hundreds of thousands of miles across the United States seeking a respite from her condition. After returning from 
a sojourn with relatives in Sweden—the first country to consider EHS a disability—the Schous heard about the Quiet Zone from a national-park ranger in North Carolina. The couple pulled into Green Bank shortly thereafter, and Diane lived in her car behind a convenience store to give the town a try.

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“Life here isn’t 
perfect,” Diane says. “But at least I’m not in bed with a headache all the time.”

Fellow sufferers heard about Diane, and soon she was 
letting visitors stay 
in her home when they came to 
experience life in Green Bank. By 2010, roughly two dozen “electrosensitives” had moved to Green Bank. Jennifer Wood, a former architect 
before electrosensitivity felled her, remembers walking into the Schous’ home and being welcomed by a handful of other electrosensitives. 
“It was just like family,” Wood says.

But not everyone in Green Bank has been so keen to meet the new neighbors. Diane ruffled some feathers when she tried to get the local church to remove its fluorescent lights, which electrosensitives find excruciating, and when she told people to stop using their cell phones as cameras around her. The senior center, one of the town’s few gathering places, obliged her request to replace the fluorescent lights in one area, 
but when she asked that her food be 
delivered to her from the center’s kitchen—so she wouldn’t have to walk under other fluorescents—Green Bankers began to protest.

“There have been some rough spots in dealing with other members of the community,” says the diplomatic sheriff David Jonese, whose Pocahontas County department 
has been called in several times to mediate disputes between old-timers and newcomers. “They want everybody in the stores and restaurants to change their lighting or turn their lights off when they’re there, which creates some issues,” he says.

Echoes of the Past

As you might guess, friction between the locals and the transplants has happened before in Green Bank. After breaking ground on the initial telescope in 1957, the NRAO needed to hire PhDs and engineers, and it began hiring scientists from out of town. But the locals—some of whose farms and homes had been condemned and displaced to other parts of town to make room 
for the observatory’s campus—didn’t take so kindly to the influx. In 1965, 
a group of farmers even complained to their members of Congress that observatory scientists had caused 
a crop-killing drought.

“I remember one fella said the 
observatory would make it rain when they wanted it to,” says Harold Crist, 
a 90-year-old Green Bank native who worked for the telescope at one time.

The big-city transplants didn’t 
immediately warm to the locals either, but with time came acceptance. Today many Green Bankers work various jobs at the telescope. The campus’s cafeteria is a favorite lunch spot for locals. And more than a few scientists moonlight as artists, with work hanging in the local art center.

At Green Bank Elementary-Middle School, right next door to the telescope, you’d expect to find teenagers bemoaning the unavailability of 
the cool gadgets they see on TV. 
But that’s not the case. According 
to one seventh grader, plenty of kids in Green Bank have smartphones, and although they can’t get a signal, they’ve found a work-around. By connecting to a home Wi-Fi network (that the telescope interference protectors apparently haven’t picked up on), kids don’t need a cell network to talk to their friends—they can just use the new texting functions in apps like Facebook’s Messenger and Snapchat. Teenagers and technology, it seems, will always find a way.

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The End of Quiet?

A force outside Green Bankers’ control may ultimately settle the clash 
of old-timers and newcomers, of technology and tranquillity: the fate of the thing that started all the trouble in the first place—the telescope.

It’s funded entirely by the National Science Foundation, and in 2013, in a wave of belt tightening across the federal government, a committee recommended shutting down the campus. NSF hasn’t said whether it will accept the proposal, but a 
decision is expected this year. 
If Washington chooses to divest, and the observatory can’t find outside funding, it could close by 2017.

Which might spell the end of Green Bank’s quaint life free of Wi-Fi.

Some say that in the long run, 
that may be best for the town. “We’ll be so far out of the loop one of these days that we won’t be able to catch up,” says Crist, who raised six children in the Quiet Zone and watched some of them move away. “People come back home and think we’re living in the Dark Ages.”

But a shuttered telescope would 
obviously be a nightmare for the electrosensitives who are just making 
inroads with the locals.

In the fall of 2013, Monique Grimes married Tom Grimes, a 
native Green Banker who owns 
a spacious hundred acres where lambs and sheep roam. Tom says 
his wife, who moved to town from 
Florida when her EHS symptoms forced her to quit her job as a speaker for a public policy group, helps out around the farm, and he introduces her to locals. “They get 
to know me first as Mo, not as an 
electrosensitive,” Monique says. “Now friends of ours have gone so far as to replace the lightbulbs in their house because they want me 
to come to visit.”

Whatever happens to the telescope, Monique is pretty convinced that her version of the science will prevail and that future generations will see the folly of iPhones and laptops just like past ones did of asbestos and cigarettes. As one sympathetic doctor told her, “You were just born a hundred years before your time.”

“Or after,” Tom quips, knowing there’s a decent chance they’re sitting in the last quiet place on earth.

In July 2015, the NRAO received 
funding for the Green Bank Telescope for at least five more years.

Everything you ever wanted to know about sex, body odor, and bladder problems, but were afraid to ask.

If you are in a relationship—or want to be—you’re sure to find yourself in a crowd of new people at some point. A friend might drag you to a singles’ mixer, your roommate might host a party with guests you don’t know, or your new partner might bring you to a family gathering.

You may have no problem mingling in a crowd. But maybe you—like many people—find it intimidating. Here’s how to not only survive but thrive when you find yourself entering a social scenario:

1. Go in prepared. Ahead of time, think about how you want to present yourself and interact with others. If you were giving a presentation at work, you’d prepare and practice. So why not do the same thing when going into a crowd?
2. Quiet your inner critic. That voice in your head might whisper that you’re wearing the wrong outfit, you’re bad at small talk, and your jokes always fall flat. Be aware of these disapproving messages—and tell them to go away.
3. Know that you’re not the only one feeling anxious. Lots of people are skilled at covering up their anxiety or compensating for it. But be assured that many people feel uneasy in crowds.
4. Let go of the pressure to be something you’re not. If you’re not the life-of-the-party type, so what? If you’re not a social butterfly, so what? Your anxiety will dissipate when you realize you only have to be YOU.
5. Remember to smile. The simplest strategies are often the most powerful. A smile stands out from the more common expressions people wear that convey fatigue, arrogance, or boredom.
6. Resist the urge to hide. You might feel tempted to find an inconspicuous corner of the room and try to go unnoticed. But doing so will make you feel even more awkward and deprive you of opportunities to meet interesting people.
7. Leverage your body language. Your physical demeanor signals important things about yourself. Make sure your nonverbals communicate that you’re welcoming and receptive.
8. Don’t wait to be approached. If you hold back, waiting for someone else to initiate, you might be standing like a statue for quite a while. With a smile and an extended hand, go introduce yourself to someone.
9. Find a friendly face. Looking around at a roomful of people can be intimidating. But all you really need to do is find ONE approachable person. You don’t have to work the whole room; just get acquainted with one inviting individual.
10. Push yourself to participate. Let intentional involvement triumph over your fearful reluctance to join in.
11. Realize that someone else will be relieved to meet you too. No one goes to a social event hoping to stare at the carpet all evening. When you make the effort to reach out, you’ll make someone’s day.
12. Listen closely. Ask a question, then listen to the response as if there is nowhere else you’d rather be. Most people can’t resist being the object of someone’s attention, and you’ll quickly move past introductions into a genuine conversation.
13. Keep conversations positive and upbeat. Conversations that begin with complaints or criticism generally go nowhere but downhill from there. It is far more interesting to discuss your likes than dislikes.
14. Assume the best about people. You might presume that others are sizing you up, judging you, or wondering what you’re doing there anyway. The truth is, most people are gracious and accepting.
15. Remain optimistic about the possibilities. Everyone in the group is a conversation waiting to happen—wanting to happen. Each person you meet is a potential friend, ally, or love.

The post 15 Ways to Interact in a Crowd — When You Hate Crowds appeared first on eHarmony Advice.

These gags will win you a Triple Crown in joke telling.

We don’t know a whole lot about Eve. We don’t know exactly how many children she had nor at what age she died, although Adam was 930 years young when he passed away. So who was this mysterious woman who begat us all? We tried to fill in some of the blanks.

Anyone with a concussion should be checked by a health care professional if at all possible. If you’re the one with the injury, don’t rely solely on your own assessment for signs you’re getting worse and need reevaluation. These signs of concussion should never be ignored.

Haunted by halitosis? Check your menu for these culprits—then reach for a simple-but-reliable bad breath cure like your toothbrush, sugarless gum, or a refreshing glass of water.

Smoking can cause at least 15 different types of cancer. And nearly 9 out of 10 lung cancers are from puffing away on cigarettes. Burn those two facts into your head if you haven't yet quit. Then read on to learn what else affects your risk.

Symptoms of ovarian cancer can be vague, but detecting ovarian cancer early could be key to survival.

An abnormal Pap test result doesn’t have to be scary when you know the right steps to take.

A former art lecturer at MIT was sentenced to a year  in jail for robbing  a bank. Although he admitted to committing the crime, he insisted he should not serve time.

His excuse: It was done as part of a performance art piece.  Source: masslive.com

After a Breathalyzer test showed her blood alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit, a New York State woman was arrested. But, she said, there was an explanation.

Her excuse: She suffered from auto-brewery syndrome, which meant her body created alcohol. Source: CNN

Another disputed DUI occurred in Wisconsin. The 75-year-old driver told officers he hadn’t touched a drop.

His excuse: His blood alcohol level was high because of his dinner—beer-battered fish.    Source: WISC-TV

On February 7, at 4:30 p.m., a driver was pulled over for topping 100 mph. The man, however, asked the police officer to be quick, as he was in a hurry.

His excuse: He had tickets for the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California, and kickoff was at 6:30. Police were skeptical, since the stop 
occurred in Pennsylvania. Source: pennlive.com

When a Florida bicyclist was detained, police found crack cocaine in his pants pocket. “Wait, what?!” said the man.

His excuse: He had no idea how the crack had gotten into the pants because they weren’t his pants. The cash the cops found? Yeah, that was his, but not the drugs.    Source: Sun-Sentinel (Miami)

A Pennsylvania man was convicted of pulling off ten armed robberies. Although the heists were caught on videos that showed his face, he 
denied responsibility.

His excuse: Of course the guy in the videos looked like him. It was his “evil twin.” Source: Las Vegas Sun

So who’s telling the truth?

Let’s raise a glass to auto-brewery syndrome lady!

Just two weeks after completing the New York City marathon, Nebraska teacher and track coach Andrea Kabourek, 32, learned she had breast cancer. Irreverent, tough, and optimistic, she sailed through her double mastectomy and chemotherapy, missing only six days of teaching while she received eight rounds of powerful, cancer-killing drugs. The chemotherapy was successful, and Kabourek thought she had beaten cancer. She went back to her two loves: teaching and travel.

But just about a year later, in 2011, Kabourek found herself winded after running halfway around the track and then walking up a single flight of stairs. This time, she was diagnosed with leukemia, which most likely developed as a “side effect” of her original chemotherapy treatment. “It’s like the small print on the back of the bottle,” says Kabourek, who was stunned by the development.

After more chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, Kabourek is back at Lincoln East High School. But she’s disturbed that some of the same drugs that led to her leukemia were deployed again to destroy her bone marrow’s abnormal (along with normal) cells before her transplant.

A ‘Secondary Cancer’ Diagnosis
Kabourek joined the growing ranks of cancer survivors who are confronting second, new malignancies—not a recurrence or spread of their original disease. Sometimes, as with Kabourek, the new cancer is an aftereffect of powerful radiation or chemotherapy treatments. Other times, genetic or familial risks play a role. And sometimes, lifestyle—diet or exposure to toxins—is to blame. The numbers are surging: An astonishing one in six people with a new cancer diagnosis had previously been diagnosed with a different cancer. “If you lump together all second cancers, it’s a very common diagnosis,” says Marie Wood, MD, professor of medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Only initial breast, prostate, and lung cancers affect more people.

Second cancers entered the breakfast-table consciousness of millions a few years ago, when Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts, a breast cancer survivor, revealed that she had a form of bone marrow cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). As with about one in five MDS patients, previous chemotherapy and/or radiation likely caused Roberts’s new life-threatening condition (she’d received both types of cancer treatment five years earlier).

Not long after, Kathy Bates revealed she had completed breast cancer treatment, nine years after first being treated for ovarian cancer. And Sharon Osbourne, a colon cancer survivor, announced that after testing positive for a breast cancer gene, she had undergone prophylactic mastectomy to avoid developing a new cancer.

Second cancers may be an unavoidable risk of lifesaving cancer treatment. But there are ways for people to minimize that risk. Here’s what doctors should be telling their cancer patients … and what all of us should know about the new front in the war against cancer.

“Many chemotherapy drugs are themselves cancer-causing agents.”
The chemo that’s eliminating a first cancer may cause another later; while targeting the DNA of cancer cells, the drugs also affect normal cells. Among the cells affected are the stem cells in bone marrow that go on to create red and white blood cells, making leukemia—blood cancer—a later risk. According to the American Cancer Society, several types of chemotherapy have been linked to leukemia, usually two to ten years after initial treatment. Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about one in every 200 women—one half of one percent—receiving chemo for breast cancer develops leukemia within ten years. It’s a relatively small number, but it’s five times higher than women treated with surgery alone.

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What you can do: Make sure the benefit of the chemotherapy you receive is worth the risk. Various genetic tests are helping doctors tailor treatments for individual patients. These tests aim to maximize the chance of a cure and avoid toxicity—including the risk of second cancers—whenever possible by treating only those most likely to benefit.

Sharon Hayden, 62, of Niuli’i, Hawaii, was able to avoid chemotherapy this way. When she developed stage 2 breast cancer in 2012, she was offered a test of gene activity in the tumor. The analysis revealed she had a low risk of recurrence and would receive little added benefit from chemo.

The test Hayden benefited from, called Oncotype DX, became available in 2004; since then, about 300,000 women have had their tumors analyzed. “In about 37 percent of the women, the results changed decisions about treatment, and there has been about a 20 percent decrease in the use of chemotherapy, usually in favor of hormonal treatment alone,” says Steven Shak, MD, chief medical officer at Genomic Health. The company has a similar test available for colon cancer and prostate cancer.

“Even targeted radiation treatment can lead to second cancer decades later.”
For many cancer patients, radiation treatment controls tumor growth, decreases recurrences, and improves survival. Like chemotherapy, though, radiation itself is a cancer risk. As patients live longer after treatment, the possibility of a radiation-induced tumor rises. At the National Cancer Institute (NCI), researcher Amy Berrington de Gonzalez, PhD, analyzed what happened to adult patients in the decade after they reached the five-year survival mark for 15 different types of radiation-treated cancers: About 8 percent of the second cancers that occurred were related to the initial radiation. In absolute numbers, that translates to five extra cancers for every 1,000 patients treated.

While the overall rate was fairly low, greater second-cancer risks were found among those who received higher doses of radiation and those who were younger at initial treatment. Testicular and cervical cancer patients, who tend to be young adults, had higher rates of second cancers attributed to their radiation treatment than prostate and endometrial cancer patients, who tend to be older when treated.

What you can do: Ask your radiologist if she’s doing everything possible to shield your healthy tissue; the more targeted the treatment, the better. Hayden, for example, was treated for her breast cancer in a facedown position with her breast hanging through a special opening, keeping vital organs out of harm’s way. Protective measures are also available for prostate cancer by using 3-D imaging to map the prostate’s location and minimize radiation to surrounding organs.

“Your daughter will always have to be closely monitored.”
Twenty years ago, when she was 15, Ruth Rechis, PhD, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and received that era’s state-of-the-art chemotherapy and radiation at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. Called mantle field therapy, the treatment exposed a wide area of her neck and chest to radiation. Now 35, Rechis and others like her find themselves at far higher risk of early breast cancer—up to 30 percent by age 50, compared with 4 percent in other women—as well as heart damage and other radiation aftereffects. “It can be a burden to keep explaining why I need a mammogram and an EKG that other women my age don’t,” says Rechis, director of research at the Livestrong Foundation.

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When cancer occurs in children and teens, they face a lifetime risk of a second malignancy more than five times greater than their peers who had cancer-free childhoods. Part of the reason is simply time; once cured, childhood survivors have many more years to develop a second cancer than someone first diagnosed at age 50 or 60. But cancer treatment is also harsher on children’s developing bodies. Aggressive chemotherapy and radiation can damage growing tissues, so childhood survivors need special monitoring throughout their lives.

What you can do: Make sure your child gets a post-cancer treatment plan, and share it with all her physicians. If you’re a childhood cancer survivor yourself, make sure you’re up-to-date on all recommended screenings. “If you were treated at a young age and aren’t sure of your risks, ask your doctor for recommendations, and find out whether you can do anything to prevent a second cancer or have it diagnosed earlier,” says Elizabeth Ward, PhD, vice president for intramural research at the American Cancer Society.

If you don’t know the details of your treatment history, contact the hospital where you were initially treated. Or seek help from one of the NCI-designated centers with survivorship programs. Download a guide (written for health professionals but available to the public) created by the Children’s Oncology Group at survivorshipguidelines.org.

“The lifestyle factors that contributed to your first cancer can raise your risk of a second.”

There is a strong connection between many lifestyle factors and the development of primary cancer,” says Jennifer Ligibel, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior physician at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. But changing these habits isn’t always easy. The leading culprit: tobacco. A smoker who has survived lung cancer, for example, is at a fivefold higher risk of developing laryngeal cancer. Other exposures that may increase second-cancer risk: heavy alcohol use (especially in smokers) and certain hormones, chemicals, and infections.

What you can do: You can’t change your genetics or your medical history, but you can control health habits—diet, exercise, smoking, and alcohol consumption.

“Consider genetic testing.”

Some inherited genetic mutations increase cancer risk by inhibiting the ability of other genes—cancer-protective ones—to do their jobs. These mutations, dubbed cancer genes, can dramatically raise the risk of first and subsequent cancers. The most common cancers with a genetic component include breast, ovarian, prostate, and colon cancers. In recent years, doctors have tested people suspected of having cancer genes so they could take steps to avoid future malignancies or detect them at their earliest, most treatable stages. Sharon Osbourne was tested before she opted for a prophylactic double mastectomy.

Andrea Kabourek, the track coach, was young when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her grandmother had died of ovarian cancer. Based on those facts, she was tested for a common genetic mutation associated with both cancers, called BRCA1, and was found positive. She plans to have her ovaries removed after age 35, which will drastically reduce her risk.

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What you can do: If you developed a cancer at an age considered young for developing it, or if you have a strong family history of certain cancers, talk to a genetic counselor. She can help you decide whether you should have one of the dozens of cancer genetic tests now available and help you interpret the results. The tests help determine what cancers you are at increased risk for, but they can’t determine with certainty whether you’ll develop any cancer.

Physicians also need to know your family history of cancer to monitor you appropriately. “Say you had breast cancer at 40, and your dad had colon cancer. That might be enough of a concern to start your colon cancer screening earlier than the standard guidelines,” says Dr. Wood.

“Try not to focus only on the cancer you’ve already had. You’re going to need to get tested for other cancers too.”

“First-cancer survivors may not realize they are at higher risk for some seemingly unrelated cancers. For example, in October, the Mayo Clinic reported that non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivors have around a 2.5 times greater risk of melanoma than other people. The earlier cancer in the bone marrow crowds out the forming immune system cells, creating the higher second-cancer risk, explains Jerry Brewer, MD, associate professor of dermatology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

With age, the risk of developing many cancers rises, whether or not you’ve been diagnosed before. Unfortunately, many cancer survivors are not as vigilant as they should be about screenings. Surprisingly, their oncologists may not be urging the right tests either. “Health-care professionals can get so focused on the one cancer that they forget about all the others,” says Christine Hill-Kayser, MD, radiation oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania. The University of Florida reported in July that 20 to 30 percent of well-insured survivors don’t get even the standard tests recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

What you can do: Develop a survivorship plan with your physicians; the plan should outline your risks, recommend preventive measures, and include a schedule for medical screenings so that if you do develop another cancer, it can be treated early. For anyone who finished treatment without a written plan, a do-it-yourself version is available at livestrongcareplan.org, created by Dr. Hill-Kayser and colleagues for the University of Pennsylvania’s oncolink.org. The site will prompt you for information (type of cancer, treatment details) and then provide recommendations from professional organizations for second-cancer monitoring.

“Second cancers may be on the upswing, but the news isn’t all bad.”

More than 12 million Americans are cancer survivors—four times the number from the early 1970s. “It’s really important to understand the tremendous advances that have been made. Second cancers are a substantial clinical and public health problem now because people are living so much longer after first cancers. It’s an adverse consequence of a real success story,” says Lindsay Morton, PhD, investigator in the division of cancer epidemiology and statistics at the National Cancer Institute.

A stomachache after a glass of milk is probably nothing, but if you feel sick every time you eat dairy, you might be facing a bigger problem.

A smart light bulb joke: Is there such an animal? Indeed, there is! This breed of gag is known by its world-weary insouciance, obscure literary references, snarky jabs at intellectuals, and the need for the joke teller to look up words like insouciance before using them.

Nearly half of Americans have some type of allergy—how many of these allergy myths have you fallen for?

There are many ways in which women experience sleep differently than men. Women contend with distinct sleep challenges, respond differently to sleep disorders and sleeplessness, and face particular health risks as a result of poor sleep. Research indicates that women need more sleep than men do, and face greater consequences to mental and physical health from insufficient sleep.

Scientific evidence indicates that circadian rhythms in men and women are markedly different. Women’s circadian clocks are set to an earlier time than men’s, making them more inclined to fall asleep earlier and also to wake earlier. For this reason, women tend to have stronger inclinations to be active earlier in the day than men. Overall, women’s circadian cycles are several minutes shorter than men’s.

The biological phases of a woman’s life — and the hormone shifts that accompany them — can bring about sleep problems. Hormone changes that occur during a woman’s menstrual cycle, including fluctuations of estrogen and progesterone, often make falling asleep and staying asleep more difficult.

Restless, disrupted sleep is common during pregnancy. During pregnancy, women are at significantly greater risk for sleep disorders including insomnia, restless leg syndrome, and snoring. Even women who don’t generally experience sleep problems find that during pregnancy they have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, as well as trouble getting enough sleep.

Poor quality, fragmented sleep is a frequent symptom of perimenopause and menopause. Sleep difficulties that occur during menopause may result from hormone fluctuations, and also as a result of other menopausal symptoms, such as hot flashes and night sweats.

Parenthood also can pose challenges for women’s sleep. A majority of mothers — both stay-at-home moms and those working outside the home — report being sleep deprived and experiencing symptoms of insomnia, according to the National Sleep Foundation.

Women are more susceptible than men to some sleep disorders, including insomnia and restless leg syndrome (RLS). Women are also more likely to have nighttime pain that interferes with their sleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation. While men are more often diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea than women, research suggests that women suffer from this sleep disorder in higher numbers than were once thought. Women who are overweight or obese, or who have high blood pressure, are especially at risk for obstructive sleep apnea.

Women are at greater risk for some health problems as a result of poor quality or insufficient sleep, according to research. Studies show that women are more vulnerable than men to heart disease and inflammation that is associated with poor sleep. Research indicates that women who already have heart disease are particularly at risk for unhealthful inflammation as a result of not sleeping well. Women may also be more susceptible than men to weight and metabolic problems connected to sleeplessness. Research indicates that low sleep in women is more closely linked to higher BMI. Women who report sleeping poorly are more likely than men to say they experience depression and anger.

Women may fare better then men in the short term, when faced with sleep deprivation. Research shows that when short on sleep, women report feeling less sleepy than men do, and demonstrate smaller declines in daytime performance. Women also rebound more quickly after making up for sleep loss. Scientists attribute this difference to a tendency among women to spend more time in deep sleep.

Woman sleeping photo available from Shutterstock

Our reaction: I’m sorry, did you say you’re paying people not to kill 
one another? I thought so. Are you nuts?! What sort of message does this send?

But it worked! Ten years ago, Richmond, California, a city of 104,000, had one of the highest murder rates in the country. Millions 
were spent on crime-prevention programs, but nothing worked. It got so bad that the city council declared a state of emergency.

But since the town 
instituted a plan to pay the toughest gang members to follow a Life Map that would keep them out of trouble, the city’s murder rate dropped 
77 percent from 2007—when the program was initiated—to 2014. 
During that period, 
homicides in the rest of the county rose.

The idea was the brainchild of DeVone Boggan, 49, the CEO 
of a youth-mentoring consultancy in nearby Oakland. Once his 
plan was approved 
by the city council, 
Boggan created the 
Office of Neighborhood Safety.

According to Mother Jones, ONS staff 
members, most of them former felons, use 
police data as well as 
intelligence they gather on the street to determine the gang members most likely to kill or be killed.

Up to 50 gangbangers are offered a monthly stipend for nine months ranging from $300 to $1,000 to stick to their Life Map. Staff members help gang members 
attain a driver’s license or GED. They also 
arrange anger management classes, job training, and other specialty courses that might help them develop the skills needed to keep them 
off the streets. The 
better they do at avoiding trouble, the more money they make.

The thinking behind paying for good behavior is simple, criminologist Barry Krisberg told the Washington Post: 
“If you can’t stabilize their financial situation, they’ll go back to dealing dope, and drugs is 
a dangerous business.”

To be sure, other 
factors, such as gentrification and a new police chief who put a priority on community policing, are often cited as 
contributing to Richmond’s drop in crime. 
All these influences have combined to recast Richmond’s image as 
a modern Dodge City.

“Young men who are historically responsible for gun violence in this city are making better decisions about how they negotiate everyday conflicts,” Boggan told the Contra Costa Times.

Richmond’s mayor, Gayle McLaughlin, agrees: “[Our] old 
reputation is dying off.”

Our reaction: Oh, the ambulance chasers are gonna love this. If you admit wrongdoing, they’re gonna bleed you dry! Why not just hand over the bank account?!

Hmm, the hospitals 
may be onto something: When a patient perceives, correctly or not, that a doctor or hospital has made a mistake, the doctor’s or hospital’s knee-jerk reaction is 
typically to circle the wagons and deny guilt. A study from Johns Hopkins found that only 2 percent of American hospitals let patients know when a mistake has occurred. But that may be changing. Oregon passed a law stating that an apology from a doctor won’t be used against him or her, while the University of 
Michigan Health System has launched a groundbreaking initiative.

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According to U.S. News & World Report, “the University of 
Michigan Health System pioneered the Disclosure, Apology, and Offer model, in which patients who have been the 
victim of an error are quickly told, issued an apology, and offered a settlement.” As a result, the hospital system’s 
legal costs dropped some 60 percent, and it had 36 percent fewer medical claims lodged against it.

While admitting a grave medical error may seem like career suicide in today’s litigious society, the fact is, what most patients and their family members really want are to know the facts and to be treated fairly.

As Richard Boothman, a former trial lawyer, told U.S. News & World Report, doctors can 
disarm angry patients by simply saying, “I could and should have done better—I’m sorry.”

Our reaction: What are you thinking?! Don’t 
you know what kind of creeps answer ads like these? Go through the proper channels to get a kidney.

Success! After having not felt well for weeks, Christine Royles, a South Portland, Maine, restaurant worker and mother of one, took time off to visit her doctor. The diagnosis he gave her was devastating: She had 
lupus and anca vasculitis, an autoimmune disease that affects blood vessels. As a result, both her kidneys were failing, and she would need a transplant. Royles, only 23, was placed on a donor transplant list along with 100,000 other people, then waited for a call.

But Royles grew impatient. Being tethered to a dialysis machine for ten hours a day will have that effect. So, using a marker, she wrote an ad on the rear window of her Kia in the hope that some kind-hearted soul would see it and respond. The ad read: “Looking for someone 2 donate their kidney. Must have Type O blood. (You only need one kidney.)” She then included her phone number.

Josh Dall-Leighton was on a shopping trip with his family when 
he spotted the plea 
on the back of the 
Kia. According to the Portland Press Herald, Dall-Leighton, a 30-year-old corrections officer and father of three, 
immediately told his wife, “I need to do this.”

He called the number on the ad, then took the requisite tests that proved he was a match.

Last June, doctors successfully removed both of Royles’s failing kidneys and replaced them with one of 
Dall-Leighton’s healthy 
kidneys.

Royles’s debatable 
(or brilliant) solution brought out the heroism in Dall-Leighton, though 
he doesn’t see it that way. His actions were practical, he told the Press Herald. “If my wife needed a kidney, and I couldn’t provide for her, I would hope that somebody else would help her out.”

Our reaction: Have you ever had kids? Know what they do with Legos? They lose them! Having a prosthesis isn’t fun and games!

Why it’s ingenious: When it comes to kids, maybe prostheses should be fun and games. Children missing limbs suffer from both physical and psychological handicaps. Carlos Torres Tovar wondered if there was a way to make these kids the life of the party.

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Tovar, a Colombian 
designer who studied at Umea University in Sweden, created a prosthetic arm with a three-finger gripper, powered by 
a specialized motorized adapter, much like many other prostheses. But here’s where it gets 
interesting: The gripper can be easily snapped off the device in favor of a gadget made entirely of Legos, one the child designs and creates. Want an airplane for
an arm? Here’s your chance! How about a doll? Go for it. 
A Maserati? Vroom!

Dario, then an eight-year-old from Colombia, was born with a partially developed right arm that stopped growing at the elbow. Last year, he became the first to test the new device. With the help of family and staff members, he created 
a battery-powered 
remote-controlled backhoe, which he fitted onto his arm after removing the gripper.

Dario’s friend joined him at the test. The friend has two fully functional arms, but he got swept up into the spirit and built a Lego spaceship. Dario snapped that onto his arm, and soon the two were off in outer space.

The reason Lego-
compatible prostheses make kids happy is simple, Tovar told qz.com. It’s social: “When you 
assemble a Lego set, you assemble it with your parents or your friends, or you even make a new friend with them.”

Our reaction: Shouldn’t they try pouring more water into the reservoir instead? There’s already enough garbage in our drinking water!

A brilliant effort: The skies finally opened up over California recently, but after five years of devastating drought, 
everyone wants to make sure the water stays in the reservoir and isn’t lost to evaporation. To that end, the Los 
Angeles Department of 
Water and Power has dumped “shade balls” into the reservoir. By blocking the sun’s rays from the water, the balls will reduce evaporation by 300 million gallons 
a year; they’ll also keep “the water clear of dust and critters, hinder algae growth, and prevent chemical reactions between sunlight and chlorine,” says USA Today.

The balls, which have at least a ten-year life span, are just four inches in diameter and are made from the same BPA-free plastic material as milk jugs. At 36 cents a pop, or $34.5 million total, 
the shade balls are a lot cheaper than the EPA’s alternative: Create a floating cover for the reservoir at a cost of $300 million.

Pouring 96 million 
plastic balls into a reservoir might strike some as crazy talk, but desperate times require desperate measures. As Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti told huffingtonpost.com, “This is emblematic of the kind of creative 
thinking we need to meet those challenges.”

If your whisk is in the dishwasher or you can’t stand forking out money for a cooking utensil you’ll only pull out once a year, try these easy swaps with products you have on hand.

For the past four years, I’ve performed Poem Store: a public project that consists of exchanging on-demand poetry composed on a manual typewriter for a donation. I’ve done most of my work in 
Arcata, at the Arcata Plaza Farmers’ Market. I have lived in and around this Northern California coastal town for three years. The community 
has embraced me and treated me as its unofficial town poet.

I think of this place as the throne of the earth, where I go to wander through ancient forests; stroll the edge of the continent; and kneel along the lip of clear, cold rivers.

Here I learned the language of landscape. Here I became acquainted with a history of harvest. Everywhere I looked, the trees were owned, considered a crop, nurtured and prepared for our consumption.

Folks would camp high up in the old-growth redwoods, trying their hand as saviors, but usually to little effect.

I wanted to know more about 
this system. About the people who owned the trees and those who sat in them. That’s because no matter how much I read, no matter how many 
tree sitters I talked to, I still felt I 
was missing something. I still felt there was something I could do to help resolve the impasse.

Neal Ewald is the senior vice president of Green Diamond Resource Company. Green Diamond is a five-generation, family-owned, and highly controversial timber harvesting company that possesses 400,000 acres 
of land in California. Green Diamond has a reputation for its clear-cut logging practices, use of toxic herbicides, and issues with mass privatization of land. Lesser known and hardly celebrated are the recent sizable adjustments the company has made, including receiving a Forest Stewardship Council certification for improved and 
responsible forestry.

In 2010, at the Arcata Plaza Farmers’ Market, I wrote Neal this poem per his request on the subject of 
being underwater:

Of all the things to do in life,
all landscapes to believe in,
all ways of proving anything is 
possible,
with the weight of water around us,
we pay tribute to the finest 
possibility.
When below the surface
we take moments to look up and know
that be it waking life or not,
all the force of the world lies deep
and well in such an unknown place.

This poem inspired Neal to solicit another, this time through the mail. He sent me a package. Inside was 
a book. He explained that he had lost his wife to cancer and that this was 
a collection of her correspondence with friends and family for the five months before she passed away.

He wanted me to study the book and then compose a poem for him and his children to read as they finally spread Wendy’s ashes in the ocean. He hadn’t been able to do this, because he hadn’t found anything that he felt was good enough for such a moment. He didn’t want to choose a song or 
a poem from an anthology. He wanted something unique, something just for Wendy. When he met me, he felt he’d been led to me for a reason. I was to write a poem for his wife.

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It wasn’t until I composed and delivered Wendy’s poem that I even realized who Neal was. He holds the key to the forest, and there isn’t much that I care about more than the 
forest. Neal presented a way for me to be directly in service to the earth. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that we could collaborate and create change.

Our friendship grew based upon the inherent trust that comes from sharing such an intimate experience. Our poetic 
exchange about Wendy allowed for comfortable and familiar alliance. We began having dinners, we started a book club, and I was invited to Green Diamond walks in the woods. And always every encounter was full of discussion.

We mused about the future of the company, what revisions could occur, what the public needed to know, and what problems needed solving.

Neal expressed great interest in my ideas. He listened enthusiastically, and his intrinsic desire to explore the unknown was very clear. He never once seemed unavailable, never like 
a fat-cat businessman but a true seeker, an openhearted wonderer.

We created a shared language. 
We developed themes to talk about each time we saw each other: grief, activism, poetry, women, love, corporate accountability, polarity, 
Native Americans, environmentalism, dehumanization.

We shared inspirations and lessons: I read stories about his father. He taught me how to shoot guns and use a chain saw.

We made plans: I would help him create a permaculture homestead 
design for his personal land. We would swim in the ocean on anniversaries and honor Wendy together, spreading lilies in the water. And 
I would recite her poem.

Above all, we focused on one 
word: yes.

Neal is dedicated to the discovery of how to say yes. He wants to disrupt the concept that there needs to be opposition. Throughout his career in forestry, he has striven to find a way to dismantle dichotomy and meet his adversaries in the middle.

This is extremely difficult when your opponents, the tree sitters, choose not to view you as a human being but simply as greedy and power hungry.

Neal is available, although under the construct of his position running a business, and he does have a Yes Zone, as he likes to call it. He wants to experiment and do things differently.

Perhaps my experience with Neal could have ended with our deep 
exchange over the poems I had created for him. If that were the only outcome of this connection, I’d have been completely satisfied. To see how those poems brought him healing was enough. But because of our trusting relationship, something else occurred.

The history of the McKay Tract, 
a piece of land that contains a grove of old-growth redwoods in Cutten, California, is much too complex for me to tell here. Folks have dedicated years of their lives trying to preserve this forest. A young man named Farmer was the voice of this particular protest. He had been covertly living in the trees for 
a long time. He hated Green Diamond. Yet with Farmer I saw possibility in his passion. After various promptings and considerable conversation, with my support, Farmer took the initiative and reached out to Neal.

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After a few in-depth meetings, an arrangement developed. Green Diamond was already working on plans for the McKay Tract, and Neal saw this common thread of interest as a way to connect with his adversaries. These two rivals figured out how to meet and discuss the forest while avoiding dehumanization. It didn’t matter that they disagreed about so many things. They chose to hear each other, to consider each other’s perspective and not simply make demands. Each worked within the other’s Yes Zone.

The McKay Tract will not be cut. The nonprofit Trust for Public Land is working on turning a great deal of it into a community forest. This agreement caused a new communion, no matter how subtle. Forest protesters were able to see Neal’s willingness. They can now credit his character and his obvious wish to say yes.

In each conversation I have with Neal, he likes to remind me that this change occurred because of us and our discussions.

I follow it all the way back to the fact that a single poem created a spark.

With this story, a reminder bursts brilliantly before us all. This is that age-old concept that one person can truly make a difference.

May we remember that everyone holding a place of power is still simply human. People may be grieving, they may be in need, they may be sitting with an ache that only we can help ease. They may be nothing like the picture that society paints of them, and they may want to do something extraordinary.

Here we pay tribute to the teachers of wisdom.
All who choose to re-create the standard way of leaving,
Who carefully furl away grief in the name of celebrating
The greater weave, who allow experience to shine as it should,
The beauty of all things held high and seen well,
Even in the darkest of times.

It is these guides who recognize the fickle ways of the body,
Knowing that all life is not had in the mind, who discover
The sturdy ground is in the kith and kin, in the loves
We nurture with the simple give and take that can only be had
Through such constant connection.

It is these who settle on patience in the face of mystery
and misfortune, knowing that we are but provided with words
as explanations and everything’s a gift. And so beyond
trying to figure answers and find ends, we should instead
honor the circle we’ve been offered, allow for its turns
and delivery to come with grace and acceptance so that we
might leave it all behind knowing how perfect it was
in all directions.

—For Wendy, Neal, Zach, and Annie, and all who continue to be touched by Wendy’s love and wisdom. Written July 25, 2010, by Jacqueline Suskin, with honor and thanks.

These fiction and nonfiction reads showcase an eclectic cast of mothers and daughters from past and present. Share the list, and then get ready to devour and discuss.

In scientific terms, sleep is a state of altered brain activity that is quite different from the waking state. During sleep, our brain cells work more slowly but more intensively. This shows up on an EEG (a machine used to record brain activity) as electrical activity that is lower in frequency but higher in voltage. There are also physical changes in the body such as changes in eye movement and muscular tension. Further variations in electrical activity in the brain show when each stage of sleep begins and ends. Here are doctors’ tips to sleep better naturally.

Sleep Stage 1
Our breathing and heartbeat become regular, our muscles relax and our body temperature falls. We become less aware of external stimuli and our consciousness starts to withdraw from reality. The slightest noise is enough to wake you from this stage and you might think you haven’t been asleep at all. You will no doubt have experienced the sensation of falling suddenly, typical of this stage. We spend about 10 percent of the night either awake or in stage 1. Some people twitch during this stage. Stage 1 generally lasts between 13 and 17 minutes. In effect, stage 1 is the stage during which we fall asleep and, as such, it occurs only once during a night of uninterrupted sleep.

Sleep Stage 2
Sleep becomes deeper during this sleep stage and our muscles relax further. Physical sensations are dampened significantly and our eyes do not move. Electrical activity in the brain occurs at a lower frequency than when we are awake. About half of our total sleeping time is spent in stage 2. Stages 1 and 2 are known as the light-sleep phase. Together, they last for about 20–30 minutes. We return to stage 2 several times during the night.

Sleep Stages 3 and 4
We reach the first of our deep-sleep stages, stage 3, after approximately 20 to 30 minutes, and the second, stage 4, after about 45 minutes. Our body is now completely relaxed. We are more or less completely disconnected from reality. To wake someone from deep sleep, you need to make quite a lot of noise or shake them quite hard. Waking someone from stage 4 is almost impossible—it’s a bit like trying to wake a hibernating animal right in the middle of winter. This is the most restful part of the night’s sleep. Muscular activity decreases even further and our eyes do not move. Stages 3 and 4 make up about 20 percent of our time asleep, but this proportion decreases as we get older. Stages 3 and 4 are known as the deep-sleep phase. Is America in a sleep crisis? Here’s how our sleep debt is making us sick, stupid, and fat.

REM sleep (the dreaming sleep stage)
Between 80 and 100 minutes after falling asleep, the deep-sleep phase comes to an abrupt end, which is often accompanied by a change in sleeping position. Our sleep switches to stage 2 for a few minutes before the EEG graph makes an abrupt change within the space of a few seconds. This shows that REM sleep is beginning—our heart rate increases and breathing gets quicker. The electrical activity in the brain creates small, rapid movements in the EEG, similar to those seen when falling asleep. Our muscles are completely relaxed, but our eyes make quick, darting movements while remaining closed. This is where the phrase rapid eye movement (REM) comes from.

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Men occasionally experience erections during this phase, and women may have increased blood flow to the genitals. The production of digestive juices increases. It is during REM sleep that we have most of our dreams. Here are 13 bizarre facts about dreams you never knew. For adults, REM sleep makes up about 20 percent of a night’s sleep. The percentage is considerably higher for infants and small children.

When healthy people are in a state of REM sleep, the muscles of our body are deeply relaxed. If it wasn’t for this we might act out our dreams, with potentially disastrous consequences. This is the most likely reason why the brain puts the body in this deep state of relaxation bordering on paralysis (known as atonia). However, when a person is suffering from some conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease, REM atonia does not occur and people can act out their dreams.

The Sequence of Sleep Stages
Our sleep follows a specific sequence of these different stages. We complete a sleep cycle and begin a new one approximately every 80 to 110 minutes, usually around 90 minutes. A night’s sleep begins with a light-sleep phase of varying duration, followed by the first deep-sleep phase of the night and a short REM phase. In the second half of the night, we spend a relatively shorter amount of time in deep-sleep phases while our REM phases tend to be longer. The final REM phase of the night can last for as long as 30 minutes or more. And then, we wake up.

The pattern of REM sleep changes as we grow older. During the first year of life, babies spend most of their time asleep in REM sleep. From the age of four, the proportion of REM sleep falls to about 20 percent of the night. People over the age of 60 spend only about 15 percent of the night in REM sleep.

With the exception of infants, people spend most of the night in the light-sleep phase. If the amount of time we sleep is reduced, it’s the light sleep phase that bears the brunt of the deficit, ensuring we still make it to the deep-sleep phases, which have the most restful effect. This is why some people can cut their sleeping time right down to a minimum of somewhere between four and six hours, depending on the individual, without losing too much of their capacity the next day.

Nevertheless, we need to spend some time in the light-sleep phase in order to reach the deeper sleep phases. It’s not possible to access deep sleep immediately after falling asleep. Good sleep takes time.

The Purpose of Sleep Stages
Each sleep phase serves a specific purpose for the body. The primary function of both our light-sleep and deep-sleep phases is to have a regenerative effect on various processes in the body. During the REM phase, the brain is almost as active as when we are awake. We need both deep sleep and REM sleep to properly process the impressions and memories of the day. The brain weighs up the information we have taken in while awake and organizes our memories, storing any important information in our long-term memory and discarding superfluous details.

This is why a good night’s sleep is vital for our mental capacity. If you get an adequate amount of sleep the night before an exam, including several deep-sleep and REM phases, you will be better able to recall the material you have studied.

Rinse, wash, and reuse.

Nearly 250,000 women are estimated to be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. It’s important to pay attention to any breast changes, and see your doctor if you notice any of the following possibly breast cancer symptoms.

DAY 1: Eat a burrito at your steady job during your lunch break.

DAY 2: Have a kid punch you in the groin to wake you up.

DAY 3: Look up how much college tuition will cost, then multiply it by the number of kids you have. Then, instead of crying, eat a late-night burrito.

DAY 4: Do one push-up, breathe heavily, and then open a bag of Wild Berry Skittles.

DAY 5: Buy a gym membership. When they give you a tour, take a good look around—this is the last time you will see it all.

DAY 6: Look at yourself in the mirror while recalling that how you look has zero to do with your chances of getting lucky today and that this is true every day forever after.

DAY 7: Carry a child for the entire zoo trip in your left arm, even after you can no longer feel it.

DAY 8: Get four hours’ sleep, and allow your body to confuse being tired with hunger and eat two burritos.

DAY 9: Chase a balloon across the parking lot of a Toys“R”Us at a “death struggle” level of intensity. Return it to the birthday girl, and wait until she smiles at you and says, “Thank you, Daddy,” before you throw up in the bushes.

DAY 10: Remember that time you were good at sports? Man, wasn’t that so great?

DAY 11: Start running but immediately injure your entire body, and then take a year off.

DAY 12: Lower your testosterone level a bit by losing another negotiation with a two-year-old.

DAY 13: Reward yourself with a milk shake for waking up today.

DAY 14: Play basketball with the grade-school kids in your neighborhood. Spend the time in the hospital catching up on your sleep.

DAY 15: Let the stress of your current financial burden allow you to feel each individual hair turning white.

DAY 16: Take your blood pressure pill, but only after stressing a bit about having to take a blood pressure pill.

DAY 17: Eat some Oven Baked Cheetos. If you don’t have any on hand, get married, and they will appear where your regular Cheetos used to be.

DAY 18: Squat down to wipe up vomit; raise up with your back.

DAY 19: Whenever you see a pull-up bar, grab it and pretend you are about to knock out some pull-ups. Wonder quietly what doing a single pull-up feels like.

DAY 20: Go to the pool and confidently take off your shirt and swim a couple of laps. Put your shirt back on and quietly dry-heave in the car.

DAY 21: Show off your new dad bod to your wife by first flagging her down on Facebook. Ignore her eye roll and laughter—she isn’t in touch with how attracted to you she is right now.

McSweeney’s (June 30, 2015), Copyright © 2015 by David Tate, mcsweeneys.net.

One thing we can all agree on: In the world we live in, there is no shortage of information, input, and advice … and no shortage of people dispensing it. An abundance of relationship experts and love gurus offer tips and rules for successfully pursuing romance. Some of this advice is very helpful; some, not so much. (We hope our articles fall into the helpful category.)

All of that said, the best advice about your love life might come from a source you are tempted to overlook: YOU. After all, you know yourself better than anyone else does, you understand your past joys and struggles, and you’ve gained insights into romance and relationships over the years. So while taking in guidance from wise counselors, be sure to heed the wisdom that comes from yourself.

Here’s how:

Honestly assess your dating history. Lots of people look back on former relationships and remember only the enjoyable, ecstatic moments. Others dwell only on the headaches and heartaches. Recognizing both the positives and negatives will help keep things in perspective — and help you let go of the past more easily and to move forward with wisdom.

Understand your dating fears. Nearly everyone has fear when it comes to dating: fear of rejection, fear of getting duped, fear of getting stuck in a dead-end relationship. Sometimes these fears serve as a helpful safeguard; sometimes they prevent us from taking risks that have huge upside potential. Is your fear based on actual danger, or is it fueled by old baggage you’ve yet to unpack and unload? Understanding where your fear comes from may lead to guidance worth following.

Identify lessons learned that will help in future relationships. What insights can you discern that will enable you to avoid trouble next time around? Nearly every experience — difficult or delightful — teaches us something. Seek to gain a clearer picture of what you need in a partner and what you want to avoid. Learning from the good experiences and the bad ones will make you a wiser dating partner in the future.

Write out the advice to yourself. No doubt you’ve picked up lots of dos and don’ts along the way — hard-earned rules of the road on the journey toward lasting love. Clarify your thoughts by writing your own advice and lessons learned in a journal. Create your own principles for success, and review them often.

Take time to explore your own inner world … you may find that the best advice about love and romance for you comes from within.

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The post How to Give Yourself Some Love Advice appeared first on eHarmony Advice.

Musical instruments, sports ball, camping gear: Here's how to neatly store your most inconvenient items.

You probably don’t have a tapeworm. But you’re likely sleeping too little, spending too much time on Instagram, and do a bunch of other things make you so freaking hungry, all the (freaking) time.

Fact: If you have a mom, you have an embarrassing mom story. Here, 22 'Reader's Digest' readers share the funniest, sassiest, and most ridiculous things their mothers ever did.

It was a steamy August day in the sleepy town of Hood River, Oregon—perfect for Erika Doring to take her almost-three-year-old, Elaina, to the local lake. She buckled Elaina into the car seat and was on her way when Doring, then 45, suddenly realized: She’d forgotten her daughter’s life jacket.

It was in the back of the children’s consignment shop she owned, a few blocks down the street from their home. She parked her car with Elaina inside, left the AC on, and ran in, not even stopping to say hi to her employee—just, “I’ve got to grab the life jacket!” Racing out a few minutes later, Doring saw the neighborhood parking enforcement officer standing beside her car. Her heart slammed in her chest. Had something happened?

A few moments later, two police officers arrived (the parking officer had called them). As Doring tried to explain, they looked at her coldly. “I would never leave my kids in the car, even in the driveway,” one said, according to Doring.

The officer handed her a citation: She was being charged with child neglect. The doting mom—a part-time social worker who worked closely with child protective services, or CPS—had 24 hours to turn herself in at the local police precinct.

A Pendulum Swung Too Far

Doring’s story is emblematic of a disturbing trend. Parenting practices common a couple of decades ago—letting your child play outside or stay in the car so Dad could run a quick errand—are now considered neglectful, even criminal.

“The pendulum has swung hard in favor of highly protective parenting,” according to David Pimentel, an associate professor of law at the University of Idaho and an expert on how the legal system addresses child neglect. “The legal standards for child protection and the agencies entrusted with it are likely to keep it there, despite compelling evidence that it should be allowed to swing back.”

I get at least one e-mail a week from parents like Doring. They stumble upon me—the founder of the movement Free-Range Kids and the accompanying book and blog—while Googling late into the night, too upset to sleep. “I just ran in to drop off a book at the library … ” or “I didn’t want to wake up my son,” their notes begin.

It’s hard to estimate how common this trend is because neglect is classified differently from state to state and because the reasons parents are charged vary widely, but dozens of experts I’ve interviewed—including lawyers, economists, sociologists, and embattled parents—agree it’s a growing problem. Take Illinois: In 2012, there were 26,343 reports of inadequate supervision made to the state’s Department of Child and Family Services. But only 26 percent were “indicated”—meaning that some level of neglect was found, according to a 2015 analysis from the Family Defense Center, an advocacy group for families in the child-welfare system.

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National data on the number of kids taken away from their families by CPS show a troubling increase. In 2003, about 206,000 children were removed from their homes following investigation (for reasons including but not limited to neglect), according to government data. Five years later, that number rose to 267,000—a nearly 30 percent increase. But more than 41 percent of children removed were not found to have been mistreated.

That statistic is even worse when you consider the consequences parents face. Being investigated can add your name to a child-abuse registry, which comes up during employment background checks. There’s the threat—or reality—of being separated from your children. Legal fees. Criminal charges. Erika Doring was ultimately acquitted of her child- neglect charge, but only after she spent a quarter of her annual income on legal fees.

Of course, no one wants to stop CPS from intervening where there is legitimate emotional or physical abuse or neglect. But that’s not these folks.

“Parents feel like they don’t have the option of leaving their ten-year-old home to dash out to the store, because somebody could call the cops and start some legal nightmare,” says Pimentel. “They can’t let their kid walk home from school, because what would the neighbors think?”

Bullied into Overparenting

That’s exactly what happened to Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, a Silver Spring, Maryland, couple who made national headlines after they let their then–ten- and six-year-old children, Rafi and Dvora, walk home from a park in December 2014. The Meitivs believe in giving their kids freedom to help them become independent. “I see a lot of kids who don’t have confidence or competence,” Danielle told me. “I want my children to be able to take care of themselves.”

The kids had made it only about halfway home when a police officer stopped them after a call from a worried onlooker. A couple of hours later, the local CPS agency showed up; a worker required Alexander to sign a “safety plan” promising not to let the kids out of sight for 48 hours. Alexander says CPS told him that if he didn’t comply, his children would be removed. A few months later, police picked up the kids while they were walking home from a different park; the children were detained by the police and CPS for more than five hours before they were reunited with their parents.

“What CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing,” Alexander told the Washington Post. “We feel we’re being bullied into a point of view about child rearing that we strongly disagree with.”

All charges against the Meitivs were eventually dropped, but it was an emotionally traumatic six months. CPS workers visited their home on multiple occasions, insisting on searching it. Social workers went to the kids’ school—without their parents’ knowledge—and even pulled the kids out of class to interview them. The Meitivs had to hire lawyers. The children had nightmares and saw a therapist. Parenthood itself has been criminalized, says Danielle. And even worse, she adds, “it’s the criminalization of childhood. In one generation, we have changed the definition of what it means to be a child.”

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Are Kids Really Unsafe?

On the tape recording, the bystander who called about the Meitiv children tells the operator he was walking his dog and spotted “two kids that are unaccompanied, and they’ve been walking around for about 20 minutes by themselves.” He doesn’t seem sure this merits a call but doesn’t want to be an apathetic onlooker in case, God forbid, something terrible happens. But therein lies the problem. Our assumptions about threats to children’s safety are totally out of whack.

In 2008, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey estimated that the rate of violent crime was 19.3 per 1,000 people over age 12—less than half the rate from 1973, when the agency began tracking data. Kids under 12 are much safer: Their assault rate is about one seventh; their robbery rate, about one twelfth; and their forcible sex rate, about half, according to George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan, PhD, in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Stranger kidnappings—the threat parents fear most—are much rarer than people think. They account for only one-hundredth of 1 percent of all missing children, according to David Finkelhor, PhD, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

You might be wondering: Could crime rates be down because of stricter, more supervised parenting? Experts like Caplan and Finkelhor, who’ve extensively crunched these numbers, say no. They attribute the decline in crime rates to more policing, aggressive prosecution of wrongdoers, the prevalence of cell phones, and greater use of psychiatric meds.

So objectively, childhood has never been safer. But media reports that misrepresent risks about kidnappings and other dangers get burned into parents’ minds—and those of community members who might call the police when they see kids alone or even those of jury members who have to decide whether a parent behaved negligently.

“If the public is misinformed about the risks children face in the world and driven by irrational fears inflamed by sensationalistic media reports, the jury may be in a poor position to judge the actions of a parent,” Pimentel has argued. “Because jurors can quickly and easily recall examples of child abductions, they will assume that such events are common … and will be quick to condemn parenting choices that fail to guard against such ‘common’ and well-known risks.”

This can unintentionally expose kids to more harm. A perfect example: Letting your kid walk to school is dangerous, right? She could be hit by a car or abducted by a stranger. But statistically, being driven to school in a car is the most dangerous way to get there. According to an American Academy of Pediatrics report about school transportation safety, 75 percent of fatalities and 84 percent of injuries to kids occurred in passenger vehicles. Just 6 percent of injuries occurred among walkers.

The Decline of Neighborliness

Thirty years ago, if an adult saw a kid wandering around the neighborhood, he or she might have said hi and asked if the child needed anything. Call the cops? Never. For one thing, the adult didn’t have a cell phone tucked into his or her pocket. But chances are the adult also knew the kid—and his or her parents—much better than neighbors know one another today.

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Only about 20 percent of people regularly spend time with those living next to them, and one third report never interacting with their neighbors, according to a 2015 report from economist Joe Cortwright. Four decades ago, one third of Americans hung out with their neighbors at least twice a week, and only 25 percent had no engagement.

“There’s a fear of taking responsibility for kids in the neighborhood,” Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior correspondent at theweek .com, wrote recently. “A neighbor’s interest may seem invasive or even creepy. Lacking church or community, bystanders in a neighborhood refer their concern about a suboptimal parental situation to the only other institution empowered to look out for the welfare of children: the state.”

The Way to Real Reform

So what can a bystander, like the dog walker who called the police about the Meitiv children, do differently? For starters, take a step back. Is the kid really in danger? Would you still call if you knew his family might face a months-long investigation? If you’re worried, talk to the child—and try to also talk to his parents—before you call the police.

“Say ‘Hey, it looks like your kid might be lost or frightened,’” suggests Pimentel. “Then the worst thing is maybe you’ve made the parent unhappy because you’re being too nosy, but calling the police is such a terrible act of aggression. And it’s a series of events that can’t be stopped once you make that call.”

Policy changes are also necessary. State laws need to define neglect with more specificity, agree Pimentel and Diane Redleaf, executive director of Illinois’s Family Defense Center. The Family Defense Center calls for clearer guidelines to help CPS investigators evaluate the actual likelihood of harm to a child as a result of being left alone—not just a theoretical threat. “If a child is entirely unharmed by being left alone, if a child felt safe in the situation, if the parents made a deliberate decision to let the child be alone, and if there are no reasons to believe the child was in danger, there should be no basis to find neglect,” the group says. “When these factors are present, investigations should end.”

Redleaf also argues for removing personal judgment from CPS investigations. “It’s a problem anytime the child welfare system decides ‘I wouldn’t let my children do this’ but doesn’t at the same time say ‘But a reasonable, non-neglectful, caring parent who has his child’s best interests at heart might decide to do this.’ We want a system that lets parents make their own decisions for their children without being second-guessed,” she says.

Pimentel calls for CPS to be rebranded as an agency that supports parents in the difficult task of raising kids rather than an adversary that threatens to break up families through child removal. For that to happen, he told me, “it almost certainly requires a statutory change. Elected officials have to say, ‘Parents are the most embattled people in our community, and we need to stick up for them rather than threaten them.’”

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The Town That Got It Right

Several months ago,” the e-mail to me began, “our youngest son was accosted by an officer for riding his bicycle in front of our house. The officer told my husband, who was home at the time, that our son wasn’t allowed to play on the sidewalk ‘without supervision.’”

The writer, Heather Head, went on to describe two occasions when her older son, age ten, was stopped by the cops while walking a few blocks from home. Both boys became too scared to leave the house alone. This was in Belmont, North Carolina, a suburban town of 10,000 outside Charlotte with a bustling Main Street, a beautiful botanical garden, and summer concerts held downtown.

“Let me publish this on my blog!” I wrote back. But Heather wasn’t sure that humiliating the police or lawmakers was the way to go. Instead, she spoke to the city manager and assistant city manager. They, in turn, talked to Belmont’s chief of police. Heather and her husband began encouraging their boys to walk to the park, the library, and the convenience store by themselves again. “It took some convincing, but gradually they started to feel comfortable,” Heather says.

Then, a few weeks ago, Heather’s seven-year-old charged rosy-cheeked into Heather’s room after a walk to the park by himself—to tell his mother he’d been stopped by a police car. “My heart pounded, and I held my breath,” she told me. She had to restrain herself from running outside to confront the cops again. But Heather wanted to hear her son’s story first.

The police car stopped beside the boy when he was halfway between his house and the park. The officer leaned out the window and asked him if he was OK. He said yes. Then the officer asked him if his parents knew where he was. Again, yes. Then the officer did something shocking.

He said, “Great. Have a nice day.” And went on his way.

Heather’s levelheaded tactic worked. By harnessing the impulse that had precipitated all those interventions—concern—she helped get the town’s government and law enforcement on board to bring kids back outside. If Belmont residents see children playing unsupervised, now they might be encouraged to ask “Hey, how are you doing?” instead of dialing 911. If the Belmont police are nonetheless called, they can ask the same thing, instead of assuming the worst of the parents. And if child protection workers are summoned, they, too, can proceed from an innocent-until-proven-guilty stance rather than the opposite. The love we feel for kids can be turned into a safety net—instead of a snare.