The Smell of Relief

"Essential oils like lavender and chamomile can do more than just soothe the senses. Research shows aromatherapy treatment reduces pain too. 

Lavender has sedative effects comparable to drugs such as Valium. Ylang ylang, chamomile and rose have been shown to relieve pain, as have diluted oils of peppermint, eucalyptus and lemongrass. To get the full effect, be sure to use true essential oils, which are 100% pure."

- Psychology Today

Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples

Simply spending quality time together is probably not enough to prevent a relationship from getting stale.

Rather than visiting the same familiar haunts and dining with the same old friends, couples need to tailor their date nights around new and different activities that they both enjoy. The goal is to find ways to keep injecting novelty into the relationship. The activity can be as simple as trying a new restaurant or something a little more unusual or thrilling — like taking an art class or going to an amusement park.

New experiences activate the brain’s reward system, flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine. These are the same brain circuits that are ignited in early romantic love, a time of exhilaration and obsessive thoughts about a new partner.

Novelty alone is probably not enough to save a marriage in crisis. But for couples who have a reasonably good but slightly dull relationship, novelty may help reignite old sparks.

From The New York Times

Mastering Your Own Mind

"It remains a radical notion in the West that benevolent states of mind such as concentration, kindness and happiness can be developed with practice. Apart from a growing "positive psychology" movement, many of whose leaders are in fact strongly influenced by Buddhism, Western scientists are still largely oriented toward healing the mentally ill, rather than improving the lives of the functionally OK.

One recent study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that 40 minutes of daily meditation appears to thicken parts of the cerebral cortex involved in attention and sensory processing. In a pilot study at the University of California at San Francisco, researchers found that schoolteachers briefly trained in Buddhist techniques who meditated less than 30 minutes a day improved their moods as much as if they had taken antidepressants.

There are many types of meditation, and they can be used to develop a number of mental skills. This attitude focuses on practices that address common emotional struggles. Through basic meditation techniques, it's possible to cultivate a longer attention span, develop emotional stability, understand the feelings of others and release yourself from the constraints you place on your own happiness.

"Meditation is about paying attention," says Kabat-Zinn. Cultivating concentration doesn't just stabilize and clarify the mind, it can also improve creativity and productivity while enhancing relationships. A common approach is to focus on an object or on the sensations of your own breathing, noting every inhale and exhale, and patiently returning your attention to your breathing each time it wanders.

The effort in the exercise is to balance awareness between dullness and distraction. To do so, you use the self-monitoring process that psychologists call metacognition: awareness of awareness. It's what lets you know when, on the one side, you're starting to drift off and need to muster fresh interest and, on the other, you're getting distracted and need to bring your attention back. As you gradually fine-tune your concentration, you notice the habitual chaos of your thoughts and, gradually, the calm that lies behind them. "Awareness trumps thoughts," says Kabat-Zinn, "because you can be aware of your thoughts."

Even among novices, studies show, a brief meditation session can be more effective than a nap in improving performance on tests that require concentration. But its benefits don't stop there. Meditation can radically transform emotion.

Cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis put forth the then-radical idea that painful emotions spring more from people's beliefs than from reality itself: Thoughts alone could lead to anguish. Today cognitive behavioral therapists, including an aging Ellis, counsel patients to relieve emotional distress by changing the content of their thoughts—challenging their beliefs and testing new possibilities.

Buddhist meditation addresses the same issue a bit differently. It changes your relationship to your emotions more than the emotions themselves. It allows you to see mood fluctuations moment to moment so that you can navigate around them."

Psychology Today

What female (plastic) surgeons swear by…..

With a title like that I’m hooked. Here's Dr Hillary Allan at the Woodford Medical Aesthetics recommendations :
- The Nefertiti Lift which is Botox on the lower face and neck
- Eyebag laser, 1540 Fractional Laser which reaches deeper lines that Botox can't touch
- Agera sunscreen which contains "prolifersyn which encourages collagen production and increases the thickness of the epidermis." Use it on the neck, hands and cleavage.
- and peptide facials which deliver active ingredients deep into the skin. The DDF RMX Platinum Facial is recommended. (Tel UK: 0800 037 1700)

She stays away too much filler and wants to try the Palomar Lux 2940 Laser which is "excellent for pigmentation and sun damage and the wrinkles that come with it." Palomar is supposed to be available only in America at the moment but I did find their Russian website where you can find out more information. Unfortunately the site's only in Russian!

- taken from Grazia UK

Mindful Martini

A 145-calorie super-antioxidant-infused cocktail.

Shake a quarter-ounce açaí puree (like Sambazon), a half-ounce lime juice, 11/2 ounces orange vodka, and 2 ounces pomegranate juice with ice in a martini shaker. Transfer into glass - and drink to your health.

Right Here, Write Now

Keeping a diary could keep you healthy.

"In one of their studies, Pennebaker and Seagal asked groups of students to write about an assigned topic for 15 minutes on four consecutive days. Later in the year, the students were asked about their health: the students who had written about emotional topics had far fewer doctors' visits.

One way to increase these health benefits is to learn how to write more fluidly and with less angst and frustration. When you're engaged with what you're doing, the rest of the world recedes.

The Write Ritual

Constraints and fears may add up to what is called writer's block. It can happen to anyone, but successful writers have learned not to panic. Here are some suggestions that may help you reframe your nonwriting periods and figure out what you need to do before continue writing:

- Set reasonable goals. Giving yourself a daunting task, such as "I will write the story of my life and appear on Oprah," is antithetical to the writing process. It is better to trivialize the task and realize that no single writing session really matters.
- Increase your knowledge of your subject. Search the Internet or go to the library to look for more details you can add to your story.
- Take risks. When Suzanne Greenberg, an assistant professor at California State University at Long Beach, researched risk-taking in creative writing, she found that many people are afraid of the repercussions of saying something honest. "It's an emotional stretch to really look at life and see all its gray areas," she says. Remember: Even though writing can sometimes feel risky, you're not really risking anything in the writing. Take a chance.
- Visualize your ideal reader. Don't picture an old boyfriend saying, "Who'd want to read that stuff?" Instead, imagine a writing buddy or a good friend who appreciates the efforts you make and never puts you down.
- Find a ritual or routine to help you through the process. Sometimes the hardest part of writing is deciding if it's worth the effort this time. But if you simply follow a pattern, it becomes automatic. As mystery author Sue Grafton explains, "I think part of the issue is presenting yourself for the task. So I show up at my desk at 9 o'clock every morning. I think your internal process needs to be geared to the fact that you will show up for work at a certain time every day."
- Remain focused on what's important and filter out irrelevant things. "The feeling that people have of being overwhelmed is verifiable in the lab," says Ronald Kellogg, Ph.D., of the University of Missouri at Rolla and author of The Psychology of Writing and Cognitive Psychology. To eliminate the confusion, Kellogg recommends outlining and prioritizing your ideas.
- Organize your thoughts. If you find yourself struggling to get words down, you might try an informal organizing device such as clustering, where you splatter information about your topic on a large sheet of paper.
- Change something about what you're doing. If you're stuck, try to write something else, perhaps in a different genre. Or find an anecdote that makes you laugh. Putting this down on paper may revive your interest in the subject."

- Psychology Today

Smart Drugs or more precisely cognitive enhancers include a variety of controlled substances available only by prescription. They include stimulants s

Smart Drugs or more precisely cognitive enhancers include a variety of controlled substances available only by prescription. They include stimulants such as dextroamphetamine (sold as Dexedrine and Adderall) and methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta) for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). By mimicking the brain neurotransmitters norepnephrine and dopamine, stimulants leave you utterly consumed with the task at hand until mission accomplished. Then you’re fired up to tackle something else, anything else.

Smart Drugs also include a class known as eugeroics, meanding ‘good arousal’. The eugeroics modafinil and armodafinil (sold as Provigil and Nuvigil) treat narcolepsy and ‘excessive sleepiness’ (ES) due to shift work and sleep apnea. But prescribed offlabel, they’ve also been found effective for ES due to overbearing superiors, perfectionist tendencies, and not enough hours in the day. They work by inhibiting the brain chemicals that cause fatigue, which, in turn energises the brain circuits. The outcome is alertness, focus and short-term memory enhancement. Some say they move you from one challenge to the next with more ease than caffeine – without the jitters.

According to a reader survey conducted by the scientific journal Nature, one in five respondents has used prescription cognitive enhancers for non-medical purposes – that 50% more than those who reported taking these drugs for their intended use!

Unlike ADHD drugs, eugeroics have thus far proved to be a nonaddictive.

Barbara Sahakian, a neuropsychologist says, “People are very attracted to these drugs particularly in today’s distracting techno-culture where we constantly flit from TV to text to IM to Web. (It turns out quite a few people to boost their performance.)

Provigil’s effects last from 6 to 12 hours. There are clear caveats. “Stimulants particularly Adderal carry a risk for addiction,” says National Institute on Drug Abuse director Nora D. Volkow. “Modafinil is too new for us to know the long-term effects. But there’s always a risk without proper surveillance.” The worst side effects (though rare) for these durgs include cardiac complications, sever skin rashes, even suicidal tendencies.

- From Marie Claire

Salon Alessandro

What : Yon-Ka 'Le Grand Classique'
Where : Salon Alessandro on Balshaya Zhytomirskaya
How much : a hefty UAH 450
How long : 1.5 hours

I've been on the lookout for a new facialist ever since my favourite girl disappeared on me. Since then just about every facialist I've been to here in Kiev has me with bleeding, irritated skin.

Last Friday I went to see Tatiana the facialist at Alessandro and so far so good. My skin looks good and even though there are a few bumps (to be expected after a facial) my skin looks fantastic. The only unpleasant bit of the facial was when Tatiana slipped on what felt like a rubber mask on my face. I'm a little claustrophic and that was a bit of an unpleasant experience.

For the price, I thought the salon itself was nothing special. Where I come from facials aren't a luxury, it's a part of good grooming so a facial with this kind of price of tag has to be something out of the ordinary!Tatiana however was very knowledgeable and gave me a couple of tips to look after my skin. Apparently I have sensitive skin.... something I was very surprised to find out. I blame it on the water and the weather here in Kiev.

Verdict : Recommended

Lock & Co Hatters

Milliners - Men's and women's hats and accessories

Worldwide mail order service available.

6 St. James's Street, London, SW1A 1EF
email: sales@lockhatters.co.uk | tel: +44 20 7930 8874

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