“The more you dwell on the negative, the more accustomed your brain becomes to dwelling on the negative,” said Dr. Hanson, who suggests asking yourself, “Are my thoughts helping to build me up, or tear me down?”

Take a deep breath in, expanding your belly. Pause. Exhale slowly to the count of five. Repeat four times.

Congratulations. You’ve just calmed your nervous system.

Controlled breathing, like what you just practiced, is one of the quickest ways to feel better. Controlled breathing can reduce stress, increase alertness and boost your immune system. For centuries yogis have used breath control, or pranayama, to promote concentration and improve vitality. Buddha advocated breath-meditation as a way to reach enlightenment.

(See the full article, which was originally published online at NYTimes.com, Nov 8, 2016, by clicking this link)

“Breathing is massively practical,” says Belisa Vranich, a psychologist and author of the book “Breathe,” to be published in December. “It’s meditation for people who can’t meditate.”

How controlled breathing may promote healing remains a source of scientific study. One theory is that controlled breathing can change the response of the body’s autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious processes such as heart rate and digestion as well as the body’s stress response, says Dr. Richard Brown, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and co-author of “The Healing Power of the Breath.”

Consciously changing the way you breathe appears to send a signal to the brain to adjust the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, which can slow heart rate and digestion and promote feelings of calm as well as the sympathetic system, which controls the release of stress hormones like cortisol.

Many maladies, such as anxiety and depression, are aggravated or triggered by stress. “I have seen patients transformed by adopting regular breathing practices,” says Dr. Brown, who has a private practice in Manhattan and teaches breathing workshops around the world.

When you take slow, steady breaths, your brain gets the message that all is well and activates the parasympathetic response, said Dr. Brown. When you take shallow rapid breaths or hold your breath, the sympathetic response is activated. “If you breathe correctly, your mind will calm down,” said Dr. Patricia Gerbarg, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and Dr. Brown’s co-author

Here are three basic breathing exercises to try on your own.

Note: If you’ve never tried breathing exercises, you may also want to take a class with an expert. Dr. Brown teaches workshops around the country. His website, Breath-Body-Mind lists his schedule. Dr. Belisa, author of the forthcoming book, Breathe, teaches breathing classes and also provides private instruction at her New York City office. Her website, The Breathing Class, lists her schedule and provides excerpts from her book.

Coherent Breathing

If you have the time to learn only one technique, this is the one to try. In coherent breathing, the goal is to breathe at a rate of five breaths per minute, which generally translates into inhaling and exhaling to the count of six. If you have never practiced breathing exercises before, you may have to work up to this practice slowly, starting with inhaling and exhaling to the count of three and working your way up to six.

1. Sitting upright or lying down, place your hands on your belly.

2. Slowly breathe in, expanding your belly, to the count of five.

3. Pause.

4. Slowly breathe out to the count of six.

5. Work your way up to practicing this pattern for 10 to 20 minutes a day.

Stress Relief

When your mind is racing or you feel keyed up, try Rock and Roll breathing, which has the added benefit of strengthening your core.

1. Sit up straight on the floor or the edge of a chair.

2. Place your hands on your belly.

3. As you inhale, lean forward and expand your belly.

4. As you exhale, squeeze the breath out and curl forward while leaning backward; exhale until you’re completely empty of breath.

5. Repeat 20 times.

Energizing HA Breath

When the midafternoon slump hits, stand up and do some quick breathwork to wake up your mind and body.

1. Stand up tall, elbows bent, palms facing up.

2. As you inhale, draw your elbows back behind you, palms continuing to face up.

3. Then exhale quickly, thrusting your palms forward and turning them downward, while saying “Ha” out loud.

4. Repeat quickly 10 to 15 times.

You know you should spend less time on your devices, but you just can’t resist. That could be because the more time you spend on your devices, the less willpower you have. Got that?

According to TIME magazine, “people who spend a lot of time ‘media multitasking’—or juggling lots of different websites, apps, programs or other digital stimuli—tend to have less grey matter in a part of their brain involved with thought and emotion control. These same structural changes are associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and anxiety disorders.”

Could it be that people who digital multitask have less willpower to start with? Perhaps, but TIME goes on to explain that “lots of device use bombards your brain’s prefrontal cortex, which plays a big role in willpower and decision-making.”

So the more you use your smartphone, the less smart you become.

If loss of grey matter doesn’t worry you, how about loss of efficiency?

Every time you leave a task to check a message or a text, there’s a switch cost. It can take your brain 15 to 20 minutes to get back to where it was before you distracted yourself.

Now that you are finished reading this post, read the full article, You Asked: Are My Devices Messing with My Brain?, here.

In Finland (a country lauded for its excellent school system) kids in primary school are given breaks every hour. After 45 minutes of instruction, students ‘take 15’ and run around, socialize, or just do anything but sit still in a classroom.

Tim Walker, an American teacher in Helskini, tried to do away with these frequent breaks for his 5th grade class and was met with foot dragging, rebellion and mind wandering. So he reinstated the breaks. And whatdoyouknow? The children became happier and more focused:

“Once I incorporated these short recesses into our timetable, I no longer saw feet-dragging, zombie-like kids in my classroom. Throughout the school year, my Finnish students would—without fail—enter the classroom with a bounce in their steps after a 15-minute break. And most importantly, they were more focused during lessons,” Walker wrote in a post on his blog, Taught by Finland.

What’s more, researchers have consistently found that physical activity helps the brain function better and learn more readily. Charles Basch of Columbia’s Teachers College wrote in his report, Healthier Students are Better Learners, “current knowledge strongly indicates that physical activity can benefit aspects of cognition, thereby favorably affecting educational outcomes. Recent literature reviews on physical activity or physical fitness and cognition have all reached the same conclusion: physical activity (or aspects of physical fitness) favorably affects cognitive functioning.”

Wouldn’t it have been nice (and enlightened) if the Common Core State Standards had incorporated not just new Math and Science learning protocols, but new standards for daily breaks and exercise at school? In Finland, students take breaks every hour not just because teachers think this is a good idea, but because it’s the law.

Let’s say you’re having a rough day. You walk through the park, the mall, or etc and see happy couples, happy families, and carefree singles enjoying themselves. You might think, “why is everyone happy but me?” Change your thinking and you could improve your mood.

A fascinating series of studies, “Misery Has More Company Than People Think,” found that people tend to think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are. People also tend to think others have more positive emotions than they really do. These miscalculations make people feel lousy. The researchers found that “lower estimations of the prevalence of negative emotional experiences predicted greater loneliness and rumination and lower life satisfaction” in their subjects. Whoa! So if you walk around thinking everyone else is hunkydory and feeling fine, you’re likely to feel isolated and blue.

The brilliant Nobel prize winner Marie Curie wrote: “Life is not easy for any of us.” AND HOW. And continued, “But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”

The Book of Times was released on February 5 and has been excerpted, reviewed or noted in Vanity Fair, Real Simple, Parade, People, Forbes.com, The New York Post, Time.com, MentalFloss, The Iron Mountain Daily News, American Profile, The Columbian, and Yahoo!!

Forbes.com: “Alderman’s greatest achievement is the continual delivery of quirky knowledge that our collective curiosities crave.”

Time.com: “This clever and entertaining compendium contains everything you’d want to know about the ticking away of seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, decades and centuries.”

People: “Fascinated by how we spend—and waste—our most precious commodity, journalist Lesley Alderman gathered the sometimes-surprising stats for her debut, The Book of Times…”

MentalFloss: “…a fascinating foray into familiar terrain and a revealing look at how we really spend our lives.”

Yahoo!: “A new book confirms what most of us already suspect—timing is everything. In The Book of Times, which was published in early February, Lesley Alderman, a health and finance reporter, compiled data from hundreds of studies to offer insight into how we spend our time.”

New York Post: “Brooklyn journalist Lesley Alderman collects hundreds of surprising surveys from around the world revealing how we spend our hours.”

Parade Pick: “It takes 31 minutes to walk off a brownie. Shocked? Relieved? That’s the kind of quirky knowledge Lesley Alderman serves up in The Book of Times, a compendium of surprising measurements of everything from love affairs to mental functions. How much of our waking time do we spend daydreaming? Nearly half. How long does it take to have sex, on average? A brisk 19.2 minutes.”

The Columbian: “Read this book and you’ll find out how time impacts … areas of life such as love, work, money, and family.”

American Profile: “This handy-dandy little volume encourages us to consider [time] hundreds of fascinating ways, with charts, statistics, quirky tidbits, intriguing trivia and nuggets of research that reveal just how, exactly, we use the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years of our lives—and how we can economize, prioritize and even put some lost minutes back on the clock. Burrowing down into the many interesting factoids of this infinitely browse-able tome, no matter how long you stay at it, makes for time well spent.

Iron Mountain Daily News: “The Book of Times is informative and entertaining and a marvelous way to while away the time on a business commute or a lazy afternoon.”

…according to Aaron Perlut at Forbes.com: “Alderman’s greatest achievement is the continual delivery of quirky knowledge that our collective curiosities crave.”

Buy your copy at Amazon.

Who isn’t, BUT giving time might make you feel as though you have more time.

A new study found that those who spend time on others feel more flush with time than those who hoard all their hours for themselves. Giving time leads to a feeling of “time affluence.” The authors of the study (Giving Time Gives You Time) explain: “The impact of giving time on feelings of time affluence is driven by a boosted sense of self-efficacy. Giving time makes people more willing to commit to future engagements despite their busy schedules.”

What do you think?