Music and Health Benefits

In the history of humanity no race has been untouched by music. Almost every culture of the world has music as its major part, and so they say that music heals the soul they are right. Most of us are listening music daily and know its many benefits like it changes moods, raises level of consciousness, reduces stress and we feel relaxed after listening music. Many of us listen music while working and also when not working. Music also helps in meditation which has a ton of benefits. In ancient Greece music was used to heal the stress and help with sleeping pattern. Indian religions have music as their essential part as Bhajan and kirtan. It is believed that it connects to the God. In India music is a part of our civilization, seers of Vedic age used to sing Vedic mantras as given in Sam-Veda.

Music improves our verbal and visual skill.

Researchers have shown that music education at early age stimulates the child’s brain in number of ways that helps to improve his verbal, communication and visual skill. This is the reason why children learns rhythmic poems more quickly and remember it. A study shows that children taking part in extracurricular activities have developed more I.Q. than those who do not. Researchers have shown that music keeps an aging brain healthy. Music is like an exercise for brain. Hence listening or playing music can give you a better memory and mental sharpness. Even people those have faced some sort of brain damage can regain partial or full memory as music help to regain old memories or neurological pattern due to rhythm and sound of music which stay long in the core of mind. Music can make you to feel happy, exited or even sad. Listening to music that hits you in several ways causes your brain to release dopamine which is known as feel good chemical.

Studies have shown that music strengthens heart and improve patient’s recovery time. Listening to your favorite music releases endorphin Harmon in brain which improves vascular health. Music also improves quality of sleep as it reduces stress and anxiety. In many cases music proved to be best medicine in case of insomnia. Research has shown that music is capable of reducing levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which is responsible for weakening the immune system, increasing risk of heart disease, lowering bone density, blood pressure, etc. Research found that by listening to just 50 minutes of uplifting music the levels of antibodies in the human body increases. Cancer patients those listened to music experienced reduction in anxiety. The evidence suggests that music interventions may be useful as a complementary treatment to people with cancer.

Fast music motivates people. They do their work more efficiently. Increase workout endurance. Listening to those top workout tracks can boost physical performance and increase endurance during a tough exercise session. This works partly through the power of distraction: When we're focusing on a favorite album, we may not notice that we just ran an extra mile. Music also help people in eating less. One study found that playing soft music (and dimming the lights) during a meal can help people slow down while eating and ultimately consume less food in one sitting. Perhaps because slowing down helps them to be more mindful of fullness cues.

One study found that music’s effect on anxiety levels is similar to the effect of getting a massage. Here’s an idea: Treat yourself to a massage and bring your favorite chilled out tunes to play during the session. It doubles the relaxation. Listening to music can positively impact your mood while driving. So when you’re feeling sad and frustrated in the car, try cranking some of your favorite tunes.

Music has been found to help cancer patients communicate their feelings, manage stress, and ease physical pain and discomfort. It can also reduce anxiety and improve their quality of life. Researchers in Finland concluded that when stroke patients listened to music for two hours a day, their verbal memory and attention improved and they had a more positive mood compared to patients who didn’t listen to music or who listened to audio books.

Regardless of your taste in music, it’s clear that musical tunes benefit our health. The best part, now you have an excuse for playing Beethoven while your roommate is trying to study.

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Tobacco effect on Human Body, Brain and Life

Today tobacco is the greatest killer oh humanity. It kills half of its users. In world over 6 billion people die due to tobacco use every year. Over five billion due to direct smoking and over 600,000 due to indirect smoking. This is an amazing fact that 80% of tobacco consumers live in low or middle income countries. Children of poor householders those are engaged in tobacco farming suffers from “Green Tobacco Disease”. Further tobacco is responsible for one among ten adult deaths. Tobacco caused hundred million deaths in 20th century if current trend continues it will cause one billion deaths in 21 century. Second hand smoke is the smoke which fills restaurant when people burn cigarettes, bidis and water pipes. There are more than 4000 chemicals in tobacco smoke of which at least 250 are known to be harmful and 40 cause cancer. In 2004 the cause of death of 28% children was second hand smoke.

Smoking’s greatest killer is circulatory

or cardiovascular diseases. If you ask people why they smoke, they will say that smoking helps them to cope with stress. They are true Nicotine found in smoke reaches to mind in ten seconds and reduces stress and depression but it does so temporarily. In this way mind carves again and again for nicotine and smoking becomes a habit. Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body. It causes cancer of lungs, pancreas, brain tumor and many other harmful diseases. Again all the forms of tobacco products, smoke less or smoke full are harmful and contains cancer causing chemicals. Smoking is also a type of addiction. Nicotine is a chemical present naturally in tobacco plant and is responsible for this addiction. During the smoking, nicotine enters the lungs and absorbed into bloodstreams quickly, reaches to brain within seconds. Nicotine produces the addiction to cigarettes and tobacco products that is similar to the addiction caused by heroin and cocaine.

People think that Hookahs are less harmful then bidis and cigarettes as the smoke passes through water, but it is also as harmful as any other tobacco product. It contains carbon monoxide and cancer causing chemicals. Water pipes are responsible for lungs throat and larynx cancer. Smoking also causes heart disease, stroke, aortic aneurysm (a balloon-like bulge in an artery in the chest), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (chronic bronchitis and emphysema), asthma, hip fractures, and cataracts. Smokers are at higher risk of developing pneumonia and other airway infections. A pregnant lady smoker is at risk of having her baby born too early and with abnormally low weight. Also a lady smoking after the pregnancy increases the chance of sudden infant death due to second hand smoke. In this way smoking is not only harmful to smoker it is also harmful to non-smoker, by causing similar diseases in them and leading to premature death of children.

There can be both social and personal reasons for smoking. There is great possibility of smoking for a child living in the society of smokers. Many youths take their first puff because their friends are smokers. People also smoke to reduce their stress. Also there is no such tobacco product which is less hazardous than cigarettes and no less amount of tobacco which is safe. So the only way to stop its harm is to quit tobacco. There are many immediate benefits of quitting tobacco. Heart rate, blood pressure which is abnormally high begins to return at normal level. Within a few hours the level of carbon mono oxide begins to decline. Carbon mono oxide reduces the blood’s ability to carry oxygen. Within a few weeks, people who quit have improved circulation, produce less phlegm and don’t cough as often. Within several months of quitting people can expect improvement in lungs function. Also people will have an improved sense of smell and food will taste better.

Quitting smoking reduces the chances of cancer and other smoke generated diseases. People who quit smoking earlier are less likely to suffer from the disease than the people who continue it. Further people who quit before the age of 30 reduce the chances of premature death and 90% percent chances of smoking-related diseases. People who quit at 50 reduces the chances of smoking related diseases 50% and who quit at 60 survive longer than those who still continue. Quitting smoking lowers the risk of cancer. Those who already diagnosed with cancer should also bother to quit as it help the body to heal with therapy. So quitting smoking is always beneficial. So never take another puff if you want to save your life.

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How to make your Brain Sharp and Active - Secret Tips

It is not only the aged persons but middle aged and youths too sometimes experience that they entered in the kitchen without any reason or they forgot a familiar name while a conversation. These moments are known as “senior moments in the language of psychology. “Senior Moments” are the primary features of memory lapses. Our unhealthy diet such as junk food, excess of saturated and Tran’s fats in meal, disturbed lifestyle are some of the reasons for memory lapses. 

This is a superstition that aging has the great role in memory lapses while truth is that mind will remain youth even in old age if we apply certain rules in our life style. Frequent attacks of depression and dual face personality and less social life are also some of the causes that damage our brain and body too. Further brain and body are not separate entities; they are one and hence affect each other, biochemistry.

How to make your Brain Sharp and Active

1. Healthy food gives birth to healthy food, if we want to sustain a healthy mind within us we must avoid junk food, fast food, and food with saturated and Tran’s fats and lacking antioxidants. Aging is an oxidation process so keeping fruits like apple, blueberries as anti-oxidants keeps us healthy and young.
2. Researches have shown that sleep has a great role in our long term memory. An adult needs deep sleep in between seven and nine hours. Deep sleep gives us relaxation and makes us ready for other tasks. The person also feels healthy deep down.
3. Read down a novel before you start your new business. Reading is the modern art of escapism. By reading we escape from our worries and frustration hence it refreshes the brain and makes neuron ready for new connections. It also increases our knowledge which we can use in our conversation with others. So we can subscribe a daily news letter so that we can read each day something new.
4. Yoga and pranayaam are very much helpful as they teach us to control our muscles and breathing. Yoga gives us relaxation. Controlling our breathing and changing its rhythms activates neurons and provide oxygen to minds in sufficient amount. So join yoga classes from today.
5. Researches have shown that if a person keeps learning throughout his life, it reduces the chances of memory lapses. In this way higher education is very helpful. We also can join cooking classes or any other creative courses like dance classes. In childhood we were very much creative, we used to make aero planes with papers, and many other things. Believe it that you are still so creative. It will help you to reduce stress; in fact it will transform the energy of stress into creativity.
6. Meditation and other relaxation techniques are very much helpful to keep brain active. So join vippasana classes for meditation. There are many meditation techniques both ancient and modern. You can choose any which suit you and is more beneficial. Meditation calms the mind and repairs it.
7. Social life is very helpful to keep mind active and sharp. Talking to a person for ten minutes is good exercise it develops memory power. Taking parts in social cultural events not only satisfy us but it sharpens our brain too. Social life and relations help in retaining long term memory as it is attached to the emotional mind. Never miss marriage party and don’t just become a watcher there dance in a group. Attend all functions if possible.
8. Games are also very useful to sharpen our brain. For example in golf we make strategies to hit a ball, in similar way our brain learns to make strategies in real life. Golf is a social game too; hence it connects us to peoples. So give the challenge to a friend to play chess at lunch time it wills strong your reasoning. Make it a habit to solve the puzzles, crosswords and Sudoku in daily newspaper. Don, t just plays the racing game on your computer only, make it a daily routine in your time table to run for a mile in fresh mourning.
9. Prioritize your mind. If you forget your granddaughter’s birth day even after repeating it many times like a parrot, see that your way was wrong. Write down events on calendar. Select a permanent space for your glasses. Don’t pressure your memory for that information which you can store in file and folder. In this way you can keep learning new things without overloading your mind. 
10. Avoid smoking and overdose of alcohol because it damages the mind. Frequent smoking bears Alzheimer. Stop it today; you can reduce chances by stopping it even if you were smoking for fifteen days. Although a little dose of red wine may help in fighting with heart diseases and cancer but fifteen doses in a week will certainly damage the mind.

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Impact of Technology on our Mind and Life

Today we are living in a world surrounded by electronic devices. These devices produce electro-magnetic radiations those are intersecting with our body, mind and nervous system. It is changing the natural flow of electro-chemical and biochemical reactions and further disturbing our emotions and thoughts. Neuroscientists have divided mind into three parts according to the evolutionary theory which are survival, emotional and rational mind. It is our rational mind which makes us different from animals and gives the power of reasoning and rationalism. When this rational mind alters with the mass media it loses its ability and the person falls on to the emotional mind. Mass media is using powerful emotions to attract peoples which pauses their rational mind and they agree to them as they are also suffering from same emotion at that time and then they buy the product. Today consumerism is using mass media as tool for emotional blackmailing. So today the world has become a gossipy village where everyone knows each other’s business.

Electronic world also affects our social life badly. Today the population of screenagers, those who spend a big part of twenty- four hours in front of an electronic device, is increasing. It may be iphone, ipad, or any other. They surf on internet for hours chatting with friends. In this way modern generation of screenagers is losing its ability to understand the emotion of a person by his her facial expression. Today the new generation is emotionally connected with the electronic devices in a way in which our elders are not connected. So there is a great difference between the emotional understanding of present and previous generation. A new type of socialization is taking birth on this portfolio of mass media and electronic world, which gave birth to the fourth type of mind, which can be called technical mind which is outside the skull. This mind is a combination of outside technical instrument and mass media and we operate it from our body. This fact is clear that we are depending much on this outside mind.

Human mind is so complex organ and yet so simple. It is the network of more than fifty millions neurons. Every neuron has its own function and when they combine to form a group they make a complex function and give rise to an activity. The biochemistry and the hormonal balance of our three minds changes as the fourth mind interferes. It forces them to produce different hormones at different time which causes tension, stress and all sort of mental crisis. The programming of mass media changes the conscious and unconscious persona of a person. A person behaves like different persons on social media. When this programming reaches deeper to his unconscious mind, the person suffers from multiple personality disorder. Today in this technical world the individualism is at risk. There is a great danger that he may lose his individuality in this crowd of machines and robots.

This is the fact that biological evolution is much slower than cultural evolution. An infant has the ability to learn any language of humans while he/she does not know any of them at the time of birth. So it is true that our mind is still an inhabitant of natural ecology and not of the modern cities. But it has to live in an electronic world where radiations are attacking from every side. So we are facing an unnatural situation hence there is a conflict within us. In fact we are fighting with ourselves. While it is also true that today technology is necessity of our life. People takes drug to change the chemistry of body and mind which again impose a program of virus on memory. We have two types of memory: short term memory and long term memory. We don’t remember all those things which are not important, for example mathematical formula is needed only till school life. So it can be said that rational mind stores short term data and emotional mind stores long term data. In this way our social life builds our long term memory and social life is at danger in this era of technology which will have a bad effect on our long term memory. So there is a need of balance to sustain our individualism.

To live a healthy and happy life its important to have a balance while using technology in our daily lives. Always keeping an eye on your laptop or phone will certainly harm you. So its better to be a bit more natural to yourselves.

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