Nicola Lindson-Hawley remembers how hard it was for her mom to stop smoking.

“One of the reasons I find this topic very interesting and why I went into it was because my mom was a smoker when I was younger,” says Lindson-Hawley, who studies tobacco and health at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford.

She remembers helping her mom keep track of the number of days she’d stayed away from cigarettes by putting stickers in a journal. The experience made her want to help others stop smoking.

By studying about 700 adult smokers, she found out that her mom quit the right way — by going cold turkey. The results are out in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

Study participants were randomly assigned to two groups. One had to quit abruptly on a given day, going from about a pack a day to zero. The other tapered down over the course of two weeks, first to half a pack each day, and then to a quarter of a pack before quitting. To read more from RAE ELLEN BICHELL, click here.

Sixty-five million Americans suffer from chronic lower back pain, and many feel they have tried it all: physical therapy, painkillers, shots. Now a new study reports many people may find relief with a form of meditation that harnesses the power of the mind to manage pain.

The technique, called mindfulness-based stress reduction, involves a combination of meditation, body awareness and yoga, and focuses on increasing awareness and acceptance of one’s experiences, whether they involve physical discomfort or emotional pain. People with lower back pain who learned the meditation technique showed greater improvements in function compared to those who had cognitive behavioral therapy, which has been shown to help ease pain, or standard back care. To read more from RONI CARYN RABIN click here.

We all love our dogs. But depending on how you show that love, you may be doing more harm than good, according to one expert.

Dr. Stanley Coren, a professor emeritus in psychology at the University of British Columbia, writes in a Psychology Today blog post that hugging a dog actually increases the dog’s stress level.

For his study, Coren looked at a random sampling of 250 pictures of people hugging dogs from Google Image Search and Flickr. “I can summarize the data quite simply by saying that the results indicated that the Internet contains many pictures of happy people hugging what appear to be unhappy dogs,” Coren writes.

What You Need To Know About That ‘Cute’ Lemur Video
Coren, who has written several books about dog behavior, says there are specific things dogs do to indicate stress. At the “high-end,” dogs will “bare their teeth” at you. But dogs can still experience stress without lashing out. To read more from NPR click here.

Evidence has suggested for some time that sleep deprivation can lead to obesity, among a host of other ills. Now researchers are digging into the mechanisms that cause our sleep-deprived brains to crave food they do not need.

A study published on Tuesday in the journal SLEEP suggested that the brain receptors that can lead the sleep-deprived to crave unnecessary food were the same as those activated by marijuana. Essentially, not sleeping can give you a ferocious case of the munchies.

The study took a close look at receptors affected by endocannabinoids — so named for cannabis, the marijuana plant — which it found were closely involved in the food cravings that come from sleep deprivation. Sleep restriction in the study’s subjects led to amplified endocannabinoid levels in the blood, leading to hunger pangs, which generally intensify in the early afternoon, to increase further.

Fourteen healthy, non-obese subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 participated in the study. All of the subjects participated in both aspects of the study, undergoing four nights of either healthy sleep or sleep deprivation, after which they were given two regular meals as well as unlimited access to “palatable snacks,” including candy, chips with guacamole and salsa, Doritos, Cheetos and ice cream, as well as healthier options such as fruit and yogurt. To read more from JONAH BROMWICH.

Most of us want our children to have the best of everything, but not too much of anything.

As a result, some families with much more than average impose a form of enforced (yet totally artificial) deprivation. Frequently the “no” is not because they can’t afford it, but because the word “enough” is flashing on some scoreboard somewhere that only they can see.

Meanwhile, those of us who grew up hearing “no” a lot are tempted to say “yes” as much as we can, if we can possibly afford to. We want our kids to live better lives than we did as children — and better ones than we could afford last year.

Whether a family is affluent or struggling, however, every question about children and money and values eventually boils down to this: How much is enough? And how much is too much?

Consider one of the most recent objects of desire: The hoverboard. Before it became crystal-clear that its explosive battery was reason enough to ban it on safety grounds, parents struggled with the flashiness and the hefty price. To read more from RON LIEBER.

Many, if not most, new parents post images of their newborn online within an hour of birth, and some parents create social media accounts for the children themselves — often to share photos and news with family, although occasionally in the pursuit of “Instafame” for their fashionably clad, beautifully photographed sons and daughters. But kids don’t like it and they are letting their thoughts be known, to read more from KJ DELL’ANTONIA, click here.

Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.

What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new. To read more on this article from Adam Grant, click here.

Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness.

The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn’t get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health. Click here to read more on Writing Your Way to Happiness

Posted by: Lu Ann Ahrens, Marriage & Couples Counseling, San Bernardino County

The body’s circadian clock even influences our thoughts and feelings. Psychologists have measured some of its effects on the brain by having people take cognitive tests at different times of day.

As it turns out, late morning turns out to be the best time to try doing tasks such as mental arithmetic that demand that we hold several pieces of information in mind at once. Later in the afternoon is the time to attempt simpler tasks, like searching for a particular letter in a page of gibberish. To read more on our internal clock, click here.

Posted by: Lu Ann Ahrens, Marriage & Couples Counseling, San Bernardino County