Posted on by Max Herrera

How to cope with stress?

Stress is a common experience for many people, and it can have negative effects on your physical and mental health if it is not managed effectively. Here are some ways to cope with stress:

Identify the source of your stress: Try to identify the source of your stress and think about how you can address it. Sometimes, simply acknowledging the source of your stress can help you feel more in control.

Practice relaxation techniques: Relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, meditation, yoga, or progressive muscle relaxation can help reduce stress and promote relaxation.

Exercise regularly: Physical activity and exercise can help reduce stress by releasing endorphins, which are natural mood boosters.

Stay connected with others: Social support can help reduce stress, so try to stay connected with family and friends.

Get enough sleep: Lack of sleep can make stress worse, so try to get enough sleep each night.

Prioritize self-care: Make time for activities that you enjoy and that help you relax, such as reading, taking a bath, or listening to music.

Seek professional help: If you are still struggling to cope with stress, consider seeking professional help from a therapist or counselor.

Remember that everyone experiences stress at some point in their lives, and it is important to seek help if you need it.

Posted on by Max Herrera

Acquiring the Habits of Highly Successful Students

Acquiring the habits of highly successful students… that’s a truly important topic! We humans are innate learners, as learning is the cornerstone for survival. We must remember, abstract and apply knowledge in diverse (and often harsh) environments in order to develop into and behave as truly intelligent beings. In short, the adaptability and resilience we exhibit stems from learning. Now, a key issue to learning is the driving force behind it, i.e., the motivation or stimuli to learn. We can learn because of fear (we want to learn how to protect ourselves from danger.) We can learn just out of curiosity (our natural inquisitive behavior.) We can learn because we want to reach some social status (approval of others is a potent stimuli to learn.) We can learn simply because we love to learn new things everyday. There are plenty of reasons to learn and yours may easily be a mixture of these. Health and money are important things in life, but learning is the base for using them wisely 🙂 If we are to succeed in life, we must hone our learning skills.

habits of highly successful students
Working in groups is also important

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Posted on by Max Herrera

Diet Tips for Preventing High Cholesterol Levels

Diet Tips for Preventing High Cholesterol Levels
Olive Oil

Current stressed lifestyles and rushed, unhealthy diets are important promoters of high cholesterol levels in the body, and that’s why I’m presenting some diet tips for preventing high cholesterol levels. We should always remember that the first step toward recovering our health and treating any medical problem should be an evaluation by a qualified specialist (I do recommend consulting a good cardiologist for treatment of cholesterol problems.)

This week I had my annual cardiological checkup. These tips expand on the recommendations of my cardiologist, and they could prove useful for keeping low cholesterol levels and, in general, a healthy lifestyle. Basically, we should start out by adopting better nutritional habits, including the following:

Eat more fiber and fruits, vegetables and whole cereals (maize, rice, wheat, sorghum, etc) because they promote lowering of bad LDL cholesterol levels, without affecting good HDL cholesterol. Prefer vegetables to fruits, though, because the latter usually contain higher concentrations of sugar. On its side, whole grains may be nutritionally superior to refined grains, and richer in fiber, some proteins, antioxidants, minerals and vitamins. By the way, did you know that “cereal” derives from “Ceres”, the name of the pre-Roman goddess of harvest and agriculture?

Prefer foods rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), such as Omega 3 (ω−3). The healthiest foods rich in ω−3 fatty acids are flaxseeds, walnuts and cold water oily fishes such as salmon, herring, mackerel, anchovies and sardines. Eggs are also a source of ω−3. By the way, did you know that eggs from chickens fed corn have one-tenth the ω−3 in them as eggs from free-range chickens that eat greens and bugs? On June 19, 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave qualified health claim status to eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) ω−3 fatty acids, stating that “supportive but not conclusive research shows that consumption of EPA and DHA ω−3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.”

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Posted on by Max Herrera

10 Exercises for Keeping a Young Mind

Simply put, your mind needs some exercise in order to stay young and healthy. The basis for brain’s life is processing of new data and stimuli. Our minds should be regularly exposed to updated information and new experiences, in order to reach higher levels of creativity, openness, speed, and adaptation. Looking for new ways of thinking is an excellent exercise for being smarter and more sociable. Nevertheless, in the following I detail a neat list of simple exercises for keeping a young mind and improving our minds’ state:

10 Exercises for Keeping a Young Mind
10 Exercises for Keeping a Young Mind
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Posted on by Max Herrera

15 Tips to Reduce Eye Strain in the Digital Age

In the digital age it is essential to know and apply some tips to reduce eye strain or visual fatigue, and take care of our eyes as much as possible. The ubiquitous presence of screens of all sizes causes fatigue in our eyes, which results in dry eyes, painful sensation when moving our eyes, difficulty to focus, headaches, and evident decrease in productivity. Read on and find out some tips to reduce eyestrain.

Tips to reduce eye strain
Tips to reduce eye strain
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Posted on by Max Herrera

7 easy tips for a healthy life

These 7 easy tips summarize my beliefs on how to live a healthy life. In a recent motivation talk, an attendee asked me for a succinct list of the things we should care for if we wanted to live longer. Well, I frankly have no idea about how to live longer, nor about how to look younger (plastic surgery perhaps?). However, I have 7 easy tips we could pay attention to if we want a healthy life:

7 easy tips for a healthy life. Simple things will make you bloom.
7 easy tips for a healthy life. Simple things will make you bloom.
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Posted on by Max Herrera

10 Tips to deal with Panic and Stress

The initial answer against fear and panic would be psychological stress. Typically, this reaction causes anxiety, wakes up panic and lost of self-confidence. In this post I’ll list 10 tips to deal with panic and stress. Fear and panic have their roots in circumstances and settings which we feel are no longer under our control. When we are dealing with a lot of variables simultaneously, the mind tends to flood with negative thoughts regarding our fears about not being able to handle the situation willingly. All humans have instincts, and we all share most of them in different stages. Stress, therefore, is a state of the body and mind reacting to a perceived danger. Ideally, such alert state would wake up reflexes for coping with danger and problems. However, when the alert becomes too big (for internal or external reasons), it has an opposite, paralyzing and unhealthy effect. Now, why did that happen? Think of your mind as a computer disk. You store all your information there, but some processes have allowed it to receive garbage information. You have to remove such garbage from your disk, and restore it to its original state.

Tips to deal with panic and stress

For the time being, the following tips to deal with panic and stress may prove useful:

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