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These Things Happen To Your Brain When You Don’t Drink Enough Water

July 10, 2016 by Power of Positivity

Whether or not you drink enough water is very important to your brain, because what happens when you don’t can be like a mild form of the cognitive impairment that is seen in early forms of Alzheimer’s disease, according to neuroscientists.

Foggy thinking can happen to even the most intelligent person when they are distracted, tired, or don’t get enough nutrition, but the same is true about your thinking abilities when you don’t get enough water for your brain. Slower memory, vision problems, and even reasoning abilities are possible when your brain is dehydrated.

Just like a piece of dehydrated fruit, your brain and other bodily tissues can loose their natural shape and dry out as cells reduce in size when you don’t get enough water to keep them full of liquid. Water is essential to keep your cells fat and happy and functioning at the optimum brain processing speed.

Here’s What Happens To Your Brain When You Don’t Drink Enough Water

There are many mental and physical symptoms when your brain doesn’t get enough water. Let’s look at some of the negative health affects of dehydration and also what it means to get enough water in the day.

Why Does Your Brain Need You To Drink Enough Water?

All of your cells need water, so your brain is not the only part of you that is affected by not getting enough of it. But being the control center for the rest of your body, having a poorly hydrated brain will make your day a lot worse than it would be if you get enough fluid to drink.

Dehydration of the brain’s tissues can cause:

* Headaches

* Dizziness

* Foggy thinking

* Confusion

* Lack of energy

* Frustration and negative mood

Researchers studying dehydration of the brain found that not getting enough water causes shrinkage of brain tissue and this particularly affects the ventricular volume of the brain, which is where the cerebral-spinal fluid is contained. The cerebral-spinal fluid is important for the brain to get nutrients and to flush waste away from the brain as well.

When you don’t get enough water, the study showed that you will feel like it takes more energy to do the same mental task that you could do if you were fully hydrated. This same effort is something that the study researchers could see on an MRI scan of the brain and the study also verified that the brain weighed less when dehydrated.

The study showed that the brain is working less efficiently when it is dehydrated. The study asked participants to do some strenuous activity where they had significant water loss due to sweat and then asked them to do a cognitive test. The MRI scan of the brains found significantly more brain heat and activity in the frontal and parietal areal of the brain when the dehydrated participants had to think about the task. They say that a ‘reduced water intake may adversely impact executive functions such as planning and visuo-spatial processing.’

The Brain Problems You Experience When You Don’t Get Enough Water

In another study of the grey matter and white matter volume of the brain before and after dehydration, researchers found that several areas of the brain experienced shrinkage in volume when the body is dehydrated.

There was a significant decrease of grey matter and white matter volume associated found in ‘temporal and sub-gyral parietal areas, in the left inferior orbito-frontal region, and in the extra-nuclear region.’

This study also found that there was a change in cerebral spinal fluid volume in the brain. They say that these changes are similar to ones that have been reported in studies of ‘mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease during disease progression.’

So if not getting enough water is like having a mild form of Alzheimer’s disease, getting plenty of fluids is important. So how do you know if you are fully hydrating yourself and your brain?

How Much Water Is Enough For Your Brain?

There is such a difference in sizes of human beings that giving a specific amount of water in ounces is difficult. Most medical professionals agree that making sure that you urinate and have a light yellow color urine about every 2-3 hours means that your body is well hydrated.

The quantity of water that you should drink is approximately 2 liters or 68 ounces, which is roughly a half-gallon of water. Your body and brain also need sodium (salt) and potassium to absorb from the water, so make sure that you are eating foods with some salt content throughout the day or that your drinking water has minerals in it naturally.

(C)Power of Positivity, LLC. All rights reserved

Silence Negative Self-Talk With This ONE Easy Trick

July 10, 2016 by Power of Positivity

We all deal with negative thoughts and judgmental voices in our heads from time to time, but what if you could learn to silence that negative self-talk with one easy trick?

The exercise we will share with you in this article can help you to achieve a peaceful state of mind, while also balancing your emotional health. Our minds often run on autopilot, and we don’t really tune into the thoughts playing over and over again until they become self-destructive. This exercise can help you to pinpoint the negative thoughts as they happen, and deal with them directly.

Silence Negative Self-Talk With This ONE Easy Trick

NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming, can help you to manage those negative thoughts, and even reform them into more positive ones. It helps you to change the way you look at the world by first dealing with HOW you interpret it through your mind. Developed in the mid-1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, it’s used in many different fields, such as trauma recovery and sports coaching. By utilizing the foundations of the exercise, Bandler and Grinder believe that anyone can achieve personal excellence and heal from a variety of conditions or phobias.

How does NLP work?

Basically, it involves connecting neurological processes, behavior, and language in order to change certain aspects of your life through reprogramming pathways in the brain. The founders believe that this set of techniques can work for anyone, as it simply involves removing processes that don’t help you achieve your goals, modifying existing programs, and installing new ones if necessary.

If you think of your brain like a computer, you will understand why this exercise works so well. Just like a computer, you can reprogram your mind based on the software that you put into it. Of course, the software is simply what thought patters you replay in your head each day. We either knowingly or unknowingly program our minds every day based on what we think, so you can easily reprogram your brain in order for it to function at its best.

A computer program helps us to do certain things, such as use Microsoft Word to type a document. So, think of the computer program as helping us to achieve a goal of typing, editing, and saving a document. In the same way, the thought processes we “install” in our brains can help us to achieve a goal as well, or they can actually hinder us from reaching the goal.

Basically, NLP involves having the perfect programs running in the brain in order to achieve maximum results, so if something doesn’t produce the desired result, we can simply “uninstall” it from our minds. Today, we’ll talk about modifying an existing program, however, to give you an idea of how you can transform negative thoughts into positive ones.

NLP Technique for Transforming Negative Self-Talk

1. Picture someone you love talking to you in a compassionate, understanding voice. How does that make you feel?

2. As you think about this, notice everything about how the voice sounds – the pitch, tone, rhythm, and volume. Become aware of all the qualities of this voice.

3. Now, put that on the back burner, and turn your thoughts towards the negative self-talk you sometimes notice in your mind. How does this voice sound, and how does it make you feel? Simply listen to it without judgement for a second…

4. Now, as you replay this voice in your mind, try to imagine these things being said in the compassionate voice of a loved one.

5. Now, replaying the destructive words again, imagine them being said in a silly voice, like that of a cartoon character.

6. Notice that just the tone of the voice in your mind can change your perspective, even if the WORDS themselves still seem negative.

7. Keep on adjusting the voice in your mind so that you can try out different perspectives.

You could switch from celebrities to cartoon characters to a loved one to anything else that you want – just keep in mind that you must play with the qualities of the voice in order to achieve the desired results.

8. Once you feel yourself having a positive breakthrough, you can then listen to the voice and see if it seems as negative as before.

Final Thoughts on Decreasing Negative Self-Talk

Chances are that your thoughts will have at least slightly transformed just because you repeated them so many times in different voices, and you know now that the voice plays just as important a role as the words being said.

This type of exercise can allow for the release of toxic thought patterns and emotions, as it draws awareness back to our minds and bodies. Once you recall the negative voice, try to see if you remember it the same way. Since you changed the voice so often, you probably won’t remember the original voice, which means your perspective changed since the beginning of the exercise. If you feel less upset than the first time you heard the negative self-talk, then that means you have made progress in transforming your negative thoughts to positive ones.

5 Ways to Protect Yourself From Negative Emotions

July 10, 2016 by Power of Positivity

You can protect yourself from the negative health effects of emotions like fear, anger and emotional pain, just as easily as you protect yourself from sunburn with sunscreen. Negative emotions are just one part of what makes us human. Yet experiencing too many of them can be overwhelming to our physical and psychological health.

In this article, we will look at some of the ways that negative emotions impact your health. Also, we will discuss how you can learn to protect yourself.

5 Ways to Protect Yourself From Negative Emotions

1. Create a protective psychic shield

In his book Psychic Development For Beginners, William W. Hewitt explains the Law of Being by saying that whatever is in your consciousness must be brought into being and ‘nothing can happen for you or to you if it is not programmed into your mind. Therefore, it makes sense to program yourself with good, beneficial goals and thoughts’

By focusing on the positive, not negative thoughts, we can create a psychic shield that can protect us from negative emotions. Creating a psychic shield is as easy as visualizing it during your meditative practice.

Hewitt suggests that as you relax and you are in a meditative state, picture your body surrounded by a glowing light and say:

‘This powerful, positive light is my psychic shield.’
‘This light will repel all negative energies from programming my mind’
‘The shield will allow only positive thoughts and emotions to pass through it.’
‘This protective shield will be with me always, even when I am not focusing on it.’

2. Focus on the positive emotions of self-control

Some negative emotions, like guilt, arise from our lack of self-control. For example, if you overeat and you know that it is unhealthy for you, you may feel guilt about it later. When you are able to successfully resist temptation, that action helps you build your personal defenses against negative emotions.

You know that you can avoid undesirable activities, like drinking too much, because you have avoided it in the past. Rather than the guilt associated with the ‘bad’ behavior, focus on the positive emotions you will feel when you successfully resist. Pride, a sense of accomplishment, and reassurance in your abilities are the positive ways to look at resisting a negative behavior.

3. Use awareness training

Meditation, yoga, and awareness of the physical sensations of negative emotions are all ways to use awareness of the present moment to learn to protect yourself from negative emotions. Researchers studying the role of awareness of bodily sensations in the experience of emotion found that Vipassana meditation, a type of meditation focusing on bodily sensations, helped people to learn the relationship between mentally feeling an emotion as a response to something negative in the environment and how the body responded to the emotion.

Once you can feel the negative emotion in your body, you can understand that your body’s response does not have to have a label associated with it. These are just sensations of heart rate, breathing, and perspiration, which you can then control by relaxing. Naming the emotion ‘fear’ only negatively affects what your body is experiencing.

4. Learn to comfort yourself in healthy ways

Psychologists believe that our ability to self-comfort is something we learn early in childhood, as we become separate people from our parents. A healthy person is able to comfort him or herself when they feel sad, scared or frustrated.

Self-soothing behavior starts out as thumb-sucking or other repetitive, relaxing behavior in childhood, but as adults, we can identify that a walk on a sunny day helps us to release negative emotions just the same way. Think about a few things that you know are healthy for you and that give you a positive emotional boost. Keep this list of suggestions available the next time you need to protect yourself from negative emotions.

5. Detach from negative emotions

Your negative emotions are not you and you are not your negative emotions. Do not blame yourself for feeling negative emotions. Instead, act as an impartial observer and see yourself as another person would see you. Say to yourself ‘It looks like I am experiencing anxiety right now. Although that might usually bother me, I choose to not be affected by it.’

You can also choose to physically detach yourself from the situation that brought on your negative emotions rather than stay and continue to feel negatively. For example, at a social gathering where you feel anxious, make a choice to leave if you are not able to switch to a positive emotional mindset.

Leaving a bad situation so that you can avoid negative emotions should not be something you feel defeated about. Instead, see it as you making a healthy emotional choice for yourself to focus on your well-being.

9 Comebacks For Dealing With Arrogant People

July 10, 2016 by Power of Positivity

You know them when you see them, and arrogant people with their snotty attitude can negatively affect your day unless you’re armed with one or more of these 9 comebacks.

An arrogant person has decided to believe that they are somehow superior to you. However, we are all equal human beings with differences that are no more or less valuable.. How you respond or react to these people when you encounter them can affect your peace of mind. Your response to an arrogant person is also a reflection of your integrity as a person. So will you be a person who stands up for him or herself?

9 Comebacks For Dealing With Arrogant People

Arrogant people share the following traits with narcissistic personality disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV, which is used to diagnose psychological problems:

Believes that he or she is ‘special’ and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
Requires excessive admiration.
Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

1. ‘Now what makes you say that?’

This comeback is intended to help the arrogant person identify the rationale behind the generalization, stereotype, or put down that they just used. We hope that they can realize that they made a negative statement that is being called into question, and will stop once they have been called out on their behavior.

2. ‘Ouch.’

Well, if they’re hurting feelings, be they yours or someone else’s, call it like you see it. This is hurtful language that the arrogant person is using and this comeback can help them to realize the harm that they are doing.

3. ‘You know my mother is ___, right?’

An arrogant person is more likely to single out a group of people by race, sexual orientation, education, etc. and talk about negative stereotypes. The reason for this is that by putting others down, the arrogant person is attempting to elevate himself by comparison.

You can quickly put a stop to the negative talk by implying that someone close to you is a member of the group that the arrogant person is belittling. This shocks them into the realization that their negative talk is not going to be tolerated, but is insulting to you personally as well. A quick apology and exit by the rude person is likely to follow.

4. ‘Are you aware that there are other points of view?’

You and everyone else is entitled to their opinion, but the arrogant person needs to realize that their negative opinion of others does not hold true for other people.

5. ‘Tell me again why you are superior to ____?’

Arrogant people believe themselves to be better than another person, so let’s have them explain why we should treat them differently. This could result in some interesting answers, but more likely you’ve made them squirm uncomfortably since you pretty much said ‘You are not superior to that other person.’

6. ‘I would appreciate it if those were the final words you say on this topic.’

Let’s end that conversation as rudely as the arrogant person started it. This comeback is intended to put an end to their hateful words, but then again, arrogant people like to hear themselves talk so you might need to be more obvious about it with this next one.

7. ‘You need to stop talking now.’

Ending the conversation with an arrogant person could be as easy as leaving. But leave them with something to think about before you go. It is entirely possible that you will have no impact whatsoever on the arrogant person though. That’s because they obviously think highly of themselves in spite of the evidence of their meanness.

8. ‘I’m sure you didn’t mean for that to sound so arrogant, right?’

This comeback assumes good intentions, even if you have no evidence that they have good intentions. This language actually allows the arrogant person a way out, by saying that no of course they did not mean to sound rude. But it also makes it clear that you refuse to play their game of belittling others.

Read about the behaviors that reveal someone is overly confident.

9. ‘Do you realize how arrogant you sound when you say things like that?’

Call them out on their arrogant behavior and let them know that you find it completely unacceptable. Psychologists who study personality traits say ‘Modest people are not preoccupied with themselves; arrogant people have an inflated view of themselves.’

In one scale of personality traits, arrogance is associated with being calculating or manipulative toward others in a social situation.

(C)Power of Positivity, LLC. All rights reserved

Science Explains How Much Sleep You Need According To Your Age

July 9, 2016 by Power of Positivity

Without a doubt, getting enough sleep to function is one of the most important aspects of health for humans.

Unfortunately, many of us suffer from a chronic lack of sleep – 35% of the population state that they get less than the recommended minimum of 7 hours of sleep per night. Consequently, we now have a sleep epidemic on our hands. The Centers for Disease Control called our lack of sleep a public health epidemic, and for good reason.

About 40 percent of adults suffer from insomnia, according to the National Sleep Foundation. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, however, when you think about how many people in the world have stress on their minds and hearts almost constantly.

When night falls, getting to sleep and allowing the mind to relax comes as quite a challenge for many people out there.

However, despite our increasingly fast-paced society and more demands being put on us than ever before, we can still adopt better sleeping habits and learn to reprogram our minds for sleep.

Think about it – as a child, you probably got to sleep without even thinking twice about it; however, as adults, we have so much going on that we often don’t prioritize sleep like we should.

With that being said, adults need a different amount of sleep than children, but just how much should we be getting per night?

We will give more insight into how much sleep you need below.

How Much Sleep Do You Need According To Your Age?

Obviously, growing children and teens will require more sleep than grown adults; however, with the overuse of technology we see today, many people of all ages suffer from a lack of sleep. The chart below will show how much sleep you need according to your age.

As you can see from the data presented by the National Sleep Foundation, both young adults and adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night. School-age children need 9-11 hours, and teens require 8-10.

Many of us put off sleep in any way we can, staying up late doing work, watching Netflix, texting, or other activities that take away from our ability to easily fall asleep.

Below, we will discuss developing better sleeping habits so that you can get the quality sleep your body needs and deserves.

Four Sleep Habits To Avoid

To get proper sleep, you need to know what activities to avoid before bed to fall asleep quickly and easily. We will list some of the most common and destructive habits to avoid and give you some better habits to adopt for a good night’s rest.

1. Getting on your phone or computer before bed

Countless studies have shown that the bright lights emitted from phones and computers can delay sleep for hours past your bedtime. The bright blue lights from tablets, phones, and computers tell our brains that we need to stay awake, not go to sleep. Think about it: out in nature, the sun would tell our bodies to wake up and start our day. So, with all these artificial lights today, we stay awake longer and longer because our brains don’t know the difference between natural and unnatural light.

Better habit: Turn off electronics a few hours before bed and keep them off during the night so they don’t awaken you with notifications.

2. Drinking caffeine or alcohol too late in the day

Caffeine sends a jolt of energy through our bodies that helps us to stay awake and feel refreshed. Drinking a few cups in the morning to help us get our day started won’t do much harm; however, downing a cup or two close to bedtime will keep you awake well into the night. Alcohol might make you sleepy initially, and many people rely on it to fall asleep. However, alcohol spikes your insulin levels after consumption, which can wake you in the middle of the night.

Better habit: If you do drink caffeine or alcohol, make sure to avoid drinking it five or six hours before bed, as it will stay in the bloodstream for hours after consumption, forcing sleep to evade you once again.

3. Thinking/worrying while trying to fall asleep

We have a problem with overthinking and worrying; many of us do it without even realizing it! Overthinking before bed will make you feel stressed, which isn’t conducive to falling asleep. Worrying will produce more cortisol, and sleep won’t come for a while.

Better habit: If you find your mind wandering, try meditating or doing light yoga before bed. If this doesn’t help, fall asleep listening to relaxing music or nature sounds.

4. Not having a regular sleep schedule

Finally, our bodies were meant to perform tasks during set hours of the day. Out in nature, we would wake up with the sun and fall asleep just after it set each night. Therefore, not going to bed at the same time and waking up at different hours each day can cause your body to become confused and exhausted.

Better habit: Go to sleep at the same time each night and wake up at the same time each morning. If you have trouble with this, set a bedtime and try to go to bed within five to ten minutes of this time each night.

7 Signs of A Psychic Attack

July 9, 2016 by Power of Positivity

People who experience a psychic attack are often afraid to come forward. That’s because they fear nobody will believe them. However, some victims know that there is nothing physically wrong with them and that are feeling one or more of these seven signs of attack.

Unfortunately, there are some malicious people with the knowledge of how to psychically attack others. So let’s look at some ways that you can defend yourself from a psychic attack.

7 Signs of A Psychic Attack (And How You Can Defend Yourself)

Beliefs about the psychic attack can be found in many cultures, from Russia to China, from India to those who study the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah. One Chinese study of colorectal cancer and the risk factors associated with it concluded that psychic attack was a factor that should be considered as a potential cause of poor health in patients.

A psychic attack is used to harm another person by manipulating and controlling them, by sending negative energy toward them. This mental manipulation occurs without your knowledge. Furthermore, it can cause physical symptoms similar to an illness, It can also cause a depressed mood, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

If you have concerns about feeling any of these symptoms, seek a medical professional to rule out a physical illness, but also seek a psychological consultation to rule out mental problems as well. Once you know that these are not factors in your condition, seek to safely remove yourself from the person you suspect of psychic attack.

1. Exhaustion followed by deep sleep

Dion Fortune, renowned psychic and author of Psychic Self-Defense says that she was attacked by a woman who used the power of thought manipulation to plant false ideas in her mind and convince her give false testimony against a former coworker. After the woman told Dion what her version of the truth was, she says ‘to my intense surprise I found myself agreeing with her in a series of entirely baseless charges against the character of a man I had no reason to believe to be otherwise than perfectly straight. The same exhaustion and the same dead sleep descended upon me immediately after this interview.’

2. Questioning your sanity

Negative thoughts that did not come from yourself can make you question your sanity following a psychic attack. Knowing yourself well enough to recognize a foreign or intrusive thought that is unusual is key to recognizing this sign of a psychic attack.

3. Frightening dreams of being attacked

A violent nightmare may be a sign of a psychic attack. Examples of these types of frightening dreams are a feeling of heaviness on your chest, trouble breathing, or an intense fear of being held down or choked.

4. Feelings of hypnosis

Psychic suggestion is one method of manipulation that is similar to hypnosis and it is a sign of a psychic attack. Do you feel trapped in a trance state not achieved through meditation? Indeed, it may be a sign of forced hypnosis or a psychic attack on you.

Although the psychic attack is not rooted in a specific spirituality, followers of occult magic know how to use psychic attacks as black magic. Thus, wearing a cross or blessed religious item on your person can help you defend yourself from these attacks.

5. Extreme fears that are unrealistic

A rational explanation may not be evident to you when you feel frozen by fear. This is a similar feeling to a panic attack, but it can last much longer. Rapid breathing, fast heartbeat, sweating, and nervousness are all symptoms of anxiety, but not being able to leave your home for days due to intense fear is a sign of a psychic attack.

6. You feel much better after a shower or a bath

Dion Fortune suggests protecting yourself against a psychic attack is crossing a source of moving water. For example, consider a stream. A shower is also a source of moving water, so this will help to cleanse negative energy as well.

To add to the psychic protection, use a salt scrub in the shower or bathe in a saltwater bath. Salt also has a cleansing and purifying effect and will help wash away any lingering negativity. While you shower or bathe, say a prayer or blessing to cleanse away the negativity and purifying your psychic energy.

7. Feeling like you can’t control your movement or thoughts

Dion Fortune describes herself as not being in control of the placement of her feet after one potent psychic attack. Burning white sage can cleanse the space around you of negative energies. Wave the smoking bundle of sage around your home as you invoke positive energy. As you sage your home, tell the evil to leave.

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Here’s What Happens To Your Brain When You Don’t Drink Enough Water

Why Does Your Brain Need You To Drink Enough Water?

The Brain Problems You Experience When You Don’t Get Enough Water

How Much Water Is Enough For Your Brain?

(C)Power of Positivity, LLC. All rights reserved

Silence Negative Self-Talk With This ONE Easy Trick

How does NLP work?

NLP Technique for Transforming Negative Self-Talk

Final Thoughts on Decreasing Negative Self-Talk

5 Ways to Protect Yourself From Negative Emotions

1. Create a protective psychic shield

2. Focus on the positive emotions of self-control

3. Use awareness training

4. Learn to comfort yourself in healthy ways

5. Detach from negative emotions

9 Comebacks For Dealing With Arrogant People

1. ‘Now what makes you say that?’

2. ‘Ouch.’

3. ‘You know my mother is ___, right?’

4. ‘Are you aware that there are other points of view?’

5. ‘Tell me again why you are superior to ____?’

6. ‘I would appreciate it if those were the final words you say on this topic.’

7. ‘You need to stop talking now.’

8. ‘I’m sure you didn’t mean for that to sound so arrogant, right?’

9. ‘Do you realize how arrogant you sound when you say things like that?’

(C)Power of Positivity, LLC. All rights reserved

How Much Sleep Do You Need According To Your Age?

Four Sleep Habits To Avoid

1. Getting on your phone or computer before bed

2. Drinking caffeine or alcohol too late in the day

3. Thinking/worrying while trying to fall asleep

4. Not having a regular sleep schedule

(C)Power of Positivity, LLC. All rights reserved

7 Signs of A Psychic Attack (And How You Can Defend Yourself)

1. Exhaustion followed by deep sleep

2. Questioning your sanity

3. Frightening dreams of being attacked

4. Feelings of hypnosis

5. Extreme fears that are unrealistic

6. You feel much better after a shower or a bath

7. Feeling like you can’t control your movement or thoughts

(C)Power of Positivity, LLC. All rights reserved

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