Published on: 19 February 2018
Last Updated on: 06 November 2024
While taking the necessary steps to keep our body toned and in shape, we often neglect the importance of mental health. There are many factors that leave both positive and negative impacts on the mind.
Knowing these factors is necessary if you want to promote the health of your brain. Plus, this way you will be able to eradicate those factors from your life that adversely impact the brain and adopt the habits that improve the overall mental health in the long run.
Here are some of the effective ways to promote a healthy brain:
Keep Your Mind Stimulated :
Brain stimulation is necessary for maintaining mental health. You can stimulate your mind by playing games that require mental focus, memory, and activity. Solve mathematical problems, puzzles, and other similar quests. You can also engage in activities that require a lot of focus and imagination like a painting.
Develop Relations :
Connecting with people is essential for strengthening emotional wellbeing and overall mental health. Sharing your thoughts and feelings with your loved ones and engaging with new people helps you stay composed. Plus, communicating with people with different perspectives help your mind to stimulate and strengthen up.
Cut Down on Smoking :
As per the latest research, smoking nicotine does not only adversely affect the lungs but also causes a decline in memory. Therefore, if you want to retain your memory in the long run and do not want to end up with dementia, cut down on smoking. Either it is topnotch cannabis or plain cigarettes, avoid their use as much as possible for better mental health.
Keep a Positive Approach :
Training your mind to be positive and take out a positive stance from every situation helps keep your brain at peace and improves overall physical and mental health. Moreover, staying happy has a very positive impact on the mind itself. When you are happy and positive, the brain releases a hormone called endorphin that promotes mental and physical health and wellbeing.
Meditate :
Meditation involves steps like breathing techniques that do not only relax the mind but also improve mental focus and memory. It is greatly renowned for its benefits of relieving stress and other mental issues like depression.
Learn Something New :
If you believe that education is only up to the level of the university, you are probably mistaken. Educating yourself each day is essential for opening up the mind and expanding it. Read a thick book that you have been avoiding lately or learn a language that you think is tough. Test your limits and challenge your mind each day. It will help stimulate your brain and strengthen the nerves inside it. Engage in activities that involve using the brain. Our brain is just like a machine; the more we use it, the better it works without getting rusted.
Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.
What is tinnitus?
The tinnitus is based on perceiving a sound that does not exist in the environment; it is often described as 'a buzzing, a beep, a noise' ... etc. It can be perceived in one ear, both ears and inside your head. The perception of tinnitus is more intense and constant in the silence of the night, in the absence of activities and other sounds or environmental noises that can mask it.
The majority of tinnitus conditions are subjective and they are perceived exclusively by the patient, although around 5-10% are objective tones generated by parts of the body that can also be perceived by other people, especially by the specialist when exploring the patient (example: murmurs, pulse, etc., generated by the cardio-circulatory system).
This is a common problem in the general population. It is estimated that around 30% of the adult population has perceived tinnitus at some point in their lives, and between 10-15% approximately experience them continuously.
In general, the presence of tinnitus increases with age; it is more common in people over 40. This may continue in the future if the harmful effects of exposure to loud sounds and noises in young people are not controlled.
How is it diagnosed?
Although the diagnostic protocol may vary, it includes the following test: a specific clinical history of patients with tinnitus, questionnaires of subjective self-assessment, clinical examination, audiological tests, imaging studies and complementary tests depending on each case.
The first step of the diagnostic protocol is to obtain information about the characteristics of tinnitus, its possible causes (for example: acoustic trauma, ototoxic, otitis, family history, hearing loss, vertigo, Meniêre's syndrome), its emotional consequences, (that is to say, emotional tension, anxiety, etc.), through a systematized clinical history.
For patients to whom tinnitus affects them severely, the most commonly used treatments are:
Home tinnitus remedies
Pharmacological treatment
Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT)
Hearing aids
Noise generators
Mixed hearing aids
Psychological and/or psychiatric help
Home tinnitus remedies
Use warm towels
This is a very old trick for those who are used to having all kinds of ringing in their ears. In addition to this, it is an effective formula that helps alleviate all tension, and it is very cheap to set a pot of water to boil or use the water from your own heater in the bathtub.
Zinc
Zinc or Iron are an important supplement in your diet; they help tinnitus disappear.
Fresh pineapple
Those who love home remedies will be pleased with the benefits of fresh pineapple because it is very efficient to help you solve any problems with ringing in the ears. It seems to be related to reducing the inflammatory processes in general.
Pharmacological treatment
There are numerous drugs used in the treatment of tinnitus: vasodilators, anxiolytics, antidepressants, corticosteroids, antiepileptic, diuretics, etc.
Sometimes tinnitus is associated with other symptoms and alterations that can be treated pharmacologically. This is the case, for example, of patients with blood flow deficit affecting the inner ear, anxious-depressive problems, Menière's disease, autoimmune inner ear disease, acoustic trauma, sudden deafness, migraine, brain problems, etc.
Retraining therapy (TRT)
Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) is one of the most widely used treatments today and aims to reduce your sound perception and its consequences, including the reactions of emotional tension, anguish, fear, etc., thus favoring the patient's habituation to it.
Headphones
When tinnitus is associated with a hearing loss, the use of properly adapted hearing aids can be the most appropriate treatment. Hearing aids, in addition to correcting hearing loss, increase the perception of environmentally sound, avoiding strong silence.
Noise generators
One of the options to treat tinnitus is the use of sounds, which can be: environmental or natural sounds amplified by headphones and also sounds produced by white noise generators. White noise generators have the same shape as hearing aids and produce a broadband noise that is easy to get used to.
Psychological treatment
Some patients present psychological and emotional consequences that may be related to the onset and development of tinnitus and/or interfere with the habituation to it (e.g., stress, anxiety, depression, etc.) and their treatment is essential to reduce or minimize the perception of tinnitus.
Read More:
Smooth Discharge Before Period
How To Remove Acne Scars Naturally
How To Pick The Right Hair Brush For Different Hair Types
Are Oncology Clinical Studies Facing Challenges?
Smoking is a trend that comes and goes with decades. Sometimes in history is was a class distinction and in some other times, it was only a practice of criminals and drug addicts. But, what is smoking?
Smoking refers to the process or burning a substance and breathing the smoke to be tasted and also absorbed into the bloodstream. Many different substances can be smoked, mostly leaves of plants. The most common plant to be smoked is tobacco. It can be found in many different presentations and with different additives for flavor or fruit scented.
After discovering the damaging effects of the combustion of tobacco in our lungs, many people and institutions have devoted their efforts to ban the consumption of cigars and cigarettes. It was the combination of higher life expectancy rates and the popularization of tobacco consumption that gave rise to studies and research of their negative effect on lungs and their direct relation to lung cancer.
Read also: The Disturbing Trend Of Multiple Chronic Medical Conditions
Once the studies showed that the combustion of tobacco created tart and tar was the main toxic element when smoking, the effort was deviated to eliminating the intake of toxic tar into the system. Longer filters, water filters, and many more devices were then created to achieve this goal. And following the creation of these items, the electronic cigarettes offer smokers the possibility of enjoying nicotine without the negative side effects of tar.
Electronic Cigarettes, How Do They Work
Electronic cigarettes are battery-operated devices, they can look like a pen, and some others have new designs that may look like cigars or cigarettes. These devices convert liquid nicotine into a vapor or mist that the user – smoker- inhales. Since what the user is inhaling, is not smoke, the community of supporters has decided to call themselves vapers. With these e-cigarettes, there is no fire and therefore no ashes and smoke to be inhaled.
E-cigarettes are offered to the public as a healthy alternative to tobacco cigarettes. They started being sold in 2003, and now, multiple houses offer different kinds of electronic cigarettes to suit different audiences and moods.
Are They Safe
The research on electronic cigarettes is not thorough yet. Many laboratories are carrying out diverse tests to examine the effect of the use of electronic cigarettes over time. Apparently, the absence of fumes makes them already a lot healthier than smoking a regular cigar. However, this does not mean they are completely exempt from doing any harm. Any substance is dangerous when it is excessively consumed, even water!
Studies have shown that nicotine present is not associated with the traditional danger of smoking. It was the tar that was to blame. In the case of nicotine vapor, it is still necessary to carry out more extensive research to assess the long-term effect it could have on the human body.
Nicotine And Oral Health
Nicotine acts as a vasoconstrictor, and this means that the flow of blood is reduced because of the consumption of nicotine. After consuming the tobacco e-liquid and without sufficient blood flow, the gums in your mouth could be affected and be left without the nutrients and oxygen they need to stay healthy. This can cause gum recession and gum death through the death of the tissue.
It is also important to point out that gum disease may be harder to diagnose when inhaling tobacco vapor. This is due to the same fact explained earlier, the vasoconstriction created by the nicotine reduces blood flow through the gums, and therefore when you brush you don't bleed anymore, or maybe the bleeding is drastically reduced, but the original causes of the gum disease are still there.
Read also: The Relationship Between Oral Health And General Health
Because of the same effect, your mouth will also find harder to produce saliva. This can cause some other minor issues. Eating, for example, could be affected because of the missing saliva, since saliva is an important element in the digestive process. Another issue derived from not producing enough saliva is bad breath. Saliva stops bacteria from forming inside your mouth, and without it, bacteria can reproduce quickly and give you terrible breath.
The recommendation would be to stay alert to the symptoms of gums disease even if you notice that you have stopped bleeding for a while. It is always good to remember that you should not take this article as the replacement of a visit to the doctor. A health professional would always be the best option when it comes to assessing the health of your mouth.
If you are thinking of switching from regular cigarettes to e-cigarettes, there will be an immediate improvement in your quality of life. The elimination of the toxic tar and smoke that was being inhaled is a real plus for your health but be concerned about other negative effects due to nicotine as highlighted in this article.
Do you know why insomnia takes place?
This can happen for many reasons, including unnecessary stress, work pressure, bad health habits, and otherworldly affairs.
Not only that, specific life trauma or incidents like the death or the illness of someone close, married life complications, or even job loss. All these can lead to insomnia.
Sleep plays a vital role in developing your brain and body. It also helps to repair any damaged cells or blood vessels. On the other hand, insomnia or sleeping disorders can deteriorate your body and increase heart attack and stroke risks.
So, insomnia is a condition where people suffer from inadequate or insufficient sleep. And it can turn out to be a real problem if not treated well.
In this article, I’ll illustrate the five magical ways you can deal with insomnia.
Ways To Defeat Insomnia- THE 5 GOLDEN RULES
When life throws you problems, don’t waste your time focusing on the issues. Instead, put your complete attention on achieving the solutions.
Insomnia is a challenge that might try to kneel you down, but through this article, you’ll be getting all the tactics to deal with it in a more innovative and more effective way.
1. Don’t Change Your “Wake Up” Routine
If you are reading this article now, make sure to follow this step. NO MATTER WHAT!!!!!
I know many of you might be wondering, “Do I have to wake up early even during my desired weekends?”
-The answer is ‘YES” if only you want to get rid of insomnia!!!
It can be a tough job, I know, but you need to go through cuts and burns if you want to achieve something.
The reason you must sacrifice your habit of staying late in bed even during your weekends is because you must bring yourself to a routine where you will always have a consistent sleep and waking time.
When you have mastered this technique, you’ll notice that your sleeping disruptions just magically vanished.
2. Wave Goodbyes To Nicotine And Caffeine
If you love smoking cigarettes and drinking deliciously hot and strong midnight coffee, you just must quit it!!!
To heed goodbyes to insomnia, you first must learn to say goodbye to your smoking and caffeine intake addictions.
Caffeine can keep you up late for several hours, and trust me, it’s more than enough to disrupt the “complete sleeping cycle” yours.
It can also awaken you frequently from sleep, resulting in “poor quality sleep.”
Nicotine is also on the same side as caffeine. These, too, result in sleep deprivation!!!
When you smoke a cigarette, it stimulates the effect of nicotine. And this addictive drug can be highly responsible for insomnia. Most smokers take at least one cigarette before going to bed.
And this can have a significant impact on your sleep. So, it will the “golden achievement” of your life if you can quit these habits for good!!!!
3. Cut Down Unnecessary Naps And Increase Exercise
I know naps can refresh your mood. And a few hours of extra sleep can make you feel more energetic. But these naps are also one of the main reasons for sleep disorders.
And do you know why?
This is because napping affects your sleeping patterns. For instance, you are habituated to sleeping at night when the lights are turned off, and it’s quiet. Therefore, your mind knows it’s nighttime, and you have to sleep.
On the other hand, while taking naps, there are no such scenarios where it’s dark and quiet, and even the place where you sleep might be different like you are taking a nap on a couch or sofa. So, the mind eventually disrupts your sleeping pattern because it’s not your regular bedtime.
Undoubtedly, exercise keeps you fit and healthy. But did you know that it also helps you to restore the proper balance of your sleep?
-Yes, exercises help you to get rid of insomnia!!!
But you need to make sure not to perform any exercise immediately before you go to bed. Instead, try to finish it at least two to three hours before going to bed.
4. Make Sure To Be Comfortable And Discard All The Worries When Going To Bed
The environment you are in has a tremendous impact on your sleep. By environment, I mean to say the “place your sleep.”
To have a good sleep, you need to have a mild temperature, a comfortable bed, and no lights should be turned on while you are sleeping. If you have pets, don’t keep them in your room if they make noises at night.
And one of the most essential “golden rules” that you need to keep in mind is “not to sleep with loads of stress in your head.” Stress is temporary, but it can make insomnia permanent.
When you are in bed, discard all the negative thoughts out of your mind. Sleep is like a prayer, and you don’t want any distractions while praying!!!
Stress therapies and methods you can use to have a quality sleep include taking deep breaths, meditating, and many more.
5. Light Therapy Combats Insomnia
LED light therapy or Bright light therapy can also be a cure for sleeping disorders.
This therapy is famous for its ability to reduce depression, stress, and also insomnia.
If you are not getting enough natural light (which is very common among people nowadays), sleep deprivation can occur.
What light therapy does is imitate the light of the sun and helps to improve the circadian rhythm of your body. This light comes out of a box, and different light therapy boxes have additional features.
Make sure to use it for at least 15 to 30 minutes every morning and maintain this routine, and you’ll see drastic results.
Whenever you take a light therapy device, always seek the assistance of a professional doctor as he knows the suitable device for you.
I hope this article will help you know the ins and outs of the 5 ways you can deal with insomnia.
When Do You Need Therapy?
There’s a difference between a bad couple of nights and chronic insomnia. If you can’t seem to get yourself sleeping better even after trying all of the tweaks, then you need some medical intervention.
Especially when you are changing your routine (waking up at the same time every day), eating the right food (no caffeine), exercising, etc.
It is therapy that will be key for getting at the root causes if your sleep issues are more related to stress, trauma, or anxiety in nature. So when does that cross from having an unrewarding few days into something bigger where you should consider this?
Be More Self-Aware
First, ask yourself this question.
Just how long has insomnia been a problem for you?
If it’s been longer than a few weeks and you see no signs of improvement in your sleep quality, that’s not a good sign. Also, pay attention to the overall effect on your daily functioning.
Are you perpetually tired all day, unable to concentrate, or becoming easily irritated?
If so, then it's no doubt starting to affect your mental and physical health; don’t deny it, embrace it.
Dealing With Constant Stress & Anxiety
Another good indicator is how much stress, worry, or anxiety you have about sleep.
Afterall, it is not just during the sleep time that you think about your insomnia. It is always!
Do you get worked up just thinking about going to bed because you believe ‘tonight is going to be another awful night of no sleep!’ – or are your thoughts such as…
‘If I don’t get to sleep in the next 10 minutes, the whole day tomorrow is going to be absolutely horrible’.
Mental exertion alone can be exhausting and only adds fuel to the insomnia fire.
That’s when short-term therapy may be helpful, breaking that mental cycle and having someone who understands what you’re going through, a patient.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) is one of the most effective treatments. With medication, you get a temporary fix, but CBT-I works to change the thoughts and behaviors that lead to insomnia. It helps you think about sleep differently and gives you tools to help with anxiety or stress that might be keeping you up.
Your Emotional Relationships
Let’s not forget the emotional side of things. In some cases, insomnia is tied to unprocessed trauma or grief. If you find that your sleep troubles seem to have begun after a traumatic life event or during a time of increased emotional turmoil, that could be a clue that talk therapy might help.
A therapist can guide you through the process of identifying and safely processing those emotions, so they stop interfering with your sleep and with your life in general.
In other words? If your insomnia is starting to cause secondary problems in your life, do yourself a favor.
Read Also:
Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Your Skin & Good Sleeping Habits
Ways to Sleep Well at Night as You Age
3 Health Advantages of Good Night’s Sleep
What are Popular Mind and Body Exercises Available at a Gym?
