This was a really odd one, so I had to read further about it. Apparently, picking up a pen and pad may actually help you to alleviate the symptoms of IBS, or Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is one of the most common digestive and bowel disorders out there today.  IBS can have a dramatically detrimental effect on your life, your health, and your mental sense of well being.

Why? Because typically, IBS results in a lot of gas, discomfort and embarrassing bouts of alternating diarrhea and constipation. Usually people with IBS experience more of one  or the other. For example, you may have IBS and mostly experience constipation, with occasional bouts of diarrhea, or vice versa. You can imagine, neither of these is pleasant or conducive to a normal life with normal activities.

While the occasional herbal colon cleanse can help normalize bowel habits, you still need to have natural ways to help alleviate the symptoms. One of them is diet. Diets that are rich in fruits and veggies and do not rely a whole lot on red meats and cheeses, which are both constipating foods, are pretty much the gold standard for keeping healthy, regular bowel habits.

On top of that, there are other lifestyle tips that may help you to regulate your bowel habits. Believe it or not, one of them is writing!  It’s not just writing though, it’s the kind of writing. When people go about writing very expressive, deep, and therapeutic thoughts without holding back, apparently their IBS symptoms subside.  It’s almost like a form of self-therapy I supposed, you could look at it that way.

The reasons they think this form of “getting it all out” writing therapy might help with IBS patients is that many times IBS is linked to our thoughts. Stress and anxiety can definitely impact your bowel movements.  Being nervous and having bottled up feelings can quite literally have that impact on your colon, in other words!  Very interesting theory, and I’m sure there’s some truth behind it.

They believe that keeping these feelings bottled up contributes to the symptoms of IBS, just as it contributes to depressing the immune system and affecting your health in other dramatic ways, without you even knowing it.  This means that psychological treatment for the symptoms of IBS may become more mainstream if the findings are further validated.  This totally makes sense, because I believe that all the body’s functions are related to the things we think about and worry about on a daily basis.

It has long been a notion that sugar in general, especially refined sugar, and even more especially super high fructose corn syrup and other sugary solids, actually feeds cancer cells and helps them to live and multiply. Apparently they have now confirmed that at least pancreatic cancer cells, one of the deadliest cancers out there, does indeed feed on fructose.  They found that pancreatic cancer cells that are fed fructose actually divide more rapidly and are able to live longer.

In short – ick, it pains me to even say this, but fructose actually is “healthy” for cancer cells to devour!  That’s why you MUST limit your intake of this sugary, cheap substance as much as you possibly can. If it can contribute to the multiplication of pancreatic cancer cells, I’d imagine it can contribute to many other types of cancer as well, acting as “fuel” for it to grow and take over, and kill off your healthy cells.

Fructose is actually a cheap food additive that gives it more flavor. It is found in many processed foods as an additive, and it is found in most sugary soft drinks and many other sugary drinks, of the non carbonated variety.  The study that actually showed pancreatic cancer cells feeding off of, and being nourished by, fructose, just confirms other earlier studies that linked fructose to the deadly cancer.

While the research noted that all sugar tends to “feed” cancer cells, and is generally a thing to be avoided in the diet, it saw fructose being preferred over simple glucose sugar as the way for these deadly cells to divide more quickly and spread more rampantly, causing a harder to fight cancer.

There are talks of developing a drug that changes the way the cancer cells metabolize fructose as an extra effort to fight this cancer. However, it’s just safe to say that avoiding this type of sugar all together is best – how’s that for prevention!?

I’ve actually often thought about what I’m about to speak of, because I’ve seen it in action too many times to deny it’s power.  I’m talking about the power of our emotions and our outwardly presence as it applies to other’s happiness and mood. It may be a temporary thing, but just someone smiling at you in passing can make all the difference in your day.

A perfect example of what I’m talking about is your typical work day, no matter what your job is. Can you deny that a day that starts off badly  usually also keeps going badly, and that it almost seems to be a self perpetuating and self fulfilling prophecy, if you let it be?

Sometimes I’ll go into work, and if everyone’s in a horrible grumpy mood and either ignores my eye contact or smile or even my hello in the morning on a Monday, I actually tend to withdraw more and stay in my own little world and perhaps feel more discontent with my job because of it.

However, if I go in to work on Monday morning and am greeted with smiles and acknowledgments by coworkers, magically, my day seems to start off better, I’m having better interactions with people, and I myself am spreading the “infection” of happiness and smiling around. It really is true that happiness and sadness or grumpiness are catching.

Studies have actually recently been done that show that both happiness and sadness have a sort of contagious factor to them. People who come into contact more with happy people tend to carry this feeling in themselves through the process of traferrence, as do people with sadness. Maybe this tends to explain why perpetually  unsatisfied or crabby people alienate others or find themselves isolated.

The good news is that you can actually change not only how your own day goes, but you can also change how other’s days are going by smiling and treating others with respect and friendliness. It really is catching, and it gets some great karma going for both you and those you come in contact with.

Well, I wish they would have thought of this little experiment back when I was a student. Sheesh, I can remember SO many early mornings, I had so little energy because it seems like when you’re a teenaged girl and you start your period, you have these times when you’re just so tired all the time. On top of that, 5 days a week you had to get up at the crack of dawn, literally, and be at school by seven o’clock am.

I remember standing out at bus stops, so freezing, and so exhausted, and not being able to pay attention in class. And if you think the mornings were bad, man, after lunch I was pretty much a zombie.

And I was a smart kid too, just very shy and very tired at school, so I didn’t really try as hard as I should have. I supposed I didn’t take high school or junior high very seriously, and I didn’t set my expectations that high for myself.  It would have been much better if I could have just had that extra hour to sleep in.

It seems like that would have really made a difference in my attention span and attitude. I just really hated that period of my life. And I think that  later day may have at least helped that attitude. I’ve always needed my sleep though, and not everyone is like that.

Now they are looking at, at least experimentally for now, making high schoolers go in later and end later during the week. The results thus far have been pretty amazing, as I suspected they would be, remembering my angst filled high school years.

Giving teenagers just an extra half hour, which is really nothing if you think about it in the grand scheme of things, apparently made for much less tardiness as well as more alertness in the students, especially in the morning time.

They also found another added benefit  to the later start of the school day at the educational facility where they piloted and studied this idea. They found that the teens were also actually eating a healthier breakfast, which accounts for the increased alertness and less tardiness as well.

Sleep is such an important factor in learning and cognitive abilities, and it would be nice if they could really consider rolling this out in other schools. They may be shocked at how much better kids can perform and actually WANT to perform when they’re not sleep deprive and rushing around every morning to come to school.

I finally got sick and tired of drinking the supposedly “filtered” water where I work 4 ten hour days a week, and decided to splurge on myself a little and bought a smaller Brita water pitcher for my office cube. I think that when you’ve been drinking water with a lot of chemicals and chlorine in it for so long, that you forget how smooth, how pure and how utterly delicious filtered water tastes.

Now, of course I’d prefer to be drinking ionized and filtered water, but I can’t yet afford an alkaline water ionizer and filter, so this filtered water pitcher will have to do for now.  Water should taste smooth and full bodied, not like it’s hard and you feel almost like you have a residue ot the taste on your tongue when you’re done gulping it. Good, filtered water should really be free of flavor, instead it should just be pure refreshing nourishment that goes down easy and hydrates your body effectively.

This little Brita pitcher cost me about $14. It was on sale at Target, normally almost twenty bucks, and filling it up gets me almost through a whole day of water, so that’s pretty good.  I do tend to drink a lot of water too, it’s my favorite beverage!  Even when I went out to lunch today, I could taste a difference between the tap water and my filtered water, even though I masked the chemical taste a bit with a lemon wedge squeezed in there, one of my favorite health tricks.

The only thing about the Brita pitchers is that the filters can get a bit pricey to replace, and they seem to lose their effectiveness fairly quickly, but what I do to reduce the cost is I buy the multipacks of the filters, that way I save a little on each filter and I have them in stock so I don’t have to pay the higher price to buy them individually. Plus, it’s not a pain in the butt to go out and constantly be buying them in singles!