Our amazing immune systems help prevent infection by fighting foreign invaders such as bacteria, viruses, or other pathogens. It includes Pattern Recognition Receptors, or PRRs; molecules which recognize a wide variety of foreign invaders. Once recognized, the body takes drastic action when they first appear, since it immediately sees...

I don’t know what will happen. The truth is none of us do. We just think we do. Most of us are great at speculating, projecting, and fretting about the future or what we think is going to happen. This comprises a huge portion of our mental noise. If...

You probably guessed it: the biggest cause for unhappiness is overthinking. Overthinking ruins friendships and relationships. Overthinking creates problems you never had. Being in your head too much prevents you from fully living. In our complex world, we need to make things simpler. There is a deluge of information...

Fluctuating moods are part of the human condition. Moods are like the tide; they flow in and flow out. Go with the flow of your moods and don’t strain to resist the low ones. That just makes things worse and extends them. The lows can help you appreciate the...

This T-shirt is a great reminder, one which we all need. We need to remember to consider the source, and since the brain has a huge negativity bias, it’s natural that it produces negative thoughts. It’s simply doing its job. This is because we evolve very slowly thru genetic...

We’ve all heard the phrase, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” Why is that? Because that’s how things look to you. Other people may look at your life with envy and see all kinds of awesome things. But you may not see those things. You may...

Can you hear the ever-present noise? Your brain is creating somewhere between 35 and 48 thoughts per minute. This chatty self-talk is happening right now as you are reading this. This is what the brain does. Neuroimaging studies suggest the normal resting state of the brain is a silent...

Long-standing emotional baggage from the past can easily affect us today. Negative or anxiety-producing patterns can easily keep replaying; they form a deeper rut and stronger network connections each time they play in a self-perpetuating cycle. Pulling out the weeds first can make rewiring and planting new networks easier....

Nature is nurture. The reduction of stress it provides is well established. Our growing indoor lifestyles dominated by screen viewing is harming us. It’s not how we were designed. Far too many people are constantly glued to their screens, even when they’re walking outside! They’d be hard-pressed to be...

Creating our own mental images is rapidly becoming a lost skill, especially compared to past generations. In our technology saturated environment, with apps like YouTube, it is all done for us. When are we forced to imagine? Very few people do it, and we need to get better at...