The double standard

There are more than 90 types of essential oils, claiming varying health benefits. It is important to note that many of their claims are still not accepted by the scientific authorities. The ten most popular ones are:

• Peppermint: for increased energy and improved digestion.
• Lavender: to relieve stress.
• Sandalwood: helps with focus and calming of nerves.
• Bergamot: for skin and for reducing stress.
• Rose: for reducing anxiety
• Chamomile: to improve mood and inducing relaxation
• Ylang-Ylang: for treating headache, nausea and skin problems.
• Tea Tree: increasing immunity and fighting infections.
• Jasmine: helps with depression and libido.
• Lemon: for headaches and to aid digestion.

Essential Oils are widely used to treat certain health conditions and problems. Some claim that these oils can help with:

• Stress and anxiety
• Headaches and migraines
• Insomnia
• Inflammation

Essential oils also have antibiotic and antimicrobial properties, can freshen up our surroundings, have a variety of cosmetic uses, and are a safe and environmentally friendly alternative to toxic mosquito repellents.

The empathy gap causes us to misjudge our own emotions and behaviors. Examples include overestimating our ability to stay composed in a stressful event, overestimating the likelihood that we can control our desire for an addictive substance, such as coffee, or underestimating how much our feelings for someone affected our judgment in the past.

The empathy gap can cause people to be unprepared for situations and act differently to what they would ideally prefer.

• Cold-to-hot empathy gaps. When someone is in a cold (emotionally neutral) state, they have trouble understanding someone in a hot (emotional state). A calm person might be unable to predict how they will act when they're upset.
• Hot-to-cold empathy gaps. Someone in this state might be passionate about a topic but fail to understand how other people feel that are not passionate about it.
• Intrapersonal bias. An interpersonal empathy gap occurs when someone struggles to consider their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
• Interpersonal bias. An interpersonal empathy gap occurs when people battle to consider someone else's thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
• Retrospective bias. A retrospective empathy gap occurs when people fail to understand why they acted emotionally in the past.
• A prospective bias. A prospective empathy gap occurs when people fail to predict the future behavior of someone who doesn't care about the same thing as much.
• The outgroup empathy gap. This is a cognitive bias that causes people to be more empathic towards members of their ingroup than toward people in their outgroup.

In the 1970s and into the 80s, research was done where mice were given a variety of supplementary antioxidants in their diet or via an injection straight into the bloodstream.

The result showed that an excess of antioxidants didn't stop the onset of disease or extended lifespan.

• In 1994, one trial followed the lives of 29,133 Finish people in their 50s who all smoked. Some were given beta-carotene supplements. The group that supplemented with Beta-carotene had a 16% increase in lung cancer.
• Another study shows a breast cancer increase of 20% for postmenopausal women who supplemented with folic acid.
• One study with 100 heavy smokers had a 28% increase in lung cancer after just four years of beta-carotene and vitamin A supplementation.

There is no one place responsible for phobias in the brain. Many parts of the brain take part. 

However, fear is important to the brain's emotional processing and learning center: known as the amygdala and the hippocampus, with a central role in the process of forming memories.

1. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (sometimes called psychotherapy) has proved to be the most effective treatment for people with phobias.
2. Exposure is another part of the treatment. It teaches the brain how to deal with seeing or being close to what the patient fears.

• Research shows that being kind to someone increases how much you like that person.
• Being asked a favor can make one feel acknowledged for their expertise, which can cause them to develop more positive feelings toward the person asking for help.
• The negative Benjamin Franklin effect happens when people who do something negative to someone will increase the degree to which they dislike that person, in order to justify their negative actions to themselves.

A psychological phenomenon that causes people to like someone more after they do them a favor, especially if they dislike the helped person. 

You can use it to benefit and protect yourself when interacting with others.

Premise 1: I can’t explain or imagine how proposition X can be true.

Premise 2: if a certain proposition is true, then I must be able to explain or imagine how that can be.

Conclusions: proposition X is false.

... and to bring this up as part of an argument. The issue with doing so occurs when this incredulity isn’t justified or supported by concrete information, and when this lack of belief is used in order to assume that a preferred personal explanation must be the right one, despite the lack of proof.

At the same time, it’s also important to remember that it’s possible that the person using the argument from incredulity is right, despite the fact that their reasoning is flawed.

Feelings are preceded by emotions and tend to be our reactions to them. Emotions are a more generalized experience across humans, but feelings are more subjective and influenced by our personal experiences and interpretations, thus they are harder to measure.

They can be defined as unpleasant or unhappy emotions evoked in individuals to express a negative effect towards something.

Although some are labeled negative, all emotions are normal to the human experience. And it’s important to understand when and why negative emotions might arise, and develop positive behaviors to address them.

• Inference-observation confusion: An assumption made that may or may not be correct. Example: Concluding that a guy is rich, based on the car he drives.
• Fortune-Telling: Assumption of knowing exactly what will happen in the future.
• Mind Reading: Assuming based on how to have read someone's mind and concluded something which may not be true.
• Extreme Extrapolation: Finding a minor clue and making something major out of it.
• Overgeneralization: Copy-pasting a piece of knowledge over something that you think is related, but is not.
• Labeling: Stereotyping a set of people based on their likes and dislikes.

The reason people jump to conclusions is the fact that they find it easy.

Fact-checking and 100 percent accuracy on everything they see or observe consume way too much time for a normal person.

Taking mental shortcuts is the path most people choose to jump to conclusions.

• The US buys an equivalent of 298 paracetamol tablets per person every year.
• The average American consumes $1,200 worth of prescription medications over the same period.
• In the UK, one in 10 people over the age of 65 takes eight medications every week.

• People with lower cholesterol levels are more likely to die violent deaths.
• If you put primates on a low-cholesterol diet, they become more aggressive. Lowering animals’ cholesterol seems to affect their levels of serotonin. Even fruit flies start fighting if you interfere with their serotonin levels.
• Studies have linked serotonin levels in people to violence, impulsivity, suicide, and murder.
• In a randomized controlled trial, statins were found to increase aggression in post-menopausal women though, oddly, not in men. Giving statins to Nile tilapia made them more confrontational and altered the levels of serotonin in their brains.

“When your goals are clear, you will come up with exactly the right answer at exactly the right time”

A dream is the root of all success, for having a dream does not limit you on what you can do. Successful people allow themselves to lean back and imagine the kind of life that is possible for them.