It’s only when you get back home that you can really begin to understand a trip and implement the changes it may have set into motion inside you.Think about what stood out to you on your trip.When did you feel moments of joy, wonder, excitement or longing? What are some of the things that you experienced on it that you rarely or never experience in the same way at home?Was it being face-to-face with natural beauty, like craggy caverns, clear waters or sunny fields?Or was it something more human, like murals made by local artists, buzzing street markets or nightlife, or school kids?

The Trip You Take Can Be Life Changing

How will we live differently in the light of what we saw there?How much can the strengthened sense of responsibility that arises from witnessing that grandeur offset the cost of travelling around it?Perhaps a “strengthened sense of responsibility” might motivate you to do things differently in your daily life. Maybe sitting in a sculpture park on your trip will inspire you to notice the shapes of the trees in your yard. How might you act differently now? Ask yourself how your life is rich in ways you hadn’t imagined before [and] how it’s poor?

Self-Reflecting Questions

One of the keys to a life-changing journey is taking the time afterwards to unpack your experiences, and not just your suitcases. Celebrated travel writer Pico Iyer explains how.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

travel

Travel

3 questions that turn a trip – even a day trip! – into a life-changing one 

Modern life is designed around three meals a day. We are told breakfast is the most important meal of the day, we're given lunch breaks at work , then our social and family lives is centred around evening meals. Before we decide when we should eat, we should also consider when we shouldn't eat.

Three meals a day 

Our bodies are more in line with intermittent fasting. Giving our bodies at least 12 hours a day without food allows our digestive system to rest. <ul><li>Fasting puts the body in a different state where it's more able to repair, look for damage, and clear misfolded proteins. Misfolded proteins are associated with several diseases.</li><li>Fasting gives the body a break, so it's able to store food and trigger the mechanism to release energy from our body stores.</li><li>Fasting could also improve our glycaemic response -  when our blood glucose rises after eating.</li></ul>

Intermittent fasting

Having an early dinner and increasing the time of your fasting window can have positive effects on your body, such as better glycaemic control. Some experts argue one meal a day is the best. Throughout history, we consumed one meal a day. But others disagree. Since one meal can increase the level of glucose in our blood when we're not eating, over a long period, it can be a risk factor for type 2 diabetes. Instead, two to three meals a day is best, with a long fasting window overnight, and consuming most calories earlier in the day.

When to eat

Hunger is often a psychological sensation. You might be conditioned to eat breakfast in the morning. This is not necessary. Data shows if you skip breakfast, you will eat fewer calories overall that day.

Feeling hungry

Eating too early in the morning should be avoided. It doesn't give you sufficient time to fast. Eating too soon after waking up also works against your circadian rhythm, which dictates how the body will process food throughout the day. Melatonin in the night helps us sleep, but it also pauses the creation of insulin, which stores glucose in the body. So if you eat when your melatonin is high, you get very high glucose levels. Over long periods, high glucose levels can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Don't eat to early in the day

The idea that we should eat three meals a day is surprisingly modern. How many meals a day is best for our health?

food

Food

health

Health

Should we be eating three meals a day?

There is a kind of person who seems at first glance to have an admirable degree of self-motivation, thoroughness and drive. They are up at dawn, they rarely take holidays, they are always sneaking in an extra hour or two of work. 
Their bosses are highly impressed, they are constantly promoted, their grades have been excellent since primary school, they never miss an appointment or turn in a piece of work that is less than stellar.

The Perfectionist

Perfectionism, tragically, does not spring primarily from a love of perfection in and of itself. It has its origins in far more regrettable feeling of never being good enough. 
It is rooted in self-hatred, sparked by memories of being disapproved of or neglected by those who should have esteemed us warmly in childhood.

The Problem With Perfectionism

We become perfectionists from a primary sense of being unworthy; uninteresting, flawed, a disappointment, a let-down, a nuisance. So powerful is this sense, so appalling is its pressure on our psyches, we are prepared to do more or less anything to expunge it. 
Working all hours, currying favour with authority, doing twice as much as the next person – these are the tools with which we seek to cleanse our apparently undeserving selves. One part of the mind promises the other that the completion of the next challenge will finally usher in peace.

The Hidden Unworthiness

We aren’t interested in perfect work at all: we are trying to escape from a feeling of being awful people, and work simply happens to be the medium through which we strive to grow tolerable in our own eyes. But because our problem didn’t begin with work, work can never prove the solution. 
Our real goal is not, as we think, to be an ideal employee or professional, it is to feel acceptable. But responsibility for a sense of acceptance cannot be handed over to our bosses or customers or a ceaselessly demanding capitalist system; these will never let us rest easy.

The Hidden Truth

We need to allow ourselves to imagine that we deserved to be accepted from the start and that it cannot forever be our fault in our minds that we were not. It is not up to us to try to prove that we have a right to exist. It is asking too much of ourselves to have to experience a referendum on our legitimacy every time we hand in a report, every exam we have to pass, every customer we have to serve.
Working well is an admirable goal, but it becomes a symptom of mental perturbation when it becomes the cover for a secret aspiration to correct a deficit of early love

Get Real

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill

Stepping out into the universe... we must confront the reality of interstellar travel. We must reach far beyond our own lifespans.

An Einstein-Rosen bridge is a shortcut through space caused by the warping of spacetime. Massive objects like stars or black holes bend time and space like a bowling ball on a trampoline. A massive enough object could bend spacetime to create a connection between two otherwise distinct points.Also known as wormholes, Einstein-Rosen bridges are perhaps the most commonly known means of interstellar travel — and the most likely to actually exist. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted wormholes, although we haven’t seen one yet.

The Einstein–Rosen Bridges

<ul><li>The entrance to a wormhole has often been represented as a tube, which makes sense given the name. But it’s also inaccurate. Interstellar, in one of its most intense scenes, got it right. From our perspective in 3-D space, a wormhole should look like a sphere.</li><li>Wormholes are an attractive approach to FTL technology because they don’t require you to break the speed of light.</li><li>Wormhole theory also allows for the possibility of traveling between universes. </li></ul>

Wormhole Representations

Imagine that! It never occurred to me to think of space as the thing that was moving!

Warp technology is synonymous with the Star Trek series. Like an Einstein-Rosen bridge, warp technology skirts around the impossibility of accelerating a ship past the speed of light. Instead, a warp drive bends space itself. It compresses space in front of the craft and expands it behind. The Enterprise is basically riding a bubble of regular 3-D space while the universe changes around it.

Warp Engines

<ul><li>Warp technology may be possible in reality.</li><li>In 1994, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a means of FTL space travel consistent with general relativity. Inspired by Star Trek, Alcubierre described an engine creating an energy field with lower density than the vacuum of space. By contracting space ahead of the ship and expanding it behind, a spacecraft could “ride a wave” forward.</li><li>Unfortunately, Alcubierre's proposal raises the same theoretical problems as wormhole travel. Just as wormholes would require massive amounts of energy — and some as-yet unknown material to sustain it — so would warp drives.</li></ul>

The Possibility Of Warp Engines

Hyperspace is best understood as a sub-region of our real space where the same physical laws don’t apply. Hyperspace has no theoretical basis like Einstein-Rosen bridges or warp drives.This universe doesn’t seem to allow faster-than-light travel. The solution: just don’t travel through our universe. In the Star Wars films, all kinds of ships are equipped with hyperspace drives, from small personal fighters like Poe Dameron’s X-wing, to larger freighters like the Millennium Falcon. Even that massive moon-sized space station, the Death Star, has a hyperdrive. In this case, “hyperspace” may merely be another name for lightspeed travel.

Hyperdrive

The Jump Drives in Battlestar Galactica made interstellar teleportation possible with virtually no delay. Both human ships and their Cylon counterparts used FTL drives. We were also told that when a ship jumps, it warps the space around it and can damage other nearby vessels.As with hyperspace, jump drives apparently require complex calculations before and during a jump to avoid the risk of a ship materializing too close to a planet’s atmosphere — or within the planet itself.For now, we’re a long way from teleporting people or jumping ships.

Jump Drives

All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; every star that ever was. Where do you want to start?

For 55 years, Doctor Who has chronicled the adventures across time and space of the Doctor and his/her human companions. Their means of transportation was a big blue box known as the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) that can take them anywhere, and anywhen, they want to go.TARDISes are more magical than the tech of Star Trek. There does seem to be some sort of delay on the way — it’s more hyperdrive than jump drive. But essentially the TARDIS disappears here, flies through the Time Vortex, and reappears there.

Closed Timelike Curves

<ul><li>In 2013, physicists Benjamin K. Tippett and David Tsang published a paper proposing a theoretical means of creating an actual retrograde-capable time machine: a way to travel to your own past. </li><li>Tippett and Tsang describe a bubble of spacetime containing a time-traveler entering a Closed Timelike Curve (essentially the same as an Einstein-Rosen bridge). Within that curve, the traveler can go anywhere on his or her own timeline, while within the bubble time seems to pass normally.</li><li>The two physicists even theorized that timelike curves could be split and connected, opening up the possibility of traveling not just along your own timeline — but anywhere in time and space.</li></ul>

Theories On Travelling To Your Past

Science fiction is full of ships that can zip around the cosmos. Only some are even loosely based on actual science. 

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

communication

Communication

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

The 5 kinds of sci-fi space travel, ranked by realism

When we daydream, we form alternate-reality thoughts with the assistance of the default mode network - a cluster of brain regions. Researchers found this network is most active when we are not focusing on anything.
<ul>
<li>Neuroscientists think this type of creative thinking can help our brains reflect on the past and plan for the future.</li>
<li>Other researchers surmise it might reduce anxiety, boost creativity and improve memory.</li>
</ul>

Daydreaming is good for our brains

Your brain does something special when you daydream—and chances are, it's healthy for you.

problemsolving

Problem Solving

Ask Us Anything: What happens in your brain when you daydream? | Popular Science

Breathing calms down our fight-or-flight responses and opens up the opportunity for us to relax ourselves and our nerves in order to choose the most considerate and constructive response, appropriate for the situation.
There are times where we feel like we are about to explode from all the anger and frustration that we feel. Oftentimes, it's better to let it all out. However, during times where this is not applicable, we can use the power of breathing in order to release the tension we feel.

The power in breathing

Many people who are perceived as good people are capable of behaving poorly under stress, but just because someone is behaving irrationally doesn't mean that we should join them in doing so.
In times like this, we must learn to pause and take deep breaths. This gives us the time and space we need in order to recollect ourselves and our thoughts.

Be comfortable with pausing

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so learn to choose your battles wisely. Sometimes the disagreement you have with another person isn't worth it for you to get frustrated. Learn to live with being able to agree to disagree.
We can still have a good relationship with people we disagree with as long as both parties remain calm and speak respectfully towards each other.

Respect people's differences

"Before you judge me, step in my shoes and walk a mile." We all live in a very much busy, distracted, and fearful world where we tend to forget to show compassion towards other people.
If ever you choose to engage with someone or in a stressful environment, make sure to set your intention to be supportive.

Show compassion

We need to allow ourselves to let things go. A person who loses their temper and gets upset is not an uncommon sighting and there is not one person who doesn't get angry.
However, by choosing to let things go and take the high road, we are accepting the similar trait of getting upset with them.

Be generous and act gracefully

How people treat you is none of your business, it is not your problem, the only thing you need to keep in mind is how you will react to it.
Your power is held in your reactions. Everyone behaves based on how they feel inside and a lot of people have never learned to effectively cope with their emotions. So try not to take things personally and don't let what others say or do to you, reduce you.

Don't take other people's behavior personally

Don't fall into an unnecessary argument just because you feel uncomfortable in silence. The things you say when you're angry are often the things you will regret saying 10 minutes later.
A moment of silence in a moment of anger can save us from thousands of moments of regret.

Appreciate silence

Often, the moment we wake up, we immediately reach for our phones and check for new emails, and this only stresses us out. Therefore, after waking up try taking deep breaths and meditating before starting your day.
Starting your day in a mindful manner lays out the foundation of being calm and centered for the rest of the day.

Start your day off right with a morning ritual

Some of us have self-soothing habits that are unhealthy for our bodies such as drinking alcohol, smoking, or eating junk food. Healthy habits make happy people therefore we must notice how we usually cope with stress and frustration and replace our unhealthy coping mechanisms with healthier ones slowly but surely.
You can try going out for a 10-minute walk, listen to music, drink tea, or even write your thoughts and feelings down.

Develop healthy coping mechanisms

When we keep the positive things by our side, it helps us move easily beyond the negativity that surrounds us. To do this, we must reflect on our small wins, be grateful for certain events in our lives, and pay the kindness forward when we have the chance.
Kindness makes a difference and this empowers us to think, speak, and do kindly towards other people.

Remind yourself of what's right, and create more of it

If you’re ready to feel more peace and less inner angst, here are some ways we’ve learned to remain calm and centered, even when those around us can’t seem to contain themselves.

mentalhealth

Mental Health

9 Ways to Remain Calm When Others Are Out of Control

It is the feeling that you are not worthy of your designation, title, position or success.Your accomplishments may be due to luck or effort, but you feel you lack the talent or skill for them.

The Impostor Syndrome

<ul><li>The impostor syndrome is like a nagging feeling that our success might be due to luck, good timing, or even a computer error.</li><li>It makes us think we have done nothing, and that we secretly are a fraud for taking undue credit.</li><li>The person suffering from an impostor syndrome lives in fear that soon the 'secret' about his true nature will be uncovered.</li></ul>

The Reality of Impostor Syndrome

The antidote to the impostor syndrome is self-efficacy, which is about learning one's own value.
Self-efficacy is described as a perceived ability to succeed at a particular task. It means having rock-solid confidence, a supercharged belief in your ability.

The Impostor Syndrome: Self-Efficacy Is The Antidote

We subconsciously give undue credit to other people who are successful around us, while we undermine our efforts.Understand that if other people can be successful using their skills, so can you.

As Good As Others

Other people who can provide you with a positive opinion or praise about your good work, including your talent and skills, can wake you out of your feeling of being a fraud.

Overcome The Impostor Syndrome: Seek An Outside Opinion

Reframing our personal hidden bias and negative feelings into something positive can change our outlook towards the situation.
Example: If you are moving fast, you may think you are impatient, but it can be reframed as the enthusiasm of reaching earlier.

Reframe Your Situation

Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here. *** Impostor Syndrome is like being a secret agent - in the most depressing way imaginable.

Self-Efficacy: The Antidote For Impostor Syndrome

With attachment comes a very strong urge to control the circumstances.
You put yourself at risk by investing so much of yourself into something, unwilling to believe that there is a tiny chance that it might not quite work out the way you plan.

Attachment and control

Feeling too much passion and attachment towards something can skew our perception of it.
And that's risky because it can make us unwilling to see the flaws in our plan.

Passion and attachment

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. ”

When you detach yourself from the compulsion of owning things just for the sake of owning them you begin to experience real freedom and joy from things that really matter.
By clearing the clutter from our lives, we can all make room for things that truly add value: health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution.

Detachment from material goals

Most of us misunderstand love to be all about holding on to the other person, trying to fix them and taking care of them in all ways possible.
We need detachment to not take personally other people's reactions, to not seek outside validation and to draw boundaries so that others don’t control us.

Detachment in relationships

Life is meant to be lived and to not to be over-analyzed.
So learn to see the lessons from an experience and move further in life with new wisdom and. Don't carry the bitterness, guilt and regret over the past experiences - they will spoil your present days.

Detachment from your experiences

It means that you do not rely on work alone to give you a feeling of completeness and to provide meaning to your life.

Detachment from your work

Don't act upon your thoughts and feelings. They are not the ultimate truth or reality.
Detachment from thoughts allows you to see your thoughts from an outside perspective, letting them come and go without allowing yourself to feel too much about them.

Detachment from your own thoughts

Why taking a step back is as necessary as moving forward From everything that I recall about my life so far, I can say one thing with absolute certainty. I have been an extremely passionate person. Passionate about everything. Be it life in general, work, friendships, relationships.

habits

Habits

Practicing The Subtle Art Of Detachment

According to several large scale surveys, up to one in three adults is affected by an anxiety disorder during their lifetime. Anxiety symptoms include tense muscles, dry mouth, irritability, making it hard to focus. It can randomly pop up at the most unexpected times.
Instead of hoping our anxiety will go away by itself, it's more helpful to reset our body, mind, and plan. And it takes less than ten minutes.

Unexpected anxiety

Anxiety can warn you that you need to take a break.
<ul>
<li>Get up and stretch your body. It will help you relax.</li>
<li>Then, drink a glass of water. Dehydration looks similar to anxiety, such as having a dry mouth or feeling lightheaded. It can also lead to tiredness.</li>
</ul>

Reset your body

Five minutes of journaling can work wonders to figure out the cause of your anxiety. It is a quick way to reflect on your thoughts and emotions.
<ul>
<li>How are you feeling?</li>
<li>Can you put it down in words?</li>
<li>When did the anxiety appear?</li>
<li>What is worrying you now?</li>
</ul>

Reset your mind

Anxiety can come from feeling stuck. We might just need a little confidence boost to get better. Resetting your plan means to stop worrying about the overall plan and to focus on the present.
Ask yourself what is the one thing you can do right now to make progress. Choose an action that doesn't require too much mental energy or planning.

Reset your plan

mindfulness

Mindfulness

Anxious for no apparent reason? It may be time to press “reset”

There’s a big part of us that doesn’t like chaos: we want order and simplicity.<ul><li>When we feel overwhelmed, we might beat ourselves up and try to look for a system to get things under control.</li><li>When plans don’t go how we hoped they would, we feel like we’re on unsteady ground, and we start criticizing ourselves or feeling like we’re doing things wrong.</li></ul>

We Prefer Order And Stability

If we could do that:
<ul>
<li>We would be Ok with the feeling of overwhelm, and not need to panic or feel bad.</li>
<li>We would simply take the next step and focus on one thing at a time.</li>
<li>We could put our work out into the world and accept the fact that we will be judged.</li>
<li>We could be with someone’s upsetness, giving them compassion rather than worrying about whether we’ll be Ok.</li>
<li>We could meditate, go for a walk, exercise, eat healthy food, deal with our finances, and do all kinds of other simple, helpful actions that we put off when we feel stressed about chaos.</li>
</ul>

Relaxing In The Middle Of Chaos

Notice when we’re feeling chaos and then use it as a kind of meditation, to breathe and then relax.
<ul>
<li>Notice when you’re feeling chaos. You don’t have to look for it. The world will always give us enough chaos to practice with. </li>
<li>Pause.</li>
<li>Breathe. Deep into your belly, slowly, letting yourself relax with each breath.</li>
<li>Then learn to relax with this feeling of chaos, uncertainty, fear, anxiety, shakiness, groundlessness.</li>
</ul>

3 questions that turn a trip – even a day trip! – into a life-changing one

Should we be eating three meals a day?

How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill

The 5 kinds of sci-fi space travel, ranked by realism

Ask Us Anything: What happens in your brain when you daydream? | Popular Science

Brianna Simons