When we’re falling in love with someone, the first thing we notice is how good it feels. It’s because the brain releases feel-good neurotransmitters that boost our mood. When we find love, it is like biological fireworks. Our heart rate is elevated, our levels of the so-called love hormone oxytocin are rising, which makes us feel connected. Our levels of the hormone and neurotransmitter norepinephrine are spiking, which makes us lose track of time; our levels of adrenaline rise, which expands the capillaries in our cheeks and makes us flush.

Love And Your Brain

Our levels of serotonin, a key hormone in regulating appetite and intrusive anxious thoughts, fall down. So when we are in love we might find ourselves eating irregularly or fixating on small details, worrying about sending “the perfect text,” “saying the perfect words” and then replaying the text or the phone call over and over again in our head.

Being In Love Lowers Anxiety

When we start feeling a deep sense of calm and contentment with our partner, brain areas are activated that trigger not just basic emotions, but also more complex cognitive functions. This can lead to several positive results, like pain suppression, more compassion, better memory and greater creativity. Romantic love feels like a superpower that makes the brain thrive.

Love Heals, According To Science

Love is a biological necessity, just like water or exercise or food. My research has convinced me that a healthy love life — which could include your beloved partner, your closest circle of friends, your family and even your favorite sports team — is as essential to a person’s well-being as a good diet.

Love Is Needed To Survive

If you don’t feel that you have a meaningful relationship, it’s as if you are socially thirsty, and your brain sends a signal to tell you that you need to help your social body. Some of the same alarms activated when people are thirsty are activated when people feel socially disconnected from others. The key is not to suppress these feelings. They are meant to help us survive; we are meant to do something about it.

The Thirst For Love

No one feels guilty when they are thirsty, right? So no one should feel guilty when they are lonely.There is a paradox in loneliness; we want to approach others, but the lonely mind has been lonely for so long that it detects more threats — inaccurately, of course — and makes you want to withdraw rather than approach others.

The Paradox Of Loneliness

Love doesn’t have to be with a living person. If you are really in love with life, with your passion, with your hobby, it can also be a buffer against loneliness.

Love Yourself, Love Your Life, Love Your Passion

For years, people have thought that to help people who are lonely, you have to put them together. But the worst thing you can do for a lonely person is try to help them without asking them for help in return — a concept based on mutual aid and protection. Instead, we need to help them have a new sense of worth. We can ask them for their advice.

Helping The Isolated

Yes, you can stay connected with others even if you are physically alone in a room.Close your eyes right now and think about the person you love the most. Now, think about the last time you made them laugh out loud. Does that bring a smile to your face? We store these positive memories in our mind, and we can access them any time. We have the remote control.

A Long Distance Connection

In her new book, Stephanie Cacioppo, a neuroscientist, delves into romance, loss and human connection as she writes of her love story with her husband.

Stashed ideas

How Love Changes Your Brain

Values drive corporate performance. My research concludes that a specific set of values drives sustained success. As I wrote in Value Leadership, these values are embodied in seven principles such as fulfilling your commitments, valuing human relationships, fostering teamwork, winning through multiple means and fighting complacency.
The Drucker Institute has its own ideas of what makes for a successful organization and it has concluded that 2021's best-managed company is Microsoft.

Microsoft Is Doing It Best

Microsoft -- whose stock price has soared 681 percent since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in June, 2014 -- has increased its overall score more than any other company tracked by the Drucker Institute since it began publishing this ranking in 2017.Here are three things that contributed to Nadella's success and how business leaders can use them to benefit their organizations.

Leadership Lessons

Most new leaders change the culture as the first order of business. Nadella changed Microsoft from a company that pushed its products on customers -- without regard for whether they were best for the customer -- to one that put customers first.Follow Nadella's approach to cultural change so your company can attract and motivate the best employees -- and they will help you win and keep more customers.

Create a culture of customer value creation

Nadella fostered innovation by encouraging people to adopt a new approach to product development. "We had to introduce and to promote new products and business models ([software as a service] vs. perpetual [licenses]). We had to drive our employees to interact with new corporate decision-makers - business vs. the original technical ones. We had to scale our employees to master new advanced products," Tenzer told me.

Innovate by fostering employee learning

When you change your company's culture and approach to innovation, your top executives will complain because you are forcing them to adjust how they think and act.Nadella issues an ultimatum to his 150 top executives: "Once you become a vice president, a partner in this endeavour, the whining is over. You can't say the coffee around here is bad, or there aren't enough good people, or I didn't get the bonus. To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a pile of shit. You are the champions of overcoming constraints."

Hold people accountable for results

Make customers better off, encourage learning, and hold people accountable

3 Leadership Lessons From Microsoft, the Drucker Institute's Best-Managed Company

As the world has increasingly embraced virtual connections over the past year, video communication has become essential to professional conversations. With over 744 million members on LinkedIn, we want to make professional conversations more personal by helping members meet face-to-face over video, especially in this time of hybrid and remote work where many of us cannot meet in person.

Video Meetings On LinkedIn

Our vision for video meetings encompassed three goals:<ol><li>Members-first: Building a members-first feature for easy video conferencing</li><li>Modular: Unlocking the power of video conferencing across the LinkedIn ecosystem</li><li>Scalable and reliable: Enabling video conferencing that can scale to support hundreds of millions of members</li></ol>

The Vision

We created video meetings by building a brand-new service to handle all communication between Azure Communication Services and the rest of LinkedIn, which allows us to consolidate all the authentication and business logic around video meetings. Additionally, we have developed video conferencing client SDKs for each platform to consolidate interaction with the server stack and provide a standardized user interface for video meetings.

Unlocking video conferencing across LinkedIn

LinkedIn Conferencing Infrastructure was built as a one-stop video conferencing solution catered to LinkedIn. Products that integrate with this conferencing platform get reliability, scale, monitoring, and trust and security integrations out-of-the-box. LICI empowers partner teams to build new conferencing features while acting as the control plane between the LinkedIn client libraries, Azure Communication Services, and LinkedIn products.

Conferencing-as-a-service for LinkedIn

Some of the areas that LICI handles include:<ul><li>Conferencing infrastructure user access credentials and tokens. Orchestration and setup of the conference.</li><li>Managing the conference lifecycle.</li><li>Managing the participant roster.</li><li>Access control of both the overall conferencing infrastructure and individual conferences.</li></ul>

LinkedIn Conferencing Infrastructure(LICI)

Azure Communications Services is built on the same technology that powers Microsoft Teams, which already supports millions of users daily. When a LinkedIn member wants to start a video meeting, LinkedIn services will communicate with Azure Communication Services to generate a user token and call token for the occasion. LinkedIn apps then join the call by using the Azure client library, providing the specified call token and identifying the LinkedIn member with the user token.

Building For Scale

As customers of Azure, we have helped tune and influence the roadmap to include our necessary feature set. With our testing and feedback loop, we have also influenced the monitoring signals and events that are useful for customers to ingest from Azure Communication Services. Looking at the API from a customer perspective, we have helped them tune their API signature. The Azure team has also been very responsive and agile in making any desired changes.

Partnership with ACS

With multiple teams working to build the conferencing experience, we had to make sure the collaboration and integration went seamlessly. We achieved this through regular working sessions and bug bashing across teams.To make sure there are no regressions introduced with new iterations of the service, we run validation tests that mimic the user behaviour in both early integration and production environments on a cron-like schedule.

Testing and Monitoring

Building Microsoft-powered native video meetings on LinkedIn

They are the friends that say yes to plans but ‘flake out’ at the last minute, wasting our time or even embarrassing us in the process. They do it due to personal issues, absentmindedness or an inability to organize their day.
Occasionally, we can give our friends the benefit of doubt, understanding that they are forgetful or scattered. If they are with us in times of emergency, or major events we can accept their flakiness.

Flaky Friends

Some people simply agree to plans because they feel pressured by the subtle expectation we put on them, even unconsciously. We can help by encouraging them to think about the decision and take some time to come up with an answer.
We need to give them time and space to be able to turn down our invitation or plan, as they may have other plans or may not have the resources. If we really want them to come to the event or occasion as it is important, we need to communicate that part well.

The Pressure To Say Yes

As their friend, give them the time and space to say "no."

The Best Way to Deal With a Flaky Friend

In order to cultivate and maintain a healthy relationship both partners must have or are developing the following skills:
<ul>
<li>To be able to make sound decisions</li>
<li>The ability to put themselves in a good mood</li>
<li>To be able to rein in their bad mood or irritability</li>
<li>The ability to solve problems</li>
<li>The ability to effectively communicate with their partner</li>
<li>They must be able to tolerate frustration; and </li>
<li>They must be able to practice empathy</li>
</ul>

Important skills to maintain healthy relationships

Love & Relationships

Chronic sleep loss may trigger a series of negative emotions that may cause us to act out relationship-damaging behaviors.The more we miss out on decent sleep the more we become irritable, emotionally labile, our frustration tolerance is lowered, and we show up negatively.

Sleep-deprived partners

When one or both partners are not well-rested, tiny quarrels may end up in major rifts. Sleep loss triggers the many relationship behaviors and communication styles we know are most toxic to relationships such as silent treatment or berating your partner.The importance of sleep in relationships shows how severe our attitude gets when deprived of it and in order to have a healthy level of conflict, we must be well-rested enough to engage properly during the conflict.

Conflict in relationships 

When we are sleep deprived our empathic accuracy drops. The words we use to communicate are colored by our sleep or the lack thereof.It's been proven by numerous studies that under sleep-deprived conditions, there is a significant decrease in the use of positive emotion words. Furthermore, the results also show that there is a lower positive emotional expression and higher negative emotional expression.

Empathic Accuracy

Having poor sleep heightens our feelings of loneliness which results in us wanting to steer away from people and a rise in anxiety levels.In addition to that, having poor sleep amplifies the parts of the brain that signals our threat responses and fear.Sleep-induced loneliness is contagious and may lead to a greater emotional distancing between partners, so if you want a solid relationship, get good sleep!

Sleep deprivation and loneliness

It’s time to start prioritizing sleep as a mutual goal within your relationship. Here's why, explains sleep scientist Wendy M. Troxel PhD.

Love & Family

Want to keep your relationship on solid ground? Get enough sleep

Grief comes in many forms and everyone has experienced it in many different ways, but this model theory is only a reference, not a rule. The five stages of grief are:
<ul>
<li>Denial</li>
<li>Anger</li>
<li>Bargaining</li>
<li>Depression</li>
<li>Acceptance.</li>
</ul>
The five stages of grief were once known as the five stages of death, however, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the Swiss American psychiatrist that invented this theory extended her model to many different kinds of losses.

The Kübler-Ross Model of Grieving

This is a common defense mechanism that buffers the immediate shock felt during unexpected situations. We may often fantasize about the untruths and hope that the news we've received isn't real.
After the first reaction of shock and denial, you may go numb for a while. You could feel like nothing matters to you anymore and life as you once knew it has changed. It may be difficult to feel you can move on, but once you've gained enough courage to face the truth, your healing journey will begin.

Denial

Pain takes shape in many different forms and often redirected or expressed as anger. A lot of people reject this feeling because of its intensity and sometimes because of their culture.
During this stage of grief, there is a possibility that you may lash out at other people, objects, yourself, or life in general. However, try to remind yourself that underneath the anger that you're feeling is pain and is a part of the healing process.

Anger

This is the stage of grieving where you try to find a way to hold on to hope in order to cope with intense pain; where we are willing to do anything and sacrifice everything just so that things could go back to the way they were.
Often in this situation we also tend to think about the things we could have done differently, but what's happened has happened, and that will not remove the guilt we feel. It's also a part of healing where we confront the reality of our losses.

Bargaining

We're not referring to clinical depression in this instance when talking about depression, but as a natural and appropriate response to grief.
When we begin to face the reality of our situation, it is not inevitable to feel instense sadness and despair. We could also experience fatigue, unwillingness to move on, loss of appetite, or not being able to enjoy the things you once did. This is also a part of our healing journey.

Depression

Acceptance is not about being okay with what happened, rather it is about acknowledging the loss and learning to live with it, and readjusting our lives accordingly.
Depending on your experience, it is quite understandable if ever you do not feel this way. Sometimes you will find yourself stationed at this feeling and then later feel another stage of grief. This back-and-forth is a natural part of the healing process.

Acceptance

Many people believe that there is a right and wrong way to grieve, but in reality, there isn't. Grieving isn't about following a list of steps and then getting over the situation right after. It's a unique journey and is experienced differently by everyone, some might go through every phase while others don't.
There is no specific order to grieve and if ever that you find yourself falling into the deep end and developing clinical depression, it's time to reach out to a professional.

Misconceptions about grieving

<ol>
<li>It is important to express your needs to trusted people such as your friends or family members. Allow them to help you in the ways you feel will best suit your needs;</li>
<li>There are support groups that have gone through the same thing as you have and these are safe spaces where you can freely express your grief without the feeling of pressure; and</li>
<li>Grief counsellors are professionals that can support your grieving process; this applies to therapists as wll.</li>
</ol>

Reaching out for help during grief

<ol>
<li>The best support comes from just being there and making it clear that you’re available to listen to the things they want to share with you;</li>
<li>It can be frigthening to message someone who is grieving and check up on them, but don't let fear stop you from showing empathy;</li>
<li>Try to lift some of the weight off of their shoulders. Explore the areas they might need help managing while they process their loss.</li>
<li>Wait for them to express how they feel instead of assuming that they're ready to talk about it.</li>
</ol>

Helping someone who is grieving

The 5 Stages of Grief

We all have a personal bonding style, which is based early on in life according to our upbringing and how we act, feel and think in a close relationship.
Attachment is our bond with our first caregiver, which is usually a parent. The style we form while growing up usually stays with us in adulthood and beyond.

Attachment Styles

<ul>
<li>When a partner has a secure attachment style, they feel comfortable and confident in their relationship and in their significant other.</li>
<li>There is a feeling of connectedness, trust, and freedom as both the partners let the other have independence and offer full support all the time.</li>
<li>A strong and secure life amply supported by one’s parents builds the foundation of this style.</li>
</ul>

Secure Attachment Style

<ul>
<li>Many people find it uncomfortable to trust the other person or to get too emotionally close.</li>
<li>They are self-sufficient and do not need emotional intimacy. </li>
<li>They quickly pull away and ‘go in a cave’ when rejected or hurt.</li>
<li>Having negligent or abusive parents is associated with people having this style, and they often suppress their internal need for love and care.</li>
</ul>

Dismissive Or Avoidant Attachment Style

<ul>
<li>Some people are always craving for emotional intimacy, even when the other person is not serious or romantic. </li>
<li>They are in a constant need of approval and reassurances from their partner, and tend to be anxious when the other person isn’t providing any.</li>
<li>These people are dependent on others for their self-worth and are often involved with people who don’t like this clingy style.</li>
</ul>

Anxious Or Preoccupied Attachment Style

<ul>
<li>Some people are doing the opposite of what should ideally be done.Their internal fears and their avoidant attitude are a paradox, and they cannot figure out if they want emotional closeness or not. </li>
<li>They deny their own feelings and never fully trust the other person. </li>
<li>The feelings of jealousy and rivalry come easily to them. </li>
<li>This style is often the result of some major loss or trauma in their lives, which made them never take security and closeness for granted.</li>
</ul>

Disorganized Attachment Style

Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.

Which of These Four Attachment Styles Is Yours?

<ul>
<li>Anger: An emotion felt when we believe we have been wronged.</li>
<li>Aggression: is an act of expression of the anger, by our words our actions. Aggression can be insults, sarcasm, shouting or physical forms like breaking things. It can also manifest itself in stress, loneliness, anxiety, guilt, or awkwardness.</li>
</ul>
When we criticize the anger, we are providing fuel to the fire, leading to further aggression on the angry person's part. If we ignore and give in, we are setting a wrong example and the person learns that it is ok and effective to be angry.

Anger and Aggression

<ul><li>We can try and validate the anger felt by an individual by making them know that their anger is maybe justified while putting firm but respectful boundaries on their aggression.</li><li>We then need to be clear about what type of aggression we are willing to tolerate, setting boundaries on the unacceptable.</li><li>We may have to put our foot down and be ready to leave the conversation or escalate the issue, without falling into the trap of guilt and emotion.</li><li>If possible, we need to restart the conversation when things have cooled down, and diffuse the issue in a calm way.</li></ul>

Validation and Boundaries

Unchecked self-talk can easily turn into self-delusion. The stories we create almost always make you look like the good guy and cannot be termed as objective. 
<ul>
<li>The way to get out of this speculative self-delusion is to avoid any speculation about other people's anger, at least initially.</li>
<li>Make sure to note down the facts of the situation. This can make the story less according to your gut instinct, and more towards the objective reality.</li>
</ul>

Avoiding Speculative Self-Talk

There are certain predictable situations, times, events and triggers where anger appears. Sometimes when we act spontaneously or reactively, the other person can get stressed and defensive, and the symptoms for those emotions can be misinterpreted as anger. A way out of this is to approach conversations in a planned way, with thought and preparation. If we can understand the patterns of other people's anger, we can anticipate them and handle them better.

Patterns of Anger

Dealing with other people's anger can be challenging, confusing, and sometimes terrifying-especially if it's someone we're close to like a spouse, parent, or co-worker. In this article, I'm going to teach you how to think about and handle other people's anger like a professional psychologist would.

How to Handle Other People's Anger Like a Pro

Your social relationships are actually a strong predictor of the quality of life, both psychological and physical. Invest in your relationships; material possessions don't generally bring lasting happiness.
Your intimate and platonic relationships need to be nurtured with love and care in order for them to thrive and produce healthy relationship habits. With good social relations, we end up happier, less stressed, more resilient to pain, and lowered cognitive decline.

Relationships are a predictor of the quality of life

Self Improvement

Many people grow up with unreliable and untrustworthy people around them. This has made them develop traits and characteristics which could have been prevented had they received proper care and guidance.
Regardless, our childhood experiences do not determine the quality of our adult lives. From an earned secure attachment—a secure attachment style that comes from our positive experiences later in life—we are able to have securely attached relationships and friendships.

A rough childhood does not condemn you to an unhappy life

We all have baggage we carry around, big or small. However, just because we do does not mean that we are incapable of finding and being in lovingly sustainable relationships and friendships.
We are imperfect beings thus we must find a good group of people that celebrates our strengths and tolerates our vulnerabilities—to some, endearing. Sure, personal healing and growth can and will improve our relationships and overall quality of life, but we can also do that activity within relationships.

You don't have to be "fixed" to live a good life

Strong relationships, earned secure attachment, and a good person-setting fit are cornerstones of a good life, even if you had a rough start.

3 Evidence-Based Lessons for Living a Good Life 

<ul>
<li>Kneeling on one knee while proposing has its roots in an ancient practise, originated in the Persian Empire.</li>
<li>This was part of a rank-based greeting ritual, called proskynesis, adopted by Alexander The Great. </li>
<li>The 11th century Knights used this gesture towards the ladies, something called ‘courtly love’, a romantic commitment that was done even to married ladies. </li>
<li>The Knights pledged to serve and honour the lady they love.</li>
</ul>

Proposing On One Knee

The life-long commitment that is asked for while proposing requires humility, devotion and steadfastness. 
Bending on one knee has been a well-known way to propose a lover from medieval times to the scenes of modern-day engagement ceremonies.

Bending The Knee: Devotion And Humility

Medieval knights (and Jon Snow of 'Game of Thrones') were known to bend the knee, which may have influenced modern-day marriage proposals.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Nathaniel N.
@nat_nn

How Love Changes Your Brain

3 Leadership Lessons From Microsoft, the Drucker Institute's Best-Managed Company

Building Microsoft-powered native video meetings on LinkedIn

The Best Way to Deal With a Flaky Friend

Want to keep your relationship on solid ground? Get enough sleep

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Nathaniel N.@nat_nn

How Love Changes Your Brain

3 Leadership Lessons From Microsoft, the Drucker Institute's Best-Managed Company

Building Microsoft-powered native video meetings on LinkedIn

The Best Way to Deal With a Flaky Friend

Want to keep your relationship on solid ground? Get enough sleep

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Nathaniel N.
@nat_nn