All posts tagged: better life

My Cancer Diagnosis Served As A Huge Life Wakeup Call | Eliot LeBow

My Cancer Diagnosis Served As A Huge Life Wakeup Call | Eliot LeBow

Published by skeptic

It can be challenging for healthy people to find happiness. But for those who have been diagnosed with a terrible disease (or have loved ones who have been diagnosed), it can be even more difficult. But it isn’t impossible. To find out more, we asked several of our Your Tango experts to weigh in on how to be happy when you have cancer. No matter what, a bad diagnosis will make you rethink your priorities and what matters in life. While that can be scary or paralyzing, our experts say this can be a positive development. For instance, expert Joyce Fine suggested that those diagnosed should “consistently extend themselves to those they love, put first-world (luxury) problems in perspective, and be mindful of the happiness they can have right now — whether they have decades or moments more to live.” RELATED: How I Found Hope In A Terminal Prognosis — After Permitting Myself To Die Expert Stuart Fensterheim agreed, noting, “The sad part of terminal illness is you realize that you will miss the lost …

The best pre-workout of 2024 to take before your gym session

The best pre-workout of 2024 to take before your gym session

Published by skeptic

Forget snacking on a banana and quickly downing a coffee, if you’re really hitting it hard at the gym and feel like you could use a little extra oomph, then getting your hands on the best pre-workout supplement might just be the thing you need to give your muscles that extra push.  But what is pre-workout and what does it do? Alex Ward, head trainer at Sweat Society in Surbiton, describes pre-workout as a “sports nutrition supplement, designed to improve energy and enhance exercise performance”. Essentially, it’s a supplement designed to give you an energy boost. Just don’t chase it with a double espresso.  “Due to the various ingredients found in pre-workout, it can help stimulate the muscles, increase focus and concentration and make you perform at a higher intensity during sessions, with less fatigue,” says Ward. “It will generally keep you going through an hour’s workout of intense training such as a weights session,” he adds. The top rated pre-workouts are the ones that slowly release the energy – and prevent you from a …

The 9 best massage guns for pain in 2024

The 9 best massage guns for pain in 2024

Published by skeptic

Massage gun FAQ   What is a massage gun? “Put simply, it’s a handheld device that sends vibrations through your muscle at a high frequency of around 40 percussions per second”, says Jonathan Codling, a physiotherapist at luxury health club Third Space in London. “These vibrations are called percussive therapy, which is based on the principles of massage, vibration therapy and foam rollers.”  When used before or after a workout, many claim the ‘pummelling’ motion variously improves athletic performance, reduces your risk of injury, reduces Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) and increases your range of motion by increasing blood flow to your muscles. Anecdotal evidence also suggests massage guns (also known as muscle guns) can help ease chronic pain and improve sleep. What is the most effective massage gun? While plenty of people report positive experience with the devices, experts maintain that there will need to be more research into the benefits of percussive therapy to say for sure.  “The current research is a promising start,” says Sam MacGregor, clinical lead in the physiotherapy team at Loughborough University. “There are studies …

The best mattress for back pain in 2024, recommended by an osteopath

The best mattress for back pain in 2024, recommended by an osteopath

Published by skeptic

FAQs   Should you sleep on a hard or soft mattress with back pain? “If you look at all the research that has been done on mattresses and back pain, medium-firm comes out as what you should have,” says osteopath Dave Gibson. “Firm, but not rock-hard. Remember, though, there’s no official grading of firmness. What one manufacturer calls firm, another might call medium-firm.” Heavier people generally need firmer support, whereas lighter people can get away with softer mattresses. Whether you sleep alone or with a partner also has a bearing on your choice of mattress. You both want to be able to turn round without disturbing each other or adopting unhealthy sleeping postures. To find the best mattress for you, Gibson suggests first lying on one in-store. “Although you won’t be able to tell if it will help with your back pain, you will be able to tell if it’s too firm or too soft for your liking, so that can be worth doing as a first step. “But a better way to spot a …

Best running headphones including Beats and Bose, tried and tested

Best running headphones including Beats and Bose, tried and tested

Published by skeptic

Wireless headphones are all the rage but they don’t automatically translate into being good running headphones. Often regular earbuds fall out, react badly to sweat or run out of charge too quickly. The best running headphones are more specialist, and whether you’re a casual jogger or a marathon runner it’s worth investing in a good pair.  Performance Coach at Performance Physique  Arj Thiruchelvam recommends going into shops when it comes to buying running headphones, rather than buying online. “It’s pretty difficult to test every aspect when shopping online but, if you can get your hands on the headphones, pop them in and jump around a bit. Running is basically a series of jumps, so have a quick bounce around the store,” he says. I took that one step further in my testing, running on a treadmill, pavements, and countryside to find the best. Scroll down for my full reviews as well as answers to frequently-asked questions, such as how to stop headphones falling out and whether sweat will cause damage. If you’re in a rush, …

The Next Great American Road Album Is Here

The Next Great American Road Album Is Here

Published by skeptic

Hurray for the Riff Raff has made the next great American road album. Tommy Kha / Shore Fire Media February 23, 2024, 10:18 AM ET The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ultimately capture the hope that a better life is at the end of a long drive. One of the best new albums of this year joins that tradition but also diverges from it, right down to the mode of transportation that it focuses on. At age 17, the singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra left their home in the Bronx and started hitching rides on freight trains. They eventually settled in New Orleans and rose to become one of the most prominent voices of the Americana scene, recording under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff. Now, on their ninth album, The Past Is Still Alive, the 36-year-old Segarra revisits memories of their youth …

How to spot the early signs of Alzheimer’s and what you can do about the symptoms

How to spot the early signs of Alzheimer’s and what you can do about the symptoms

Published by skeptic

Finally – after many false dawns – an effective new drug for Alzheimer’s is on the horizon. In early May, US scientists announced that the drug donanemab delays the worsening of symptoms by 35 per cent. Half the patients on the trial found their mental decline was halted for more than a year.  The Alzheimer’s Society went as far as describing the results as: “the beginning of the end for Alzheimer’s disease”. There a still few hurdles to jump before donanemab becomes available in the UK. But even when it does arrive, scientists insist that early diagnosis – by watching out for subtle symptoms – is still key. In February, scientists announced a new blood test that could predict dementia up to 15 years earlier. The new test, the result of a study by the University of Warwick, looks for proteins in the blood and can pick up signs that the prescriptions of drugs such as donanemab – or lecanemab, a similar medication – would be appropriate. It’s well known that memory loss and confusion …

Greg Abbott’s Neo-Confederate Crusade – The Atlantic

Greg Abbott’s Neo-Confederate Crusade – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Ulysses S. Grant once said that the Confederate cause, the defense of chattel slavery, was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Texas’s embrace of neo-secessionist rhetoric in defense of letting children drown in the Rio Grande belongs somewhere on that same list. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is engaged in a number of legal battles with the Biden administration over immigration. One of them involves Abbott ordering the Texas National Guard to set up razor wire and floating barriers in an effort to deter migrants. The federal government argues that those barriers have also blocked Border Patrol from being able to arrest and process migrants in accordance with federal law. Earlier this month, a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande, the river that runs along the border with Mexico. A short time later, when Border Patrol was alerted to two other migrants in distress, national guardsmen reportedly prevented federal agents from reaching them. In 2023, the Houston Chronicle reported that …

The Impossible Pursuit of a Good Death

The Impossible Pursuit of a Good Death

Published by skeptic

Two years into recovery from a bad romance with booze and other drugs, an Iranian American poet makes a half-hearted attempt to redeem his misspent youth. He decides to write a book about people whose deaths retroactively imbued their lives with meaning: Joan of Arc, the early Muslim leader Hussain, the Irish Republican Army militant Bobby Sands, and, though he’s still alive, himself. Such is the premise of Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr!, an existential comedy about the difficulty of finding beauty in banality and sense in suffering. The novel opens in abjection. The protagonist, Cyrus Shams, lies prostrate on his piss-stained mattress in a college town in 2010s Indiana, beset by the anxious stupor that befalls those who do “the right drugs in the wrong order.” In a gesture as old as Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, he prays for a sign from God. But this particular drunken supplicant happens to be intimately familiar with the tradition of drunken supplication, and he knows that he’s too wretched to expect a grand gesture. …

The Myth of the Unemployed College Grad

The Myth of the Unemployed College Grad

Published by skeptic

Perhaps no puzzle has consumed the American media more in the past few months than the chasm between official measures of the economy and how average people feel about it. Inflation is down, and wages are up—yet voters remain gloomy. Young people are, at least by some measures, the most pessimistic. They think the economy is bad and getting worse. Why? The answer has major implications, not least on the outcome of the next presidential election. You can’t blame the media for being so eager to figure it out. But pundits and reporters might want to look harder at their own penchant for writing stories that make the economy look worse for young people than it really is, including, above all, by incorrectly declaring that college diplomas aren’t what they used to be. A recent Washington Post story, “New College Grads Are More Likely to Be Unemployed in Today’s Job Market,” typifies the trend. It begins with a recent graduate named Lucas Chung forlornly sitting in his childhood bedroom. He has moved back home, because …