IF YOU WOUKD LIKE TO ORDER ONE. Our Venmo Account Is ChicoStatePsiChi. Please Send $45 And Put Your Name,

15+ Things We Wish People Understood About Anxiety

It is utterly exhausting living in a near constant state of fight or flight for so long.

Continue Reading 

Apacalyptica!

Why You Think You Are Not Good Enough AND How to Fix it

“If I asked you to name all the things you love, how long would it take to name yourself.” – Anon

There is no shortage of reasons why we sometimes feel like we flat out aren’t good enough. Maybe it’s low grades in school, or we think we are too thin, or too fat, or too young. Maybe our partner makes us feel inadequate, or our parents seem to believe we can’t do anything right.

Sometimes we do it to ourselves. We compare our home, or clothes, or cars to where someone else lives, or to what they wear, or to what they drive. If we believe their things are better than ours, then we tell ourselves we are less of a person.

Society doesn’t help us believe that we are unique, or that being unique is seriously “good enough.” There is constant pressure to be the best team, the best student, the best assistant, the best employee. We compare ourselves to models in magazines and hold ourselves to a certain standard of perfection that is as unrealistic as it is attainable.

It isn’t a Feeling. It’s a Thought.

When you don’t feel “good enough” it’s often because you are telling yourself you’re stupid, or ugly, or incapable. The thoughts you use to describe yourself make you unhappy. These thoughts make you feel depressed and worthless. According to Ali Miller, MFT, this is an important distinction. She believes that…

CONTINUE READING HERE

The French Netflix uploaded this on twitter…….

At age 23, Tina Fey was working at a YMCA. At age 23, Oprah was fired from her first reporting job.  At age 24, Stephen King was working as a janitor and living in a trailer. 

At age 27, Vincent Van Gogh failed as a missionary and decided to go to art school.   At age 28, J.K. Rowling was a suicidal single parent living on welfare.

At age 28, Wayne Coyne ( from The Flaming Lips) was a fry cook. At age 30, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.  At age 30, Martha Stewart was a stockbroker.  At age 37, Ang Lee was a stay-at-home-dad working odd jobs. Julia Child released her first cookbook at age 39, and got her own cooking show at age 51. Vera Wang failed to make the Olympic figure skating team, didn’t get the Editor-in-Chief position at Vogue, and designed her first dress at age 40. Stan Lee didn’t release his first big comic book until he was 40. Alan Rickman gave up his graphic design career to pursue acting at age 42. Samuel L. Jackson didn’t get his first movie role until he was 46.

Morgan Freeman landed his first movie role at age 52. Kathryn Bigelow only reached international success when she made The Hurt Locker at age 57. Grandma Moses didn’t begin her painting career until age 76. Louise Bourgeois didn’t become a famous artist until she was 78. Whatever your dream is, it is not too late to achieve it. You aren’t a failure because you haven’t found fame and fortune by the age of 21. Hell, it’s okay if you don’t even know what your dream is yet. Even if you’re flipping burgers, waiting tables or answering phones today, you never know where you’ll end up tomorrow. Never tell yourself you’re too old to make it. 

Never tell yourself you missed your chance. 

Never tell yourself that you aren’t good enough. 

You can do it. Whatever it is. 

Brain waves reflect different types of learning

Figuring out how to pedal a bike and memorizing the rules of chess require two different types of learning, and now for the first time, researchers have been able to distinguish each type of learning by the brain-wave patterns it produces.

These distinct neural signatures could guide scientists as they study the underlying neurobiology of how we both learn motor skills and work through complex cognitive tasks, says Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Oct. 11 edition of Neuron.

When neurons fire, they produce electrical signals that combine to form brain waves that oscillate at different frequencies. “Our ultimate goal is to help people with learning and memory deficits,” notes Miller. “We might find a way to stimulate the human brain or optimize training techniques to mitigate those deficits.”

The neural signatures could help identify changes in learning strategies that occur in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, with an eye to diagnosing these diseases earlier or enhancing certain types of learning to help patients cope with the disorder, says Roman F. Loonis, a graduate student in the Miller Lab and first author of the paper. Picower Institute research scientist Scott L. Brincat and former MIT postdoc Evan G. Antzoulatos, now at the University of California at Davis, are co-authors.

Explicit versus implicit learning

Scientists used to think all learning was the same, Miller explains, until they learned about patients such as the famous Henry Molaison or “H.M.,” who developed severe amnesia in 1953 after having part of his brain removed in an operation to control his epileptic seizures. Molaison couldn’t remember eating breakfast a few minutes after the meal, but he was able to learn and retain motor skills that he learned, such as tracing objects like a five-pointed star in a mirror.

“H.M. and other amnesiacs got better at these skills over time, even though they had no memory of doing these things before,” Miller says.

The divide revealed that the brain engages in two types of learning and memory — explicit and implicit.

Explicit learning “is learning that you have conscious awareness of, when you think about what you’re learning and you can articulate what you’ve learned, like memorizing a long passage in a book or learning the steps of a complex game like chess,” Miller explains.

“Implicit learning is the opposite. You might call it motor skill learning or muscle memory, the kind of learning that you don’t have conscious access to, like learning to ride a bike or to juggle,” he adds. “By doing it you get better and better at it, but you can’t really articulate what you’re learning.”

Many tasks, like learning to play a new piece of music, require both kinds of learning, he notes.

Brain waves from earlier studies

When the MIT researchers studied the behavior of animals learning different tasks, they found signs that different tasks might require either explicit or implicit learning. In tasks that required comparing and matching two things, for instance, the animals appeared to use both correct and incorrect answers to improve their next matches, indicating an explicit form of learning. But in a task where the animals learned to move their gaze one direction or another in response to different visual patterns, they only improved their performance in response to correct answers, suggesting implicit learning.

What’s more, the researchers found, these different types of behavior are accompanied by different patterns of brain waves.

During explicit learning tasks, there was an increase in alpha2-beta brain waves (oscillating at 10-30 hertz) following a correct choice, and an increase delta-theta waves (3-7 hertz) after an incorrect choice. The alpha2-beta waves increased with learning during explicit tasks, then decreased as learning progressed. The researchers also saw signs of a neural spike in activity that occurs in response to behavioral errors, called event-related negativity, only in the tasks that were thought to require explicit learning.

The increase in alpha-2-beta brain waves during explicit learning “could reflect the building of a model of the task,” Miller explains. “And then after the animal learns the task, the alpha-beta rhythms then drop off, because the model is already built.”

By contrast, delta-theta rhythms only increased with correct answers during an implicit learning task, and they decreased during learning. Miller says this pattern could reflect neural “rewiring” that encodes the motor skill during learning.

“This showed us that there are different mechanisms at play during explicit versus implicit learning,” he notes.

Future Boost to Learning

Loonis says the brain wave signatures might be especially useful in shaping how we teach or train a person as they learn a specific task. “If we can detect the kind of learning that’s going on, then we may be able to enhance or provide better feedback for that individual,” he says. “For instance, if they are using implicit learning more, that means they’re more likely relying on positive feedback, and we could modify their learning to take advantage of that.”

The neural signatures could also help detect disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease at an earlier stage, Loonis says. “In Alzheimer’s, a kind of explicit fact learning disappears with dementia, and there can be a reversion to a different kind of implicit learning,” he explains. “Because the one learning system is down, you have to rely on another one.”

Earlier studies have shown that certain parts of the brain such as the hippocampus are more closely related to explicit learning, while areas such as the basal ganglia are more involved in implicit learning. But Miller says that the brain wave study indicates “a lot of overlap in these two systems. They share a lot of the same neural networks.”

7 Questions to Ask When You’re Feeling Overwhelmed

1. Which of these tasks should I prioritise? Do what’s most important first, and the pressure will subside.

2. Would I achieve more if I got some extra sleep? If you’re too tired to work then you’re usually less productive.

3. Are other people sucking the life out of me? Are there certain individuals who’re demanding too much time?

4. Is there anything at all that I can delegate? Do I have to do it all, or do the whole thing on my own?

5. Have I taken on too much on because “I don’t let people down”, or I’m afraid of saying “no”; or do I fear the negative reactions of others?

6. Is my space full of clutter, and that’s adding to my stress? Do I need to tidy up, or just get rid of some old stuff?

7. Can I withdraw, or take time off to recharge my batteries? Do I really need a break, and need the chance to be refreshed? Would I likely perform better if I made time for self care