Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions?
Many people think most about how to improve their lives when a new year is approaching. Everyone wants to make different changes in life but one thing is clear … all of the top 10 New Year’s Resolutions on everyone’s list are things that they feel will make them happier.
The three main categories that appear over and over again on everyone’s lists are changes involving improvement in health, finances and personal relationships. It makes perfect sense that true happiness requires a healthy body, freedom from financial concerns and other people with whom you can share your life.
Most of us have room for improvement in more than one of these general categories. If that’s so in your case then you should probably have more than one New Year’s Resolution. Rather than deciding to get in such great shape that you can run a marathon next year, why not plan to exercise thirty minutes per day and also improve the relationship with a loved one? True happiness requires at least a moderate success in each of the three categories. Being the most fit person on Earth won’t make you happy if you are sitting home alone or if you’re dealing with debt collectors. The smart thing to do when making resolutions is to set reasonable goals in all three areas. Then once you’ve accomplished those goals you can always set further ones.
The number one New Year’s Resolution in the developed nations today is to lose weight. If that’s your goal, first ask yourself why that is important to you. Just being thinner won’t necessarily make you happier. If you want to feel better and increase your endurance, that’s a great reason! If you think that being thinner will increase your chances of finding love, that might be helpful but it also might not. Being aware of why you want to achieve a goal can be very useful in deciding how much effort to put into that goal. And remember that if it took you five years to gain the weight, you shouldn’t expect to take it off in a month. Would it be the end of the world if it took a full year to be fit for the rest of your life?
The number two New Year’s Resolution is often to quit smoking. All you have to do is visit an old age home and see the elderly people with persistent coughs and unable to survive without an oxygen bottle to know that quitting is just common sense. It’s not always an easy goal to achieve. Nicotine is an extremely addictive drug! Many people who have quit failed several times before they were successful. You shouldn’t use that as an excuse to give up but also don’t give up just because you failed the first time. Smoking can interfere with all three main categories of happiness. Some employers won’t hire you. Some potential mates won’t have you. You are far less likely to be healthy. ‘Nuff said!
The third most common New Year’s Resolution is another health-related issue. Getting more exercise is important for decreasing your chances of getting so many life-ending illnesses. When your heart, lungs and muscles work more efficiently you feel great! You’ll look better! You’ll feel better! You’ll most likely live longer! You’ll work harder and probably earn more money! You’ll play harder in your free time! While exercise seems like a lot of work at first, you actually get to the point where it’s enjoyable in a very short amount of time. A minimum effort of only 30 minutes per day of vigorous exercise is all you need. It won’t reduce your time for other things because fit people require less sleep. Play racquetball with the boss and you might also improve your finances. Or play tennis with a family member, frien or an appealing potential mate to also improve your relationships. Walk a treadmill while watching television. Make exercise fun and you’ll stick with it for life.
Several further New Year’s Resolutions involve improving one’s financial situation. Learning a new career or saving money or getting out of debt are often mentioned. During hard economic times simply getting a job is often at the top of some people’s list. This is an area where many people over-emphasize the increase in happiness that they’ll receive. Obviously, you must have enough money to afford a safe place to live, decent food, dependable transportation, clothing and all of the other things neccesary for a decent life. But do you need a bigger boat to be happy? Or a bigger house? Or the best restaurants when you dine out? These things are nice but not necessary. They are likely to increase happiness but they usually also come at a cost. Do you have to work 70 hour weeks to afford that bigger boat? That could be taking time away from getting healthy or from building personal relationships. On your deathbed will you be more likely to remember those great times on the boat or the picnics with your family? Or the evenings at home with friends. So there’s nothing wrong with wanting more money and things but when you set those types of goals don’t forget about the other things that make you happy!
In fact, another common New Year’s Resolution is spending more quality time with family and friends. When is the last time you asked a loved one what their day was like? Do you have friends that you know would be there for you in a pinch? Are you involved in a fully committed relationship or one that’s lost its juice? Find common interests with your family members and set dates to do those things with them. Ask your mate out on a romantic date and leave the kids with Grandma. Help a good friend with a problem in their life.
Unfortunately, some of us have really serious problems. A common New Year’s resolution is to stop abusing alcohol or a drug. Addictions are especially important to defeat as they nearly always destroy all chances of happiness in all three main categories. If you are addicted to something, understand that you almost certainly won’t be able to solve these types of problems by yourself. We’re all human … no one is perfect. Swallow your pride and ask for help! Not sometime next year. Do it today! You’re never so deep in that hole that you can’t pull yourself out with help. If you don’t know what to do, ask a loved one, a friend or a cop if necessary to refer you to someone who can help you. There’s a rainbow at the end of every storm but you have to take action.
One New Year’s Resolution that isn’t made nearly often enough is to help someone who is less fortunate than yourself or someone in need. You don’t need money to do this. The lonely old man who sits on his porch alone all day might love it if you’d just take 15 minutes once in a while to talk to him. He might appreciate it if you’d take him along to the grocery store when you’re going anyway. Spend an evening each month serving food at the local homeless shelter. Call the numbers on bingo night at the old folks’ home. If you’ve got limited financial resources, donate those canned goods from the pantry that your family won’t eat. Drop a dollar in the Salvation Army bucket during the holidays. It’s only a dollar and others are hungry! When you pass that donation site by it makes you feel bad or resentful. When you drop one dollar in there you’ll feel good about it! Isn’t that worth a buck? If you’re more fortunate do a little more. Some charities can feed dozens of people in poor nations for a 25 dollar per month premium. Happiness given to others comes back several times over! It really does!
Other miscellaneous New Year’s Resolutions include falling in love, learning something new, stopping procrastination and getting organized. All of these desires can greatly improve your happiness but remember to be reasonable in setting goals and don’t concentrate so heavily on one thing that you ignore everything else.
Happy New Year!
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What to Say When Someone Dies?
It is very hard to find the right words to say to someone who has lost a loved one. Most of us badly want to console that person but what we say often just magnifies the suffering.
One thing that you definitely don’t want to do is say that you know how the person is feeling. Even if you have suffered a similar or identical loss in the past, this moment of consolation belongs to the person who is currently grieving. The fact that you may actually know what they’re going through might help you to be less agonized over their suffering but it won’t be of much use to them.
Of course, we should never mention that their loved one’s death was a good thing. People often say that a deceased person who experienced pain at the end is “better off now”. The person who is suffering the loss might understand what you’re saying but it won’t help them with their feelings of loss.
Another common but inappropriate thing is telling the person that they have to go on living or that death is just a part of life. Most people need to grieve for a while before they can let go of their loved one. Saying that life goes on insinuates that they shouldn’t grieve at all.
Another thing we certainly don’t want to do is exasperate the person’s grief. Saying things like, “What a horrible thing to happen” or “You must be absolutely devastated” or “What a horrible way to die” are likely to just make matter worse.
Also be careful about offering to help the person or about being someone they can talk to about their grief. If you’re not really sincere about possibly listening to hours of grieving, don’t offer! If your life is already full to the brim, you may want to reconsider offering assistance. By all means, doing those things when someone dies can be a wonderful gesture that can enhance your future relationship with the grieving party but it can do exactly the opposite if you don’t follow through. Another thing to consider is whether you are really close enough to the person to offer to listen to their grief. You could be seen as “butting in” to an agonizing situation.
So if you decide not to offer help or an open ear, what can you say that is totally acceptable? The most common one is probably, “I’m sorry for your loss”. It’s a relatively neutral statement that lets the person know you care about what they are going through but doesn’t magnify the inevitable negative emotions.
One last thing to look out for is lying about the deceased in order to offer comfort to their loved ones. A child can suffer great emotional strife over losing a parent even if that person was not a wonderful person. Saying something like, “Your father was the kindest person I’ve ever known” when everyone knows that’s not true will just put your sincerity about the child’s suffering in question.
Also remember that different people react in different ways when someone they love dies. Don’t criticize people because if they don’t cry as much as you would or even don’t cry at all. You have no way of knowing what they are feeling inside. On the other hand, some people may grieve much longer and/or more severely than you do. That’s ok too! Be understanding!
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What is Love?
There are many types of love. The love of a friend, love for a parent, love for a child, love of god, and the love of inanimate objects (food, hobbies, music, etc). For the purposes of this article, however, we will discuss the most often referenced type … romantic love.
So why is it so difficult to agree on the definition of love? Well, love is an emotion and emotions are not easily defined. There are also other emotions that may confuse the subject as they are similar in their effects to love. So perhaps the best way to answer the question is to look at what things most people would agree are necessary in maintaining a loving relationship.
Often, the first emotion one experiences in the process of falling in love is lust. Lust is a craving of a physical nature for another person. Lust is easily confusable with love due to that craving. You intensely want to be with the person and that’s definitely one aspect of love. Lust, for that reason, may account for the belief in “Love at first sight”. Couples who do go on to form a permanent loving relationship remember the lust that they felt for each other when they first met and credit that moment as the one where they fell in love. It’s unlikely, however, that they would have succeeded in forming that lasting relationship if lust was all they ever felt for each other.
The next step in falling in love is developing attractions for each other that are not strictly physical in nature. Here we’re talking about attractions based on your desire for shared commitments, most notably going steady, monogamy, marriage, children, and common interests. When you feel that overwhelming need to see your partner, is it always physically oriented? If so, you haven’t moved out of the lust phase. If you can’t wait to spend time doing something with your partner that is of mutual interest and totally unrelated to sex, then perhaps you’ve reached the attraction phase. Even more so, if you envision that person as the one you’ll spend your life with … paying the mortgage … getting up with the baby in the middle of the night … cleaning the house … and so on, you are on your way to a loving relationship!
One important point to mention here is that both partners must feel that way before there’s any hope of creating a long-lasting, loving relationship. If only one of the parties has developed those non physical attractions, it’s time to slow things down! Common signs are where your partner doesn’t care to do anything you are interested in. The only non-physical activities they want to do with you are those they are interested in. Remember, the attraction phase requires common interests. You should, however be aware that this phase may take slightly longer for your partner than it does for you.
The next phase in falling in love is attachment. This is where you put those desires for major commitments in the attraction phase into full operation. Both partners have an overwhelming desire to marry or otherwise commit to each other for life, have children together, buy a home together, and make other decisions that result in their working together as a permanent couple. We’ve all seen the movies where everyone has “cold feet” over these decisions and a bit of anxiety over such major steps is normal. Beware of the partner who is overtly anxious though. This is the final step in falling in love and if you’re partner is more than a little unsure, are they really in love with you? Don’t forget, you’ve both had the attraction phase to think those things through. There should be little or no doubt at this point.
So now you and your partner are definitely in love. How do you keep things that way? Ask a dozen people who divorced after five or ten years of marriage how they felt about their partner on their wedding day. Most all of them will reminisce about how “in love” they were. So what went wrong?
Probably the most common reason for this is that they skipped the attraction phase. Going straight from the lust phase to the attachment phase is a recipe for relationship disaster! You need those common interests and non-lustfull attraction to make a long term relationship work … period! A large percentage of couples make this mistake.
The second most common reason for “losing love” is not maintaining the things you developed in the attraction phase. Did you stop engaging in common interests? Did you stop “dating”? You know … that exercise where both parties dress up to impress the other. Where you do something together that’s fun for both. Do you do things together with your children? Like a family? If you loved to go dancing together, do you still do that? Do you still make nice comments about the other one’s appearance? These are the things that contributed to falling in love … stopping them can cause that love to fade away.
So in conclusion, when asking, “What is Love?” and more importantly, “Am I In Love?”, ask yourself these questions:
1. How much of my feelings for this person are “lust” oriented? How much is about other things?
2. Do I want to share the important parts of my life (marriage, children, mortgages, vacations, etc) with them?
3. Am I confident that they feel the same way about me?
If you really think about those questions and be totally honest with yourself, you’ll be well on your way to knowing what love is.
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What Do Dreams Mean?
One of the first mysteries to haunt the human mind was, “What do dreams mean?”. The simple but unsatisfying answer is that we don’t know what dreams mean or if they mean anything at all. Most experts today feel that dreaming is the method that the brain uses to organize the thoughts of the day and to decide on the importance of each of those thoughts. Should the brain make the woman’s face that you passed on the street today a priority memory or should the assignment you got from your boss be more important? This, theoretically, allows the brain to deal with a far smaller number of details and keeps us from going crazy. The dreams that we remember are random memories that combine to create a story during the process.
Most leading psychiatrists and dream researchers, however, also feel that our emotions have a great effect on how those random memories combine to form a dream. If you miss your maternal grandmother, for example, who passed away last year, that woman on the street that was mentioned earlier might look a lot like your grandmother or someone else in your dream reminds you of her for some reason.
There does seem to be reason therefore, to believe that we might be able to gain some insight into our subconscious mental state by analyzing our dreams. Here are a few of the most common dreams and an explanation of what they might mean:
Dreams Where You Find Yourself Nude in Public:
1. You have something that you’re trying to hide and fear that you will be exposed.
2. You are shirking some duty like getting a report done for work and you fear the embarrassment if everyone sees you without your report. Or maybe you haven’t studied for the math test tomorrow and everyone will see how stupid you are.
3. If you find yourself naked in public and you’re not bothered by it, that could mean that you are very confident about yourself.
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Dreams Where You Are Flying:
Flying dreams are almost always pleasant! They usually mean that you are currently feeling “above” all of the day-to-day troubles of life and you’re probably feeling confident about the future. There are exceptions, however. If you are having flying dreams where you have difficulties controlling your flying, it could mean that you are concerned about your ability to achieve something in your life that will make you happy. If you fly too high and become afraid of the height, your dream could mean that you are afraid that in your quest for happiness, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
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Dreams in Which You Are Falling:
There is something going on in your life that is worrying you and you feel totally unable to do anything about it. You may in addition feel that there are going to be horrible consequences if you can’t find some solution to your dilemma. It may be that your boss recently voiced their displeasure over your performance at work and you’re afraid of being fired but you don’t think that you are able to give them what they want. Or maybe your spouse isn’t happy with their social life but you don’t feel you can afford more entertainment.
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Dreams That Involve You Being Chased:
Chase dreams often mean that we are being threatened by something or someone that we don’t feel we are capable of dealing with in our real life. In the dream we often run as fast as we can in an attempt to escape the problem but we can’t manage to escape. Whatever or whoever is chasing us is usually right behind us throughout the dream. Often, if the dreamer faces the real life challenge and defeats the problem, this will result in their turning and confronting the chaser in their dream and most likely defeating the attacker in the dream too! In cases where the dreamer feels really overwhelmed by the problem, they may not get anywhere no matter how hard they run. This indicates that you believe that no matter how hard you try, there is no solution to your dilemma.
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Dreams Where You Are Not Prepared to Take An Exam:
If you find yourself in a dream where you know you have to take a test but you can’t find the testing room, or you forgot your number 2 pencil, or you just don’t feel that you know the subject well enough to do well, you may be feeling that someone in your real life is testing you in some way and that you are not up to the challenge. Another possibility is that you yourself have put yourself into a situation you might not be prepared for or, in other words, you’re testing yourself. Often, the dreamer is blowing the problem out of proportion. You simply need to identify what the test is that you’re anxious about and either end the test or prepare yourself to pass the test.
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In conclusion, you probably shouldn’t take what happens in your dreams too seriously because those dreams are composed of a combination of random events of the day. If your sibling, for example, tries to kill you in a dream it may just mean that you are upset with them about something and you also heard a news report of a man who killed his own brother. That certainly doesn’t mean that you really want to kill your brother. Those kinds of dreams might mean that you have unresolved issues with your brother that are troubling you. Perhaps troubling you more than you are consciously aware of and, therefore, need action to be taken for the sake of your mental health.
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Things to do When Bored?
Things To Do When Bored For Self-Improvement:
Things To Do When Bored For Pure Fun:
If Nothing Else Works And You’re Still Bored:
Take a nap. Life often looks better when you are well rested and sleeping may kill enough time until something more exciting comes along. Be sure you don’t overdo the sleeping though as excessive amounts of time in bed can cause severe depression! If you do get depressed, tell a friend or relative how you feel and ask them for advice. Consider getting some counseling. Definitely don’t sit around being bored too long! Life’s too short and there’s a big wonderful world out there! It’s just sometimes difficult to find your way.
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How Much Should I Spend on a Wedding Gift?
Deciding on how much to spend on any gift can be agonizing but especially so when it comes to a wedding gift. After all; you want to show the bride and groom how happy you are for them and the way we typically do that in a capitalistic country is why expensive gifts. Of course, we also should consider that many couples need help from friends and family in order to set-up a household and another consideration is the fact that a wedding and honeymoon can dig pretty deep into a couple’s pocketbooks. So how much should you spend on a wedding gift to show a proper amount of happiness and do your part in helping the couple to get a start in married life?
This author has studied many sources for their suggestions and here is the conclusion reached. If the wedding is of the typical, middle-class variety whether in a Church or in someone’s backyard, you certainly want to spend at least fifty dollars. That would be an appropriate amount if you are a high school friend who no longer regularly hangs out with the bride or groom but you still consider yourself a friend.
For seldom seen cousins or other more distant relatives and co-workers who work closely with the bride or groom, you might want to bump that up to seventy-five dollars. Fifty dollars would still probably be ok if you are a cousin who isn’t that close or a co-worker in a different department.
If the wedding gift is from is a friend or a close cousin, you should probably spend between seventy-five and one hundred dollars.
For close relatives and close or best friends, a wedding gift should probably cost between one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars.
Of course, there are dozens of factors that could change those numbers. Have the gifts at other recent weddings in your group of friends and relatives resulted in more or less expensive wedding gifts? If you know that for sure, by all means adjust the amount you spend! If spending $150 on a wedding present for your sister would make you look foolish and make other guests uncomfortable with their gifts, then spend less. If the wedding you’re attending is for a billionaire’s daughter, you might be very embarrassed to spend $1000!
You might also want to consider asking others how much they plan to spend on their gift. Be careful who you ask though. This activity is often considered “bad form” so only ask people you are very close to like parents, siblings, best friends, etc. You might find that they are just as much “in the dark” about what to spend as you are!
Your last hint as to how much to spend on a wedding gift is what the couple has listed on their wedding gift registry. If they have six $50 items, twenty $100 items, eighty $250 items, and fifty $500 items, you can probably figure that they are expecting guests to spend more than stated above. Hopefully the registry will include more reasonable items and you should endeavor to pick a great wedding gift off the registry and use it for wedding gift ideas.
Of course, it’s still totally your decision how much to spend on a wedding gift or if you will attend at all! If you honestly feel that fifty dollars, for example, is all you should spend and all of the $50 items are gone, you could give the couple cash or a gift certificate. If they are unreasonable about what they are asking guests to spend, you will probably hear remarks from other guests to reinforce your beliefs. And, of course, if they gave you $500 for your wedding two years ago, you probably should reciprocate.
In any case, take some comfort in the fact that you’re not alone. Wedding guests will spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 billion on wedding gifts in 2009!
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