stinks. Although people tell me all the time they like feeling busy—perhaps because it makes them feel important and significant—I’m not buying it. Would you ever choose busyness over a more relaxed form of productivity? When life starts to feel hectic, here are a few ways to dial back the overwhelm. 1. Give yourself a shot of awe When researchers induced feelings of awe in people—by showing them video clips of people next to vast things like whales or waterfalls—it altered their perception of time such that the people felt like they had more time on their hands. So much time on their hands, in fact, that awestruck people become likely to give ... posted on Mar 11 2016 (38,542 reads)

live in a loud and distracting world, where silence is increasingly difficult to come by -- and that may be negatively affecting our health. In fact, a 2011 World Health Organization report called noise pollution a "modern plague," concluding that "there is overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population." We're constantly filling our ears with music, TV and radio news, podcasts and, of course, the multitude of sounds that we create nonstop in our own heads. Think about it: How many moments each day do you spend in total silence? The answer is probably very few. As our internal and external env... posted on Mar 14 2016 (81,347 reads)

find ourselves in turbulent and unpredictable times. From the horror at the Bataclan, to the upheaval in Syria and the senseless bloodshed in San Bernardino, we live in a time of great confusion and pain. As an artist, creator and dreamer of this world, we ask you not to be discouraged by what you see but to use your own lives, and by extension your art, as vehicles for the construction of peace. While it’s true that the issues facing the world are complex, the answer to peace is simple; it begins with you. You don’t have to be living in a third world country or working for an NGO to make a difference. Each of us has a unique mission. We are all pieces in a giant, flui... posted on Mar 16 2016 (17,515 reads)

article originally appeared on The Body Is Not An Apology and is reprinted by permission. More of Cody Charles’ writing can be found here. This is a follow-up to my previous piece entitled Ten Counterproductive Behaviors of Social Justice Educators. The latter was written for folks who consider equity work as their core life purpose. I wrote Ten Counterproductive Behaviors of Well-Intentioned People for the folks who consider themselves good people invested in social justice and conversations around equity, but who may show up in the ally role most often. Well-intentioned people make mistakes, lots of them. Mistakes must be expected and being held accountable has to be expected... posted on Mar 18 2016 (40,144 reads)

Lawrence Bloom. His team invented today’s ubiquitous hotel cards that promote towel reuse. But the businessman turned earth guru doesn’t plan to stop there; he’s on a lifetime mission to save us from ourselves. Alicia Buller reports. One day, many years ago, Lawrence Bloom sat in his luxury Mercedes, parked outside his seven-bedroomed, three-bathroomed house in London’s wealthy Hampstead. “Is this it?” he asked himself, as a familiar charge of fear coursed through his veins. “I had reached that material place where everybody aspires to be and, for me, anxiety was like a coat hanger: the jacket that I had worn before that moment was &lsq... posted on Mar 19 2016 (12,179 reads)

my wish is to be more whole—more wholly myself—I will have to include more of the complexities of my nature. Yet my behind-the-scenes hope has often been to get rid of what I don’t like in myself, so I go about my conscious life denying certain disagreeable features or squishing them into more acceptable traits. Yet there are other aspects that I approve of and freely lay claim to. If you too seek wholeness, you might want to join me as I try to look at the whole picture, warts and all. Ugh! That means we’ll have to include the wimpy self we’re ashamed of, the angry self we revel in but hide from others, the confused self we re ashamed of, and even the dow... posted on Mar 26 2016 (16,713 reads)

organization has souped up the traditional soup kitchen. Kansas City Community Kitchen in Kansas City, Missouri, serves food restaurant-style to homeless people, a process which includes greeters, waiters and a side of respect. "They're treating me good, like they don't know I'm homeless." YES. #KCCK #NotJustASoupKitchen  — Episcopal Community (@ECS_KC) February 11, 2016 “We are trying to flip the photo of what a soup kitchen looks like,” Mandy Caruso-Yahne, director of community engagement at Episcopal Community Services, which runs the kitchen, told Upworthy. The Kansas City Community Kitchen has been serving the community for... posted on Mar 27 2016 (10,518 reads)

that he takes into his thinking about living and dying and medicine was galvanized by a freak accident while he was a college student in which he lost both of his legs and part of one arm. MS. TIPPETT: So many of the ways you talk about and seem to think about and just approach what you do, palliative care and hospice, is also completely interwoven with this design sensibility that we’ve been talking about all the way through, and these aesthetics and the language you use and the images you use. For example, you say, “Our shared mortality is a source of great beauty.” What do you mean when you say that? DR. MILLER: The fact that we have these bookends of birth a... posted on Apr 4 2016 (26,214 reads)

virtues go, patience is a quiet one. It’s often exhibited behind closed doors, not on a public stage: A father telling a third bedtime story to his son, a dancer waiting for her injury to heal. In public, it’s the impatient ones who grab all our attention: drivers honking in traffic, grumbling customers in slow-moving lines. We have epic movies exalting the virtues of courage and compassion, but a movie about patience might be a bit of a snoozer. Yet patience is essential to daily life—and might be key to a happy one. Having patience means being able to wait calmly in the face of frustration or adversity, so anywhere there is frustration or adversity—i.e., ne... posted on Jun 28 2023 (24,231 reads)

a prison menu is a bleak task. Common food items range from nutraloaf—a mishmash of ingredients baked into a tasteless beige block—to, rumor has it, road kill. The substandard quality of food at some correctional facilities has led to protests and hunger strikes, as in summer 2013 when nearly 30,000 California state prisoners refused food to demand, among other things, fresher and more nutritious meals. But some states, along with correctional authorities and prison activists, are discovering the value of feeding prisoners nutrient-rich food grown with their own hands. Prison vegetable gardens, where inmates plant and harvest fresh produce to feed the larger ... posted on Apr 20 2016 (11,693 reads)

with Robin Wall Kimerrer MS. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: “Why is the world so beautiful?” This is a question Robin Wall Kimmerer pursues as a botanist and also as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes, “Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss — a bryologist — she describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” She opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate. DR. ROBIN WALL KIMMERER: I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last... posted on Apr 22 2016 (15,108 reads)

psychologist Paul Ekman explains how to extend compassion beyond our circle of family and friends. Paul Ekman is Professor Emeritus in Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, and an expert on emotion recognition. His work in identifying the muscular underpinnings of facial expressions has been instrumental in helping us understand the universality of emotion and its place in our social lives. In 2009, he was named by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world, and his work even entered popular consciousness when it led to a popular TV show—Lie to Me. In recent years, Ekman has had a growing interest in applying his knowledge of e... posted on Apr 24 2016 (11,750 reads)

Gross: Can you talk more about the value of solitude, and why you argue that if we don’t learn to be alone, then we’re guaranteed to be lonely? Sherry Turkle: The capacity to be alone is the capacity to know enough about yourself and who you are, and be comfortable enough with that. That way, when you are with another person, you’re not trying to make that person into somebody you need them to be in order to buttress a fragile sense of your own self. You can actually turn to a person and see them as another person, and have a real relationship with them. Now, the person who can’t do that is going to be one of these people who nobody wants to be with,... posted on Apr 25 2016 (24,772 reads)

and Ciliana during one of many reconciliation events For more than 50 years, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (in Spanish, FARC) have been fighting a guerrilla war for social justice. In response, the rich and powerful created paramilitary forces to defend the existing social order. On both sides, those doing the fighting are mostly poor campesinos (villagers) and workers. Ciliana, a graphic designer, is serving a 29-year prison sentence for a killing as a member of the Paramilitary forces. Claudia joined the FARC to offer her first aid and psychology skills. So far, she has served eight years of her 40-year sentence for killing and terrorism. They are serving their t... posted on Apr 26 2016 (8,320 reads)

journey as a parent of a specially-abled son has been one of extreme emotions – from disappointment to hope; from pain to joy; from love to anguish – it’s been a journey like never before. When Vivaan was born, one of my close friends sent me Kahlil Gibran’s famous poem On Children. The first verse in the poem is often quoted, but I would still like to share it here. Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. My journey as a parent of a differently abled son has been one of extreme emotions &ndash... posted on May 2 2016 (15,372 reads)

you've made the first relinquishment, you have found inner peace because it's the relinquishment of self-will. You can work on this by refraining from doing any not-good thing you may be motivated toward, but you never suppress it! If you are motivated to do or say a mean thing, you can always think of a good thing. You deliberately turn around and use that same energy to do or say a good thing instead. It works! The second relinquishment is the relinquishment of the feeling of separateness. We begin feeling very separate and judging everything as it relates to us, as though we were the center of the universe. Even after we know better intellectually, we still judge things th... posted on May 4 2016 (20,426 reads)

think that the best way to discover what pronouncing blessings is all about is to pronounce a few. The practice itself will teach you what you need to know. Start with anything you like. Even a stick lying on the ground will do. The first thing to do is to pay attention to it. [...] The more aware you become, the more blessings you will find. If you look at the stick long enough, you are bound to begin making it a character in your own story. It will begin to remind you of someone you know, or a piece of furniture you once saw in a craft co-op. There is nothing wrong with these associations, except that they take you away from the stick and back to yourself. To pronounce a blessing on some... posted on May 8 2016 (17,288 reads)

GRACE PAINTING There’s nothing quite like the unspoken bond between the best of friends. And that bond in particular means even more to Iris Grace Halmshaw, a 5-year-old British girl who was diagnosed with autism in 2011, reported ABC News. Her disorder prevents her from speaking like so many kids her age, so through the encouragement of her parents, she learned how to express her emotions through painting instead. Her works of art are nothing short of incredible, and her family sells them for hundreds of dollars each, using the money to pay for her therapy treatments and art supplies, and to raise awareness about autism, according to their Facebook page. While Iri... posted on May 14 2016 (20,378 reads)

could ever be printed about the Supreme Court ruling. We need more of the courage of drag queens and astronauts. (Applause) But I want to talk about the need for us to dream in more than one dimension, because there was something about Apollo that I didn't know when I was 8, and something about organizing that the rainbow colors over. Of the 30 astronauts in the original Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, only seven marriages survived. Those iconic images of the astronauts bouncing on the Moon obscure the alcoholism and depression on Earth. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, asked during the time of Apollo, "What can we gai... posted on Sep 7 2016 (15,896 reads)

an adaptation from his new book, Dacher Keltner explains the secret to gaining and keeping power: focus on the good of others. For the past twenty years, I have been carrying out experiments to find out how power is distributed in groups. I have infiltrated college dorms and children's summer camps to document who rises in power. I have brought entire sororities and fraternities into the lab, capturing the substance and spread of individual's reputations within their social networks. I have surreptitiously identified which members of groups are gossiped about, and who receive gossip. To chart the experience of power, I have studied what it fee... posted on May 17 2016 (15,255 reads)