How to be more commanding

All set to confront, negotiate, or impress? Take care! These top ten distracting behaviours can cost you the upper hand:

• Touching your hair
  
• Licking your lips
  
• Playing with rubber bands or paper clips
  
• Twirling your moustache
  
• Drumming your fingers
  
• Clicking pens
  
• Biting your fingernails
  
• Tapping your feet
  
• Picking your teeth
  
• Repeatedly adjusting your glasses.

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A Real Heel

Women, you're not doing your legs any favours by wearing those fashionable wide-heeled shoes instead of stiletto pumps, according to Harvard researchers. Using a barefoot stride for comparison, the researchers recorded the jump in knee stress as 20 women walked in shoes. Heels at least five centimeters tall -- regardless of width -- boosted pressure by about 24%. The doctors say you're better off sticking with flats. » Continue reading

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Pet Poison Control

To prevent a life-threatening situation for your pet, be aware of these common house-hold hazards:

• Chocolate. In dogs, it can cause irregular heartbeat and seizures. Just 85 grams of chocolate can even kill a 10-kilo dog. Other paws-off foods: onions, onion powder, yeast dough and mouldy foods.
  
• Plants. For dogs and cats, ingesting common plants can cause depression, tremors, even death. Among poisonous plants -- both indoor and outdoor varieties -- are castor bean (seeds), sago palm, dieffenbachia, rhododendron, azalea, oleander, hyacinth, lily and tulip. Also read Pets are at risk outside too for the symptoms of consuming poisonous outdoor plants.
  
• Chemicals. Cleaning agents, lawn chemicals, rat poisons and automotive products should be kept completely out of reach. Just one teaspoonful of automobile coolant could kill a cat; less than one tablespoon could be lethal to a 10 kilo dog.
  
• Medications. Administer pet medicines exactly as prescribed. And keep your own medications safely away.

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Tired? Water Works

Fatigue is an early sign of mild dehydration, according to experts. Staying on top of your liquid intake will keep you fresh. Though you can get a third to a half of your daily water needs from food, you still require eight-plus cups of fluid to feel right. Make sure at least five of them are water, say experts, and add a cup every time you down diuretics -- beverages that drain body fluids -- like coffee or liquor.

Also read
When do you need water? » Continue reading

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Breakup Predictors

Want to know if a relationship will last? Ask the woman's friends. According to Christopher R. Agnew of Purdue University, USA, they're particularly astute. His team studied 74 couples and their friends. All were asked to judge the couple's commitment. Her friends proved better at predicting outcome than anyone, including couples themselves. » Continue reading

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Healing Power of Forgiveness

Forgive and forget. Most of us find the forgetting easier, but maybe we should work on the forgiving part. "Holding on to hurts and nursing grudges wears you down physically and emotionally," says Stanford University psychologist Fred Luskin, author of Forgive for Good. "Forgiving someone can be a powerful antidote."

In a recent study, Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet, an assistant professor of psychology in Michigan, USA, and colleagues asked 71 volunteers to remember a past hurt. Tests recorded steep increases in blood pressure, heart rate and muscle tension -- the same responses that occur when people are angry. (Research has linked anger and heart disease.) When the researchers asked volunteers to imagine empathizing and even forgiving the people who had wronged them, they remained calm by comparison.

What's more, forgiveness can be learnt, insists Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project. "We teach people to rewrite their story in their minds, to change from victim to hero. If the hurt is from a spouse's infidelity, we might encourage them to think of themselves not only as a person who was cheated on, but as the person who tried to keep the marriage together."

Two years ago Luskin put his method to the test on five women from Northern Ireland whose sons had been murdered. After undergoing a week of forgiveness training, the women's sense of hurt, measured using psychological test, had fallen by more than half. They were also much less likely to feel depressed and angry. "Forgiving isn't about condoning what happened," says Luskin. "It's about breaking free of the person who wronged us."

The early signs that forgiving improves overall health are promising: In 2001 a survey of 1423 adults by the University of Michigan's Institute for social research found that people who had forgiven someone in their past also reported being in better health than those who hadn't.

However: While 75 percent said they were sure God had forgiven them for past mistakes, only 52 percent had been able to find it in their hearts to forgive other. Forgiveness, it seems, is still divine.

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Healing Power of Laughter

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Healing Power of Music
Healing Power of Sleep » Continue reading

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Gentle Slovenia

"Slovenia?" a would-be tourist might remark, "I don't think so. Haven't they just had a war?"

Well no, actually. Except for ten days in 1991 when Slobodan Milosevic sent troops in a futile bid to stop his smallest child from leaving the collapsing federal Yugoslav nest, this doughty little nation nestled on the sunny side of the Alps has seen no fighting and no terrorism.

Slovenia is the golden goose that got away. But in truth, it never really felt part of Yugoslavia. A thousand years of Austrian and Venetian domination have left their cultural imprint on its towns and villages; and with three distinct microclimates crammed into its 20,000 square kilometres, it can be an eerily convincing Italy, a bona fide Bavaria, even a plausible Provence, with the culinary trimmings to match.

In the markets of the tiny capital, Ljubljana (population, 270,000), bosomy grandmothers selling mounds of pale sauerkraut, pumpernickel and sausage vie with wiry peasants toting the lighter far of the Mediterranean world: goat's cheeses, aubergines and forest mushrooms. And all plucked form a countryside that runs the topological gamut from snowcapped mountains, through south-facing slopes awash in grape vines and wide plains smothered by sunflowers, to a sandy strip of Adriatic coast. "It's Europe in miniature," exults Steve Fish, an expatriate London businessman who markets golfing holidays.

It's actually a kinder, gentler Europe, which has long since disappeared elsewhere. In Ljubljana there's a refreshing lack of commercialism and a surfeit of civic pride. Baby spires and turrets peek up from postage-stamp squares and pocket handkerchief promenades. The river Ljubljanica is criss-crossed by a series of tiny white stone bridges and flanked by terraces of oversized dolls' houses whose pastel facades soothe strollers and waterside diners.

There are advantages to living in a time warp. There's no smiley theme park ethos in these parts. "Why try and improve on what God gave us?" asks a local cabinet minister. "It would be like sticking Disneyland on top of Everest." » Continue reading

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