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Creating a stess reducing playlist
The effects of music on the brain are well known and have been documented by scientists for years. Listening to music is known to activate our whole brains, so the potential for it to modify our moods is great.
By thoughtfully selecting music, you can create playlists that will allow you to combat stress, evoke positive emotions, increase relaxation as well as many other positve benefits. The starting point is to determine what your current state of mind is and what you would like to acheive instead. Using this goal, it is important to gradually build in the change, starting with songs that empathise with your current mood; before slowly building towards your goal.
Using familiar music is a good place to start here. Songs that you are used to listening to will evoke certain emotional responses based on your previous associations with them. Memories are stimulated by music, therefore we can be transported back in time in an instant through music. Based on your ideas of songs that you know have a certain impact on your mood, suppliment them with songs that have similar characteristics.
One important thing is to never use music you don’t like. This is only going to have a negative impact on your mood. If, after creating your playlist, you find you don’t react the way you intended to a certain piece of music, remove it.
If you are using music to try to relax, consider using instrumental music. When listening to songs with lyrics, we use a lot of our brains trying to process these lyrics. Lyrics can also increase the stimulation of memories which may not be what you want when trying to relax.
The most important thing is to trust your own music intuaition. You will have almost certainly discovered songs in the past that make you cry, or ones that motivate you to push a little bit harder while exercising. If this is the case then you are already aware of the huge impact that music can have on your brain. Trust in this knowledge and you will be able to harness the power of music to cmobat stress, improve your motivation or help you relax.
5 amazing tools you should use to improve your blogging.
Sometimes it can seem as if whatever you try on your blog you are not getting anywhere. It can be really difficult to turn those creative juices into views and interaction, fortunately there are many tools that can help you put a little extra shine on your content.
Below is a list of the top 5 tools that I personaly use and that have given me a degree of success.
1. Hemingway editor
The Heminway editor is such a useful app that grades the readabilty of your work. It is so easy to use as you can either type your post directly into its editor, or copy and paste your work in afterwards. The idea behind the app is to ensure your blog posts are written in such a way that they are simple to read for all people. The difficulty of sentences is ranked, as well as the number of adverbs used and your use of passive phrases.
2. Canva
Canva is a free app that allows you to make striking blog covers and interesting social graphics quickly and easily. Using an intuitive drag and drop interface, Canva allows you to pick it up and run with it almost instantly and requires no prior knowledge of graphic design.
3. Evernote
Evernote is a really useful note taking app that makes keeping track of all of your ideas really easy. A basic personal account is available for free, though you will be charged a small fee for the fully featured bussiness account. The personal account has always been enough for my needs, but if you want to use some of the more advanced collaborative features you may want to go for the bussiness account.
4. Unsplash
The visual elements of your blog are just as important as the written content. High quality pictures can really take your content to the next level. Unsplash is a great free repository of free, high quality images. This is an excellent alternative to costly stock images, while still giving the high quality that is so important to your blog.
5. Buffer
Buffer is a useful application with which you can schedule your hashtags, social links and other content to be shared to social media as and when you want. This allows you to have a near constant social media presence without putting in hours of work. It is a simple set up, and Buffer does the work for you.
5 Ways to improve your sleep.
Getting a good night’s sleep is just as important for our health and wellbeing as having a healthy diet and getting regualr exercise.
Research has shown that poor sleep can have immediate negative effects on exercise performance, hormone levels and brain function.
Good sleep on the other hand, can help improve exercise performance, help you eat less and be generaly healthier.
Here are 5 tips to help you sleep better at night.
1. Control your light exposure.
Studies have shown that increasing your exposure to bright light during the day can have a positive effect on the quality of your sleep. These studies have mainly focused on people with severe sleep issues, but should also help improve your sleep if you have only moderate sleep problems.
The reason bright light exposure helps with sleep is becasue it helps keep your circadian rhythm healthy. Circadian rhythm is also known as your body clock. This helps both night time sleep quality as well as daytime energy levels.
Conversely, reducing blue light exposure in the evening is also known to be beneficial to sleep. Blue light is emmited from electronic devices such as smartphones and computers. It has been shown to negatively effect your circadian rhythm by tricking your brain into thinking it is still daytime. This has an impact on hormone production and means certain relaxing hormones such as melatonin are reduced.
The best way of reducing the impact of blue light is to stop watching TV and turn off bright lights about 2 hours before going to bed.
2. Reduce caffeine intake late in the day.
Caffiene is known to have benefits such as increasing energy, focus and even sports performance. Unfortunately these energy boosting properties make it the enemy of good sleep. In one study it was shown consuming caffeine up to six hours before bed had a significant impact on sleep quality.
Caffeine has been shown to stay at elevated levels in the blood for upto 8 hours. Therefore caffeine intake after mid-afternoon is not recommended, especially if you are already having trouble sleeping.
3. Be consistent.
Your body’s circadian rhythm works in a set loop, aligning roughly with the sunrise and sunset. Becasue of this it is advisable to try and go to sleep and wake up at consistent times. It is tempting to go to bed and wake up later on the weekends, however studies have shown that those who have irregualr sleeping paterns and who go to bed later on the weekends have a lower quality of sleep.
4. Get the temperature right.
Body temperature has a massive impact on sleep quality. When it is too warm it can be very difficult to get to sleep, this is a problem that most people, even those that don’t normaly suffer from sleep problems, experience during the summer. Keeping your room at a constant temperature of around 70 degrees farenheit, or 20 degrees celcius, year round will help you sleep better.
5. Relax.
Instead of spending the last couple of hours before bed watching TV or spending time on your phones, it is advisable to spend some time relaxing each evening. Relaxing activities such as reading a book or taking a relaxing bath can lower your heart rate which is known to help you drift off into a deep sleep. Even if you don’t feel like taking a full bath before bed, you could try just bathing you feet in warm water.
Other techniques such as deep breathing and vizulization can also help you relax.
Sleep plays such a big role in our health that it should be made top priority if you wish to be in the best health you can be.
Creating compelling content when you’re out of ideas.[Infographic]
So often I sit staring at a plain screen, wondering what I should write about in my latest post. It is always nice to try and create fresh, new content that has not been seen before. Unfortunately, that is a difficult thing to achieve. After all, everything has been written about, or drawn, or sung about or whatever. There is so much content available to all of us, all of the time that it can seem literally impossible to come up with something new. The good news is that you don’t need to come up with completely fresh content, giving your own take on other peoples work is just as useful and allows that work to reach a wider audience.
With that in mind, here is a great info-graphic created by Copyblogger based on work by their very own Danny Iny.
Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.
