NO BULL

Just one energy drink can cause potentially harmful spikes in both stress hormone levels and blood pressure in young, healthy adults, a new study shows.

After drinking a 16-ounce can of “Rockstar Punched,” young adults had a 74 percent increase in blood levels of the “fight-or-flight” hormone norepinephrine, said lead researcher Dr. Anna Svatikova, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.  That’s more than double an average 30 percent increase in norepinephrine the same participants experienced when they consumed a fake energy drink, Svatikova said.  Blood pressure also spiked due to energy drinks. For example, mean blood pressure increased by 6.4 percent after energy drink consumption, compared with a 1 percent increase when the young adults downed the fake drink, the study found. The sham energy drink contained the same amount of sugar and nearly the same calories, but did not include natural stimulants found in the Rockstar drink, she said. The stimulants in the real energy drink include caffeine, taurine, guarana, ginseng and milk thistle extract.

These findings were presented at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in Orlando, and the results will be published simultaneously in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Energy drinks can contain up to five times more caffeine than a typical cup of coffee, according to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).  Emergency room visits involving energy drinks doubled between 2007 and 2011, rising from about 10,000 to nearly 21,000, SAMHSA said.

SOURCES: Anna Svatikova, M.D., cardiologist, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.; Linda Van Horn, Ph.D., R.D., professor, preventive medicine and nutrition, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, spokeswoman, American Heart Association; Nov. 8, 2015, presentation, American Heart Association annual meeting, Orlando, Fla.; Nov. 8, 2015.

7 Principles of Creative Thinking

1. You Are Creative

Artists are not special, but each of us is a special kind of artist who enters the world as a creative and spontaneous thinker. While creative people believe they are creative, those who don’t hold that belief are not. After acquiring beliefs about their identity, creative people become interested in expressing themselves, so they learn thinking habits and techniques that creative geniuses have used throughout history.

2. Creative Thinking Is Work

You must show passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of developing new and different ideas. The next step is patience and perseverance. All creative geniuses work with intensity and produce an incredible number of ideas — most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by major poets than by minor poets. Thomas Edison generated 3,000 different lighting system ideas before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability.

3. You Must Go Through the Motions

When producing ideas, you replenish neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to challenges. Going through the motions of generating new ideas increases the number of contacts between neurons, and thereby energizes the brain. Every hour spent activating your mind by generating ideas increases creativity. By painting a picture every day, you would become an artist — perhaps not Van Gogh, but more of an artist than someone who has never tried.

4. Your Brain Is Not a Computer

Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves patterns of activity, rather than simply processing them like a computer. The brain thrives on creative energy that results from experiences, real or fictional. The brain cannot tell the difference between an “actual” experience and one that is imagined vividly and in detail. Both are energizing. This principle helped Walt Disney bring his fantasies to life and also enabled Albert Einstein to engage in thought experiments that led to revolutionary ideas about space and time. For example, Einstein imagined falling in love and then meeting the woman he fell in love with two weeks later. This led to his theory of acausality.

5. There Is No Right Answer

Aristotle believed that things were either “A” or “not A.” To him the sky was blue or not blue — never both. Such dualistic thinking is limiting. After all, the sky is a billion different shades of blue. We used to think that a beam of light existed only as a wave until physicists discovered that light can be either a wave or a particle, depending on the viewpoint of the observer. The only certainty in life is uncertainty. Therefore when trying to produce new ideas, do not evaluate them as they occur. Nothing kills creativity faster than self-censorship during idea generation. All ideas are possibilities — generate as many as you can before identifying which ones have more merit. The world is not black or white. It is gray.

6. There Is No Such Thing as Failure

Trying something without succeeding is not failing. It’s producing a result. What you do with the result — that is, what you’ve learned — is the important thing. Whenever your efforts have produced something that doesn’t work, ask the following:

• What have I learned about what doesn’t work?
• Can this explain something that I didn’t set out to explain?
• What have I discovered that I didn’t set out to discover?

People who “never” make mistakes have never tried anything new. Noting that Thomas Edison had “failed” to successfully create a filament for the light bulb after 10,000 attempts, an assistant asked why the inventor didn’t give up. Edison didn’t accept what the assistant meant by failure. “I have discovered ten thousand things that don’t work,” he explained.

7. You Don’t See Things as They Are – You See Them as You Are

All experiences are neutral and without inherent meaning until your interpretations give them meaning. Priests see evidence of God everywhere, while atheists see the absence of God everywhere. Back when nobody in the world owned a personal computer, IBM’s market research experts speculated that there were no more than six people on earth who needed a PC. While IBM saw no market potential for PCs, two college dropouts named Bill Gates and Steve Jobs viewed the same data as IBM and perceived massive opportunity. You construct reality by how you choose to interpret your experiences.

Advice FROM Siblings of Special-Needs Kids

Natalie was just four when her brother Patrick, younger by two years, was diagnosed with autism. Even as a young girl, it was a blow for her. “I remember when he was born; it was so exciting. I was going to have a sibling!” she said. She soon realized, however, he wasn’t going to be a traditional brother like her friends had. “Why our family? Why us? Why me?” she asked.

Now, as a 22-year-old, Natalie accepts and cherishes her brother. But it took a long road to get there. “There are certain stages you go through.”

First, there was denial. She kept wishing the doctors were wrong or hoping he would have the kind of autism that doesn’t manifest itself so openly. As a child she used to draw fake, perfect families, hoping one day they would be real.

Then the anger. Her brother’s situation meant, she said, “you are not the most important person in your house. Your parents’ effort, and the people coming to your house, the therapist and the occupational therapist-all those people aren’t there for you, but for your brother.”

She would get frustrated that simple trips to the grocery involved stopping to tie shoes, crying, fits over which side of the car to sit on, complaints that the lights were too bright. She regularly thought about how unfair it all was.

Slowly, over many years, a shift occurred. She started seeing her brother not as a source of frustration, but as a unique person with his own strengths. “I looked at it from a different angle,” she said. “He’s an incredibly talented musician, and he has perfect pitch, and he can play the piano, he can play the drums, he is an excellent guitar player. When he started excelling at guitar, I realized I wasn’t dealing with a burden; he is an individual who is in some ways much more talented and much more capable than I am.”

Sibling challenges 

Siblings like Natalie are often deeply impacted by a brother or sister with special needs.

In addition to having anger and resentment, Natalie placed pressure on herself to be the perfect child to her parents. She hated softball and basketball but played them for years so her dad would have a team to coach and cheer for on the weekends. “I tried to really excel at sports because my father didn’t have a son who he could go outside and play catch with,” she said.

She wouldn’t ask her parents for a ride to the mall or $5 for ice cream because she didn’t want to be a burden on them in any way. Even now, she feels the pressure to be successful in her career (she works in sales for a tech startup) so she can one day support her parents and brother. She even graduated from college a semester early to get the money rolling in sooner.

Rache, a 17-year-old high school junior, felt embarrassed inviting friends over to her house after school in case there was an episode by her younger sister Sophie, who had a severe form of OCD. There were times, she remembers, “when I would get anxious when Sophie was anxious” If her sister was having a tantrum, she would run into Sophie’s room and take away the scissors so she couldn’t harm herself or others.

Rachel also felt an obligation to take care of her sister. “As her older sister I took it on as my responsibility. There are times when she calls me her mom because I act like it, and I want to help her. I want to do whatever I can to support her.” One of the scariest moments was when her sister attended a treatment center across the country. “I felt like I was in zero control of what was happening,” she said.

We asked older siblings of children with special needs to give advice on how to address some of these challenges. Here is what they told us:

Advice for parents 

Build a wide support system  

Laura, a 26-year-old advertising executive, has a younger brother who is 23 and has a form of autism that makes it hard for him to communicate. As one of four kids, she felt the best thing her parents did was create a wide support system for her autistic brother so the burden didn’t fall as much on the family.

“He had after school programs, he had teachers who came to our house during dinner time, he had a lot of support so that didn’t put as much pressure on us or my parents,” she said. “They were able to care for more kids,” she said. Aunts and uncles would also step in and help spread out the responsibility.

Be open with your children and include them in decision-making.

Parents often try to shield siblings from what is happening. Natalie says that approach is well-intentioned, but it can cause more harm than good. “You want to feel like a team,” she said. “You want to feel like you are in this together, because too often the parents feel like a team and you are siloed, so it’s just you by yourself. If you include your kids in the conversations and let them help you make decisions, it’s huge because you feel like it’s not just on you.”

Set aside special time for each of your children

Rachel feels that the most important thing for parents is to “just remind your kids that you are always there for them and maybe set aside time for siblings so they know they are still cared about and loved.” This can be a private vacation, a special activity once a week, or five minutes before bed. Your children will cherish this time, she added. “I took the time that I did get with my parents not as much for granted as I had previously.”

 Advice for siblings

Reach out to others

When she was younger, Natalie felt she was the only one in her situation, and that no one could possibly understand what she was going through. Once she got older and talked openly about it to friends, teachers, and boyfriends, she realized she was hardly alone. She even wrote an article about her challenges on a website and received thousands of responses.

“The more you hold it in, the worse it is,” she said. “When you put yourself out there, it’s scary—you don’t know what will happen. But you have to put yourself out there and find support and realize you aren’t by yourself.”

Laura agreed: “I can see that it can be isolating as a sibling,” she said. “I feel like the support network is very important for caring for someone with a disability. We especially need to reach out.”

Make special time for your sibling

The more siblings spend quality time with their brother or sister with special needs, the more they realize how remarkable that person is.

Laura realized how hard-working her brother was. “He is doing things all day and working all night, and he usually does it with a good attitude,” she said. “He’s taught me a lot.” She sets aside time to do special things with him so she can appreciate him more. He loves Aladdin, so she recently took him to see the musical on Broadway. They also regularly go to a theme park near the family home on Long Island.

Now that she can drive, Rachel likes to take her sister to Starbucks when she is getting frustrated with her schoolwork, to get a break. It’s a special time they can share, and it helps them grow closer and appreciate one another.

Make time for yourself

Many siblings feel guilty about wanting a break from their sibling with special needs, but getting time away is essential, said Rachel. “That was a major thing for me, and I had to step back at some points and have a break from it all. In the summer, especially, I get to be anxiety-free instead of worrying all the time. Just going out to dinner with my friends or going to see a movie helps.”

Focus on how your experiences have helped you

Looking back, Rachel realizes how having a sister with OCD made her the person she is today. She became more independent because she felt she couldn’t ask her parents, who were always so busy with her sister, things like how to solve a homework question. “I figured it out on my own,” she said.

She also thinks it made her a more aware and sensitive person. When her sister went into a treatment center she channeled her need to help into serving others. She “wasn’t able to do much,” she said, so “I took it upon myself to help others.” She joined J Teen leadership, a teen-led community service organization and soon started chairing it.

Laura believes having an autistic brother made her more curious and tolerant of people different than her. She spent a year in China teaching English, something she might not have done otherwise.

Natalie learned the life lesson of not measuring people against each other. “I think you are always comparing people to yourself,” she said, “And when you stop comparing someone to yourself and start thinking they are being the best person they can be, that’s when your eyes open and you are like, ‘Oh this makes sense and this is right and all is good.’ “

Bright Screens at Night JEOPARDIZE the Sleep of Young Teens

Enough light exposure at night can keep anyone from falling asleep as quickly as they otherwise would have. One study found that 96 percent of teens use at least one form of technology in the hour before going to bed. But the new research, published online in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, finds that the sleep biology of boys and girls aged 9 to 15 who were in the earlier stages of puberty were especially sensitive to light at night compared to older teens.

More specifically, an hour of nighttime light exposure suppressed their production of the sleep-timing hormone melatonin significantly more than the same light exposure did for teens aged 11 to 16 who were farther into puberty.

The brighter the light in the experiments, the more melatonin was suppressed. Among 38 children in early to middle puberty an hour of 15 lux of light (think dim “mood” lighting) suppressed melatonin by 9.2 percent, 150 lux (normal room light) reduced it by 26 percent, and 500 lux (as bright as in a supermarket) reduced it by 36.9 percent. The 29 teens in the late or post-puberty stage were also affected, but not as much. Exposure to 15 lux did not suppress melatonin at all, 150 lux reduced it 12.5 percent, and 500 lux reduced it by 23.9 percent.  The effects were the same for boys and girls.

“Small amounts of light at night, such as light from screens, can be enough to affect sleep patterns,” said study senior author Mary Carskadon, professor of psychiatry and human behavior in the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and director of chronobiology and sleep research at the E.P. Bradley Hospital in East Providence, R.I. “Students who have tablets or TVs or computers — even an ‘old-school’ flashlight under the covers to read — are pushing their circadian clocks to a later timing. This makes it harder to go to sleep and wake up at times early the next morning for school.”

Carskadon, lead author Stephanie Crowley of Rush University Medical Center, and their co-authors said children and their parents should limit use of screens at bedtime, even though it has become pervasive.

This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (grants MH52415 and MH01358) and the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (HL105395).

Stephanie J. Crowley, Sean W. Cain, Angus C. Burns, Christine Acebo, Mary A.  Carskadon. Increased sensitivity of the circadian system to light in early/mid puberty. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism

Effects of Parents’ Math Anxiety on Children’s Math Achievement

Previous research has established that when teachers are anxious about math, their students learn less math during the school year. The current study is the first to establish a link between parents’ and children’s math anxiety. These findings suggest that adults’ attitudes toward math can play an important role in children’s math achievement.

“We often don’t think about how important parents’ own attitudes are in determining their children’s academic achievement. But our work suggests that if a parent is walking around saying ‘Oh, I don’t like math’ or ‘This stuff makes me nervous,’ kids pick up on this messaging and it affects their success,” explained Beilock, professor in psychology.  “Math-anxious parents may be less effective in explaining math concepts to children, and may not respond well when children make a mistake or solve a problem in a novel way,” added Levine, the Rebecca Anne Boylan Professor of Education and Society in Psychology.

Four hundred and thirty-eight (n=438) first- and second-grade students and their primary caregivers participated in the study. Children were assessed in math achievement and math anxiety at both the beginning and end of the school year. As a control, the team also assessed reading achievement, which they found was not related to parents’ math anxiety.

Parents completed a questionnaire about their own nervousness and anxiety around math and how often they helped their children with math homework.  The researchers believe the link between parents’ math anxiety and children’s math performance stems more from math attitudes than genetics.

“Although it is possible that there is a genetic component to math anxiety,” the researchers wrote, “the fact that parents’ math anxiety negatively affected children only when they frequently helped them with math homework points to the need for interventions focused on both decreasing parents’ math anxiety and scaffolding their skills in homework help.”

Maloney said the study suggests that parent preparation is essential to effective math homework help. “We can’t just tell parents — especially those who are anxious about math — ‘Get involved,'” Maloney explained. “We need to develop better tools to teach parents how to most effectively help their children with math.”

A. Maloney, G. Ramirez, E. A. Gunderson, S. C. Levine, S. L. Beilock. Intergenerational Effects of Parents’ Math Anxiety on Children’s Math Achievement and Anxiety.Psychological Science, 2015

IT CAN WAIT – REALLY!

Six lives are  irrevocably changed by the devastating consequences of a seemingly innocent glance at a phone while driving. PLEASE SHARE & WATCH WITH YOUR LOVED ONES ~ OFTEN

10 Questions

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The Forgotten History of Autism

Decades ago, few pediatricians had heard of autism. In 1975, 1 in 5,000 kids was estimated to have it. Today, 1 in 68 is on the autism spectrum. What caused this steep rise? Steve Silberman points to “a perfect storm of autism awareness” — a pair of psychologists with an accepting view, an unexpected pop culture moment and a new clinical test. But to really understand, we have to go back further to an Austrian doctor by the name of Hans Asperger, who published a pioneering paper in 1944. Because it was buried in time, autism has been shrouded in misunderstanding ever since.

UN-DO SEND

‘Undo Send’ is one of the excellent features we previously featured in Top Gmail Features for Teachers. Undo Send allows you to cancel a sent email immediately after it has been sent. What’s new today is that Google has finally made this feature available as a formal setting in Gmail on the web.

Undo Send was first released in 2009 and since then it remained in Gmail Labs which is Gmail’s experimentallab that tests features to be added to Gmail official setting. Initially, Undo Send came with only 5 seconds interval time from the time you hit the send button till you decide whether you want to delay it or not. With this new update, Gmail now lets you choose between 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds for cancellation period.

To activate this feature, head over to Gmail, click on  setting and scroll down till you find ‘Undo Send’ then tick ‘enable undo send’ and select your cancellation period.

https://plus.google.com/+GoogleforWork/posts/Q8o3MPyUXRw

“They Always Thought You Were Smarter!”

The study, published Friday in the Journal of Family Psychology, focused on siblings and academic achievement. Jensen and co-author Susan McHale from Penn State looked at 388 teenage first- and second-born siblings and their parents from 17 school districts in a northeastern state. The researchers asked the parents which sibling was better in school.

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