After I’d finished in the gym, I went straight home and had my usual breakfast of 4 Weetabix. As soon as I’d finished, I opened my MacBook Air, turned on the Pomodoro app and set the timer ticking for 30 minutes. I spent 30 minutes replying to emails from my “to-reply” label in Gmail, and then stopped when the timer went off. I quickly packed my bag and headed to Caffe Habitu, ready for a productive rest of the day.

You dominated your Monday workout, setting the tone for workout domination for the whole week.  “This week I am going to hit new records with my workouts. I already kicked ass on Monday, let’s keep it up!”

You dominated your Monday with healthy food choices and meals, setting the tone for continued healthy eating all week.  Your brain permanently stays in “I’m making healthy choices this week” mode.

You popped right out of bed on Monday without snoozing, so snoozing becomes less of an issue with each passing day.  It’s not a question of willpower, it’s just “what you do.”

You were incredibly productive on Monday, which makes the rest of your week much less stressful.  

So stop sucking and start dominating.

A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning — and how omega-3 fatty acids can counteract the disruption. The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiology publishes the findings in its May 15 edition.

“Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of integrative biology and physiology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. “Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage.”

Life-span theories explain successful aging with an adaptive management of emotional experiences like regret. As opportunities to undo regrettable situations decline with age, a reduced engagement into these situations represents a potentially protective strategy to maintain well-being in older age. Yet, little is known about the underlying neurobiological mechanisms supporting this claim. We used a multimodal psychophysiological approach in combination with a sequential risk-taking task that induces the feeling of regret and investigated young as well as emotionally successfully and unsuccessfully (i.e., late-life depressed) aged participants. Responsiveness to regret was specifically reduced in successful aging paralleled by autonomic and frontostriatal characteristics indicating adaptive shifts in emotion regulation. Our results suggest that disengagement from regret reflects a critical resilience factor for emotional health in older age.

Daytime sleepiness may have more to do with lifestyle and emotions than it does with a poor night’s sleep. In a new study, obesity and depression were found to be the culprits behind daytime sleepiness.

Sometimes coffee does not do the trick when trying to cure daytime sleepiness. While a lack of sleep and sleep apnea did play a role in feeling lethargic during the day, emotional stress and obesity were the two main causes of daytime drowsiness. Researchers believe that the sleepiness epidemic parallels the current obesity epidemic.

Long article (yawn).

Abstract

Telomeres are repeating DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes that protect and buffer genes from nucleotide loss as cells divide. Telomere length (TL) shortens with age in most proliferating tissues, limiting cell division and thereby contributing to senescence. However, TL increases with age in sperm, and, correspondingly, offspring of older fathers inherit longer telomeres.

When the patients received ketamine, their depression symptoms significantly improved within 40 minutes, and remained improved over 3 days. Overall, 79% of the patients improved with ketamine, but 0% reported improvement when they received placebo.

A truly stunning find. I imagine a ton of good is going to come from this. I wonder how easy it is to get this stuff.

Carlin Robinson, 12, walks from her grandmother’s car to the school bus in Manchester, Ky. Her house can be seen in the background. A study published in 2010, investigating high obesity rates in the town found that residents used cars to minimize walking distance, to the detriment of their health.

Photograph by Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images.

If walking is a casualty of modern life the world over—the historian Joe Moran estimates, for instance, that in the last quarter century in the U.K., the amount of walking has declined by 25 percent—why then do Americans walk even less than people in other countries? Here we need to look not at pedometers, but at the odometer: We drive more than anyone else in the world. (Hence a joke: In America a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.) Statistics on walking are more elusive than those on driving, but from the latter one might infer the former: The National Household Travel Survey shows that the number of vehicle trips a person took and the miles they traveled per day rose from 2.32 trips and 20.64 miles in 1969 to 3.35 and 32.73 in 2001. More time spent driving means less time spent on other activities, including walking. And part of the reason we are driving more is that we are living farther from the places we need to go; to take just one measure, in1969, roughly half of all children lived a mile or more from their school; by 2001 three out of four did. During that same period, unsurprisingly, the rates of children walking to school dropped from roughly half to approximately 13 percent.