General

Effect of Drugs on the Brain

: Image via Wikipedia

You may know by now that drugs release a copious amount of dopamine to the brain, a chemical that makes the brain transmit a feeling of pleasure. But what you may not understand is that the brain will start to make less dopamine or will reduce the amount of receptors that can get signals, because of the increased levels of dopamine introduced by the drug.

Because of this, when the user stops taking the drug, dopamine can become unusually low, and the brain’s ability to record pleasure is stunted. Then the user will often become depressed and will not get pleasure from those things that used to be enjoyable.

Then the user needs to take the drug so that the dopamine in the brain will be at a normal level. Then tolerance develops, as the user needs to have increasingly larger doses of the drug to get that rush — or the high they experienced when first taking the drug.

Scientific studies reveal that continued drug use makes significant changes in the neurons of the brain and can cause permanent damage. For instance, when the level of a neurotransmitter called glutamate is changed because of a drug, users do not learn as well. Glutamate is involved in the brain’s ability to learn.

Drug abuse can also cause long-term damage to memory as well. In addition, as many may know, drug abuse loosens inhibitions. An addict often will engage in very risky behaviors because drugs affect self-control and impair the user’s ability to make safe decisions.

Who hasn’t seen colleagues who have had a few too many drinks at the office party embarrass themselves and others with behavior they regret later? For an addict, this loss of control becomes a way of life — and when in the throes of physical addiction, the need for the drug takes over, and even regret flies out the window.

Filed Under: Drugs, General, Medication Tagged With: Addiction, Brain, Dopamine, Drugs, Health, Neurotransmitter, Substance Abuse, Substance dependence

What Makes a Leader?

: Image by jmtimages via Flickr

The qualities that make a good leader are debated by many. Some are listed below, so take a look to see if you or a family member might qualify to be the next president of the United States.

Most leaders need to have a vision of where they want to go — the future they want to create for their organization or country, if we are sticking to the president analogy. A good leader will know that crafting and communicating a vision is key to getting buy in from clients, partners and employees.

A good leader should be able to inspire people to carry out the vision. You need to be passionate about what you do and what you want others to do. Otherwise, everything will fall flat. There are many ways to inspire others, including public speaking and leading by example. Ronald Reagan was a great example of an inspirational leader.

Good leaders are generally very focused on achieving their goals. They often think in a linear fashion and set out to finish one task before starting on another. Good leaders know what their priorities are and don’t lose focus.

In addition, leaders are often results oriented. In their minds, it is not the process that counts, but the results. Just get it done is their motto!

Good leaders know how to persuade people and how to encourage people to see things their way. One thing that often trips up individuals hoping to be leaders is that they don’t realize that it is more effective to lead by persuading than to force people through intimidation. That is a strategy that often backfires when people eventually rebel.

Other qualities in a good leader include charm — an ability to appeal to all types of people and be liked. Think of a Bill Clinton — his affability made him likable.

Filed Under: General, Medication Tagged With: Bill Clinton, History, Leadership, President, Public speaking, Reagan Ronald Wilson, Ronald Reagan, United States

Pay Your Medical Bills With a Payday Loan

It seems like unexpected bills are always popping up. They’re just part of life. When you’re sick or injured, though, an unexpected medical bill can put a lot of stress on you. Even when you are trying to get your life back from substance abuse, life doesn’t leave you alone. You still have to pay for the effects of your substance abuse.That’s especially true if it puts you out of work for a few days or if your money is already tight and you can’t pay it until you get your next check. If that’s the case with you, there are options. One of those options would be to borrow from family or friends, but they may not be able to help you – and you may not feel comfortable asking them to.

Another choice is to get a payday loan. These are small loans, and you don’t need a credit check for them. You can use it to pay your bill and pay the loan back later. Then, you can stop worrying about that bill and concentrate on getting better, so you can get back into work and the rest of your life. Before you pay that medical bill, however you decide to do that, make sure that you look at it carefully. If the charges aren’t accurate or they don’t look like items you actually understand, ask about them.

Your doctor or hospital should be willing to tell you what the charges were for. If they can’t explain them or they’re for things you don’t remember having done, you should definitely challenge them. Billing departments can and do make mistakes, so don’t automatically assume that everything is correct just because the bill was sent to you. If you don’t act as your own health care advocate, who will? Even if the charges are correct, it’s always better to question them if you’re unsure. That way you’ll know what you’re paying for – and you might be able to work out a payment plan while you’re there.

Filed Under: General, Health Tips, Medication Tagged With: Hospital, Money, Payday loan

Effects of Marijuana on Your Body

: Image via Wikipedia

If you’re considering quitting smoking marijuana, here is some information about the effects of marijuana on your body that may help give you motivation to quit.

Effects of Marijuana on the Brain

When you smoke marijuana, the effects cause you to feel relaxed and mellow. Colors and other senses may be more enhanced, but it’s possible for those effects to leave and for feelings of paranoia and panic to replace them.

You’ll also find that chemicals in marijuana interfere with cannaboid receptors in the hippocampus that cause problems with short-term memory. Other effects include slowed reflexes, having a hard time concentrating, trouble remembering things, feeling sleepy or anxious, and feeling paranoid. There is also a decreased blood flow to the brain. All this can lead to acute toxic psychosis, delusions, hallucinations, depression, panic attacks, and schizophrenia in the long term. Short term, marijuana use causes impaired judgment, which means you are less likely to make responsible decisions. You can also suffer from memory defects up to six weeks after your last joint

Affects of Marijuana on the Body

The main chemical in marijuana is THC (short for delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol). This is what causes the high that users of marijuana experience. Smoking is usually the preferred way to ingest marijuana because of the way it’s absorbed through the lungs. Physical side effects of smoking marijuana include tremors, headaches, increased appetite, breathing problems, and nausea. Long-term physical effects include cancer. In fact, it’s been found that smoking just 5 joints a week will give you the same chances of developing cancer as someone who smokes one pack of cigarettes a day.

It’s also been found that smoking marijuana regularly can lead to damage of the cells in the bronchial passages. This can lead to chronic bronchitis among other things. These protect the body from microorganisms, which decreases the body’s ability to fight off bacteria, fungi, and tumor cells. It also weakens the user’s immune system making it more susceptible to infection, etc.

With all of these effects on your body, you have to wonder if it’s worth the “high” you receive from smoking marijuana.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Cancer, Cannabis, Drugs

Link Found Between Smoking and Heart Disease

: Image via Wikipedia

Did you know that a recent study found that 20 percent of all deaths due to heart disease were caused by cigarette smoking? When you smoke, your risk for heart attack increases with each and every cigarette you light up. The longer you smoke, the more likely you’ll have a heart attack. It was found that those who smoke one pack of cigarettes each day are twice as likely as those who do not smoke to have a heart attack. For women who take oral contraceptives, that risk is increased several times as well as risks for stroke and peripheral vascular disease.

How Smoking Can Cause Heart Disease

Smoking cigarettes can increase chances of developing heart disease for several reasons: The nicotine found in cigarettes decreases the oxygen that makes it to the heart. It also increases blood pressure and heart rate. Nicotine has also been found to damage cells that line the coronary arteries as well as increasing blood clotting.

Health Problems from Heart Disease

Heart attacks are one manifestation of heart disease and can be life threatening. Symptoms of a heart attack include a discomfort in your chest and possibly radiating to your back, jaw, throat or arm; pressure or heaviness on your chest, arm or below the breastbone; a choking feeling or indigestion that may feel like you’re having heartburn; sweating, nausea, or vomiting; dizziness; irregular heartbeats.

But heart attacks aren’t the only thing that can be caused by heart disease. Other conditions include arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, and coronary artery disease. Obviously, our hearts are important to our health and keeping them healthy will increase your chances of a healthy full life.

Improve Your Health by Quitting

Ending your habit of smoking is one of the best ways to increase your level of health. Heart disease isn’t the only health problem caused by smoking and if one condition doesn’t get you, another will including lung cancer, emphysema, mouth and throat cancer, and more. There are many methods for smoking. Research to find one that’s right for you and then make a plan that includes attainable goals.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Blood pressure, Heart disease, Lung cancer

How to Help Your Kids Avoid Drugs as Teenagers

: Image via Wikipedia

In addition to talking to your kids about drugs and saying no when offered, there are other things you can do to help keep your kids away from drugs during their pre-teen and teen years.

Friends

One of the most important decisions your child will make is choosing good friends. They’ll have a huge impact on his or her life when your influence decreases and his or her friends become a teenager’s whole world. When your kids are younger, talk to them about what makes a good friend, about how important it is that their friends share the same values and respect how they feel. Talk to them about how if that person will drop them as a friend just because they don’t want to smoke, drink, or do drugs, that he or she isn’t really their friend.

Activities

As the saying goes, “the devil finds work for idle hands to do.” When kids don’t have anything productive to do, they’re more likely to get into trouble. Putting them in constructive activities such as sports, scouting, plays, musical training, etc. can help take up their time. It will teach them about hard work and discipline which will strengthen their character, and it will help them to find others who are like-minded, making it easier to have friends that have the same values.

Build Self-Esteem

Along those same lines, being a part of activities can help raise your child’s self-esteem, which decreases the chances that they’ll use drugs to fit in. Other things you can do to raise their self-esteem include offering lots of praise for doing a good job. When you need to talk about a mistake they’ve made, focus on the action, not them. Give chores to your kids for them to do and then praise them when they do them. Spend time with your children one-on-one talking about what matters most to them and not letting other things interrupt this time. Say that you love them and show them that you love them (by doing things for them, giving affection, and spending time with them).

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Adolescence, Child, Self-esteem

Postcard Printing at a Reasonable Rate

The boss had told her to find a place that would do postcard printing at a reasonable rate. She had no idea what Ms. Cloward considered a “reasonable rate.” She didn’t ask Cloward questions when she was in one of her moods. You just nodded your head and hoped that you’d get it right, hoped that you’d be able to read her mind. It was a question of when do you want your punishment, when do you want the harangue to begin. You could ask her to explain herself and the tirade would start right away. You’d never get the question answered anyway. Better just to carry on with the task, and then if you got it wrong, you’d hear from her later. It was a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. Well, anyway, Sara had learned how to work the system a little bit. They say this is one of the great things about humans, that they can adapt to almost anything. It wasn’t like she was comparing her job to being on a chain gang somewhere, but it did require a certain amount of grit to remain there. The hours weren’t bad, nine to five, but it was high stress and buzzing with negativity.

You never knew when Cloward would come flying out of her office in a rage over something like a misspelled word by one of the copywriters or a wrong color by one of the designers. The woman was a walking time bomb. And she was inconsistent. Days went by and she didn’t even bother to show up, projects came in and went out, and she never knew anything about them. Then one day, she’d show up and ask to see something, spend a few hours pouring over it with a fine-toothed comb, and then she’d call the whole creative team in and give them a good reaming.

Filed Under: General

Check Out Online SAT Prep Course

Right now the sun is out and everyone is relaxing and having a good time. But September is just around the corner — and that means a return to school and SAT placement tests for college-bound high school students.

Prepare your child for the all-important SAT with an online SAT prep course. Your budding genius can take an online course anywhere, anytime. He can take a math refresher course while lounging in pajamas and eating breakfast before heading out to surf the waves. Or she can sip some hot cocoa during a rainstorm and study those analogies and vocabulary. What about studying by the pool? The possibilities are endless.

Taking a course online also reduces the carbon footprint. You won’t be driving to sit in a classroom and you won’t need to use reams of paper. Look for a course that combines real-time video instruction with independent study. It’s a plus if there is a team of instructors, rather than just one teacher, and if you can contact people who have already taken the course to ask questions. Also, find out if the course provides practice SATs and if the classes are available 24 hours, seven days a week. That way, if a class is missed, your child can catch up easily when time allows.

Some courses provide quizzes that can be taken before class starts and cover concepts contained in the course. Make sure that the class covers all three sections of the SAT — math, critical reading and writing. Your child can re-take the SAT after attending the online session to see how their score improves! Studies have shown that a SAT preparation course can improve your child’s score by more than 100 points — a significant number in the competitive college admission world. So what are you waiting for — prepare your student to ace that SAT!

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Education, High school, SAT

Get Back on Track with Credit Counseling

: Image via Wikipedia

A lot of people are struggling with their finances today, because the economy is floundering in many parts of the world. One of the biggest problems that these people face is not being able to pay their credit cards and other obligations. As they get further behind in their bills, they start owing more interest and late charges. Even if they start making more money, they’re often so far behind that they’re just not able to catch up again. When they see that they can’t find a way out and things aren’t getting any better, one of the ways they can get some assistance is to go to credit counseling.

A credit counselor will help them figure out just how much debt they have and how they can start paying it off. These kinds of services usually call a person’s creditors and work with them in order to negotiate payments and get interest rates lowered. When they do that, they’re able to help someone who’s in a credit crunch pay less each month and still pay off debt. If you use a credit counseling service you’ll usually pay the service one set payment each month, and the service will use that money to pay your creditors. Many services charge a fee, so be sure to ask if there is a fee and how much it is. You don’t want any surprises.

Using a counseling service will show up on your credit, but it’s not as bad for your score as having a lot of late payments or a bankruptcy on there. It’s also better than having collection agencies calling you and struggling to pay your bills each month. Ideally, people shouldn’t end up with so much debt that they can’t pay it, but this is not a perfect world. Things happen, and when they do a credit counselor can help.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Credit, Credit counseling

The Smokeless Cigarette

If you are a smoker then you know the attachment that comes with this codependent relationship. You have felt the guilt of lighting up because the addiction pulled you in once again, leaving you seemingly powerless over its reign over your physical and emotional being. The antagonistic calling for your attention never seems to cease so you pick up another cigarette, all the while knowing that this unhealthy behavior is not only hurting you but those around you. The next cigarette could be the one that helps you put them down for good. Maybe it will make you feel sick enough, guilty enough, mad enough that you feel this heavy reliance upon it to assuage your anxiety, fulfill your boredom, or tackle your anger. But then you pick up another.

There are options to the smelly and toxic cigarettes that have controlled you for too long. The alternatives are electronic cigarettes that look like average cigarettes, but actually differ greatly in their makeup and consequences. These smokeless cigarettes simulate the process of smoking without emitting any smoke so they may be used anywhere. In a world where smoking has been banned in almost every city park, restaurant or bad, these “e-cigs” are tolerable anywhere because the nicotine contained within them is breathed in through vapor instead of smoke.

Safe from causing fires and healthier because they contain fewer carcinogens, these cigarettes are a powerful tool in transitioning to a smoke-free lifestyle. While they are not endorsed as effective quitting aids, they do represent the first step in engaging in alternative and less harmful smoking behavior. Available in different designs and flavors, electronic cigarettes may be just what you need to release yourself from the power that nicotine addiction has over you.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Electronic cigarette, Health, Tobacco smoking