Adios y Buenas Dias Amigas Intelligente (Just Wanted to Get Your Atttention!)

Hi Friends of Intelligentwomenonly.com

I've moved my web site and blog, and you arrive there via the usual http://intelligentwomenonly.com It looks a little different, and zippier I think, but not a whole lot. I have short hair and have added brain fitness to my list of topics. Lots of new stuff coming up although I'm not ready for a webinar I'm sorry to say. But I'm going to webex.com to see if I can figure it all out. See you soon at the new site with the same good stuff about negative self-talk, brain fitness, gender differences psychosocial, cultural stuff, and odds and ends about books, movies, sex, trends, and life's transitions.

Sleep is Important to Body/Mind and Everything Else I Guess

A Wall St. Journal article, June 5, about sleep, gender differences and similarities, and import for relationships. It reminded me about how ever health care person I've seen in the last 6 months has reminded me how important sleep is to my teeth, energy level, lung capacity, running capability, brain function, and heart disease. And I don't have anything wrong with me except routine dental stuff plus I sleep like a log. Must be a new trend. Here are a couple of interesting facts and quotes.

• Men tend to be night owls. Women are 50% more likely to be insomniacs than men.

•  Most adults need about 7-9 hours of sleep a night.

•  Twenty three percent of people with partners sleep in separate beds because of too much sleepus interuptus (made up phrase of course); caused by preferences for differing room temperature, or sheet steeling, too much movement, lights on late. Sleeping together is still best for overall health.

• No surprise that we don't sleep as well with our partner if we've had a run in during the day.

" . . . the psychological benefits we get having closeness at night trump the objective costs of sleeping with a partner," according to sleep expert Dr. Wendy M.Troxel.

"Newddhists' — A Coined Word (by James Atlas) for Westerners Hungering for Balance

Also called, "nightstand Buddhists" by the author of the NYTimes Op-Ed, 6/17/2012 as he writes about a spiritual retreat he attended in northern Vermont. Atlas sounds like a rank newbie to the concepts of bare attention, psychological distance, the no-self, and the rest of the many values of meditation, whether it is based on Buddhism — or not.

I was uncomfortable with the author's approach — making it all sound mystical and strange, though beneficial.  As many of you know, meditation, mindfull or mindempty, is a great route to brain fitness. It improves immune response and mood, reduces stress, increases resistance to distraction and strategic allocation of attention, plus generally increases emotional self-regulation. How else can you get so much for so little effort and time?

Running in Moderation Provides the Most Benefits

Most of my assets, I attribute to running: emotional level headedness, coping skills, general low level of anxiety, good immune system and general health. Now I find that even though I'm not running marathons, or even running 5 days a week. it's a good thing! An Argument for the Slow-but-Steady Approach 

People who ran 1 to 20 miles per week at a pace of 10 or 11 minute miles reduced their risk of dying than those who ran more than 20 miles a week and those that ran faster than 7 minute miles. Regular jogging increases longevity. Hurray!

Since I'm now understanding that brain fitness improves with aerobic activity, I'm  jogging more frequently, but for shorter periods of time, and worrying less about speed. And I'm feeling sharper. The placebo effect?

In a week, the new site will be up and running. You'll get to it the same way, www.intelligentwomenonly.com and it will look similar, and have all the old posts, plus new pictures and information. Remember change is good for brain function!

Hi visitors and friends of intelligentwomenonly.com The new, upgraded, redesigned web site and blog should be done by the end of next week. All will be pretty much the same, with posts from the last two years still available and continuing Monday, Wednesday, Friday posts on the same and/or slightly different topics for intelligent women.

Meantime, I'll keep putting up current articles on topics of interest: sharp brains, eliminating negative self-talk, gender, women's psychology, stress reduction, brain/physical fitness, the newest research on thinking, translated into application for today.

Good Health for Brains by Alvaro Fernandez

Here are 5 habits to increase your brain's good functioning. The tips come from Alvaro Fernandez, founder of Sharpbrains.com. Good stuff. I only copied the first five because they're the best, but you can see the others if you're interested at sharpbrains.com
  I'm working on this stuff with intensity and delighted to forget about crossword puzzles.

The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains

By: Alvaro Fernandez

Let’s review some good lifestyle options we can fol­low to main­tain, and improve, our vibrant brains.
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1. Learn what is the “It” in “Use It or Lose It”. A basic under­stand­ing will serve you well to appre­ci­ate your brain’s beauty as a liv­ing and constantly-developing dense for­est with bil­lions of neu­rons and synapses.
2. Take care of your nutri­tion. Did you know that the brain only weighs 2% of body mass but con­sumes over 20% of the oxy­gen and nutri­ents we intake? As a gen­eral rule, you don’t need expen­sive ultra-sophisticated nutri­tional sup­ple­ments, just make sure you don’t stuff your­self with the “bad stuff”.
3. Remem­ber that the brain is part of the body. Things that exer­cise your body can also help sharpen your brain: phys­i­cal exer­cise enhances neurogenesis.
4. Prac­tice pos­i­tive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mind­set and you look for­ward to every new day in a con­struc­tive way. Stress and anx­i­ety, no mat­ter whether induced by exter­nal events or by your own thoughts, actu­ally kills neu­rons and pre­vent the cre­ation of new ones. You can think of chronic stress as the oppo­site of exer­cise: it pre­vents the cre­ation of new neurons.
5. Thrive on Learn­ing and Men­tal Chal­lenges. The point of hav­ing a brain is pre­cisely to learn and to adapt to chal­leng­ing new envi­ron­ments. Once new neu­rons appear in your brain, where they stay in your brain and how long they sur­vive depends on how you use them. “Use It or Lose It” does not mean “do cross­word puz­zle num­ber 1,234,567″. It means, “chal­lenge your brain often with fun­da­men­tally new activities”.

I'm still reeling from much information and many mental gyrations as a result of sharpbrains.com virtual Summit. Here are a couple of new surprising facts:

• Multitasking isn't good for your brain. The word toxic was used which seems like overkill to me, but . . .

 The impression I got was that brains are wired to work quickly and efficiently. When you're working on several different projects and types of thinking at one time, (watching TV, talking on the phone, knitting OR taking notes on a lecture, planning an upcoming meeting, and thinking about your new blog logo), your neural pathways have to make detours, take longer to arrive at planned destinations, and your attention, my guess without fMRI.

 I am finding that I am doing much better with one mental project at a time, although there are definitely seemingly mindless tasks that I can do simultaneously. e.g. watching a boring TV program and a reading a boring newspaper article. Of course I don't remember much of either, but it doesn't matter other than for me to wonder why I'm bothering with boring stuff.

 I'd like to hear what other women' experience is with more single focus, less multifocus. My experience is that men are generally more single focused than we are — and it can sometimes be annoying, particularly when I'm multifocusing.

Here's a part (the conclusion) of an article about problem solving by Art Markman, a PT blogger.  So right on!

 May 21, 2012
  Is There a Formula for Smart Thinking?

" In gen­eral, an impasse feels so frus­trat­ing, because you don’t know what to do next. That feel­ing of being stuck makes you anx­ious. Get­ting anx­ious and stressed when try­ing to solve a prob­lem is not usu­ally a recipe for suc­cess­ful thinking.

Prob­lem solv­ing can be stress­ful in part because you have a lot of men­tal habits that you have gen­er­ated through years of prac­tice think­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, not all of those men­tal habits are con­ducive to smart thinking.

The think­ing habits you have are not part of some fixed men­tal toolkit that you were born with. Those habits were cre­ated by going to school for years and then they were rein­forced by all of the think­ing you have done since then. Smarter think­ing requires devel­op­ing new habits to com­ple­ment the ones that have already brought you suc­cess. It also requires chang­ing habits that are get­ting in the way of smart think­ing. When you reach an impasse, you need to have habits that allow you to do for your­self what I helped my son to do. You have to develop habits to cre­ate high qual­ity knowl­edge and habits to help you find it when you need it."

Gender Pay Gap Thrives from 22-65

 While intelligentwomenonly.com is recharging, I'll send out links to articles of interest for smarties.



"On average, women with college degrees or higher see their pay stop growing at about age 39, while men continue to see wage increases until they’re 48, according to a new report by PayScale, an online compensation data company."

 http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/04/11994886-gender-pay-gap-persists-as-women-age?lite

I'm at Sharpbrains.com Summit — Virtual Conference

I'm going to attend the sharbrains.com virtual conference the 7th and 8th of June. I'm not quite sure what to expect, but I'm looking forward to it. Lots of great speakers on topics all related to brain health and fitness, thinking, for people of all ages, all stages. I'll be Tweeting about it daily. If you're interested, my Tweets come to intelligentwomenonly.com or you can follow me on Twitter, @drtingley

Update on Intelligentwomenonly.com

Hi readers, regular and new —

I'm going to take time off (a week, or possibly two) from  posting as I redesign, rewrite, and reorganize, intelligentwomenonly.com — with help from web designer, Debbie Hulbert. In the meantime, I'll post previous popular posts for your consumption and links to articles that might be of interest. You can always browse the categories (in the red boxes) and find ideas: about eliminating negative self-talk, new research about thinking and the agile mind, fluid intelligence and brain training, an occasional article about women and sex ( why are men, rather than women, generally researching and writing about women and orgasms?), lots about intelligent women's psychology, making and breaking habits,.

I'll still Twitter @drtingley and be back with the recharged blog in a week, or maybe two with an upcoming series about positive, negative and realistic thinking — maybe a webinar, maybe not!

Judy