Know It All

Romantic love, beautiful and intoxicating,  heartbreaking and soul-crushing, often all at the same time. Why do we choose to put ourselves through its emotional wringer?  Does love make our life meaningful? or is it an escape from our loneliness and suffering? Is love a disguise for our sexual desire, or a trick of biology to make us procreate? Is it all we need? Do we need it at all?  If romantic love has a purpose, neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet. But over the course of history, some of our most respected philosophers have put forward some intriguing theories.  1. Love makes us whole, again: The ancient Greek philosopher Plato explored the idea that we love in order to become complete. In his "Symposium" he wrote about a dinner party, at which Aristophanes, a comic playwright, regales the guests with the following story: Humans were once creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces. One day, they angered the gods, and Zeus sliced them all in two.

In ancient Greece, headaches were considered a powerful affliction. Victims prayed for relief from Asclepius, the god of medicine. And if the pain continued, a medical practitioner would perform the best- known remedy, drilling a small hole in the skull to drain supposedly infected blood.  This dire technique called trepanation often replaced the headache with a more permanent condition. Fortunately, doctors, today don't resort to power tools to cure headaches. But we still have a lot to learn about this ancient ailment.  Today we have classified headaches into two camps: 1. Primary headaches 2. Secondary headaches Primary headaches are not symptomatic of an underlying disease, injury, or condition; they are the condition itself. Primary headaches account for 50% of reported cases, we actually know much more about secondary headaches.  Secondary headaches are caused by other health problems with triggers ranging from dehydration and caffeine withdrawal to head and neck injury or h

 Right now you are probably sitting down to read this blog and staying seated for a few minutes is probably okay but the longer you sit the more agitated your body becomes. It sits there counting down the moments until you stand up again and take it for a walk. That may sound ridiculous because we love to sit right? Not really sitting for brief periods can help us recover from stress but nowadays our lifestyles make us sit much more than we move around and our bodies are simply not built for such a sedentary existence. In fact, just the opposite is true, the human body is built to move and you can see evidence of that in the way it is structured. Inside us are over 36o joints and about 700 skeletal muscles that enable easy, fluid motion. The body's unique physical structure gives the ability to stand straight against the pull of gravity. Our blood depends on us moving around to be able to circulate properly. Our nerve cells benefit from movements and our skin is elastic meaning it

 In the 4th   millennium, Asian Egyptians wrote a dream book listing over a hundred common dreams and their meanings and in the years since we haven't paused in our question to understand why we dream? So after a great deal of scientific research, technological advancements and persistence we still do not have any definite answer but we have some interesting theories. Lets us look at some of the theories that may answer our question of why do we dream: 1. We dream to fulfil our wishes: In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud proposed that while all of our dreams including our nightmares are a collection of images from our daily conscious life. They also have symbolic meaning  (like if you see a shoe, in your dream then it is a sign of power, security and strength) which relate to the fulfilment of our subconscious wishes. Freud theorized that everything that we remember when we wake up from a dream is a symbolic representation of our unconscious primitive thoughts, urges and desires. Fre

 Sleep is perhaps the single most effective thing that we can do each and every day to reset the health of our brain and our body. By understanding a little bit more about what sleep is we can get the chance to improve both the quantity and quality of our sleep.  What is sleep? Well sleep at least in human beings is subdivided into two main types. Non REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep. REM Sleep Non-REM Sleep: Non REM sleep is further subdivided into 4 separate stages: Stage 1: Awake/Light Sleep Stage 2: Light Sleep Stage 3/4: Deep Sleep As we go into the light stages of Non-REM sleep our heart rate starts to decrease, your body temperature starts to drop and your electrical brain wave activity starts to slow down but as we move into deeper Non-REM sleep that is the stages 3 and 4, all of a sudden the brain erupts with these huge big powerful brain waves. The body gets recharged in terms of its immune system, we also get this beautiful overhaul of our cardio-vascular system and upstairs i

 Many of us like to start our day with a cup of coffee and perhaps end the day with a glass of wine or some other kind of alcoholic drinks . But it turns out that these two substances alcohol and caffeine can have surprising impacts on our sleep.  Caffe ine: Let's start with caffeine, Caffeine is a kind of drug that we call the psycho-active stimulu s and everyone knows that caffeine can make you more alert and can wake you up but there are at least two additional hidden features of caffeine that some people may not be aware of. 1. The first is the duration of action of the caffeine. Caffeine for the average adult will have an effect for about 5-6 hours, what that means is that after about 5-6 hours   50% of that caffeine that you had is still circulating in your system. Caffeine has a quarter-life of about 10-12 hours. In other words, let's assume that you had coffee at 2 pm in the evening, it could be possible that almost the quarter of that caffeine is still swirling around

Good night sleep is incredibly crucial for our health, it is as important as eating healthy and exercising.  Let us first consider some of the points to understand why sleep is that important for us. Poor sleep can link to higher body weight. In fact, short sleep duration is associated with an increased risk of weight gain and obesity in both children and adult.   Poor sleep affects hormones that regulate appetite. Those who get adequate sleep tend to eat fewer calories than those who don't.  Good sleep can maximize problem-solving skills and enhance memories. Poor sleep has been shown to impair brain function. Long sleep has been shown to improve many aspects of athletic and physical performance. Sleeping less than 7-8 hours per night is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Sleep deprivation can cause prediabetes in healthy adults in as little as 6 days. Many studies show a strong link between short sleep duration and type 2 diabetes. Poor sleeping patterns are