How To: Start a Gratitude Habit

20

There is good news for the grumpy among us. An attitude of gratitude can be learned. One way to inject your existence with more gratitude is to intentionally create a habit surrounding it. Habit creation can be broken down into a couple of simple steps and integrated into one’s daily life. Begin creating a gratitude habit today that becomes automatic tomorrow. Okay, maybe not tomorrow, but by Thanksgiving, I bet you’ll be thankful for how thankful you are.

Continue reading

Read With Me : How Emotions Are Made

 This year, we’ve started a series called ‘Read With Me’ we’re sharing all most of what we’ve read this year in hopes you’ll follow suit and dust off that book you’ve been meaning to devour! Here are all the previous Read With Me posts.

Screen Shot 2018-09-18 at 11.15.14 PM

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett took me several months to finish maybe closer to a year. This book is written for the layperson, but it is packed full of emerging neuroscience as well as past theories and research about emotion. In short, it’s a lot. Much of the information was new to me, which also meant I had to do a lot of highlighting (320 highlights to be exact!) and rereading as well as jumping back and forth when certain terms or studies were referenced again later. I read a few books at a time so I can chose depending on my mood and I had to bypass How Emotions Are Made before bed because I so badly wanted to read and understand each sentence. Continue reading

Read With Me : The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Want to know something neat? Each time you click through to Amazon from our website, we are kicked back a few cents from each purchase with no extra cost to you. If you ever feel like going wild on Amazon, click through from our site and you’ll be supporting us at the same time! Thanks, yo.

A couple weeks ago, a cool cat gifted me The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This book is freaking stellar, interstellar? Should we talk about McConaughey movies all day? No. Books! Although there was a movie made about this book. I haven’t watched it and the ratings look pretty low, so admittedly I not going to.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was written by the late Douglas Adam’s and is actually a trilogy (which ended up turning into quintet), which sold more than a million copies in his lifetime. It’s science fiction doused in humor that is suspense driven – so totally quick, easy, and hilarious to read.  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reminded me of works by Tom Robbins or Kurt Vonnegut. Here’s the set of Hitchhiker books and a list of books similar to Hitchhiker’s Guide if you’ve already read it.

 

You’ll Enjoy Reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy If :

Continue reading

Read With Me : The Nature Fix

nature-1-22

If you dislike reading, tune out now because this is the third post about books in two weeks. #Nerdalert OR get into it man! Now’s the time. Okay, I’ll shut up. Last week I touched on the positives of reading and clued you in on the books I was reading. You can see them all on our sidebar to the right and just FYI anything that you buy from Amazon by clicking through from our website kicks back a few cents to us at no additional cost to you. Pretty cool, huh?

I mentioned in my Year in Readview post that I was working on The Nature Fix : Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative – a neuroscience read but written by a journalist, not a scientist, so equal parts informative and entertaining. That sounded like a dig on scientists, it wasn’t, but geez their books can be a little heavy and hard to get through. Once I really focused on reading this book, I flew through it in three days.

Florence Williams does an excellent job of setting the scene for each city, park, and wilderness space she spends time in. She also lays out the scientific process and experiments as well as potential knowledge gaps in an understandable and often comedic manner. It’s easy to process without being bogged down by too many details and yet she’s not just skimming over the science stuff. She’s not skimming at all actually, this entire book focuses on our mental and physical health and yet it doesn’t read like a textbook. Ahem. You can also tell that Florence is doing her due diligence to not just feed you the success stories. She’s honest and she mentions the less than perfect results of some studies, again I point to the background in journalism. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book. I was learning something page after page, positives about spending time in nature that I could share with my Schu Tours adventure groups and friends alike.

Continue reading