How Meditation Can Help You Overcome Your Fears

Fear and anxiety can be overpowering and keep you from accomplishing tasks. Fortunately, there is a better way to overcome your fears through the ancient art of meditation. Anyone can achieve this through guided practice and time. I'll explain to you how meditation can help you overcome your fears in this article so you can conquer it.

One of the main aspects of fear is brought on by intimidation of the event or thought that does not subside until after the fact. Through mediation, the mind becomes quieted from the over-activity that feeds into fear. It allows a person to detach one's self from the negative emotion that is being triggered. In order to learn how meditation can help you overcome your fears you must first master the skill required to become centered.

Meditation has been scientifically proven to effectively treat stress and anxiety, two factors that are commonly associated with fear. By learning the art of meditation you will be able to take control of your mental state and reach the calming response that will allow you to conquer your fears. Meditating trains your brain to respond differently to the negative thoughts and emotions that automatically occur when fear is brought on.

Tips for Overcoming Addiction

Addiction is very complex and overcoming it may be quite challenging. It is important to understand that fighting addiction requires effort, attention, and time. With a little planning, motivation, and a lot of determination, you have a good chance to beat addiction. Whether you want to quit gambling, smoking, stop drinking, telling lies or sex, here are tips for overcoming addictions.

Know why you do it

What is the purpose of your behavior? Is it to help you deal with stress and depression or just for leisure? You must be able to answer yourself that question. It may not be easy to admit that you have a harmful habit, but you cannot change what you do not acknowledge. Be real to yourself.

5 Easy Ways to Keep Motivated

Motivating yourself to excel at your job or to be an example to your employees, should not be something you do only when the spirit moves you. It’s an ongoing process that should include every facet of your business life. This means your mental attitude, physical well-being and appearance, work atmosphere, your interaction with others (clients and employees alike), and your off-the-job environment.

Motivational experts get paid big bucks to tell professionals, striving for success, that they must constantly examine these factors. How do you do that? Follow the 5 tips that follow, and watch the changes.

1. Maintain a Positive Attitude – Let’s realize that life is only 10% of what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. We’re responsible for our own actions and attitudes, and changing them when appropriate. When you’re around people/things that are uplifting and positive, you

feel that way. You have more confidence in yourself, and know you can change whatever needs changing. If you can make your workplace such a place you’ll find happier workers and higher production. You might even find your employees look forward to coming to work!

2. Leave Personal Troubles Home - Everyone has problems, but they don’t belong at work. Turn your attention and energy entirely to your on-the-job tasks. This will actually be good for you because you’ll get a mental break from your troubles.

3. Create Positive Affirmations - The reason for writing goals for your business is the same as creating positive affirmations on paper. What your eyes see and ears hear, your mind will believe. Try it! After you’ve written them down, read them aloud to yourself – and do it every morning when you get into work. You’ll be amazed at what happens. Come up with a set of new ones every month. Statements such as, “I’m an important and valuable person,” or “I know I’ll make good use of my time today.” Repeating them out loud everyday at a set time will help reinforce positive actions.

4. Make Sure Break Times Are Really Break Times - This is an area where most bosses/entrepreneurs fall down. You become so intense about the project or situation you’re working on that you don’t ease up. Thinking that it’ll be solved in the next few seconds, and then you’ll get a cup of coffee can lead you right up to quitting time. Regularly adhering to a specified break schedule, even if you’re the boss, releases the tension. If you work on a computer this is even a greater problem because before you realize it – you’ve been working in that same position for hours. The best answer to this is to set yourself a reminder on your appointment calendar for every 2 hours, and let the computer reminder chime send you the alert to move around.

5. Exercise, Exercise, Exercise - I know that lately it seems that “exercise” is the cure-all to every physical ailment or your love life, but despite that there is some truth to that ugly word. By “exercise” I don’t mean that you should go out and join a gym and spend your lunchtime, 3-days-a-week there working out. What is really beneficial and workable is that at those chiming alerts from your computer, get up and walk around your desk or room. Maybe go outside and get the mail and enjoy the sunlight (if you’re an entrepreneur that has a home office), or just get up and do a few stretches. Concentrated, tense thinking – typing - plotting plans - or whatever your work, makes all those muscles tighten up and knot up. Then when we move we “ooh” and “ouch” because we’ve knotted up into a ball of tension. Periodic stretching, even at our desk, or just getting up and walking over to the

window and getting a different view can help. One of the greatest disservice modern business décor has done to us, is making our offices pristine, sleek, unencumbered spaces. There is nothing more relaxing than getting up from your desk and walking over to a peaceful, serene, seascape or pastoral painting and just drinking it in visually. Momentarily transporting your mind out of work and into that place does wonders. A few good paintings and less shiny chrome in offices would benefit us all.

Fantasy Study Tip: Eliminate Distractions and Keep your Focus

Maintaining interest in studying is something most students find hard to accomplish. If you are one of those students finding it hard to get interest studying, you should know that it is vital to get rid of distractions and stay focused. Know just how to do so in this article.

Destroy Distractions and Maintain Focus

When you are studying, you will feel that everything else may seem much more appealing, even simply staring at your wall. First off, have a firm thought that you are going to study hard and going to get good ratings. However, thinking about this is not enough to stay focused, as there are lots of distractions that might be surrounding you.
There are so many things you have in mind, especially as you sit down to study. The technique basically lies in preventing distractions efficiently and maintaining motivation in you to carry on studying.

How to Do It?

The roll of distractions might be endless and varied for everyone. But then, you can cope with them efficiently by employing a disciplined method along with some practical techniques as suggested by the following:

Tips on Building Your Own Eco-Friendly Home

Eco friendly homes are built using processes that are resource efficient and environmentally responsible. All facets of the home from interior to exterior design are provided with eco friendly features. Even construction, maintenance, and operation are performed in ways that don’t affect and endanger the environment.

Building Tips and Guides

- Site Conditions: Before planning in building your new home, you should consider the best site. Choose an area that suits your wants and needs. It should be able to offer space for various solar accesses, water, air, privacy, gardens.

- Building materials: If you really are after building an eco friendly home, you should use environmental friendly materials. You can use ceramics, cement, aluminum, bricks, steel, and glass as the raw materials. Before, wood is considered as a primary material in eco friendly homes but because of the illegal logging issue, it was replaced with aluminum and mild steel. In addition to that, you should also use non toxic paint, LED lightings, recycled tiles, recycled glass, recycled aluminum, as well as other recycled products and materials.

- Rooms: Consider room locations and the amount of natural air and sunlight that can enter through it. Also consider the amount of natural heat to enter the rooms in certain time of day.

- Home Layout: Most eco friendly homes are equipped with open design layout to reduce the cost of construction. It also enhances ventilation and light. It is also easier to manage and arrange the furniture with open spaces.

The Benefits Of Maintaining Your Stop Smoking Resolution

For some, a stop smoking resolution might only be a matter of staying healthy but the truth is, there are actually plenty of benefits that you can expect to get, experience and enjoy once you are totally committed to maintaining it.

Enjoy an Increased Lifespan

If you want to see your grandchildren up and about, you need to say goodbye to smoking as early as now. Smoking can increase the risk of dying as much as ten times much earlier because of the different life threatening issues which are associated to this bad habit.

Lessen Your Chances of Suffering from Different Serious Health Conditions

Cigarette smoking can make your living and your life vulnerable. There is a high chance that you will live with sickness each and every day. Make sure that you quit smoking as early as now if you like your life to be healthy and free of different ailments such as fertility issues, impotency, macular degeneration, cataracts, osteoporosis, tooth loss and gum disease.

Make Your Body as Pure as That of a Baby

Everyone loves babies and by quitting smoking, you also increase your chances of making your body similar to that of a baby all over again. If you want to be pure and feel good like a baby, give up on your smoking habit right away. The moment you do so, it will only take several minutes for you to go back to your normal state, from the normal temperature of your hands and feet, to your pulse rate and blood pressure.

Relieve Your Honeymoon Night Every Single Night

By quitting smoking, you also help in improving your sex life. Staying away from cigarettes can be of great benefit for both genders. Women are going to be aroused much easily and men are going to enjoy better erections. On top of that, being a non-smoker will make you look more appealing to the eyes of the opposite sex.

Put an End to Harsh Coughing

When you decide to stick to your stop smoking resolution, you will notice an instant decrease in your heavy coughing. Simultaneously, heavy breathing and breath shortage will also lessen because your lungs can now function normally all over again. When your lungs reaches its normalcy, it can increase its ability of handling mucus, cleaning the lungs, and lessening the chances of incurring various infections.

Say Goodbye to Smoker’s Stink

After several minutes of quitting smoking, you can expect that the smoking odor will also disappear from your body. And when you smell good, you will also become more attractive to those around you because there is definitely no one who would like to hand around with someone whose smell is like that of a cigarette stick. On top of that, your home will also smell cleaner and fresher when you quit smoking.

Feel Good and Look Good

Smoking can cause premature aging, something that nobody likes. For sure, you would not want to be mistaken for a person who is twice older than your actual years of being in early 20s. When you quit smoking, this will not just benefit your general health for at the same time, this will help improve your looks and overall appearance. Smoking can cause wrinkles, making you seem slow and dull. To feel better and look better, maintain your stop smoking resolution and experience great changes in your life.

10 Signs of Addiction

Addiction is a multifaceted disease and depending on the substance and frequency of abuse; addiction treats every individual differently. While symptoms and treatment of addiction vary from one person to another, what remains similar are the signs that someone is suffering from addiction.

Below are the most common signs of drug addiction. The signs do not appear with every drug addiction, but they appear frequently enough to represent a warning sign that something is amiss.

1. Mood Swings

People who are addicted to drugs are prone to mood swings depending on whether or not they’re under drug influence. The mood swings can be as a result of a psychiatric disorder affiliated with addiction or on the substance abused.

2. Being evasive or secretive

Addicts will go to great lengths to hide their addiction. This includes keeping secrets, acting in unusual manners, or avoiding clear answers to your queries.

3. Change in physical appearance

Addiction will have a significant and noticeable impact on the victim’s body. For example, unexplained weight loss, irritated skin, strange smelling on clothing, development of unusual sores on the body or even strange smelling on clothing.

4. Apathy or complacency

While this isn’t common, it’s a noticeable characteristic. An individual who is normally quite active can lose interest all of a sudden. They will no longer seem to be interested in hobbies, skills, and talents that they typically enjoy.

5. Erratic behaviors

These can be the most noticeable signs of addiction. These responses are entirely not typical of the individual. For example, excessive giddiness out of someone who is typically serious. The behaviors can become dangerous situations.

6. Mental instability

Addiction can trigger a psychological imbalance. This is seen when the victim starts acting compulsively, lose their ability to focus, perform actions driven by paranoia or hear voices which are not real.

7. Neglecting your responsibilities

The user starts having issues at work, school or with his household responsibilities because of the addiction. Addiction makes serious and negative impacts to the victim’s day-to-day activates.

8. Memory loss

Substance abuse often leads to blackouts from a heavy usage in a small period of time. The more blackouts a victim gets the more long time memory loss that victim suffer. Illicit drugs have direct impacts on the functioning of a human brain which leads to memory loss.

9. Changes in possessions

Addiction causes a victim to lose sight of everything else. The victim may start selling personal items for cash, or be in possession of improvised drug apparatuses. Some of them even start stealing to feed their next high.

10. Lying frequently

Individuals struggling with addiction will flat out lie to you to protect themselves to admitting their addiction.

10 Small Changes that Improve Your Writing

Writing for passion? Or perhaps for a blog, website or sales letter? Whichever the case, your writing needs to be compelling enough so as to grab the reader’s attention while conveying the message in clear terms. This said, the following is an overview of 10 small changes that improve your writing

Read more

Reading more is considered as a basic essential when it comes to improving your writing skills. Reading more not only broadens your imagination and stimulate your creativity, but also improves your vocabulary and use of proper grammar and syntax

Write daily

The secret to becoming a good writer is practicing. Writing daily helps you to practice the craft while at the same time, broadening your imagination

Write in good plain English

The best writers are those who write in good plain English. As such, your work should not be full of extraneous ideas, pretentious jargon and bloated words that might end up insulting the intelligence of a reader and worst of all, patience

Keep the writing and editing separate 

Separating the writing and editing tasks helps you produce better quality work. Editing while writing not only interrupts the flow of ideas but also takes up plenty of time

Start with the main idea

As a rule, you should start off with the main idea so as to give readers a strong hint of what you are saying before following up with an explanation

Vary your sentence structure, length and type

Varying sentence length, structure and even type helps you to achieve 2 important things in writing. For starters, it enables you to emphasize a point while at the same time prevents monotony

Concrete words

The use of concrete words is considered as a mark f quality when it comes to writing. Unlike abstract words, concrete words have a particular meaning and as such are not considered as being vague. Concrete words can be described as words that can be actually felt, smelt, heard or even seen and include words such as dancing, hot and bed. Abstract words on the other hand are vague in nature with a good example being – one of the best, good and wonderful

Avoid being too verbose, trim everything down

Avoid being wordy or too verbose in your writing. To achieve this, you have to go through your writing eliminating any unnecessary words

Factor in the readers agenda

Who are the target audience? What does a reader expect? By answering these questions, you will be able to factor in a reader's agenda as part of your work

Make it easy on the eyes

Most readers are intimidated by a huge chunk of text staring right back at them. As such, ensure you incorporate paragraphs of varying length so as to make your text more appealing

By considering the above mentioned 10 small changes to improve your writing, you are assured of greatly improving your writing skills

How to write better content for social media

Writing is not easy. Leave alone writing for social media but everyone would think they can write well. It is until you sit down by the keyboard you find that you really don’t know how to write.

Enough said. This was not a critique post but rather a helpful one on how to write better content for social media. Well, you may have read about this subject a million times and you are about to do it now. No one has ever died of knowing too much so go ahead and read the post.

Use clear titles

The major reason why your blog posts never get a single click may be your choice of titles. You are a fun of abstract topics but readers are not. They want a title that summarizes your articles or videos.

Diversify your content

Words, and chunks of them, will not give you any better results. Add to them some animation, videos and creative graphics. Modern readers are lazy. If they would get a picture to summarize your content, you will be their champion. Give them what they want and you will be the sweet song they will never stop to sing.

Create useful content

What makes a GOOD or BAD friend

There are different types of friends. There is the good and the bad. However, who will want to be with bad friends? Probably, no one will want to. So, if you want your friends to be good to you, you have to make sure that you are good to them as well.
There are three types of friendship. These include friendship of virtue, friendship of mutual interest and friendship of usefulness. Whatever types of friend you have, it is still imperative for you to be a good friend.
So, what makes a friend a good friend? It is important that you don’t just know the qualities of a good friend. You must also know how to act and be like one. If you are a good friend, you will rejoice in your friend’s joys and will sorrow over his pains. A good friend is not only sympathetic, he is also empathetic. You will share his feelings, weeping with him when he weeps and rejoice with him when he rejoices. A good friend won’t unfriend his friend is he disagrees. Friendships should be tested whenever there are some disagreements. Yet, if you are a good friend you will never cut your friends off for that reason. You will tell them what you think they need to hear and the other way around. However, you must do it in a way you know they can accept it. You may do this if you really love them unconditionally more than you care for your views.

What is a good friend?

A good friend will always keep in touch with you regularly. You can contact your friends from time to time and you can expect that they will do the same to you. Friends like these are regarded as good friends. So, if you consider yourself as a good friend, you must communicate with your friends fairly regularly. Trust is a very important element of friendship. Knowing that you can trust your friend and that your friend trusts you are indeed a joyful thing.

A good friend can be trusted implicitly. You must earn the trust of your friend and yours to them. Consequently, you need not to doubt that they will have your back. This will also eliminate the fear of your friends stabbing in your back. If you trust your friends enough you won’t hesitate to reveal them about your highly confidential and private matters.

A good friend should defend and stand by your side should bad times take place. This is probably the topmost measure of friendship. Being a good friend, you will feel what your friend is feeling. It is like “hurting my friend, means hurting me”. It should not come out as, “well, you don’t do anything to me, so it is not my issue”. If you give care to your friend, you will stand by him during such tough battles. Instead of further worsening the situation, you may at least calm her by giving her positive outlooks. Making the situation worse by fighting the same person who has hurt your friend will never be a good idea. This only means that a good friend does not promote convoluted situations, but rather make things right in the proper way he knows how to.

What is a bad friend?

What is a computer virus,how it is spread and it's effect

A virus program is usually able to replicate itself and this too is an added problem once the virus latches on to a system. Progressively getting out of control, the virus will attempt to cause as much damage as possible before it can be detected and eliminated. The replication is usually intentional and designed to act just like a Trojan, thus causing the unsuspecting user being caught off guard. If a file that contains a virus is opened, or copied onto another computer, then the other computer will also become infected and this process is repeated every time the file is opened and downloaded onto other systems.

A virus can easily be introduced into a computer system along with any software program and this is bad news for the users of FTP otherwise referred to as file transfer protocol. The viruses can also become a problem when there is referencing done and email attachments are being used. When the virus enters the computer system, it can attach itself to, or even replace an existing program. This of course is not good for the user, who will ultimately open the attachment or file and cause the virus to be activated.

How Are Viruses Spread?

Having a virus unleash itself within a computer system can be a nightmare for the user, as this is most often done unintentionally but with no less detrimental effects. There is no real way to detect how a virus really attacks and spreads but a lot of effort is put into how to ensure the damage done is as minimal as possible.

Overcoming fear: How to Challenge Yourself Everyday

Fear serves a useful function. It keeps us safe by placing us in a high state of alert when we sense danger. But irrational or illogical fear can also limit our lives and keep us from rising to new challenges. In those with anxiety disorder, the normal nervous system response to a threat is easily aroused and difficult to subdue. Fear can cause physical and psychological symptoms that sabotage our goals.

Fortunately there are a few simple ways to challenge yourself and lean into fear.

Recognize that fear is a universal emotion, one you are vulnerable to. In her book “The Gifts of Imperfection, researcher Dr. Brene Brown said that, “Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

Reasons Why People Fail at Overcoming Addiction

In the last article, we discussed the addiction cycle and how getting trapped in it sort of feels like a fly that is caught between two panes of glass with no way out. This is obviously one of the major reasons that people fail at overcoming their addiction but it is by far not the only reason. In this chapter, we will explore some of the ways that people place destructive roadblocks in their own way to prevent them from escaping their addiction.

READ: The Addiction Cycle

Back to the Cycle

The Addiction Cycle

If you have ever sought out treatment for your addiction, or even read alcoholism or substance abuse guides on the subject you might have heard of the addiction cycle. This addiction cycle applies to every type of addiction, not just alcoholism or drug abuse, and breaking this cycle – or understanding how to break the cycle once you get into it – can be the key to overcoming your addiction for good. We will explore exactly how the addiction cycle works and what you can do to break it as well as how to customize a general addiction cycle to fit your own particular problem and help you overcome it.

Why the Addiction Cycle Is so Insidious

So, why is the addiction cycle so difficult to break? The answer is both extremely complex and very simple. The reason that the addiction cycle is so unmanageable is that it self-perpetuates. What that means is, the end of the cycle gets the beginning of the cycle going again – and this can go over and over and over until a huge outside force comes in and breaks it. In substance abuse and alcoholism treatment they call this “hitting the bottom” or “getting sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Let’s go over the addiction cycle step-by-step.

How to stop smoking cigarettes for free

Why Quitting is Just So Hard

Smoking still remains to be the primary preventable cause of many fatalities all over the United States. But if you are a smoker, you know that kicking this habit is easier said than done. You can put the blame of nicotine, which is a highly addictive tobacco component that can lead to emotional dependency and physical withdrawal.

However, now that the New Year is here, this is now the perfect time to work on your stop smoking resolution. There is no need to be disheartened in case you still struggle with kicking the butt because you are not the only one that fights in this battle. The truth is, this is one of top 5 New Year’s resolutions that a lot of people make every year, meaning there are really plenty of other people who share the same dilemma as you. Before anything else, you need to deal with your addiction as well as the habits that go with this. Start with creating a realistic plan that will help you get through this particular challenge.

Advanced Planning

How to make your Copywriting attractive

Grabbing and Holding Attention

At this point in the book you should now have a good idea of how to write well. Some of this will come with practice but if you keep the tips we’ve covered in mind, your writing should already be more engaging and interesting for the reader.

Now we can dive into the good stuff: understanding the psychology of our readers to try and persuade them to buy from us, sign up to our newsletter or bookmark our page.

And the first challenge you’re going to face in this capacity is just getting them to read what you’ve written. A lot of people are going to land on your pages every day and unfortunately, most of them will leave within a few seconds of getting there. The average time that someone spends on any website is actually under a minute and most of us can attest to this if we reflect on our own browsing behavior.

The fact of the matter is that we’re constantly in a rush, we’re desensitized to all the adverts we see and we’ve become accustomed to getting the information we’re looking for in a very short amount of time.

The Basics of Good Writing

Before we get into the specific side of trying to sell to your audience or get them to want your product, it makes sense to start by looking at writing more generally and at what is required for your content to be considered ‘well written’.

Writing is art and as always, art is very difficult to define and to judge. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that…

But perhaps the best way to judge a piece of writing is to look at it in the context of what it is trying to achieve. What is the goal of the writing and how well does it complete that goal? Because ultimately, nothing else matters.

If your goal is to spin a good yarn and entertain an audience, then good writing is writing that achieves that. If your goal is to convey a specific piece of information, then readers should come away now knowing what you wanted them to know.