Living Well

Delicious and Good For You: The Benefits of Green Tea 0

Green tea has to be one of the healthiest drinks out there. If you’re looking to give your immune system a boost, speed up your metabolism, or improve your brain function without moving a muscle (except to grab your favorite mug), then green tea could be the secret ingredient you’ve been needing in your life.

Green tea helps with the best of both worlds, because it can help improve your outside by starting from the inside. Green tea is also completely natural. What more can you ask for? With how many benefits are jam-packed in this tasty little drink, you’d wonder why absolutely everyone hasn’t taken advantage of it yet.

Let’s start with the basics green tea is loaded with antioxidants and nutrients. You’ve heard it all your life, I’m sure— these things are awesome for you. But let’s break it down a little for those of you interested in the details. How do these things actually affect the health of your body? Antioxidants are nutrients and/or enzymes, meaning they play a huge role in fighting free radicals, substances that attack your DNA and other healthy cells. Antioxidants boost up your ability to fight off these free radicals, and push back against things like visible aging and cellular damage, and reduce the chance of disease. Antioxidants mop up these unstable free radicals to repair and limit cell and molecule damage that comes from our everyday contact with them.

Green tea contains a superpower called Epigallocatechin Gallate, which we’ll call EGCG. This compound has been tied to numerous studies that show it is effective in treating various diseases, making it a big contributing player in green tea’s health-boosting reputation. Green tea has also been known to increase fat burning and boost the metabolic rate.

Green tea also helps to keep you awake. Are you someone that needs your morning coffee in order to make it through the day? Green tea is likely a better alternative for you. Although it doesn’t contain as much caffeine as coffee does, green tea doesn’t contain the added cream and sugar that many of us coffee drinkers love. Instead, you get an all-natural option with all the aforementioned health benefits. Green tea contains this active stimulant, but because it does not have the same amount that you find in coffee, you won’t get the same jittery effects, which is oftentimes our least favorite part about getting our morning java. Instead, you’ll have a more productive, stable buzz. You’ll still reap the benefits of being more energized, but you won’t find yourself tapping your foot against your desk all day.

Hate drinking your tea plain? You can add some natural ingredients that serve up excellent health benefits themselves. Boost up the flavor and nutrition with lemon or honey.

Lemon is packed with nourishing elements like vitamins C, B6, A, E, and iron, magnesium, potassium, and protein, among others. Lemons also help to restore balance to the body’s pH, and is known to fight infections and cold through flavonoids.

Honey will add a sweetness to your tea that rivals sugar in your coffee. Besides its delicious taste, honey also aids in soothing things like allergies and sore throats. Honey will also help you to get yourself off to sleep, as it is a natural sleep aid. Honey is additionally overall anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, regulates blood sugar, probiotic (meaning it contains friendly bacteria!), and helps to strengthen the immune system by way of producing immune cells. How’s that for a super-packed drink?

We've only just begun to scratch the surface when it comes to what green tea can do for your body. It's all-natural, has a comforting taste, and produces a multitude of beneficial changes that will become visible after adding a few cups to your diet. What's not to love? Now go ahead and brew yourself a cup, you can thank us later.

5 Apps to Increase Mental Clarity 0

We all have stressors in our day-to-day that get into our heads and hinder us from reaching a place of peace. Fortunately, scientists and techies are coming up with creative ways to help us combat these things. We’re living in the 21st century, so technology has now come into play as a valid tool to help improve your mental state. You can now utilize brain training apps as a tool to increase your mental clarity.

Some of us want to be able to focus better while at work, release ourselves from distracting thoughts, or even just boost our mood. Mental clarity can be a component that leads to your fulfillment, and allow you to achieve peace and balance through brain training activities. These apps aim to train your brain in several different categories— like positivity, meditation, communication skills, awareness, or memory— and in turn lead you towards a new direction. Many have attributed the change to a healthy lifestyle to these apps, so what have you got to lose? Here are 5 of our favorite apps that increase mental clarity.

Elevate: This app focuses on cognitive function, like reading, writing, and listening. This colorful game gives you three training sessions a day that focus on improving your communication skills. It might sound like your high school english class, but Elevate makes these trainings a lot more fun and intriguing. By using bold color schemes, playful animations, and goal-based directions, you feel as though you’re playing a game instead of teaching yourself a lesson about sentence fragments. Elevate aims to improve things like memory, calculation, decision making, and focus through a variety of games that are short and sweet.

Headspace: This app is all about meditation, promising to teach you how to meditate in just 10 minutes a day. Meditation is the holy grail of peace and relaxation for many, and this app aims to expose it to those who are having difficulty or are unaware of how to go about meditation. The goal is to get you to a place where you can focus better, stress less, and smile more. Headspace will teach you the basics of meditation through breathing and visualization, and from there you can choose a category you’d like to focus your session on. Categories include foundation, health, relationships, and performance.

Lumosity: Arguably one of the most popular brain training apps, Lumosity aims to improve skills that can easily translate to real-world tasks, like remembering a list or making decisions. The format is split into sessions of three race-against-the-clock training games tailored to your goals, including but not limited to: memory, attention, problem solving skills, processing speed, and flexibility of thinking. This app feels like a true educational tool that is used to hone in on your cognitive abilities, so you can gain skills that you can apply in your everyday life.

Personal Zen: This app focuses on two animated characters: a happy, friendly little guy, and an angry, negative one. As they burrow through a field of grass, the player must follow the happy character and remember it’s patterns and routes. The point of the game is for the user to focus on the positive, and not the negative. The scientists who created Personal Zen call it’s method “attention bias modification training”, which means it intends to train your brain to pay attention differently. The game aims to reduce stress and anxiety, hoping that the players exit out of the app feeling happier and more positive having focused on the character that reflects those traits. It has also been used in studies as a precursor for an event that can be stress-inducing, like giving a speech, in order to lessen the anxiety associated with the event. Those who played had significantly less stress levels than those who played a placebo version.

Happify: This app trains you to conquer negative thoughts, and in turn hopes to help you show gratitude, cope with stress, and empathize, leading you to live a happier and more fulfilled life. Happify focuses on “positive psychology” meaning strengths and virtues that the player finds within themselves. Features of the app are quizzes, identifying positives polls, and lists that will grant life-changing new habits to the player. Happify aims to improve your mood and your general outlook on life, by retraining your brain to be happier. Performing these guided reflections daily will surely bring you some newfound positivity. Helping you to become more aware, grateful, and be able to focus on the driving forces in your life.

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10 Daily Affirmations to Live By 0

Many find that filling their mind with positive, self-assuring thoughts can start their day in the right direction. Here are some positive daily affirmations that we can all use in our lives to make taking on the world a little bit easier.

1. I am in charge of how I feel and today I am choosing happiness.

2. Amazing opportunities exist for me in every aspect of my life.

3. I freely give up what is no longer serving me, and release it to create space for what inspires me.

4. I either have control or I don’t; worry is wasted energy.

5. I choose to fully participate in my day.

6. I am at peace with all that has happened, is happening, and will happen.

7. I am a powerhouse, I am indestructible. I am conquering my problem and defeating it steadily each day.

8. I am a better person for the hardship I have gone through.

9. I feel safe in the rhythm and flow of ever-changing life.