1. Eat a satisfying dinner
2. Eat fruit
3. Drink herbal tea
4. Brush your teeth
5. Drink some water
Sparkling water flavored with a little citrus or cucumber is particularly effective at distracting your mouth from the desire to keep chewing.
6. Call a friend
7. Get moving
8. Play video games
Darya is a scientist, foodie and advocate of local, seasonal foods.
it may not be feelings of love or loyalty that keep couples together. Instead, scientists speculate that your level of commitment may depend on how much a partner enhances your life and broadens your horizons — a concept that Arthur Aron, a psychologist and relationship researcher at Stony Brook University, calls “self-expansion.”
To measure this quality, couples are asked a series of questions: How much does your partner provide a source of exciting experiences? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? How much do you see your partner as a way to expand your own capabilities?
The Stony Brook researchers conducted experiments using activities that stimulated self-expansion. Some couples were given mundane tasks, while others took part in a silly exercise in which they were tied together and asked to crawl on mats, pushing a foam cylinder with their heads. The study was rigged so the couples failed the time limit on the first two tries, but just barely made it on the third, resulting in much celebration.
Couples were given relationship tests before and after the experiment. Those who had taken part in the challenging activity posted greater increases in love and relationship satisfaction than those who had not experienced victory together.
Now the researchers are embarking on a series of studies to measure how self-expansion influences a relationship. They theorize that couples who explore new places and try new things will tap into feelings of self-expansion, lifting their level of commitment.
“We enter relationships because the other person becomes part of ourselves, and that expands us,” Dr. Aron said. “That’s why people who fall in love stay up all night talking and it feels really exciting. We think couples can get some of that back by doing challenging and exciting things together.”
Tara Parker-Pope’s new book is “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.”
C.S. Lewis once said that the same thing happens in Christianity; it’s what you add to it that ruins it. In fact, C.S. Lewis called it the “Christianity and Syndrome;” where we link our faith to some other cause to which we are partial and say “this is the center of our faith.”
And so we hear from our pulpits that the main focus for us must be Christianity and Marxism, or Christianity and Capitalism, or Christianity and Social Action, or Christianity and Gun Control, or Christianity and the Republican Platform, or Christianity and the Pro-life Movement or Christianity and the Twelve Step program or Christianity and Homosexual Rights movement or anything else you might want to insert there.
And the fact is, that as soon as you add an “And” to Christianity you have lost your focus. A Christian worldview speaks to all of those important issues; but every one of them is peripheral to who we are. We are not Christians AND something else; we are Christians, and we let our faith guide us in all other decisions of life.
Gregory T. Riether
“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.”
Maj. Jake Marvel: Chaplain of the New York Air National Guard's 109th Airlift Wing.
As the highest ranking chaplain at Stratton Air Force Base in Glenville, Marvel conducts spiritual programs for airmen. He has deployed in support of military missions. He has prayed and counseled Army National Guardsmen after Hurricane Katrina and military personnel injured in the war in Iraq at a U.S. base in Germany. He has also accompanied the 109th Airlift Wing on trips to Antarctica and Greenland.
How do you serve military members with different religious backgrounds?
"I find beauty in the different faiths. It's not my job to convert folks to my faith. My job is to let people experience the depths of their own faiths and become aware of that in their lives. I work to enable them to have the courage to become the people God has created them to be."
When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God LOVES man: not that He has some “disinterested,” because really indifferent concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect,” is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.
