Smell the Roses! - Breathing Space Blog

Studies at The Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation shows that flowery odors will help your brain function more effectively. Test subjects were asked to complete puzzles before and after being exposed to flowery odors. The scents apparently relax or improve your mood—subjects were able to complete puzzles 17% faster after smelling the flowers.

Drugs, Unfortunately, Rule - Breathing Space Blog

Where is the Breathing Space in a nation that pops a pill at every turn? You'll never convince me otherwise: as a society our default response to information and communication overload is ingesting psychopharmaceuticals.

Patrick Di Justo, writing years back in Wired Magazine said, "America may be the land of Mickey Mouse and Goofy, but the U.S. isn’t exactly the happiest place on Earth. Antidepressants are the most commonly popped pills in the country, accounting for 227 million prescriptions filled last year alone. Of course, Prozac and its descendants aren’t the only popular psychiatric meds: Remedies for seizure disorders -- often used to treat bipolar disease, as well as epilepsy -- and for anxiety are among the 10 most-prescribed drugs in the nation."

"But even as our hunger for pills has grown, basic innovation has slowed. Many “new” medications are actually reformulations of previously approved drugs, not novel molecules. As a result, some of the most widely taken treatments have been around for years: Today's leading anxiety beater, alprazolam, for example, originally hit the market in 1981 as Xanax."

Real Leisure is Vital - Breathing Space Blog

Real leisure is necessary in our lives. It cannot be squeezed into our busy days. It must happen at its own pace. We need to take the time to relax. Without a balance between work and play, we become "human doings" instead of human beings.

A New Year, Time for Tickler Files - Breathing Space Blog

If you're overwhelmed by what crosses your desk, it's worth considering the benefits of having a file folder for each month of the year and a file folder for each day of the month. This idea, the "tickler file" system, has been in practice for years.

Create a file for days 1-31 of the month, and place it at the front of one of your file drawers. Behind that, have a file for each month of the year. If it's the second day of the month, for example, but you receive something that you won't need to deal with until the 15th, then put it in the file for, say, the 13th to allow yourself some slack. If anything comes in that you don't need to handle now, put it in your tickler file. This yields some immediate benefits. It keeps your desk clear and eliminates a lot of worry about where things go.

As the days and months go by, you continually take files that were in front and put them in the back. Once you get this system in place, you'll find that many of the things you file may not need to be acted on later. The benefits of this system are immediate.

The Breathing Space Institute Platform - Breathing Space Blog

January 1, 2015:  The Breathing Space Institute Platform
 
Population
        Replacement-level human population is the practical and ethical approach to ensuring a sustainable quality of life on this planet – for human beings and other remaining species. Responsible parenting is the most important element of society.

Information
        As producers of information, each of us needs to control the amount of data we offer to others so as to not inundate or overwhelm them. As consumers of information, we need to be discriminating about what we ingest and realize the counterproductive impact of taking in more information than we can reasonably assimilate.

Media Growth
        The need for responsible reporting has never been more critical. Even among supposedly high reputation media outlets, politically biased, tabloid, and innuendo journalism is tearing at the fabric of our society. Media professionals and their audiences must overcome the prevailing  predisposition of focusing attention on 1) disasters, 2) scandals, 3) personal attacks, and 4) news that fails to convey a balanced view of society. 

Paper, Paper
        Paper still remains the medium by which most information in our society is distributed. Each of us faces the challenge of adopting new measures to limit the amount of paper on our desks. Such measures include more selectively targeting message recipients, limiting the length and frequency of messages, and recycling.

An Over-abundance of Choices
        No one benefits by being confronted with more choices than he/she can sensibly consider. As producers, we need to offer appropriate choices that best serve consumers. As consumers, we need to ignore many of the choices confronting us.

Books to Explore - Breathing Space Blog

Books to explore:
The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, by Robert Lang, Yale University Press, 2001
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz, Ecco/Harper Collins, 2004

Simpler Living, By Jeff Davidson Skyhorse Books, 2010

Goodbye to Simplicity? - Breathing Space Blog

Too true:
In our complex modern world, nothing is simple anymore, not even dying.
Lori Watt