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proprioceptors are the sensors in your muscles that help to govern your balance. All of your muscles and tendons have these sensors. When you’re injured, the proprioceptors become damaged and don’t function properly. This can lead to becoming more easily injured, such as when you are running on uneven terrain. In those circumstances, when you’re about to roll your ankle, it’s your proprioceptors that inform your tendons and muscles to fire to stop that process.

Inflammation is known to be boosted by stressful situations. But when yoga experts were exposed to stress (such as dipping their feet in ice water,) they experienced less of an increase in their inflammatory response than yoga novices did.

Yoga focuses on deep breathing and controlling breathing, which may slow down the body's "fight or flight" response — the body's reaction to stress, Kiecolt-Glaser said.

Yoga also involves meditation, which helps people learn to pay attention to how they are feeling. So yoga experts may be more aware of their stress and better able to control their response to it.

More Americans with psychiatric conditions are being treated with drugs alone compared with a decade ago, while "talk therapy" -- either by itself or in combination with medication -- is on the decline, a new study finds.

The results, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, are based on data from two government health surveys conducted in 1998 and 2007.Over that period, the percentage of Americans who said they'd had at least one psychotherapy session in the past year remained steady -- at just over 3 percent in both 1998 and 2007.However, among Americans receiving any outpatient mental health care, the proportion being treated with drugs alone rose from 44 percent in 1998 to 57 percent in 2007.Meanwhile, combined treatment with drugs and psychotherapy declined from 40 percent to 32 percent, and the use of psychotherapy alone slipped from 16 percent in 1998 to about 10 percent in 2007.National spending on psychotherapy also declined -- from an estimated total of $11 billion in 1998 to $7 billion in 2007. Overall spending on mental health care remained fairly steady, however -- at $15.4 billion in 1998 and $16 billion in 2007- suggesting an increase in the proportion of mental health spending devoted to drug therapies.

"Mental health care," he said, "is evolving in a way that means more people are receiving treatment, but are not necessarily getting the most effective therapy."

Although mind-bending drugs such as psilocybin are still used most often by people looking to get high, researchers around the country have begun to explore whether these and other illegal drugs can help treat intractable depression, anxiety, and other mental-health problems.

n the past month alone, studies have been published on the benefits of MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) in people with post-traumatic stress disorder and on the fast-acting antidepressive effects of the club drug ketamine (aka "Special K").

But research into the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs ground to a halt in the early 1970s, after the federal government criminalized LSD and psilocybin -- and after the drugs were eagerly adopted by college students and the hippie counterculture. "These studies had to be shut down because of the cultural reaction,"

Every minute, there's a death due to cardiovascular disease in women, says Gregg Fonarow, director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who was not an author."This constitutes 422,000 deaths a year — more than cancer, respiratory disease, Alzheimer's and accidents combined," Fonarow says.The guidelines recommend that women:•Avoid smoking and exposure to environmental smoke.•Be physically active, getting 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise.•Establish a comprehensive risk-reduction regime if diagnosed with heart disease or have a heart event.•Achieve a healthy body weight.•Eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables; choose whole-grain, high-fiber foods; eat oily fish at least twice a week; limit saturated fat, cholesterol and sugar; avoid trans-fatty acids.•Consume omega-3 fatty acids by eating fish, or in capsule form if they have high cholesterol.

“Exercise is a form of stress,” she pointed out. So is social isolation. Each, independently, induces the release of stress hormones (primarily corticosterone in rodents and cortisol in people). These hormones have been found, in multiple studies, to reduce neurogenesis. Except after exercise; then, despite increased levels of the hormones, neurogenesis booms. It’s possible, Dr. Stranahan said, that social connections provide a physiological buffer, a calming, that helps neurogenesis to proceed despite the stressful nature of exercise. Social isolation removes that protection and simultaneously pumps more stress hormones into the system, blunting exercise’s positive effects on brainpower.

London’s original pledge evolved into a plan to get one million more people around England playing sports three or more times a week for at least 30 minutes at a time, known as the 3x30 plan. Even that target is proving elusive. Figures issued in December by Sport England, the governing body for community sports, indicated that participation at the 3x30 level had increased by 123,000 since 2007-8, when the one million baseline was established. But that number increased by only 8,000 in the last year. At the current rate, the goal of one million new participants would not be reached in 2012-13 as hoped but more than a decade later in 2023-24.

the number of adults doing zero moderate sports activity rose by nearly 300,000 from 2005, when London was awarded the Olympics, to the fall of 2010.

London is hardly the first host city to struggle with its Olympic legacy. In truth, international events like the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup leave a greater discernible impact on infrastructure than on sports. Roads, airports and rail systems are improved while a number of stadiums become white elephants and lingering sporting benefits remain indistinct. Six years after Albertville, France, hosted the 1992 Winter Olympics, the figure-skating arena and speed-skating oval there were fenced off and abandoned. The magnificent Olympic stadium showcased during the 2008 Beijing Games, known as the Bird’s Nest, was seldom being used a year and a half later.

If you are trying to eat as healthy as the government wants you to, it’s going to cost you: at least $7.28  a week extra, that is. A recent update of U.S. nutritional guidelines -- what used to be known as the food pyramid and is now called "My Plate" -- calls on Americans to eat more fresh foods containing potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin D and calcium.

With potassium, for instance, the participants consumed an average of 2,800 milligrams a day — 700 milligrams below the recommended amount. To get up to par, they’d have to spend an extra $1.04 a day, or $380 a year. For a family of four, that's $1,520 annually. To boost levels of dietary fiber and vitamin D, they’d have to spend about 35 cents extra a day for each of the two nutrients. Most participants came so close to meeting calcium guidelines, they wouldn’t have to spend more on dairy products.

Boosting potassium doesn't have to come with such a high price tag, though. “If you were to guide people toward the most affordable sources of potassium, you could do it more cheaply,” Monsivais said. Potatoes and beans, for instance, are inexpensive sources of potassium and dietary fiber, For a mere 95 cents, you could buy five bananas at Trader Joe’s, and they’d provide 450 to 500 milligrams of potassium each. So why would the participants in Monsivais’ study have to spend so much? King County includes Seattle, one of the most affluent and highly educated cities in the country. When those folks consume potassium, Monsivais says, it tends to come in the form of more expensive fruits and vegetables such as nectarines and dark leafy greens. Sure, they could eat more economically, but they'd have to know how to do so, Monsivais said. The guidelines may be based on solid scientific evidence, he says, but they won’t do much good if Americans don’t know what foods provide the best nutritional bang for their buck.

Feeling stressed? Then try savoring the scent of lemon, mango, lavender, or other fragrant plants. Scientists in Japan are reporting the first scientific evidence that inhaling certain fragrances alter gene activity and blood chemistry in ways that can reduce stress levels. 

people have inhaled the scent of certain plants since ancient times to help reduce stress, fight inflammation and depression, and induce sleep. Aromatherapy, the use of fragrant plant oils to improve mood and health, has become a popular form of alternative medicine today. And linalool is one of the most widely used substances to soothe away emotional stress.

Linalool returned stress-elevated levels of neutrophils and lymphocytes — key parts of the immune system — to near-normal levels. Inhaling linalool also reduced the activity of more than 100 genes that go into overdrive in stressful situations.

Proprioceptive cues are images and other sensory cues that enable you to modify your running stride for the better as you think about them while running.

Using proprioceptive cues effectively requires concentration and discipline. Our natural tendency is to let our thoughts wander aimlessly while running. If you're serious about improving your stride, you must fight this tendency by forcing yourself to concentrate on and execute a particular proprioceptive cue for hundreds of consecutive strides.

You'll get the best results from proprioceptive cues if you use one at a time throughout the entire length of a run and you use them generally at least three times a week every week. Because proprioceptive cues require you to use your muscles differently than they are accustomed to being used, certain muscles may fatigue more quickly, so it's best to begin using each specific proprioceptive cue only during short recovery runs.