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In a 2013 study, Karla Klein Murdock, a professor of psychology at Washington and Lee University, researched college-age texters. She found high-volume texters who were most stressed in their relationships were also most likely to admit to experiencing academic burnout and the lowest emotional well-being. Poorer sleep quality also seemed to plague the frequent texters. Why might heavy texting carry such a costly toll on people who are highly stressed in their relationships? A reasonable possibility that Murdock suggests has to do with the behavior and expectations of the heavy texter. Texting creates its own relational vortex. If the texts are flying fast and furious, things can easily get out of hand. Without the in-person cues that you would get if you were having a face-to-face discussion, misunderstandings and hurt feelings can quickly escalate. Texting also carries a cognitive cost, draining your attentional resources. As your inner reserve is worn down, you become exhausted and burned out. The physiological activation involved in texting erodes your sleep, and the stage is set for you to feel emotionally depleted.

Psychologist Dr. Kelly McGonigal does a TED talk about how to make stress your friend and how to cope with it better. Although seemingly impossible, she introduces a new way to view stress which is clinically proven to improve performance in any situation.

Positive thinking can be used to manage and reduce stress.

Patterns of negative or positive self-talk often start in childhood. Usually, the self-talk habit is one that's colored our thinking for years, and can affect us in many ways, influencing the experience of stress to our lives. However, any time can be a good time to change it! The article offers several pointers for change.

"Change has occurred so rapidly for our species that now we are equipped with brains that are super sensitive to threat but also super capable of planning, thinking, forecasting and looking ahead," said Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. "So we essentially drive ourselves nuts worrying about things because we have too much time and don't have many real threats on our survival, so fear gets expressed in these really strange, maladaptive ways." Dr. Hariri studies the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that has been called the seat of fear (there's one in each hemisphere of the brain). But it's really the seat of anticipation. The amygdala primes you to react - your pulse quickens, your muscles tense and your pupils dilate - even before other parts of your brain can figure out if you need to be scared or not. Nowadays, our amydalas can be overactive, thanks to 24/7 awareness of disasters around the world and/or stress/instability in one's personal and professional life. Remaining in this state of wary hypervigilance can contribute to issues like social anxiety, hypochondria, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia and all manner of phobias. It also plays a role in racial and religious intolerance because fearful people are more inclined to cling to the familiar and denigrate the unfamiliar. If you can sense and appreciate your fear - be it of flying, illness or social rejection - as merely your amygdala's request for more information rather than a signal of impending doom, then you are on your way to calming down and engaging more conscious, logic-dominated parts of your brain. At that point, you can assess the rationality of your fear and take steps to deal with it.

"...a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress. ... Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said. ... The study focused on "prosocial" gossip that "has the function of warning others about untrustworthy or dishonest people," said Willer, as opposed to the voyeuristic rumor-mongering about the ups and downs of such tabloid celebrities as Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen."

I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.

I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.

It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.

Screens have changed our reading patterns from the linear, left-to-right sequence of years past to a wild skimming and skipping pattern as we hunt for important words and information. One 2006 study of the eye movements of 232 people looking at Web pages found they read in an "F" pattern, scanning all the way across the top line of text but only halfway across the next few lines, eventually sliding their eyes down the left side of the page in a vertical movement toward the bottom. None of this is good for our ability to comprehend deeply, scientists say. Reading text punctuated with links leads to weaker comprehension than reading plain text, several studies have shown. A 2007 study involving 100 people found that a multimedia presentation mixing words, sounds and moving pictures resulted in lower comprehension than reading plain text did. Slow reading means a return to a continuous, linear pattern, in a quiet environment free of distractions. Advocates recommend setting aside at least 30 to 45 minutes in a comfortable chair far from cellphones and computers. Some suggest scheduling time like an exercise session. Many recommend taking occasional notes to deepen engagement with the text.

Talks about how rhythmic characteristics of language and accents are reflected in the rhythms of songs.

In a 2011 published study (https://mp.ucpress.edu/content/29/1/51.full.pdf+html), Nicholas Temperley and David Temperley, 2 musicologists, did a musical corpus analysis showing that the Scotch snap, a sixteenth-note on the beat followed by a dotted eighth-note, is common in both Scottish and English songs, but virtually nonexistent in German and Italian songs, and explored possible linguistic correlates for this phenomenon. British English shows a much higher proportion of very short stressed syllables (less than 100 ms) than the other two languages. Four vowels account for a large proportion of very short stressed syllables in British English, and also constitute a large proportion of SS tokens in our English musical corpus. A Scotch snap, as Adam Neely notes in the above video, is the musical, rhythmical counterpart to a trochee in poetry. Say the phrase "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" to hear a series of Scotch snaps.

Not about linguistics, but of general interest to students. Talks about genetic basis for test anxiety--and under which conditions it is advantageous. This article is long but gets more interesting the further you read.

Modern language learning strategies such as in class explanations, drills, and "role playing" exercises can be ineffective for some people. These approaches can come across as stressful. It can becomes difficult to understand the explanation or remember the rules of the language. Here are five language learning skills that may help.

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person's propensity to act irrationally. Fear-provoking words-like poverty, illness, and death-also stimulate the brain in negative ways. And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry-perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.

There are numerous positive effects of writing in a journal. The action of writing our thoughts, ideas and feelings benefits us in numerous aspects of our lives. One benefit of writing in a journal is that is boosts memory and comprehension. This is because there is a relationship between our hands and brains created by writing thoughts and ideas. Words are representation of ideas and the formation of letters causes the mind to compose or re-compose ideas while journaling. The second benefits is emotional, physical and psychological healing. This is because translating an experience into language makes the experience graspable and allows you to free yourself from emotional blockages and lowers anxiety, stress and induces better sleep. These are two out of ten benefits of writing in a journal that is proposed in this article.

Listening to music while studying can be helpful for many different reasons. Since music can affect your mood, if you listen to relaxing music it can prevent you from becoming stressed while studying. Music can also help to block out other distractions while studying, especially in busy or loud environments.

"No matter whether you're a new hire or a veteran professional, at some point you're going to have to initiate a 'difficult conversation' with a boss, co-worker or colleague. This conversation could be between you and one person, or it could be between you and an entire group of people."

On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think. We're automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if we've never seen either of them before. It's totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and don't notice it.

And for more on spatial orientation and color perception differences, read Guy Deutscher's _Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different Through Other Languages_. Referencing the first point that the author of the article makes, that English speakers are more apt to blame others, it's interesting how certain languages, like English, stress agency: someone/something causes an event, whereas languages like Hawaiian, are indeed, more apt to characterize situations in the passive: the event simply happened.

Interesting connections between language and the subconscious mind