Tag: Kids

Are the shelves at home overflowing with bits and pieces? Is it a struggle to turn up a matching pair of shoes, or two earrings, let alone one hairpin?

Here are three ways to get a house better organised, and the pleasing thing about all of them is that they repurpose something you already have.

Binder clips in the freezer

Take a handful of binder clips and clip your bags onto the freezer shelves.

It is a little fiddly at first, keeping the bag sealed while you fix it to the rung, and practice sorts that out. What you get back is time and space, and a freezer that looks considerably more organised than it did.

A magazine rack for pot lids

Once the pans themselves have a home, the lids still need one, and lids are what turn a tidy cupboard back into a jumble.

The walls inside a cupboard are the right spot and they are almost always going unused. You can buy a dedicated lid holder. Or you can save the money and give an old magazine rack a second life doing exactly the same job.

A cutlery organiser for toothbrushes

Toothbrushes are among the most germ-laden things in a house, which is not what most people expect of an object they put in their mouth twice a day.

What they need above all is to dry out properly between uses, and a crowded pot does not allow it. Take an unused cutlery organiser and give every brush its own compartment. Each one gets air on all sides, and nothing touches anything else.

Three small changes, no purchases, and a house that is easier to live in by the weekend.

However tough a person is, emotion remains a powerful part of a life, and there are moments where what you feel simply swamps you.

Start with what this is not. Learning to control your emotions does not mean learning to suppress them. It is closer to the opposite. Once you accept that you, like everybody else, react to particular inputs with particular feelings, you give yourself the chance not to let those feelings run your thoughts and your actions.

There is generally nothing wrong with expressing what you feel. We are wired for it. But anger, anxiety and fear are the three that need handling, and the question underneath is simple. Are you running your emotions, or are they running you?

You are in charge of your thoughts

Do not accept the idea that your own thinking is beyond your say.

Emotions certainly influence thoughts. What gets forgotten is that it runs both ways, and thought can be used to guide feeling, either strengthening it or working against it. The two are closely linked and they are not the same thing.

Try to look at the situation objectively. If you cannot, put it to a friend you trust, someone who can see it with less bias than you currently can and help you sort out what you actually think.

You are in charge of what you do

Even when the feeling stays stubbornly negative, what you do about it is still open.

Acting on a feeling, or declining to, is within your gift. Take a step back and look at the options instead of moving on instinct.

Be clear about what this buys you. Choosing the next action well will not make the feeling disappear. It reduces how much power the feeling has over you, which is a different and more achievable thing.

You can only control yourself

Run through the difficult emotions and the same thread shows up in all of them, which is control.

We are angry because we cannot make other people do what we want. We worry because tomorrow is not ours to arrange. We grieve because we lost someone or something through circumstances that were never in our hands. We are afraid because something is threatening us that we cannot govern.

Once you see that almost the only thing available to you is yourself, letting go of the rest becomes easier. Not easy. Easier.

Which leaves one place to put your attention, and it is enough. Not the event. How you respond to it.

A quietly useful idea from the health sessions: each organ has its own language, and it speaks to you through the habits it thrives on. Give it the habit it prefers and it does its job; ignore that habit and it eventually complains. Here is the short phrasebook.

The map

The heart prefers a daily walk. The brain prefers quality sleep, not just any sleep. The lungs prefer deep, deliberate breathing. The bones prefer weight-bearing effort — walking, squats, climbing stairs. The blood prefers plain water, taken daily. The gut prefers foods rich in the good bacteria of probiotics. Muscles prefer resistance work at least twice a week, not cardio alone. The nervous system prefers meditation. Memory prefers being made to learn something new. The skin prefers daily protection from the sun. The immune system, like the brain, prefers good sleep.

The principle underneath

None of these is dramatic, and that is the point. Health here is less about occasional big interventions than about listening to each system through the ordinary habit it responds to, and giving it that habit often enough to count. Pick one organ, give it its favourite habit this week, and let the list grow from there.

Physical education matters more than studies. Not as a pleasant addition to them, not as the period that empties the head between two difficult lessons. More, because it is what shapes a young person into a better human being, and no examination has ever been designed to measure that.

What it teaches, before anything else, is how to raise the quality of your own life. Fix a child’s whole attention on school work and the life around it goes flat and stops moving, and a young life in that condition heads somewhere particular. Towards low spirits, and towards failing.

Exercise also does something quieter. It builds stamina, and a student with stamina starts to be pleased by his own intelligence and his own abilities rather than anxious about them. That is a rare thing to watch happen in a child, and it does not happen at a desk.

Study after study has shown how much physical activity matters inside a school, which is why so many now push their students towards it instead of surrendering the games period the moment examinations appear on the calendar.

It gives concentration back

The research points at the basal ganglia, the region that governs how well a person can hold focus, and finds that physical activity enlarges it.

That has never mattered more. A student today carries several distractions at once, the television at home and the phone in the pocket among them, and simply staying with one subject has become genuinely hard. A teacher who pushes physical education is doing something direct about that, not merely letting the class run about.

It matters for healthy growth

A great many school children now treat unhealthy food as ordinary daily fare. Fries, fizzy drinks, pizza, burgers. Eaten on a regular basis, that road leads to obesity in childhood.

Exercise at school holds off both obesity and high blood pressure, and the mechanism is plain arithmetic. Activity spends the surplus calories. Calories that go unspent are laid down as fat. Physical work turns the same surplus into energy instead of storage.

It protects sleep

Sleeping properly through the night is one of the foundations of a happy and healthy life. A child who has genuinely exerted himself finishes the day with a tired body, and a tired body wants that sleep rather than resisting it.

Follow what comes of it. A rested child sits straighter through lessons and follows them instead of drifting. Attention of that kind prevents the careless slips that lose marks on work already understood. And it leaves something over, which the child spends being useful to his teachers and decent to the students beside him.

It gives the stress an exit

School is a hectic business for every person inside it, and the pressure is often not academic at all. It may be a quarrel with a friend. It may be a poor grade that turned up despite honest work.

A student under that weight cannot concentrate on his performance if he is never given room to unload it. Physical activity provides the room. Working the body and breathing deeply pulls extra air into the lungs, which carries more oxygen to the brain, and a brain supplied that way settles and lets go of the tension.

Why the schools changed their minds

Many have now written physical education into the core of the curriculum and actively encourage a balance between lessons and exercise.

They did it for a reason that should close the argument. The children who join in turn out happier and in better health than the ones who give every available hour to school work.

Positivity makes an optimist of a person, and an optimist spends far less of the day on worry and on the thoughts that circle. Build the habit and you become happier company, someone whose eye goes to the brighter side of a thing and who assumes the best is on its way.

The word to notice is build. This is not a temperament issued at birth to the lucky. Take it up as a way of living and the ordinary business of the day gets easier to carry, and useful changes start arriving in the life around it. Here is what it actually gives you.

The aura effect

You will have heard this put loosely elsewhere, and there is something to it. What you genuinely want begins finding its way to you.

Part of that is simply company. Decide to be positive and you drift towards people who have decided the same thing, or better still towards people who are further along than you and pull you up. Some of the others you convert. You help them notice what is worth noticing in a situation they had already given up on.

That is not a small service to perform. It is how peace gets carried into a vast and troubled galaxy, one person at a time.

Days of fun and folly

This one is close to obvious once you say it. Look only at what is good in a situation and you can pull that good out of surroundings that are mostly bad.

Even through a season of grief there is a flicker of something better somewhere in the day, and locating it is what lets a good day start at all. Not a perfect one. One that began well rather than badly, and then another behind it.

The best thing you can pass to anybody is exactly that. Be positive, then watch the day follow suit.

For a glass half full

An optimistic outlook lets you picture the world as a cheerful place, and anyone who pictures it that way finds something to be glad about wherever he happens to be standing.

It also turns you into a supply of happiness for the people nearby. The optimist lifts others without being asked and works for their good almost out of habit, and that is welcome news for everyone within reach of him.

There is a practical dividend as well. More ways open up to involve yourself with other people, and you take your share of the pleasure of a thoroughly merry world.

Where it starts

Not with a resolution, which is gone by Thursday. With one ordinary situation today, and the decision to look for what is good in it before cataloguing what is wrong.

Repeat that often enough and it stops being a decision at all and becomes simply the way you see. Which is the whole of the method, and the reason the question is how to gain the attitude rather than whether you were born holding it.

A small number of nightmares recur across almost every population studied. Falling. Being pursued. Teeth coming loose. Arriving somewhere unprepared, often for an examination taken decades ago.

The consistency is the interesting part. Whatever produces them is not cultural.

When they happen matters

Most occur late in the night, during the stage of sleep where dreaming is most vivid and the body is temporarily unable to move. That paralysis is a safety feature, stopping you acting out what you dream.

It also explains the specific helplessness people describe, the sense of being unable to run or shout. In a very literal sense, you cannot.

The rehearsal idea

One long-standing suggestion is that these dreams are a form of practice. The brain runs threat scenarios in a setting where failure has no cost, and the recurring themes are the ancient ones. Falling. Being hunted. Losing standing in the group.

It fits the pattern reasonably well, though it remains a proposal rather than a settled account. Anyone who tells you the function of dreaming is known is ahead of the evidence.

What they are not

They are not messages in code, and the dictionaries that assign a fixed meaning to each object have no support behind them. Content tends to reflect what has been on your mind, which is why stress, illness, fever and a disrupted schedule all reliably increase them.

A nightmare after a difficult month is a symptom, not a signal.

When it stops being ordinary

Frequent nightmares that damage sleep, or that follow a distressing event and keep returning, are worth raising with a doctor. There are approaches that work well, and enduring them is not the only option.

Most food traditions contain the same instruction in different words. Eat what is growing now. It was practical advice long before anyone could explain it, because in most places there was no alternative.

The reasoning underneath it holds up reasonably well.

Seasonal produce is simply fresher

Much of the nutritional value in fruit and vegetables declines from the moment of harvest. What is in season locally has usually travelled less and waited less, so more of it survives to the plate.

There is nothing mystical in this. It is mostly a question of elapsed time.

The seasons and the illnesses line up

Citrus arrives in the months when respiratory infections circulate. The vegetables that store through winter are dense and warming. Summer produce is largely water, at the time of year when losing water is the main risk.

Whether this is design or coincidence hardly matters. The practical effect is that eating with the calendar tends to supply roughly what the calendar demands.

Where the claims go too far

No food prevents an infection, and it is worth being blunt about that because a great deal is sold on the opposite promise. Diet supports the immune system. It does not command it. Someone eating impeccably will still catch what is going around.

Single ingredients get particularly overstated. Nothing in a kitchen cures anything on its own.

What is reasonable to expect

A body that is well fed, well hydrated and rested tends to recover faster and feel less flattened while doing so. That is a real benefit and a modest one, and modest is what it should be sold as.

Variety across a week matters more than any single item in it. That is unexciting advice, which is probably why it keeps needing repeating.

A virus is not really alive in the way a bacterium is. It carries a set of instructions in a protein shell and it can do nothing at all on its own. It has to reach a cell, get inside, and use that cell’s machinery to make copies of itself.

That single fact explains most of what follows, including why antibiotics do nothing.

The symptoms are largely your own response

The aching, the fever, the tiredness. These are mostly not damage caused by the virus. They are the immune system running hard.

Raised temperature makes conditions less comfortable for the invader and speeds parts of the defence. The exhaustion is the cost of an expensive process running at full rate. Feeling terrible is, awkwardly, the sign that the system is working.

Why antibiotics are useless here

Antibiotics attack structures that bacteria have and viruses do not, such as a cell wall. There is nothing for the drug to act on.

Taking them anyway does not shorten the illness by an hour, and it does contribute to resistance, which is a genuine and growing problem. This is worth being firm about, including when a prescription is offered easily.

What actually helps

Fluids, because fever and breathing through the mouth lose more water than usual. Rest, because the response is metabolically costly and working through it lengthens it. Time, because most viral illnesses are self-limiting and end when the immune system finishes.

When it is not ordinary

Difficulty breathing, a fever that will not come down or returns after improvement, confusion, dehydration, or an illness that keeps worsening past the point where it should be easing. Those warrant a doctor rather than patience.

The rest is mostly a matter of letting a system that knows what it is doing get on with it.

Something goes wrong and within seconds the mind has produced an explanation involving somebody else. The traffic. The brief. The person who did not reply. It happens before deliberate thought arrives, which is why it feels like observation rather than choice.

What blame is actually protecting

Not reputation. Self-image, which is a smaller and more fragile thing. Accepting a share of the fault means holding two ideas at once, that you are broadly competent and that you got this wrong, and holding both is uncomfortable enough that the mind will do real work to avoid it.

Blame resolves the discomfort instantly. That speed is the whole appeal.

The price is control

Here is the trade nobody notices making. If the cause sits entirely outside you, so does the remedy. You have bought comfort with the currency of agency, and the exchange rate is terrible.

The person who says the brief was unclear has said something true and has also arranged for the same thing to happen next quarter. The person who adds that he did not ask for clarification has kept a lever.

Responsibility is not guilt

Worth separating carefully, because people conflate them and then avoid both. Guilt is about deserving blame, it looks backwards and it mostly hurts. Responsibility is about what part of this was yours to move, it looks forward and it mostly helps.

You can accept a share of the cause without accepting a share of the shame. Most people have never been shown the difference.

A workable rule

Assume ten percent. Whatever went wrong, and whatever anybody else did, find the tenth of it that was yours. It is almost always there, it is usually small, and it is the only part you can do anything about tomorrow.

A farmer owed money to a lender who wanted his daughter. The lender proposed a wager. He would put one black stone and one white stone into a bag. If she drew white, the debt was cleared. If she drew black, she was his.

She watched him bend down on the stony path and pick up two stones. Both were black. He dropped them in the bag and invited her to choose.

The trap is the frame, not the stones

She had three apparent options and all of them were bad. Refuse and her father was ruined. Draw and lose. Expose the cheat and humiliate a powerful man in public, who would find another way.

What she did instead was take a stone, fumble it, and let it fall among the thousands on the path before anyone saw it. Then she apologised, and pointed out that the colour of the remaining stone in the bag would show what she had drawn.

The lender could not object without confessing.

Why this is worth remembering

Because the shape recurs. Take the offer or lose the client. Accept the transfer or accept the exit. Agree with the room or be the difficult one. Two doors, both bad, and the pressure to walk through one quickly.

A choice presented as binary has usually been narrowed by somebody with an interest in the outcome.

The move is not cleverness

She did not out-argue him. She used the one fact she had, which was that he could not admit what he had done, and she left him his dignity while doing it. That is the part people skip.

Winning while making the other side confess is a different and much more expensive game.