https://elemental.medium.com/p/1d58e5d9e661 Get started Open in app Sign in Get started Elemental Your life, sourced by science. A publication from Medium about health and wellness. Follow 223K Followers About Get started Open in app Markham Heid *Pinned The Nuance How 'Soft Fascination' Helps Restore Your Tired Brain Attention fatigue is a threat to your cognitive and mental health [0] [0] Photo: Myles Tan/Unsplash Imagine shining a flashlight at a wall in a dark, empty room. If you walk toward the wall, the light will contract. The closer you get to the wall, the smaller and more concentrated the beam of light becomes. By the time the flashlight is an inch from the wall, you'll see a tight, bright circle of light surrounded by shadow and darkness. Your attention is a lot like the beam of that flashlight. You can focus it closely and intensely on something, or you can relax it -- allowing it to grow soft and diffuse. A lot of research... Read more * 4 min read 270 1 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Brandy L Schillace *2 days ago Coping With Death Death is Both an Event and a Process The Intricacy of Grief in Uncertain Times [1] [1] Photo by Gabriel on Unsplash Death is not a thing, but things: a process of emotions, states of being, suddenly shifting relationships, the buzz of needful activity, an empty chair, a dialed number that doesn't connect. In the clutches of grief, death may seem like a single event, the running down of a curtain beyond which none of us can see -- but it is also a path, a journey, a process. Knowing this more deeply can help us to grieve. In my book Death's Summer Coat, I talk a lot about the human need to categorize and differentiate. We want to say: surely death... Read more * 5 min read 75 2 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Craig Spencer MD MPH *Jun 10 I Don't Miss Covid It's been a long time since I saw a Covid patient in the ER, and I couldn't be happier [1] [1] Photo: Camilo Jimenez/Unsplash I'm an emergency room doctor in New York City, and I haven't seen a Covid-19 patient in weeks. It feels great having my old job back. In March 2020, Covid flooded our ERs. At first, it was just a dribble -- one or two Covid patients per day. But within a week, the virus had taken over every body in every bed. Every shift in the emergency room brought an endless stream of patients, one after another, all struggling to breathe and in desperate need of oxygen. The swiftness of Covid's arrival in our emergency rooms took us by surprise... Read more * 4 min read 536 10 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Brandy L Schillace *Jun 9 Coping With Death What to Expect When Death Comes In the wake of Covid-19, we are all grieving. How can we come to terms with death -- and what does it teach us about living? [1] [1] Hanwell Cemetery; Photo: Edward Howell/Unsplash In 2015, I published a book. It began like this: "A wake," my mother said. "To sit with the dead." We were on our way to West Virginia, to an unremarkable two-story colonial where my grandfather's remains had been washed and laid out for viewing. It had been raining all night, but apparently no one in this homey funeral parlor had been sleeping. They'd been sitting up with the body. Sitting up -- with the body -- all night. There are no good adjectives to describe my feelings about this. I was seventeen and grieving, but I wasn't horrified. Shocked... Read more * 4 min read 777 5 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Roy Britt *Jun 9 Age Wise It's Time to Really Talk About Depression Several strategies can help prevent a downward spiral -- they all start with reaching out [1] [1] Photo: Leon Liu/Unsplash This is the second in a four-part series on preventing depression, a serious and growing mental disorder that can strike at any age and, if untreated, persist and worsen. Rainy days often get me down. Even a little overcast can put me into a funk. Sometimes I just get moody for no good reason. That's all normal. But when feelings of sadness persist day after day, any of us -- me, you, a family member, or a friend -- runs the risk of plunging into debilitating depression. There is no immunity. There are, however, effective prevention strategies. "There is ample... Read more * 6 min read 493 8 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Markham Heid *Jun 8 The New Delta Strain Reveals the Shakiness of Our Covid-19 Situation The longer the wider world remains unvaccinated, the greater the risk that a devastating new variant will emerge [0] [0] Photo by Yolanda Sun on Unsplash In a letter recently obtained by The Guardian newspaper, more than 100 former presidents and heads of state urged the leaders of the world's wealthiest countries to do much more -- to commit more money, in particular, but also more aid and resources -- toward making and distributing vaccines across the globe. "No one anywhere is safe from Covid-19 until everyone is safe everywhere," the letter's signatories wrote, according to The Guardian. That's not just lofty talk, and it's not just a plea for the sake of the unvaccinated. That is cold reality. Apart from the deadly threat that the... Read more * 3 min read 1.8K 14 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Humphries *Jun 3 The Absurdity of Peer Review What the pandemic revealed about scientific publishing [1] [1] Image: athree23/Pixabay I was reading my umpteenth news story about Covid-19 science, a story about the latest research into how to make indoor spaces safe from infection, about whether cleaning surfaces or changing the air was more important. And it was bothering me. Not because it was dull (which, of course, it was: there are precious few ways to make air filtration and air pumps edge-of-the-seat stuff). But because of the way it treated the science. You see, much of the research it reported was in the form of pre-prints, papers shared by researchers on the internet before they are submitted to... Read more * 7 min read 1.4K 36 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Roy Britt *Jun 3 Age Wise Can We Prevent Depression? Self-care strategies to use before depression gets the best of you [1] [1] Photo: Sasha Freemind/Unsplash This is the first in a four-part series on preventing depression, a serious and growing mental disorder that can strike at any age and, if untreated, persist and worsen. Naomi Osaka's withdrawal from the French Open -- precipitated by "huge waves of anxiety" the 23-year-old feels over obligatory press events and the "long bouts of depression" she says she has dealt with since 2018 -- highlights the reality of the shadowy world of depression, an increasingly common condition that can sneak up on any of us, at any age, for reasons obvious or mysterious. Osaka's decision to "exercise self-care," as... Read more * 6 min read 881 10 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Markham Heid *Jun 2 The Nuance How the 'Frog-Pond Effect' Distorts Your Self-Image Few of us fully appreciate the role of social comparison in our well-being [0] [0] Photo by Marcel Strauss on Unsplash For a 2012 study in PLOS One, researchers invited a young woman into a laboratory at Ohio University. The woman learned that she would be taking part in an "aesthetic judgment" experiment. The researchers took a photograph of her face and then asked her to sit at a table that held two objects: a computer monitor and a mirror. On the monitor, the woman viewed a series of headshots of what the study termed "attractive professional models" -- all of them women. Following this barrage of beautiful faces, the woman's own photograph appeared on the screen. But it wasn't just... Read more * 6 min read 1.4K 11 Show more --------------------------------------------------------------------- Brandy L Schillace *Jun 2 Why Is There No Cure for IBS? Despite the rise in gut health awareness, treatments for IBS have barely changed in decades [1] [1] Photo: Jonathan Borba/Unsplash You probably know the drill: you see a new doctor and have to answer a long checklist about your condition. For me, it's a new gastroenterologist, and the long history bit is exhausting. Yes, I have flare ups -- yes, they are painful. I suffer from IBS-C, which is slightly more polite than saying "irritable bowel syndrome with constipation." Embarrassing, right? Essentially, my digestive system goes paralytic. It just...stops. But of course, bacteria don't stop; they continue doing the work of digesting things and creating byproducts that take up space. A lot of space. ... Read more * 5 min read 453 12 Elemental Your life, sourced by science. 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