The longer we learn, the longer we live?

That's what a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests.

Researchers from the Swedish Institute for Social Research and the Centre of Health Equity Studies found that students who have nine years of schooling die less after hitting age 40, compared with students who spend just eight years in schooling.

The research included 1,247,867 people, who were all born between 1943 and 1955 in Sweden. By 2007, 92,351 of those people had died.

The researchers examined their causes of death, and found that people who got the added year of learning had lower risks of death from certain conditions that seem linked with education. For example, women had a lower risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, while men had a lower risk of death from external causes.

The study initially set out to examine whether school standards would be better if children were schooled for longer, Nature News reported. Therefore, in the late 1940s, Sweden tested a new system where some students were schooled for nine years, while others kept to the already-instituted eight years of schooling.

Study researcher Anton Lager told HealthDay that the study doesn't necessarily mean that the added year of education causes you to live longer, but rather that it perhaps taught people more about healthy behaviors and factors that could lead to a longer life.

Sleepwalking is far more common than previously thought, affecting nearly one-third of adults at some point in their lives, according to the first major study to assess the disorder's prevalence in the U.S. in more than three decades.

She began immediately by focusing on one of life's biggest rocks, the day-to-day choices we make to lead an authentic, balanced and fulfilling life. She told me that after spending considerable time doing some soul searching following her divorce, she came up with a formula that works for her. She emphasized that it took considerable time and commitment to retrain herself so that she would consistently make choices that matter.

How Much Toxicity Will You Allow Into Your Life?

She quickly reframed the question of leading an authentic life into one of how much toxicity we are willing to live with and allow into our daily experience. What an incredible question and reminder that soul-centered guidance is all around, if only we choose to receive it when it shows up.

Chan Luu told me that we need "skill in self-nurturing," that we need to learn to set and maintain boundaries around our personal and professional lives. A world-class designer with an amazingly-successful business, she added that she had to learn "to make her business work around time for herself" instead of the other way around. She defined time for herself as having "self-love and respect for self," explaining that just as companies have good infrastructures to support their work, we need to apply the same principles to our own personal lives.

A Formula For Well-Being

She then led the way into this profound insight of self-discovery: You must develop and exhibit a commitment to yourself and take time to nurture yourself, every day. Successful businesses pay attention to their customers, to their employees, to their processes, and to their quality every day. What is the equivalent for paying attention to your life?

The research also suggests this group might experience less pain overall.

"We have found that people who ruminate about their pain and have more negative thoughts about their pain don't sleep as well, and the result is they feel more pain," study co-author Luis F. Buenaver, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement.

He added that if cognitive behavioral therapy can help people who suffer from chronic pain to change how they think about it, they could end what he called a "vicious cycle," allowing people to feel and sleep better sans medication.

In the new study, published online in the journal Pain, researchers looked at more than 200 women with chronic jaw and face pain. Participants filled out questionnaires about their sleep patterns and pain levels, as well as their feelings about that pain. So-called "pain catastrophizing" was tied with greater sleep disturbances, the authors write.

This isn't the first time researchers have looked at how reactions to pain affect pain levels.

According to a study by SecurEnvoy, a company that deals in mobile phone technology, the fear of being apart from your cellphone is on the rise.

“It’s almost like I need a sign on my back saying, ‘My head is broken.’ And you can’t see it. It’s like not visible and it’s like not many people understand, “said Allison in an interview with Rock Center’s Kate Snow.

Allison, who lives with her family in Chester Springs, Pa., has had at least five concussions.  She is only able to attend school four hours a day.  Her room is lit with soft blue light to ease her headaches and her family now eats dinner by candlelight.

Part of that is the fact that 80 percent of the single parent families in the U.S. are headed by females. Combined with two-parent families, it's statistically likely that girls will have a female role model in residence.

Still, we're up against powerful cultural and media currents. The great post-feminist irony is that in an age of hard-won female opportunity, media is channeling that opportunity to a place of hyper-sexualized stupidity. It's not who you are — it's how hot you are.

Ask a young girl about the females she looks up to, and chances are good that — after family members — her list will be crowded with celebrities.

Young women at the most emotionally malleable time in their lives will naturally turn to celebrities for cues on everything from love to dress to sexuality. You don't have to spend a lot of time wading around in the media muck to see that young females are represented by a collection ranging from sad to frightening — whose claim to celebrity is becoming a coarse side show.

Not long ago conventional thinking about midlife held that it's a time for holding on as best you can in the face of steady decline and loss.

Nevertheless, many remain fearful of "going forth" or finding their "true self," partly because they know that illness, tragedy, unpredictable events and death can and do occur. I've written about these themes in some of my previous posts. For example, about depression during midlife. But overall, I find that learning to embrace both the "positive" and "negative" experiences of midlife is the path to growing up into full adulthood. That's especially relevant to the Post 50 years. Read more for the five suggested steps:


 •  Drink plenty of water before, during and after exercise.


 •  Don't exercise as vigorously as you normally do, especially during the first few days of hotter weather.


 •  Pay attention to factors other than temperature, including humidity.


 •  Exercise early in the morning or late in the evening, to beat the hottest temperatures.


 •  Wear lightweight clothing that fits loosely.


 •  Listen to your body and take a rest when you need it.
 

1. I got the power! Power production and the ability to be reactive is a quality that we lose as we age. The good news is that if you include certain exercises as part of your exercise program, you can develop power, elasticity and reactivity. You may have seen some of the tools that work great for developing power on trendy TV shows such as The Biggest Loser or in the movies, which make them seem like fads or trends, but they are more than that. At Results Fitness we use tools such as kettlebells, ropes and medicine balls to improve our clients' abilities to generate power. In addition, you can work up to explosive exercises such as box jumps. Power exercises using all of these tools are hot right now, but are also more than just a trend. Start to incorporate power development into your fitness routine.
 

For as long as you live, the sun's effects will be compounded. This means that as you get older, the damage that the sun has wreaked upon our skin will become increasingly evident.

Studies have shown that both UVA and UVB radiation are responsible for solar damage to the skin. They have also shown that photoaging due to this radiation occurs within the first 20 years of your life. Therefore, the sooner you begin taking protective measures, the better off your skin will be.

Dermatoheliosis is the term used to describe the cumulative effects of chronic sun exposure. The changes in the skin range from benign proliferation of skin cells (hyperplasia) to epidermal dysplasia and neoplasia, both of which can be benign or malignant.

Dermatoheliosis also leads to blotchy pigmentation. Solar damage stimulates an abnormal deposition of clumps of elastin within the dermis, which is called elastosis. Elastosis is what leads to wrinkling.

According to a new study by researchers at The Miriam Hospital, our expectations can indeed influence our drinking habits. Lori A.J. Scott-Sheldon, Ph.D., the study's lead author, says, "If you believe alcohol gives you 'liquid courage' or that drinking helps you 'fit in' or be more social, you're likely to drink more."

The researchers aim to reduce college binge drinking by showing students that many of the great things they associate with alcohol are due to their expectations, rather than the alcohol itself.

To this end, they staged social experiments called "alcohol expectancy challenges." Students were taken in groups to a bar-like setting and given either an alcoholic or a non-alcoholic drink. No one knew which drink anyone else was given. Students then engaged in social activities, such as party games, and were asked to evaluate whether other participants were drinking alcohol versus a placebo. In the majority of cases, groups had difficulty determining who actually received alcohol and who did not.

The challenges have been designated by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism as one of only three effective alcohol-prevention treatments for college students.

But these findings, published in the journal, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, are not only useful for college students. Head researcher Scott-Sheldon adapted her research for the layperson for The Atlantic Monthly online, and created five do-it-yourself strategies for reducing your drinking and maintaining a healthy relationship with alcohol. Read more for her helpful strategies:

The big rocks in life (your health, your relationships, your personal or spiritual growth, your values, etc.) all require you to focus and make choices about what you are going to do next. That part may be obvious in the saying, but in reality, doesn't it seem that a whole lot of people spend a whole lot of time on the pebbles of life instead? You know the drill: tweeting about breakfast, bad hair days, or the commute to work. How about spending an hour or two on Facebook, cruising around pictures, posts, and other proxies for communication and relationship?

Fundamentally, the question comes down to how you are choosing to use your energy as life shows up. You can use your mental, emotional or physical energy to create positive experience or negative experience, much like you can use a hammer to drive a nail or pound your thumb. The hammer doesn't care, and your energy doesn't care, but you do!

How's your experience going so far today? Are you growing or cowering in the face of whatever lies in front of you? Are you using your energy to expand or to contract? If you haven't already, you will most likely bump into one of life's challenges in the not-too-distant future. Today, tomorrow, later this week — when may be unknown, but you can pretty much bet something is going to show up that will challenge you.

"We found that when you remove e-mail from workers' lives, they multitask less and experience less stress," study researcher Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at UC Irvine, said in a statement.

The research was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer-Human Interaction Conference.

Researchers attached heart rate monitors to 13 people using the computer as they worked in an office setting. The monitors measured the study participants' heart rate variability — a more varied heart rate is linked with lower stress levels, while a more constant heart rate is linked with higher stress. Software sensors also monitored how often the study participants switched between windows on their computer.

The researchers found that when provided access to checking email, the study participants were constantly in on "high alert" — with more constant heart rates — and changed screens 37 times an hour, on average.

In the process of making his case, Taubes makes the following statement:

By institutionalizing this advice as public-health policy, we waste enormous amounts of money and effort on programs that might make communities nicer places to live — building parks and making green markets available — but that we have little reason to believe will make anyone thinner.

Waste of money? Dismissing the role of community design in the fight against obesity is deeply irresponsible. Money spent making communities healthier is not wasted, nor does it simply result in a few parks here and there. If we truly want to combat obesity in this country, we must continue to invest our resources in creating viable alternatives to the auto-dependent lifestyle gripping the American middle class. We must continue to invest in and support the growth of walkable mixed-use communities and to retrofit our sprawling suburbs into healthier places to live.

While yes, we really do need to understand sugar's impact in our diet; a healthy lifestyle must include exercise. The only form of exercise that is sustainable in the long term is that which is integrated into our daily routines. Of course a few parks aren't going to make people thinner. Who has the time or energy to make it to the park at the end of a long commute?

When communities are designed in such a way that a dinner out, coffee with a friend, a trip to the playground, or a quick trip to the drug store are a few blocks (along a sidewalk) from homes, we easily and naturally integrate walking into our daily routine.

Take this example. In 1969, approximately half of all students walked or rode their bike to school, according to the Department of Transportation. Today, that figure is down below 15 percent, with over half of all students arriving by private automobile and another 25 percent taking the bus. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), in the last 30 years, the number of overweight children in the United States has tripled, from five percent to 15 percent. The CDC cites a direct correlation between the reduction in children walking and biking to school and the increase in weight.

Here's the problem, most community designs don't provide safe walking routes to school. Either the distance between the home and school is too great or it is not safe to walk (no sidewalks) or not safe to cross streets. To combat this problem, the CDC has started a nationwide program to support and encourage the creation of safe routes to school for children to walk and bike. This investment is not wasted.

It sounds simple but its power is super-charged. The dual aspects of gratitude and recognition, both imbedded in the loving art of appreciation, are like sunshine and water to a plant.

As modern couples, we are at extreme risk for taking each other for granted. We juggle career, family, home management, extended families, aging parents, and health concerns. It's no wonder that our most intimate relationship gets lost in the day to day shuffle.

Fortunately, offering a little appreciation for your partner requires very little extra effort. Appreciation is something of a magic tool. In intentionally showing appreciation for your partner, you increase your own satisfaction with the relationship. Simultaneously, your mate will feel happier and more emotionally supported. Who knows, they may just start to intentionally appreciate you.

Read more about six easy ways to integrate appreciation into your daily life!