Why Do We Need a Good Sleep – Every Night?

Sleep Stages

When people need extra time to keep up with the demands of everyday life the only answer seems to be cutting back on sleep. When you understand sleep you’ll find out that this answer could be very damaging to your health. You need a healthy sleep-wake cycle.

How much sleep do we need and how many hours we actually sleep? A lot of people sleep only about 6 hours a night. An adult needs about 7.5-9 hours to completely restore physical and mental energy.

There are two types of sleep, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and non-REM sleep. Non-REM sleep has 4 different stages going from transition sleep to deep sleep. Non-REM sleep restores your physical energy, REM sleep restores your mental energy. During the night your sleep goes back and forth between REM and non-REM sleep. One cycle last about 90 minutes. If you don’t get enough sleep you have to pay the price with REM sleep since the body wants to restore physical energy first.

What happens if we don’t get enough sleep? We don’t have enough energy throughout the day and we probably forget how it does feel to feel good. But there are other more serious effects too:

• Fatigue, lack of motivation
• Moodiness
• Inability to cope with stress
• Concentration, memory problems
• Weight gain
• Increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and other health problems

With sleeping in on the weekends unfortunately you can’t solve your sleeping problem. You need at least eight hours quality sleep every night.

A Good Personal Finance Program Gives a Peace of Mind

Without a personal finance program it’s hard to manage your money. Most people have several bank accounts, credit cards, loans, retirements account and investment accounts. Without a financial program it’s impossible to keep track of all of these accounts.

I personally use Quicken Premier 2011. It’s really worth the money. I only buy it every 3 years because it allows me for 3 years to use its online features.

There are a few very useful features I use all the time. I download transactions from my banks and credit card companies every couple of days. This way it’s very easy to monitor how I spend my money. I also know exactly what is charged on my credit cards. I match the downloaded transactions with my saved receipts. If I find anything suspicious I call my bank or credit card company.

Another feature I often use is to manage my bills. It’s very easy to schedule bills. I also schedule my paychecks too. If the paychecks vary week to week it’s possible to enter an average paycheck. I know exactly how much money I have in my accounts today tomorrow, next week, next month or even a few months from now. Now surprises.

As I mentioned I download the transactions every couple of days so when it’s time to reconcile my account at the end of the billing cycle all the transactions are there. Many times it only takes less than a minute to reconcile a bank or credit card account. It’s so easy that it’s actually fun.

I have been using Quicken for over 10 years and I couldn’t live without it. I save a backup of the Quicken file on an external hard drive once a week. Once my hard drive crashed and restoring everything from the backup files was very simple. I never thought about using an online financial software. I like to keep my personal information personal.

Cancer-Fighting Benefits of Broccoli and Other Cruciferous Vegetables

Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage belongs to this group of vegetables. They are not only healthy because they contain vitamins, minerals and fiber but they also contain phytochemicals such as sulforaphane. Sulforaphane helps the body to activate detoxification enzymes and to prevent cell damage.

Cruciferous vegetables also help to protect against cancer by reducing oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is caused by harmful molecules called oxygen-free radicals.

These vegetables can reduce the risk of colon, lung, prostate, breast and other cancers.

An important thing you should know is that the way you prepare these vegetables matters. An enzyme called myrosinase has to be present to form the anti-inflammatory component sulforaphane. Many people destroy myrosinase by overcooking these vegetables. Steaming it for two to four minutes is the best way to protect the enzyme and the vegetable’s nutrients. Brussels sprouts contain a large amount of this essential enzyme.

The compound found in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables is one the strongest anti-cancer fighters.

I Love Family Vacations

We’ve just got back from our summer vacation from Europe. I enjoyed every moment of it or maybe almost every moment of it. That’s because I don’t like to go thru or wait at airports.

This summer we went to Hungary. I like it since I was born there but my wife likes it too and she was born in New Jersey. My boys love it of course and it’s not only because the drinking age is 16 (for beer and wine) but also because they have lots of cousins to play with.

We spent most of the time in Budapest, where my family lives, on the Buda side in the suburbs. It is a very quiet and nice place, and there is no violence. Although people lock the front door all the time which usually has several safety locks. We stayed in a four bedroom apartment on the third floor. The only problem was that there was no elevator, but everything else was just perfect.

The weather was excellent warm, but not hot and without the humidity. Every day was sunny, nice and cool during the night which helped me to have deep sleeps.

We used public transportation which is very good in Budapest. The bus stop was right there where we stayed and we could be in the center city in just 20 minutes. We bought a weekly pass which was about $25 and it was good for all the public transportation within the city limits.

We spent one day at the Lake Balaton. We were lucky with the weather again. Lake Balaton is a fresh-water lake, about 77 km long and 3-12.5 km wide. It’s about 2 hours from Budapest.

I think the greatest thing in family vacations is that we do things together and all those great memories that nothing can erase. 

 

Can You Really Make Money Fast on the Stock Market?

I recently started to follow the stock market. It’s amazing how the market fluctuates day after day. A lot of the numbers didn’t make any sense until I read a couple of books visited financial web sites and watched business news on the TV.

Soon I found out that basically there are two types of investors, passive and active. Most of the passive investors let someone else manage their money and don’t really care about the market’s daily, weekly even monthly movements.  Sometimes they don’t even know what exactly they have in their portfolio.

The active investors closely follow the market’s every movement and they frequently buy and sell securities based on the market conditions. Successful active investors know exactly what they have.

So how much money can you make? Passive investors make less money. They usually make money when the market is in an uptrend and they lose money when the market is in the downtrend. A successful passive investor can make 5-10 % a year.

An active investor can also make money when the market is in a downtrend by what is called shorting stocks.  Although shorting stocks is risky, but in a downtrend you can make money faster then in an uptrend. An active investor makes about 10-15% a year.

There are also options which are derivatives of securities such as stocks. The price movement of options is not as simple as it is for the underlying stocks. Options which are basically contracts also expire, so after a certain time they can be worthless. Options are risky but they are highly leveraged. For example a 1% price movement of the underlying can result in a 15-20% price increase in the option’s value. With options it’s possible to make 100% profit in less then a week.

If you want to start to invest it’s best to get familiar with stocks first and a couple of years later move on to options trading. No matter what you trade, you can’t control how much money you are going to make but you can control how much money you lose. 

You Need to Escape from Multitasking to Relax Your Brain

It’s hard to imagine our lives without computers, cell phones, television, computer games. The use of technology is part of our daily life. We constantly check our emails surf the web, check the news, and watch our favorite shows or movies often in the same time. It’s only possible if we teach our brain how to multitask.

There are benefits of multitasking. We are more productive. Multitasking also gives a chance to escape from the present while doing something else. Sometimes multitasking can be dangerous for example driving and using your cell phone in the same time. On the other hand multitasking doesn’t teach us to focus. When you multitask you try to pay attention several things in the same time. But is it good if you really have to focus only on one thing?

With new technologies we are addicted to multitasking. We think that without those gadgets our life would be very boring. There was a time when none of these gadgets existed and people were not bored at all and they could accomplish great things in history.

We need to escape sometimes from multitasking and just do one thing to relax our eyes and brain. Even if it lasts only 10-15 minutes a day it could make a big difference. Take a walk, listen to soft music without doing anything else, read a book or just sit back in a quiet room closing your eyes for a few minutes.

How Stress Can Affect Your Health and Weight

Stress has become a too familiar part of our daily life. Stress is real and a serious threat to your overall health as well as your efforts to lose weight.

Your body is constantly trying to maintain a state of internal stability, called homeostasis. You sweat to cool yourself on a hot day and shiver to stay warm when it's very cold. When your body feels stressed, it struggles to compensate for the real perceived threat that's created the stress.

This response can trigger a complex series of biochemical changes that struggle to bring you back to your pre-stressed state. For example, when you're stressed your body releases various hormones and chemicals including adrenaline, cortisol, and others that shift your body into a flight-or-fight response. These hormones increase your metabolism, your heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, and muscle tension.

If these bodily changes are channeled into a physical activity the stress can be resolved. If, however, the stress is chronic and unresolved part of your life, like a difficult boss or an unhappy relationship, the effects on your body are ongoing and dangerous.

Long-term unresolved stress of the kind that many of us endure daily makes us vulnerable to hypertension, coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, and other disorders. Unresolved stress also has been linked to developing insulin resistance as well as developing the "belly fat" associated with inflammation. Too much cortisol may also contribute to leptin resistance. Leptin is a hormone that is recognized as a "turn off signal" to hunger. Elevated cortisol in conjunction with adrenaline can also encourage your body to hold on to fat especially around the abdomen.

So how do you deal with stress? If you teach yourself to adopt some simple stress-reducing strategies, you really can reduce the physical effects of stress. You need to become stress resistant.

Regular exercise can help you to dissipate unfavorable chemical responses created by stress. Stress reducing techniques practiced daily can be pleasurable in your daily routine.

Proper diet can reduce the inflammation and internal stress of your body.