6 Ways to get the most out of your love life

1. I’m married and exhausted. Sex or sleep?

“Both,” says Paul Glovinsky, PhD, co-author of The Insomnia Answer. “It’s not just a question of sex but of timing. Often, women are stimulated by sex and can’t sleep afterward.” Which, as you know, means he crashes like a mighty oak while you lie awake and fume. “If you can time things to coincide with the time of day when you’re at peak energy, your sex life will be significantly more satisfying.” (Remember sex in the morning? Weekend naptime?) And speaking of time, Linda Young, PhD, a Washington-based therapist who specializes in helping women foster healthy relationships, adds this: “The average encounter is only around 20 minutes, so ask yourself why you’re hesitant. Your resistance might be a reflection of your lack of satisfaction with the sex.” Or your fear of intimacy, your performance anxiety, your anger about something else in the relationship—the point being that sexual unhappiness can be a shield for many other types of issues.

2. My clock is ticking. Settle for the guy I care about, or hold out for The One, who may never show up?

Do. Not. Settle. “Both of you—not to mention the children you might have—may pay the price of a fractured relationship later,” says psychotherapist Ken Page, founder of the dating workshop Deeper Dating. Marrying Mr. Almost The One is, on the other hand, perfectly admissible. “If someone is your match in 75 to 85 percent of the things that are important to you—values, character strengths, how he treats other people, emotional fitness—that’s not settling,” says Young. “But it’s up to you to infuse ‘good enough’ with energy and passion so that it becomes fantastic. And chemistry counts; you need to be attracted to each other.”

3. I’ve met a great guy. He never calls. Should I call him?

“It’s 2008. You can call,” says Steve Santagati, author of The MANual and resident expert at AskSteveSantagati.com. Still, Santagati urges you not to put the guy on the spot. “Let him initiate plans. You can just say hello to open the lines of communication, and he might hear something in the phone call that he didn’t get the first time you met.” The way he responds will tell you whether you have a future together.

4. He’s married, but he says he’s not happy and it’s ending. I should stay away, right?

Run as though you’re fleeing a burning house. Which, in fact, you are. “He’s already showing you he hasn’t put enough distance between himself and his problematic relationship,” says Young. “If you get involved, he’s going to subject you to all his issues, and you’re going to be a wonderful dumping ground.”

5. When, if ever, is it a good idea to try again with a guy whose heart you’ve already broken?

About as often as pigs fly. “Usually, you can’t go backward,” says Manhattan-based matchmaker Janis Spindel. “It’s a case-by-case scenario, but statistics show that it doesn’t usually work.” The case where it might work: when the failure was unrelated to your attraction or personalities but caused by outside circumstances—say, one of you was going through a family tragedy, or you were transferred to another city. Absent such extenuating circumstances, analyze what went wrong the first time, assume a similar dynamic will arise again, and then determine whether that dynamic is feasible in your current life.

6. I love my partner, but the sex is underwhelming. Stay the course or go?

Neither. Instead, you’re going to do the hardest thing you’ve ever done. “Think about the things that turn you on in the deepest ways, the things that make you feel most loved and cared for,” says Page. “What kind of touch? What words? What kind of pacing makes you feel the most affection for your partner? Tell each other, no matter how wild or tame your desires might seem. When the two of you are unafraid to be naughty and vulnerable together, the experience can be amazing.” Sex thrives on risk and surrender, and you’re probably missing one or both.

Arianne Cohen is a Manhattan-based writer. Her exploration of the world of tall people, The Tall Book (Bloomsbury), will be published in January 2009.

Additional reporting by Brooke Kosofsky Glassberg and Kate Sandoval.

 

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Got a Complex Task? Study, Sleep on It

Sleep Enhances Learning of Complex Skills

By Daniel J. DeNoon

If you’ve just learned a complex skill, here’s how to do it better: Get a good night’s sleep.

Practice may make perfect, but not if you haven’t slept, suggest studies by Howard Nusbaum, PhD, David Margoliash, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Chicago.

Researchers have shown that sleep improves performance of some simple tasks, such as recall of memorized lists. But until now, sleep’s role in more complex learning hasn’t been clear.

Nusbaum, Margoliash, and colleagues studied the issue by teaching college students to play a first-person shooter video game called Unreal Tournament 2003. Only students who had never played more than 10 such games were allowed to participate. Most of the students in the study were female, 163 out of 207 participants.

First-person shooter games are complex. They require learning to use both hands to manipulate a computer keyboard and mouse to move through a virtual world in which they have to kill — and avoid being killed by — a variety of “bots.” Players have to adjust to rapidly changing situations.

The basic study design was to see how well the students could play a second first-person shooter game — Quake 3 — after learning to play Unreal Tournament.

After being tested on their initial Quake 3 skills and then being trained to play Unreal Tournament, the students were divided into groups:

• The “AM control” and “PM control” groups received training in the morning or evening and immediate testing on Quake 3.
• The “12-hour wake” group received training in the morning but were tested on Quake 3 that evening, 12 hours later, without any sleep in the interim.
• The “12-hour sleep” group received training in the evening but were tested the next morning, 12 hours later, after getting a night’s sleep.
• The “24-hour AM” and “24-hour PM” groups received training in the morning or in the evening and returned for testing 24 hours later.

Predictably, the “control” students played Quake better after learning the skills needed to play Unreal Tournament, regardless of whether they learned to play in the evening or in the morning. Time of day had no effect on learning this complex task.

The “12-hour wake” students tested 12 hours after training — with no sleep — were better than they’d been before training, but improved only about half as much as those tested immediately after training. It seems that their learning deteriorated over the course of the day.

But the “12-hour sleep” and “24-hour” groups — which got a night’s sleep before testing — did just as well as those tested immediately after learning the skills.

“Sleep consolidated learning by restoring what was lost over the course of a day following training and by protecting what was learned against subsequent loss,” Nusbaum says in a news release. “Sleep has an important role … in stabilizing and protecting memory.”

The researchers suggest that during sleep, memory traces are replayed and modified while the brain is “offline.” During this process, there is coordination of the sensory and motor systems involved in complex tasks learned during waking hours.

They report their findings in the November issue of the journal Learning & Memory.

End of the Affair

END OF THE AFFAIR 

Plastic bags lose their lusterNearly 75 years ago, soft plastic ranked up there with the Mona Lisa and Tower of Pisa as one of civilization’s masterpieces, at least according to Cole Porter in his masterpiece, “You’re the Top.” Feelings have changed a bit since then.

While plastic remains the ne plus ultra as far as convenience is concerned, people are not so thrilled with its nasty habit of never, ever going away. Plastic bags, in particular, have come in for a lashing because of the way they litter the streets, get tangled in treetops, choke sea turtles and other animals who mistake them for food, clog municipal sewage systems and, once in landfills, refuse to decompose.

What we have here is yet another love-hate relationship that we do not have the strength to end. As a result, governments at all levels around the world have found it necessary to step into the breach to save us from ourselves.

Australia, Bangladesh, Italy, Ireland, South Africa and Taiwan are among the countries trying voluntary programs, taxes and bans to get the problem under control. American cities have also gotten into the act. The first was San Francisco, which outlawed plastic bags at large grocery stores and pharmacies in 2007. Well, that’s not so surprising, San Francisco being San Francisco, but this past July, Los Angeles voted for a ban beginning in 2010 if the state fails to move ahead with a 25-cent fee on shoppers requesting plastic bags. Westport, Connecticut joined the club in September.

Most recently, New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg proposed a six-cent plastic bag tax (or fee, as he would have it, to avoid having to get approval by the state legislature). The city has been abuzz ever since. Some people say it’s time; others wonder how they’ll ever survive.

I’m a New Yorker and I couldn’t be happier. I only wish the city would tax paper bags, too, since they have their own drawbacks. As the plastics industry is oh-so-quick to point out, they contribute even more to global warming than plastic bags and take up more room in landfills when not recycled. On the other hand, they generally are recycled and then turned into fresh paper, whereas plastic bags are rarely recycled and even more rarely turned into something new. Moreover, when the wind starts blowing, paper bags are much less likely to take off. Paper never causes much of a litter problem anyway since it biodegrades, unlike you-know-what.

But this argument is beside the point because “paper or plastic?” is a trick question whose answer is “reusable.” Now that you know, don’t wait for a plastic bag tax or ban to come to your town. Go ahead and break the disposable habit on your own.

No need to buy expensive bags for the purpose. Any old canvas totes you happen to have will do — such as the one you got from NRDC when you joined. (You did join, didn’t you?) Stick one in your purse or backpack and a few in the trunk of your car if you drive so you’ll always be prepared. If you have a problem remembering to take them out of the trunk when you get to the store, as I’ve heard some people do, tape a reminder to the dashboard. Ugly, yes, but that’s what will make it so hard to miss.

Perhaps you’re reluctant to take this step because you have a dog who needs picking up after. If so, see my discussion of how to handle the dog poop quandary.

That leaves garbage disposal. In all likelihood, you will still need some kind of plastic bags for that (but probably the heavy-duty variety which is less likely to cause a littering problem — especially when weighed down with garbage). However, you can minimize the need by reducing your trash. Here’s how:

- Avoid buying overly-packaged products.
- Reuse what you can before disposing of it.
- Give away what you no longer want to reuse.
- Don’t overbuy perishable food items.
- Use older vegetables and bones for stock.
- Compost food scraps and yard waste.

When you find yourself pining for the convenience of yore, think about the last time you spotted a plastic bag where one never should be — at the beach, in the woods, in the mountains or in your yard — and I bet you’ll feel convenience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

—Sheryl Eisenberg

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MIndful in the midst of a raging fury

One of the most difficult things to learn is that mindfulness is not dependent on any emotional or mental state. We have certain images of meditation. Meditation is something done in quiet caves by tranquil people who move slowly. Those are training conditions. They are set up to foster concentration and to learn the skill of mindfulness. Once you have learned that skill, however, you can dispense with the training restrictions, and you should. You don’t need to move at a snail’s pace to be mindful. You don’t even need to be calm. You can be mindful while solving problems in intensive calculus. You can be mindful in the middle of a football scrimmage. You can be mindful in the midst of a raging fury. Mental and physical activities are no bar to mindfulness. If you find your mind extremely active, then simply observe the nature and degree of that activity. It is just a part of the passing show within.

–Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English

from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book

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When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

The human eye is an incredible instrument. Yet it does have one inherent problem: It makes it difficult to see. After all, we usually see what’s there — and not what might be. We see who someone is — rather than who they have the ability to be. It’s when you finally see things with your open mind, your heart, and your beliefs that the world sees you in a new light as well.

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“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brillant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God! Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine like children do. We are meant to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not in some of us; it’s in all of us! And as we let our light shine, we unconditionally give others permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.“ 

 

~ Marianne Williamson

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The most you can expect of yourself is to do your best. And the best you can genuinely do at this time is to fully embrace oneness, to serve as an example, and to teach others to do the same. The more people who embrace oneness, the more united we become, and the better off the entire planet will be.

If you want to align yourself with oneness, you’ll eventually have to leave thoughts of separation behind. Whatever divides us is incongruent with oneness. The more you immerse yourself in patterns of separation, the more you distance yourself from the experience of oneness. This includes nationalism, racism, sexism, and similar mindsets that emphasize our separateness. It also includes working at a job where you’re rewarded or punished based on your ability to outperform others, a spiritual belief system where some people are saved and some aren’t, and a family-relationship model based on loving certain people more than others. Regardless of how deeply ingrained these patterns may be, if you want to shift to a higher level of social consciousness, you must eventually relinquish them.

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This is a special invitation from me

Hello . . . 
. . . I’m Vaness Saint-Louis

I’m setting up my coaching practice and I’m looking for high energy
people to do some trial coaching sessions with me.

But first, if you have a couple of minutes, I’d like to check and see
if us doing a session together even makes sense, because I
don’t want to waste your time with this.

I would like to share a little peek into coaching with me.

My desire is to help you make conscious decisions in your
personal development and courageously follow through on them.
This means having the maturity to take 100% responsibility for
your health, your career, your finances, your relationships, your
emotions, your habits, and your spiritual beliefs.

It requires taking a hard look at yourself, consciously deciding
what kind of person you truly are on the inside, and then getting
your actions to be congruent with your true self.

The goal is to help you achieve outstanding effectiveness while
maintaining internal balance, where your thoughts, feelings,
actions, and skills are all working together to create the life you
truly desire.

Look at your favorite dream, be it success in your professional life
or a more personal dream like a fabulous relationship, a
life-long/current goal or healing more fully to optimal health.
Instead of being stuck in your old way of moving forward, imagine
taking new steps for new results.

Old ways of behaving keep you comfortable and safe, but they don’t
get you where you want to go. Coaching with me helps you move
beyond your comfort zone to a more expanded level of safety and
assurance.

You focus on taking steps to attain your targeted goals. Goals that
before seemed risky and elusive are now right before your eyes on a
regular basis. 

Coaching with me is being fully engaged. It is moving forward and
attaining your goals. It is being involved in fully living your dreams.
This is my world, it can be your world too . . . 
. . . welcome . . .

Please contact me for a free introductory session.

Here’s how it works: I usually set up an introductory session with
you to help both you and me decide whether coaching is right
for you. I do not charge for this session. If you choose to continue
with formal coaching sessions, we setup a coaching program that
is tailored to your needs.

Vaness Saint-Louis
Life Coach
Http://www.Vaness.ws
Contact Phone: 516-233-7377

You were born to win,

but to be a winner you must plan to win,

prepare to win,

and expect to win.

Zig Ziglar

 

Like Obama told us: “YES WE CAN”

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