Search Results for: blog instinct our fight or flight

When to Trust Your Gut

Researchers from the University of Leeds took a look at instinct and found that often, your first impulse is the right one. Intuition isn’t just some bolt from the blue. It may actually be a lightning-fast brain response to a situation. In super quick bursts, your brain can compare past experiences with current situations to give you an idea of how to proceed. We don’t realize it’s happening, so the idea seems like instinct, inspiration, or intuition. The brain does a lot of things without our conscious effort — useful things like breathing and other body processes. Intuition may just … Continue reading →

What Your Nose Knows

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Don’t knock your nose — scientists believe that the nose is capable of recognizing thousands of smells. In fact, studies are showing that your sense of smell may be as much as ten thousand times sharper than your sense of taste. That’s pretty amazing! So how does smell work? Inside your nose are millions are cells that act as scent receptors. We have hundreds of different kinds of smell receptors that allow us to identify lots of different odors. Once your scent receptors detect a smell, they send the information to a cluster of neurons in the brain known as … Continue reading →

When You or Your Spouse Needs Surgery

Have you or your spouse ever needed to undergo surgery? As my regular readers may know, both my husband and I have both needed surgery in the last three months. Three months, it’s kind of scary when you think that’s all it’s been since I took Scott to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. It was the first weekend of December and the following day was Cassidy’s birthday party. It was a scary night, all told, while the doctors worked diligently to diagnose why he was in so much pain and running such a high fever. It happened so quickly, … Continue reading →

Are Your Boomerang Children at Home?

This phrase cracks me up, honestly – the idea of a boomerang is that you throw it; it curves out and then returns to your hand. We send our children out like boomerangs all the time – sending them to school, sending them to a friend’s and sending them out to play and we do want them to return, but when we send out our young adults to get married, to go to college or to live independently – it’s not necessarily what parents have in mind to have them return home again. Boomerang Kids Can Affect Your Relationship When … Continue reading →

Instinct: Our Fight or Flight

Human beings need a lot of things to feel alive. They need family, love, sex, but we only need one thing to actually be alive. We need a beating heart. When our heart is threatened, we respond in one of two ways. We either run or we attack. There is a scientific term for this: fight or flight. It’s instinct. We can’t control it. Can we? – Grey’s Anatomy When we’re married, our instinct for fight or flight can really get in the way of solving problems and relating to our spouses. When we are fighting or disagreeing with our … Continue reading →

The Intelligent Spider

I tend to think of insects as simple creatures. Single-minded, like an ant scurrying over a huge obstacle because that’s where the trail goes and the idea of taking an easier path around isn’t there. Instinctive, like that fight or flight response that kicks in when faced with danger. But I may need to rethink that. Maybe they’re not as simple as I think they are. There’s a spider that lives on my back patio. I haven’t gotten close enough to see what kind it is, or even what color. It’s just a spider. Not too big, but big enough … Continue reading →

The Dental Horror Story: Going Back to School

So I’ve spent the last couple of days bringing you up to speed. At the end of The Horror of Dental Insurance & Teeth I told you about the catch 22 of my insurance coverage where my wisdom teeth were concerned. It’s bad enough that I was getting flack for being 35 and not having had my wisdom teeth out, but the whole insurance thing? Yeah, it’s the stuff nightmares are made of. So What to Do Now? I have to admit as defeated as I felt, I knew that this wasn’t the time to lie down and die. I … Continue reading →

Initiating Breastfeeding with the Breast Crawl

Did you know that if you place a newborn on his mother’s abdomen after birth, he is capable of finding her breast all on his own and initiating breastfeeding by himself? This act is known as the breast crawl and it is being heavily promoted during World Breastfeeding Week. All Babies Do This This phenomenon was first published in an organized study in 1998. Infants were dried off and then immediately placed on their mother’s abdomen with the baby’s head on mom’s chest. Every single infant was able to instinctively find his mother’s nipple and begin suckling. In subsequent studies, … Continue reading →

Wives Who Work From Home – Working for the Weekend

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We’ve been working for the weekend all week long in our wives who work from home series and we’ve talked about planning your schedule, getting respect for your work and keeping your husband from steamrolling your business. Today, we’re going to focus on a subject that is actually the hardest one in the world for me: the weekend. A weekend is defined as the end of the week; it typically falls on Saturday and Sunday. If you work in an office, you usually have the weekends off. When you work from home, however, there is no real such thing as … Continue reading →

Just in Time for National Dog Bite Prevention Week 2007

Just a little while ago I read Aimee’s harrowing tale of her recent dog park outing with Moose and Lally. (See: You Should Have Seen the Other Guy?) What an appropriate (yet unfortunate) tale that emphasizes this week’s theme: National Dog Bite Prevention Week. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Each year, 800,000 Americans seek medical attention for dog bites; half of these are children.” Yikes. Even worse, about 386,000 who suffered injuries needed to go to the emergency room; about a dozen people died. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It … Continue reading →