Life
Seasons change. /
Decorations do, too. /
Some gone too soon.
.
.
Filed under 2021, haiku, photo, photo by David E. Booker, poetry, Poetry by David E. Booker, Sunday story
Feeling stress over your writing? Maybe a little relaxing will help. Sound therapies have long been used to help us cope.
Source: These 10 songs are scientifically guaranteed to chill you out
By Melanie Curtin
4 minutes
Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves.
So, here’s a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth.
Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one’s health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.
Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck.
The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.
Related: What Music Does To Our Brains
According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date.
In fact, listening to that one song — “Weightless” — resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants’ overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates.
That is remarkable.
Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created “Weightless”, Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener’s heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza.
In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you’ve got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.
Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, “‘Weightless’ was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous.”
So, don’t drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:
I made a public playlist of all of them on Spotify that runs about 50 minutes (it’s also downloadable).
There’s also a free 10-hour version of “Weightless” available if you want a longer listening experience.
Filed under 2018, abbreviations, Sunday story
The rooster atop the birdcage. Through the window are books offered for sale.
By David E. Booker
I have worked at a struggling independent bookstore. I used to joke that I couldn’t hang out in bars, so I hung out in bookstores instead. Truth is, I probably wouldn’t be hanging around bars anyway. They never held much attraction for me.
But a neighborhood bookstore in a former bar, and on top of that a bar that has a reference in literature? Sometimes more serendipitous things have happened, but for slightly over two years Central Street Bookstore was just such a place. Housed in what was formerly the Corner Lounge, the same Corner Lounge referenced in Cormac McCathy’s novel Suttree, it was a place where you could find a good used or rare book as well as stand at the bar that may have been around when Cormac McCarthy lived in Knoxville.
You could also find interesting curiosities such as an orrery, a smiling Buddha with red nipples, a limber-headed statue of Edgar Alan Poe, and a rooster sitting atop a birdcage housing lights. It was a place, as owner John Coleman said, “where people can still make serendipitous discoveries,” be those discoveries novels by authors you knew or didn’t know (including Suttree and other books by McCarthy), books of poetry, history books, and copies of books you might not find anywhere else, including comic books and even the occasional book on tape. I found and bought probably way too many books there for myself and friends, including some this past Christmas.
Some of the books for sale at Central Street Books.
Unfortunately, that will all end this March 2013, when Central Street Books closes its doors. John says the store is too small to be profitable, and that at least for the moment, he’ll concentrate on his Internet book selling and traveling to sell at book fairs. He will also have some books at a local antique mall. The struggling independent bookstore I worked at over 15 years ago is also closed. Has been for many years. The building is now home to an Oriental restaurant.
It was a serendipitous that this bookstore showed up in my neighborhood, even if for only two years. I’m just not sure where my next serendipitous finds will be found.
Books and more.
Filed under Essay, Photo by author, Sunday story
I was somewhen gliding over Virtuosity when I woke up from my copy/paste coma. I was ten thousand bar stools above pay dirt, but the drinks had stopped coming long before the last sequence of route rot procedures was done. I tried to perk up with three quick and awful coffees and a Hershey’s kiss left over from my last intrusion into the real world, but it wasn’t helping much. The coffee was a tannic acid man’s dream, bitter and beyond redemption no matter how I tried to doll it up. And the kiss, well, I am a sucker for chocolate, even old chocolate, but this kiss had seen its last sweet pucker long ago, maybe even in a candy gallery far far away.
She walked into my room the way all sycophants do these days – with an air of predestination. She sat down in the old overstuffed chair next to the old overstuffed couch I was crouched on. She placed her legs in just such a position that a trigonometry professor would’ve been had pressed to explain, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes from triangulating on them. They were her best feature, but the rest of her was at least suborbital as well. She dressed in clothes with sharp angles, some of which would probably frighten an armadillo. Her lips were as full and shiny as a waxing moon and her hair gleamed as if it were a source of light all its own. In short, she was as textured as the night, and just as dangerous.
She dragged out a smoke and was about to light it.
“Not in here.” My head was a series of dots and dashes in binary world, and lighting up wasn’t going to help.
She pouted and then put them away. “The boss sent me.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
She looked perplexed, lost in the great heartland of non-sequitors, a trollop with a message trying to make connections with polarized plugs in a non-polarized world.
“The boss says—”
“I know what the boss says. He says it every time he sends one of you floozies down my rat hole with a message, and every time he promises me my freedom and every time he finds a way to wriggle out of following through. Tell Lucy, Charlie ain’t kickin’ at the ball no more.”
She looked even more nonplussed. I could just imagine one big minus sign stretched above her pretty little head, like a halo dancing black hole mambo with an event horizon. One day enough neurons might come burrowing out, Steven Hawking style, to make a moment of enlightenment, but age and propriety would keep me from waiting that long. After all, it’s not polite to stare indefinitely at a glacier, no matter how easy on the eyes.
[Editor’s note: not sure what to do with this. If I should pursue it or let it go. if you have read it, any thoughts or comments? is this an interesting beginning? Thank you for stopping by.]
Filed under story, Sunday story, Virtuosity, Workshop weekend, writing
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