LIME.com - Self-Improvement

Overcoming Self Sabotage

jride — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:28:18 -0600

By Meagan Francis Susi Elkins, a media producer and mother of two in Michigan, has a lot of lofty goals: Be more careful with her money. Exercise regularly. Express her creative side by writing every day. Eat healthy, whole foods. Keep better track of her budget. Unfortunately, Susi also seems to run up against a lot of roadblocks. The healthy meal she intended to cook for her family's dinner? More often than not, she comes up just one key ingredient short, throws in the oven mitt and...

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The Great American Apparel Diet: Zippo Spending for One Year

cshannon — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:03:53 -0600

Talk about reuse: These women gave up spending money on new clothes for a year. Could you do it?

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The Beauty of Beauty

jgrough — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:42:16 -0600

What is beauty? A sunset? A Mozart concerto? Brad Pitt? Sea glass? A broken bottle? Cigarette butts along a roadside? Piero Ferrucci explores the concept of beauty in his new book Beauty and the Soul by encouraging readers to step away from the “packaged” beauty our world feeds us and, instead, listen to our inner voice to find our personal taste. His book explores beauty from all angles: how to discover more of it in your life (keep a diary and jot down those spontaneous moments when you...

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Learning By Heart

jride — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:48:34 -0600

By Andrea Manitsas The economy will rise… some day. But in the meantime, we must, as they say, look on the bright side. Jobs may be scarce, unemployment at a 26-year high. Positions you could have landed with ease a few years back may not even garner a response—let alone an interview—today. Even if you are among the employed, the 467,000 cuts made in June alone may have you feeling uneasy. But with all this frustration comes opportunity. Instead of needlessly sending out your resume for...

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Fear, Real or Imagined

AbigailLewis — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:34:49 -0600

Fear is both one of the most essential and one of the most crippling things that humans experience. While it serves as a survival mechanism, it also can blur our sense of what is or isn't an immediate threat. Either way, fear is most clearly contemplated in its absence, because a state of fear makes it much more difficult to stay "conscious." The heart starts racing, fight or flight kicks in, and while fear is clearly appropriate in some situations, the body doesn't always...

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Deepak Chopra's 7-Step Exercise to Release Emotional Turbulence

cshannon — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:09:45 -0600

By Deepak Chopra, M.D. It's not easy to deal with painful emotions head-on. But it's a key to good health and well-being physically, mentally and spiritually. If we don’t deal with pain when it occurs, it will resurface as compounded emotional toxicity later on — showing up as insomnia, hostility and anger or fear and anxiety. As a further complication, if you don’t know how to deal with feelings of anger and fear, you're likely to turn them inward at yourself, believing, “It’s all my...

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Facing the Music

derek_beres — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:11:19 -0600

“I don’t smoke,” she said, looking me in the eyes, continuing slowly for emphasis: “And neither do you.” “You,” punctuated and drawn out. I was thankful to Colin for picking up Dave Matthews Band tickets for my birthday, my twentieth. 1995. We rolled in with a crew to Manhattan via NJ Transit, a fifty-minute train ride from New Brunswick. Outside of Madison Square Garden a hippie passed, not indiscreetly chanting “hydro.” The college call-to-arms. We accepted, slipped him a fifty, and...

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The Self Help Column Better Than All Self Help Columns

derek_beres — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:02:00 -0600

In 1859, the same year Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, another genre-defining book was published in England: Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. Unlike the endless barrage of to-be-influenced books haphazardly borrowing shamanism, runes, astrology, dieting trends, Tantric sex (whatever that means), and the patented ten-step program, Smiles’s book was a Victorian-aged manual for the proper Christian; it was predominantly a book on ethics and social behavior. It was also a bestseller,...

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Brain Myths—Busted

jride — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:03:08 -0600

Five examples of neurological nonsense you can forget about for good.

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A Spotless Mind?

jride — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:06:06 -0600

Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.

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