Can you really glow with health? – and focus on procrastination

Hope you’ve had a relaxing break and feeling refreshed and ready for the season to come

Glowing with health?

• You’re glowing as you read this – albeit faintly (around 1,000 times too weakly for your naked eye to see) – Humans Glow In The Dark, It’s Just Too Weak For Our Eyes To See.
• You glow more strongly around your cheeks, forehead and neck, partly thanks to higher metabolic activity or oxidative stress, and partly due to sun exposure changing the chemistry of your skin – Imaging of Ultraweak Spontaneous Photon Emission from Human Body Displaying Diurnal Rhythm.
• You glow more brightly in the late afternoon when that metabolic activity is at its peak.
• There is even some evidence that these biophotons evolved as a critical vector for communication and repair between cells in the brain – Is there a difference between thermal radiation and infrared radiation? The code of light: do neurons generate light to communicate and repair?
• Mapping this glow has promising applications in healthcare as a diagnostic tool, identifying metabolic disorders or diseases by detecting abnormal glow patterns. Bioluminescence imaging (BLI) is already used in research to monitor gene expression, track disease progression, study cancer metastasis, and observe cellular interactions in live animal models – A Comprehensive Exploration of Bioluminescence Systems, Mechanisms, and Advanced Assays for Versatile Applications.

Seeing the wood for the trees – tackling procrastination 

That paintbrush has been sitting there for weeks. Why is it so hard to get on with stuff sometimes

And could the visual environment help?

1. Declutter – People who feel overwhelmed by possessions are more likely to procrastinate – Procrastinators and Clutter: An Ecological View of Living with Excessive “Stuff”, but the impact seems to depend on your personality type: people who already struggle with decisions are more affected by visual clutter than those who are ‘action-state oriented’.. – Reactance, Decisional Procrastination, and Hesitation: A Latent Class Analysis of Clutter Behavior.
2. Give yourself a gold star – When it comes to motivation, being acknowledged for your efforts came top after having access to the relevant information – even beating material rewards – Study of impactful motivational factors to overcome procrastination among engineering students.
3. Try two simple mind-set techniques that harness the power of your ‘mind’s eye’: task-oriented visualisations and tolerance of ambiguity training – Comparing the Effectiveness of Instructional Mental Imagery and Tolerance of Ambiguity Training on Students’ Academic Procrastination.

And if you’re still struggling to get on with life laundry, watching a short film of a walk through a forest might help – unless of course you end up scrolling through YouTube videos! – Effect of Viewing Video Representation of the Urban Environment and Forest Environment on Mood and Level of Procrastination.