I think it’s common knowledge that smoking is bad for you. It harms organs like your lungs, heart, kidneys and bladder, it makes your skin wrinkle and look unhealthy; just all around bad stuff. Smoking cigarettes ages you faster.

But according to a new study published in the American Journal Of Public Health, drinking just one 20-ounce sugary soda drink a day may age you just as quickly as smoking cigarettes. This study involved 5,309 American adults between the ages of 20 and 65 with no history of diabetes are cardiovascular disease and studied them between 1999 and 2002.

For the people involved in this study, the more soda you drink, the shorter their telomeres become over time. Telomeres are the protective caps on DNA at the ends of chromosomes in cells...

By Judy Zehr

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

What drives our anxious mind? One of the keys can be found in our “default circuits” or the neural circuits — the thoughts and feelings — that incessantly run as the semi-conscious backgrounds of our inner lives.

These default circuits are “wired” into our inner lives by repetition and experience and resemble a mental virus we pick up from our culture or family. Our default circuits are like the little man behind the curtain running the great and powerful Oz. They might run the show, but they are fueled by implicit memories: unconscious or barely conscious fears, lusts, hostilities, passions, cravings, repulsions and the like...

Weeping is a mechanism that lets go of sorrow. Yet you do not really want to be done with sorrow. You may say you do. You may think you do, yet you drown yourself in tears of sorrow, and somehow, and somehow the sorrow is a comfort to you. Weeping assuages something within you at the same time as it opens wounds and puts salt on them. When you don’t know what else to do, you cry. It is not a show-down. It is not coming to terms with your self-avowed heartache. It is just weeping, and sometimes you don’t really know why. You can list reasons, yet you don’t really know why.
 
It is not wrong to cry. If it is a release, it is a release you need at the time. You don’t know what else to do. Often your woe doesn’t have a name. It is an unnamed woe in your heart. There seems to be no end to it. When you turn the pages of your life on Earth, you feel abandonment. Time has passed, and loved ones are no longer with you. Your crying may come down to this:
 
“What am I going to do without my friend? I have lost a friend. I have lost mother and father and brothers and sisters and more friends that I can count. In many ways, loved ones are lost to me in a distance of time and space. Oh, how I would visit with my lost friends now if I could.
 
“I am bereft at life. Life is an ache in my heart. I am sure life is not meant to hurt so much.