Everyone has a sleep issue from time to time and I’ve found a surprising solution that helps – it’s called “Digital Sandman” by a company called Holothink (http://www.digitalsandman.com). You listen to an audio program that helps your mind calm down into a “sleep ready state”. Works great and they probably have no idea how much it’s improved my own sex life!

Many factors affect sleep quality, and therefore sex frequency and quality. Proper diet, enough exercise, mental stimulation, adequate fluid intake—basically all the things we know make us healthy make us sexually potent as well. Healthy bodies are sexy bodies.

But in today’s society, attention to exercise, diet and all the rest, don’t always provide complete support for sound, refreshing sleep. Stress and worry can keep us tossing and turning even though we’re otherwise super-healthy. All these factors are involved. Sex is a built-in, god-given desire, the realization of which floods the body with feel-good hormones that improve our quality of life and ability to cope with what’s coming next. Deep sound sleep is similarly hard-wired into us. It is the setting for regeneration of cells and electro-chemical resetting for the next day of awakeness.

Anything that makes it easier to get good quality sleep has equal potential to improve your sex life.

Holothink offers many products designed to help you improve your mental functioning. Their Digital Sandman package (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) covers the full range of sleep issues with tracks including Power Napper, Sleep Support, Overcoming Insomnia and Digital Sandman to help you sleep better (and improve your sex life!).

Visit http://www.Holothink.com to try a free demo.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Ways to help enhance the quality of your family life

Building and maintaining strong and loving relationships in your life, especially within your family life, is one of the great hallmarks of successful living. No amount of money, wealth, or fame can replace the value in raising a nurturing family life.

Anyone can make a lot of money, anyone can work harder and attain more success within their career, but it takes someone special to create and hold on to the trust born from a loving and deep meaningful relationship.

Regardless if it is your wife, your husband, or perhaps your children, even your friends… having the ability to be open and honest with people in a relationship is the key hallmark of a truly successful man or women.

There are literally hundreds and hundreds of books and courses on the shelves to day that can help with advice in this area. Today we have put together a few tips that can help you better enhance the quality of the relationships within the scope of your family life:

1. Always keep in mind what is most important in your life by making the needs of your loved ones a top priority. Strive to put your relationships, especially your family, ahead of everything else. Of course there may be times when sacrifices have to be made, but never at the expense of diminishing the quality of your family closeness.

2. All too often we tend to bring our work home with us. Although this practice may be good for business, it can be detrimental to the attention of our spouse and our children. The best way to overcome this obstacle is to work harder at work by doing the most important tasks possible that bring the best returns, so that we do not have to ignore our family by taking our work home from the office.

3. The next time you are trying to decide how much time to spend at work verses your time at home with your family, keep this in mind: It is the quality of time at work that counts but it is the quality of time spent at home that matters. In other words, the time you spend at work is measured by results and productivity and the time spent at home with your loved ones is measured in terms of contentment and love.

4. Watching television, browsing the Internet, or reading a book does not constitute spending time with your family, even if they are in the same room with you. It is easy to fall into the idea that it is, but remember that while you may be occupied, you are missing out on precious time to interact with your loved ones. This is not to say that you should not have time to yourself by doing the leisure activities that you enjoy, just keep it balanced.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Is your marriage time-starved?

In one particular way, a relationship is just like a small baby. And although a baby is a very strong and resilient creature, without food and nourishment it will surely die. In the same way, couples who are living a time-starved lifestyle finds that their relationship dies unless they feed it emotionally.

You may have heard the term called “The 2 day marriage” before. This is a term that describe the hundreds of thousands of couples all over the world who are both so locked into their careers, mixed with the tasks of raising the family at night, that the only time they get together is on the two days of the weekend.

Although these 2 days may sound like fun and relaxing times to most people, couples find that even these weekends seem to drain their marriages of emotion and closeness. This is because so many of the forces of the weekend marriage try to suck the energy out of it.

During the week the schedule if full with work and then taking care of the kids, and of course sleep. But on the weekends, it seems that we have to take care of all of the other little tasks that we couldn’t get to during the week.

Stephanie, a married mother of two says “When we have much less time then we don’t give anything to ourselves, and of course we don’t have time for each other, and the stresses we face make it easier for us to turn on each other. My husband and I found each other arguing every chance we had, even when we set aside time on the weekends. Something had to change.”

We still love each other, but the distractions of our lives cause us to stop doing the things we know to do to take care of the relationship. So what is it that couples that are left with only time on the weekends do to heal and ultimately enjoy a better relationship?

One important way of getting close and dealing with time issues in a marriage is to take care of yourself. Successfully married couples who get in only a couple of days per week to be together made it a priority to take care of themselves as individuals and made sure that they each got their important needs met.

They understand the fact that if they do not give to themselves love and self attention, then they will not have love and attention to give away. Let’s put it another way: A little less for the relationship in the short run means a lot more for the relationship in the long run.

Popularity: 27% [?]

What Does He Mean By That?

The purpose of good listening is to gain maximum understanding. Many people are tuned in only to the words of a speaker or to the body language or the tone of voice and do not listen to the whole message. In understanding a message, each of these is important.

In order to hear the entire message, keep in mind the following points:

1. Think about the specific words the speaker is saying.

2. Maintain an eye contact with the speaker. You cannot read body language without looking at the speaker. Eye contact tells him that you are listening.

3. Engage your mind to interpret his body language. You may intuitively understand it because much of what is sent nonverbally is subconsciously understood. If you feel your emotions are coloring your understanding, do an awareness check.

4. Watch facial expressions and how the speaker uses his hands and arms. These will give you the most information on his nonverbal communication.

5. Listen to his tone of voice. Is it consistent with his words?

6. Interpret the complete message when he has finished. Respond to what you think he is saying and then listen carefully to his response to you.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Why do we hurt the ones we love?

Have you ever been involved with an upsetting argument in the past with someone close to you like a friend, family member, or spouse? Of course you have, most everyone has had been upset with people they love.

What is ironic about these arguments is that we tend to say things in the heat of the moment to our loved ones that hurt their feelings. Many arguments that we have with the people close to us in our lives are ones that we wouldn’t even have with a stranger.

So why is it that when we are angry we tend vent this anger out to another person that is almost always somebody close to us like our spouse, our kids, or a close friend? Why is it that sometimes we treat strangers better than we treat our own family and friends?

It is obvious that anger does not look very loving when it is coming out. The ironic part about getting upset is that we do it most often to the people we love the most in our lives. There are times when we are having a hard time at home with our spouse or kids and treat strangers better than we are treating our family.

You see, the reason why we tend to show more of our anger towards our loved ones is because the more love that you feel towards a person, the more open your heart is. And the more open you are, the more vulnerable you will become to those you love. This is where the protective emotion of anger comes in.

When we choose to stay in a long term relationship and marry someone, all of our intentions are usually the very best. Most people do not plan on getting together only to have violent arguments and psychologically damaging each other. We happen to get into these senseless scenarios by being blinded and consumed by our fear and anger.

What starts out as anger quickly moves into violence when it stimulates retaliation and revenge. You have to be emotionally healthy in order to avoid these painful consequences.

You must always be conscious of your choices and be aware of your actions. Try to feel compassion while experiencing strong emotions. If you want to keep yourself and your loved ones safe during high emotional and stressful situations, then you must reach this point of mental awareness.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Does Status Increase Happiness?

Social status is alluring. Throughout history, people have believed that they could fight their fear of not being enough by rising in the social hierarchy. But status is a slippery slope. No matter how high you climb, there are countless people still above you. And there’s always a long way to fall if your fortunes should fail. If you compare yourself to the people above you in the pecking order, you’ll sabotage your self-esteem. If you allow yourself to feel superior to the people below you, you’ll live in fear of dropping to their level.

Feeling superior to others is always tempting, but it’s a terribly weak tool for achieving happiness. It may pamper your vanity but it will never bring you peace of mind. If status really made people happy, white-collar workers would be markedly happier than blue-collar workers, since they enjoy more status. However, according to all sorts of studies, they’re not.

One interesting study showed that teenagers - who tend to be even more insecure and status-conscious than adults - are not happier when they’re reared in high-status families. In this study of 1,000 teenagers, those in the lower social classes reported the most happiness, and those in the highest social classes reported the least happiness. Rich kids usually have so much of everything that it’s worth nothing.

One of the worst instigators of status seeking in our current culture is television, because of all its ads, and because so many people on TV are rich and beautiful. Among the most chilling studies on the effects of TV was one done shortly after it was introduced, in the 1950s. Because of government regulations, TV stations were first allowed to broadcast in just 34 cities in 1951, and then in 34 more cities in 1955. In 1951, in the first 34 cities in which TV was allowed, the rate of petty theft and larceny increased dramatically. Then, in 1955, the same increase in property crime was experienced in the next 34 cities. Researchers concluded that TV hyped material status so flagrantly that people became willing to steal to achieve it.

Furthermore, researchers noted that TV increased not only the desire for material status, but also the expectation of it. People felt they deserved status symbols after seeing people on TV with them. This expectation of status pointed out an important general principle in the science of happiness: Happiness depends to a significant degree upon expectations. If you inflate your expectations, you’re begging to be unhappy. That’s one of the worst problems with wealth - it always bloats expectation. Rich people whine about things that would delight most people. Happy people keep their expectations under constraint, no matter how much money they have.

Popularity: 15% [?]

How Lack Of Forgiveness & Blame Wreaks Havoc On Your Nervous System

You may have considered that the ideas of seeking revenge or avoiding harm are carefully thought out responses. Not so. They are the product of a biologically designed system of protection. Your nervous system offers these responses when you perceive danger. What is unfortunate is that your nervous system cannot tell whether the danger you are seeing is occurring now or ten years ago.

Your nervous system does not know if your mother is yelling at you today or in 1981. Your nervous system does not know whether your husband had an affair today or in 1993. Your nervous system responds the only way it knows how whether you have thought about a problem once or twelve hundred times.

To make matters worse, the fight-or-flight response alters our ability to think. The stress chemicals do part of their work of protecting us from danger by limiting the amount of electrical activity available to the thinking part of the brain. The stress chemicals also play a part in diverting blood flow from the brain’s thinking center toward more primitive parts of the brain.

The body is so exquisitely designed to protect us from danger that it won’t allow us to waste our precious resources planning things out or thinking of new ideas. Our biology says survival is most important. Our body is willing to stand guard each of the 100 times we remember the horrible way our boss yelled at us or the 200 times we describe in bitter detail the day our mother walked out on the family.

Think About This…

How else could our bodies limit us to only two choices? Our bodies are trying to save our life by diverting some electrical energy from the thinking part of the brain to the more primitive and reactive parts. Your body will try to save your life when you face a saber-toothed tiger. Your body will try to save your life if the car in front of you swerves and you have to jam on your brakes. You will need every ounce of concentration on the task at hand to survive these challenges.

Your body has no need to save your life when you are remembering how unkind your mother was ten years ago. You do not need fight or flight when you tell your spouse that your best friend yelled at you. You do not need sympathetic nervous system arousal to explain for the thirty-fifth time how unfair it was that your father loved your sister more than you. You must learn to distinguish real from imagined danger to function effectively. You cannot learn this critical life lesson when you are busy blaming others for how bad you feel or how poorly your life has unfolded. Playing the blame game, you are trapped in a vicious cycle of hurt and physical discomfort.

Popularity: 15% [?]

4 Secrets Of A Sexy Marriage

Sexual desire in every relationship fluctuates between both partners. Some stages are of course predictable. For example, the following times are when sexual moods and patterns of lovemaking may shift: when you first marry, after your child is born, when the kids leave home, or when there is career pressure.

Knowing this, and being confident enough to talk about it, makes intimacy stronger. Those marriages that maintain sexual desire, strong intimacy, heated emotional bonding, and erogenous attraction all take part in the following actions that contribute to the “secret” of their marriage:

1. Sexual marriages do not keep affection inside of the bedroom only. Couples whose sex lives bring them the most happiness tend to eroticize their lives. In other words, they give affection both physically and verbally throughout the day. They do this in different ways. They touch, hug, kiss, and flirt. Whether it’s reassuring or frantically passionate, touch makes the difference between making love and having sex.

2. Married couples who always seem to have passion in their relationship make it a habit to make time for love. Sexy wives know that lovemaking is a habit: The more you do it, the more you like it, and the more you like it, the more you will do it! Lovemaking is a top priority, and if that means that sex has to be scheduled, then so be it. Just because it is planned does not make it any less exciting for these couples. They feel that sexual excitement feeds on itself, so they just do it.

3. These steamy couples also make it a point to talk everyday. Even if it is just ten minutes in the morning and a few more minutes at night, they voice their love for each other continuously. In taking the same behavior patterns from these kinds of couples, your duty is to voice your own love for your spouse in any manner that pleases you. Call each other pet names, remember to always say goodnight or goodbye when you leave. Just be sure that you don’t fall into the mind-reader trap of assuming your partner knows or should know what you are thinking and feeling just “because he loves me.” Those sexy couples in marriages make a point of expressing their feelings and their attraction to each other on a routine basis.

4. Kissing is also at the top of the list of priorities for the passionate couple. We’re not talking about a perfunctory peck on the forehead but rather a deep, sensual, teasing kiss that is given with passion. Many longtime couples rarely kiss at all, going straight to intercourse when they have sex. Don’t you remember the backseat? How about making out in the movie theater? Keep this up, steal a kiss!

Popularity: 25% [?]

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