We live in a noisy world

While one of the major causes of hearing loss is ageing, another common cause is exposure to noise.

This can come from voluntary exposure such as noisy cars or motorbikes, loud concerts or night clubs, or listening to loud music through headphones.

You can also be exposed to too much noise when you’re at work. Many people work in an environment where they are exposed to loud noise. If you’re in manufacturing and construction, you’re more likely to be affected.

Excessive noise at work can lead to temporary or permanent hearing loss, or tinnitus (ringing in the ears). If you work in a noisy environment the damage to your hearing can be cumulative, even taking a number of years.

The degree of hearing damage will depend on:

• the level/s of noise you’re exposed to;
• how often and how long you have been exposed to the noise, e.g workers who are exposed to hazardous noise on a daily basis at work are at a far greater risk of developing noise-induced hearing loss; and
• your susceptibility to noise.

What you can do

The most effective way to control noise is to eliminate it completely or reduce it. But when this isn’t possible, it’s important to always wear personal hearing protectors, such as ear-muffs or ear plugs, and make sure you wear them correctly.

If you do suspect you have some degree of hearing loss, see your doctor, who can organise for you to have a hearing test.

Quick noise level check

It’s not always obvious when noise levels are hazardous. A quick test you can do is the ‘one metre rule’. If you need to raise your voice to talk to someone about one metre away, you can assume the sound level is likely to be hazardous to hearing.

Sounds a crazy idea? Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. The benefits of icy cold plunges have been known for centuries, even practised by the Romans in their famous bath houses. Science is now catching up, with evidence that regular cold showers can lift your mood, increase alertness, and improve your immune system.

A recent study from the Netherlands found cold showers could reduce the number of sick days people took.

The 3000 participants in the study were asked to finish their morning showers with a 30-, 60-, 90-second blast of icy cold water, or to shower as they usually did, for 30 consecutive days.

They found the cold shower groups were absent 29 per cent fewer days than people in the control groups.

“This is the first high-level evidence showing that cold showers can benefit your health,” says lead researcher Dr Geert Buijze.

Even though many of the participants initially hated the cold shower experience, they stuck it out. By the end of the study two-thirds of the people decided to continue with them, said Dr Buijze.

Want to give it a try? Ease yourself in with 10 seconds, then build up gradually. If you have a medical condition and are not sure you should have icy cold showers, talk to your doctor. People with weaker immune systems and serious heart conditions, for instance, should get their doctor’s approval first.

• Another great way to feel more connected and purposeful is to volunteer for a cause that’s important to you. This could be online volunteering in the evening, or in real life on weekends.
• And of course, if you have a dog, make the most of having your very own friend-finding machine. Take your dog to the local dog park or café at a regular time, and you’ll soon find yourself bumping into and getting to know other dog owners. Dogs have the ability to break down barriers and get even the shyest people talking.

How to calculate how much sugar you’re eating

Food labels can tell you how much sugar is in a food, but they don’t tell the whole story.

There are two parts to a food label: the list of ingredients and the nutrition information panel (NIP). The NIP is also called the nutrition facts label in some countries.

The NIP will list total sugars per serving and per 100g. What it won’t tell you is whether that sugar is a natural part of the food or added by the manufacturer. This can be very misleading with a food such as natural Greek yoghurt. While the NIP will list sugar, this is the lactose – an intrinsic, natural sugar of diary foods. If you want to know whether a pot of yoghurt has sugar added, you have to read the list of ingredients.

When sugar is added to a food it must be included in the list of ingredients. You’d think sugar would be easy to spot, but there are over 40 different names for added sugar, including barley malt, evaporated cane juice, fruit juice concentrate, dextrose, molasses, and maltose. Going back to the example of yoghurt, and added sweetener may appear as sucrose, fruit juice concentrate or honey.

Before you make a resolution not to let any sugar pass your lips, even WHO don’t recommend zero intake, most people would benefit from reducing our intake, but we don’t need to totally quit. So that’s good news for the chocolate lovers among us.

Which sugar is the healthiest?

Coconut sugar, rapadura, maple syrup, agave, rice malt syrup – they are all sugar, all act in a similar way in the body, and all have the same kilojoules. Some may be slightly less processed and contain trace amounts of nutrients but nothing that’s going to make a significant difference to your health – only your wallet.

Ways to be wise around sugar

• Don’t drink your sugar. Sweetened drinks are the easiest way to over-consume sugar, and these include soft drinks, sports drinks, and fruit juice.
• Read the labels on the foods you eat most often. Some will have more added sugar than you suspect. And if any form of sugar is listed in the top three ingredients, that suggests it’s a high-sugar food.
• Want to work out how many teaspoons of added sugar a product has? One teaspoon holds about four grams of sugar.
• Enjoy baking? Cut the sugar by at least one third – you’re unlikely to notice the difference.
• Don’t avoid whole fruit and dairy because of their intrinsic sugar – these are foods that are part of a healthy diet and haven’t been linked to any adverse health outcomes.

What causes tinnitus?

Tinnitus is not a disease, but it is a symptom of other medical conditions. It can be caused by neurological damage, vascular disease, high blood pressure, hyperthyroidism and long-term exposure to loud noise.

Short-term tinnitus can be due to wax build-up in the ears, or even a reaction to medication such as aspirin or antibiotics.

What can I do about it?

Although tinnitus can’t be seen or heard by others, it can be diagnosed through hearing tests, so see your doctor or an audiologist.

Your doctor may be able to identify the underlying cause of the tinnitus and find ways to manage that. For example, if your tinnitus is caused by medication, they might suggest switching to another type.

You can also try the many proven treatments and therapies. While these therapies can’t get rid of tinnitus, they can help reduce the perceived severity and make it easier to deal with.

What are the treatments for tinnitus?

• Hearing aids

Around 90 per cent of people with tinnitus also have hearing loss, but even if you’re in the other 10 per cent, a hearing aid can still help.

• Sound therapies

External sounds can help mask, distract or help your brain ignore your particular tinnitus noise.

• Emotional therapies

The psychological impact of tinnitus is significant, and therapies which help you manage the stress and distress it causes can make a huge difference.

• Wellness and lifestyle

Stress, alcohol and caffeine can make tinnitus worse, and many people have found that changes such as healthier diet, exercise, meditation and yoga can help.

What meditation CAN do

Meditation, along with its offshoot mindfulness, is proven to boost your mental and physical health.

Thousands of studies suggest it can help you reduce stress, improve sleep, increase focus and improve anxiety, depression and insomnia, and even reduce blood pressure.

There are too many studies to go into here, but let’s focus on some of the most popular benefits:

• Stress reduction

Meditation is scientifically proven to reduce stress within eight weeks of regular practice.

Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, found that meditating can change your brain, particularly the parts of the brain linked with stress.

She conducted a study of people who had never meditated before, and put one group through an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program. In the group who learned meditation, she found differences in five areas of the brain, including the parts involved in mind-wandering, in learning, cognition, memory and emotional regulation; in empathy and compassion and in the amygdala, the part for anxiety, fear and stress.

• Focus

Meditation is proven to help you improve your focus, and in today’s “attention economy”, that’s something of a superpower.

Researchers from the University of Washington studied the impact of an eight-week course on mindfulness-based meditation on a group of knowledge workers. They found those who trained in meditation stayed on tasks longer and made fewer task switches as well as reporting less negative emotion afterwards.

• Anxiety, depression, and insomnia

A 2014 literature review of 47 trials in 3,515 participants suggests that mindfulness meditation programs show moderate evidence of improving anxiety and depression.

Another 2012 review of 36 trials found that 25 of them reported better outcomes for symptoms of anxiety in the meditation groups compared to control groups.

What meditation CAN’T do

While meditation and mindfulness are proven to help deal with the challenges of life, they’re not a cure-all.

One of the reasons people give up or get frustrated with meditation is the expectation that it will solve all your problems and transform your life.

Recently, numerous psychotherapists and meditation teachers have voiced concern about the commercialisation of mindfulness.

Dr Nicholas Van Dam, Senior Lecturer in Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, was a co-author of a paper called Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation. Along with psychiatrists, psychologists, and mindfulness experts from 15 different institutions, he says we need to be wary of people over-selling the benefits of mediation.

“I think the biggest concern among my co-authors and I is that people will give up on mindfulness and/or meditation because they try it and it doesn’t work as promised,” says Dr Van Dam.

Another concern is that when people are told they can, and should, ease their stress with mindfulness, it can imply that our stress is caused by us and our inability to control our minds, not by the inequalities of the system we live in.

Do:

1. Pay attention to the subject line. Avoid general words like ‘Hi’, ‘FYI’ or ‘Touching Base’, and instead write a clear concise subject line that reflects the body of the email, such as ‘Meeting date changed’.

2. Limit your emails to a few short paragraphs. “If you routinely send long, wordy emails, it’s likely that some of your recipients will start tuning out,” says workplace adviser and consultant Alison Green, author of the blog Ask a Manager. “If you need to communicate a large amount of information, email probably isn’t the way to do it.”

3. Make it clear what you’d like the recipient to do. Most of us receive an enormous number of emails, so help the recipient know exactly what you want them to do, says Green. Do you need information or input? Do you want them to take a particular action? Or are you just updating them, so you don’t require any action?

Don’t:

1. Hit “Reply all”. Unless the whole group needs to read your response – such as an ongoing group discussion – avoid using ‘Reply All’ advises Green. “More than 20 years after email came into popular use, offices are still battling epic reply-all failures that flood people’s mailboxes,” she says.

2. Use lots of CAPS and exclamation marks!! Using capital letters can be intimidating to the recipient, as it sounds like you’re yelling, while lots of exclamation marks at the end of sentences can come across as overly emotional or immature.

3. Get angry or snarky in an email. Email isn’t well suited to conflict, as it’s easy for your tone to come across much more harshly than it would in person, says Green. If you sense yourself becoming frustrated, it’s best that you back away from your email and have a real conservation.

Do you ever wonder if your morning caffeine habit could be harming your health? Maybe it’s time to discover the truth about the popular drink.

Many of us love coffee. Its caffeine is a stimulant that helps us feel less tired and more alert, even improving mood, reaction times and general brain function.

For a long time, coffee has been the victim of mixed messages. “One day coffee is reported as being good for us, and the next day, it is harmful,” says nutrition research scientist Dr Tim Crowe on his blog Thinking Nutrition.

But in the last few years a number of large studies have reassured us that moderate coffee drinking is not only safe, but might actually be beneficial.

Coffee lowers disease risk

In 2016, a large scientific review looked at over 1200 studies on coffee and disease, including cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, liver disease, neurological disorders and longevity. For most of the health outcomes, the benefits of three to four cups of coffee a day (moderate consumption) outweighed the risks.

For anyone at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, one of the world’s fastest growing chronic conditions, the news about coffee is good. “Regular coffee drinkers have up to a two-thirds reduced risk of developing this condition,” says Dr Crowe.

Are you concerned about coffee’s supposed links with cancer? In a June 2016 report, the World Health Organisation officially lifted coffee from the list of potentially carcinogenic foods, while the World Cancer Research Fund International concluded that coffee consumption was linked with a lower risk of several types of cancer, including liver and endometrial.

Coffee drinkers live longer

A 2018 study that tracked half a million UK residents, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, found those who drank coffee had a lower risk of dying of any cause. Because this is a correlational study, we can’t say for certain that coffee was the cause of the lower risk of death, but other large studies have similar findings.

What’s the good stuff in coffee?

While some of its health effects are related to caffeine, coffee is more than simply a stimulant. Both decaf and regular coffee contain a host of antioxidants including plant compounds called phytochemicals, many of which are likely to have health benefits. In fact, one estimate has found that the typical United States diet provides more antioxidants from coffee than from fruit and vegetables combined. Coffee also contains several nutrients including riboflavin, niacin, magnesium and potassium.

These aren’t all reasons to start drinking coffee if you don’t already, but they do suggest that you can safely enjoy, and benefit from, three to four cups a day.

When to be cautious with coffee

• If you’re pregnant: It is recommended by health organisations in most countries that you have no more than 200mg caffeine (a maximum of two cups of coffee) a day because of a potential higher risk of miscarriage in women who consume too much caffeine.
• If you have high blood pressure: don’t overdo your coffee habit as caffeine can temporarily increase blood pressure, although the long-term effects are not known.
• If you have trouble sleeping: limit coffee drinking to before lunch. The half-life of caffeine – the time it takes your body to eliminate 50 per cent of what’s consumed – can vary between people and may last anywhere from two to 10 hours. This means it can still affect you long after you’ve finished your last cup.

Research tells us that practising gratitude boosts our physical, mental and emotional health.

According to Robert Emmons, founding editor-in-chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology, feeling grateful can lower your blood pressure, improve your immunity and help you sleep better. It also reduces your risk of depression and anxiety and boosts resilience.

Yet, when we try to practise gratitude in real life, it often sparks a strange rebellion, like a child told to be grateful for vegetables at dinner.

There are two reasons for this:

1. It can feel invalidating

If we try to be grateful without acknowledging the challenges we’re facing or any difficult emotions we’re feeling, it can make us feel resentful.

2. We’re wired to look for danger

As humans, we’ve evolved because of our finely attuned ability to identify and overcome threats. Our survival depended on us focusing on things that were wrong, not on those that were right.

So how do we overcome these instinctive blocks to gratitude?

Here are three proven ways to boost your gratitude:

1. Let yourself feel the bad and the good.

Allow yourself to acknowledge other feelings – of sadness, fear or anger, for example – even while you practise feeling grateful. You can still look for things to be grateful for while admitting that life is hard right now.

2. Make gratitude a habit. Robert Emmons, the gratitude expert mentioned above, recommends setting aside time each week to write in a gratitude journal. He also shares the tip that focusing on people has more impact than focusing on things.

3. Go deep rather than wide. Emmons says focusing in depth on one thing that you’re truly grateful for can have more benefit than trying to think of a long list of superficial things.

So grab a piece of paper, or open the notes app on your phone, and find one thing to be grateful for right now!

There are also dedicated gratitude apps that you can use. Try searching for them in the App or Play stores.

Give yourself a rest from a repetitive task or position by taking a microbreak of up to 60 seconds every 20 minutes.

Try the following:

• Eye break. Use the time to look away from your computer to help ease eye strain, symptoms of which include dry, irritated eyes, blurred vision, neck and back pain and headaches. Use the 20/20/20 rule: every 20 minutes, shift your eyes to look at an object at least 20 feet away (six metres) for at least 20 seconds.
• Deep breathing. Focus on your breath for a few seconds to give your mind a break. Breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds and out for four to five seconds. Repeat three times.
• Shoulder shrug. Inhale deeply and gently lift your shoulders up to your ears. Hold for a few seconds, then let them slowly fall. Repeat three times.
• Chin tuck. Sit up straight with your shoulders back. Now imagine drawing your chin back towards your spine. Hold for 10 seconds, then relax.
• Back twists. Sit on the front of your seat, both feet on the floor, with a gap between your back and the back of your chair. Cross your arms lightly in front of your chest and slowly twist your upper body from side to side as far as is comfortable. Repeat a few times each way.
• Neck stretch. Start with your head squarely over your shoulders and your back straight. Lower your chin toward your chest and hold for 10 to 15 seconds. Relax and slowly lift your head back up. Then tilt your chin up to the ceiling, bringing the base of your skull toward your back. Hold for 10 seconds and return to the start position.

• Side tilt. You can do this standing or sitting. Gently tilt your head toward your right shoulder until you feel the stretch (don’t raise your shoulder). Hold the stretch for 5-10 seconds, then return to the start position and repeat on the other side.
• Leg extensions. While you’re sitting, pull in your tummy then slowly extend each leg in turn and lower back down.
• Tennis ball roll. Give your feet a gentle massage. With your shoes off, roll the arch of your feet over a tennis ball back and forth for about 30 to 60 seconds.
• Take a stand. Set a timer to remind you to stand up for at least every 30 minutes. While you’re standing, place your hands on your waist and gently arch your back, going no further than is comfortable.

Need a bit of fun in your downtime?

There could be some benefits from watching those funny cat videos you love. While it’s best to take a break from the screen to move, one study found that humour can have an energising effect when you’re trying to do a complex task.

A study done on 124 students found that when they were given a boring task and then exposed to funny videos (an episode of “Mr Bean”) the students worked twice as long as those who watched videos on neutral subjects.