The person that have influenced me

As we live in society, it is natural that other people have an influence on us. And I'm not an exception as well. So in this article I'm going to talk about one person who influences me.

That person is my friend Ruta who I met about 4 years ago at school. She's a person that I'm proud of. She's true, sincere, sophisticated and 'deep'. She is the person who is out of superficial world- probably that is one of the main things that I like about her and what I got from her. She barely always tells what she thinks; has a gift to see in people special qualities- usually what others can't see; she looks at the life deeply. For me she is just special.

Personally, I think I've changed as a personality since I've met Ruta. More concret- my attitude to the world, people has changed. Not radically as still me and my friend are different personalities but slightly- for sure. The thing I've noticed that I changed my attitude to parents to better side, especially to my father- Ruta in some way showed me the special part of my father. I'm grateful for it. And just for herself being the person I can rely on and who can tell me the truth even if it may be hurting me.

Despite the fact that she is in the other part of Europe now, I feel this relationship being important to me. As well as her influence, which is not as it was, but still exists

and I want it to continue. Because that influence shows me secret parts of ourselves and the transcendental world.

References: http://www.hickerphoto.com/data/media/146/northern_light_T1481.jpg

Dreaming- does it touch everybody?

A word dream describes a subconscious experience of various sensations that include sounds, images, emotions etc. that appear during sleep, especially REM sleep. I would like to mention a few questions related to dreaming in this article- who dreams and what does affectthe amount of dreams we remember.

Firstly, the question :" Does everyone dream?" occurs. The answer to it is :"Yes". We even dream in the womb. Besides, the length of dreaming varies over our lifetime. As a newborn infant we dream about 80% of our sleep time ( 80% of sleep in the REM state ), later this number shifts- as adults we have 20-25 % of our sleep in REM state and lastly, the amount of REM sleep to old people is 20%. In order to understand it better I will give you an example- if we ( adults ) sleep 8 hours , we dream for an hour and a half each night. For older people, if they sleep 8 hours, dreams take a bit more than an hour. So everybody dreams, just different amount of time. But actually there exist some very rare exceptions - people can loose ability to dream if the area of the brain that controls dreaming is injured.

So as we know that everybody dreams ( without rare exceptions ) , another question emerges to the surface - why do we remember so few of our dreams ? The answer is quite simple- we remember just what was very intense and powerful. Otherwise there isn't impact that makes us to pay attention. Much of our dreams consist of simple daily experience, for example- what we have been doing at work, which is not very terrible nor very great and we don't pay attention to it which leads to the fact that we don't remember our dream. Another factor for remembering dreams is how we wake up. If we wake up from dream naturally, this dream is usually very fresh and recent, usually more dramatic than other dreams ( we dream few times during night ) so we remember it. But as for nowaday society, we tend not to listen to our natural body rythms and we wake up from either the noise of alarm clock, or screaming baby or other factors. In this case we disturb natural rythms and disturb dream, which means we don't remember it.

To sum up, dreams are known to everyone. But some of us remember more of them, some less. That is connected not just with intensity of our dreams ( whether dreams are captivating or not ), but also the quality of our sleep. By listening to natural rythms of our body, we will have a better sleep and will remember the subconscious experience of our sleep time.


References:

http://www.balancedlivingmag.com/images/2005/July-August%2005/dreaming_TOC.jpg

About phobias

Firstly, what is a phobia? It isn't just a simple fear as you may think. A phobia is an excessive and persistent fear of : a situation or an object. The fear is considered excessive because it is out of proportion to the actual level of danger associated with the situation. When an individual with a phobia is exposed to the feared situation, an immediate anxiety response is triggered that can sometimes grow into a great panic attack. So people with phobias avoid the feared situations or objects. Otherwise, they endure a lot of distress.

Phobias vary a lot, but it is distinguished 10 most common phobias.
The first place in this list is taken by arachnophobia, which is a fear of spiders- half of women and 10% of men suffer from it. Though this phobia may look quite funny, the symptoms of it are not funny at all. They are breathlessness, dizziness, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, feeling sick, shaking heart palpitations, inability to speak, to think clearly, a fear of dying, loosing psychological control, an enormous detachment from reality, frequent panic attacks.
Social phobia ( a fear of being evaluated negatively in social situations) is frequent as well. Victims of this phobia are afraid to open criticisms, humiliation and they are tend to be unable to speak , sweat and blush in front of others. One more phobia, which is called agoraphobia, has similarities with social phobia. Those who suffer from agoraphobia are generally afraid of being in the centre of attention and usually avoid going to public places and social gatherings. It may sound as a joke, but a famous American actress Kim Basinger, who won an Oscar, suffers from both - social phobia and agoraphobia. When she accepted her Oscar , the words from her didn't come, though she had been practising a response for days.
Aerophobia, a fear that tortures Whoopi Goldberg, is a fear of flying. Acrophobia- a fear of height. Those who suffer from panic attacks in elevators, trains or other confined spaces ( Adolf Hitler was one of them ) are called claustrophobics.
Some strange phobias, such as emetophobia ( a fear of vomit ) or carcinophobia ( a fear of cancer ) also are in the list of 10 most common phobias.
And the last two that go into this list are brontophobia- a fear of lightning and thunder ( logically- these people hate summer ) and necrophobia- a fear of dead and death.

The last point I would like to mention is a way of treating phobias. A superior way is considered to be cognitive behavior therapy ( CBT ) which focusses on slowly and safely exposing a person to a feared situation or stimulus. It involves repeated approaching of fear- provoking situation or object until it no longer produces a strong fear reaction. As for medications, they should be used just in phobic situations in order to allow the person to function in that situation, but not for treating phobias.

This is just a liitle information to get to know deeper what phobias are. As it is seen, phobias are widespread and they have serious effect on our mental health and for this reason they have to be eliminated.


References: http://www.visioncoachingservices.com/pictures/phobia%20woman.jpg