Breathing and digestion are both involuntary processes in your body. However, youcan exert a little control over your breath. And, what's more, deep purposeful breathing can improve your digestion. It seems like taking deep breaths yields so many benefits that it's hard to keep track: heart health, stress relief, improved sleep are just a few; however, improved digestion is simply another aspect of breathing deeply.

There are two basic types of breathing: chest breathing and diaphragmatic breathing. Chest breathing utilizes the upper muscles of your chest to pull oxygen into your lungs, the Mayo Clinic states. Diaphragmatic breathing is what clinicians consider "deep-breathing" because it utilizes the body's dominant breathing muscle: the diaphragm (a big, dome-like muscle that contracts continually, helping you to breathe). There's nothing wrong with chest breathing, but when it comes to mealtime, a few deep inhales and exhales can encourage slower, more mindful eatingand reduce symptoms associated with GI disorders like indigestion and constipation.

When you are distracted, running, in a hurry, or otherwise stressed, your body moves into fight or flight mode, which means your sympathetic nervous system is active. When this happens, your body releases stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline boosts your energy, elevates your heart rate, and raises your blood pressure. Cortisol controls (what it considers to be) non-essential activities within the body like digestion, theMayo Clinic says. This means blood moves away from vital digestive organs, says Jenna Volpe, RDN, LD, CLT, specializing in digestive health. Instead, blood moves to the arms, legs, and lungs, which is helpful if you need to run from a bear (but not if you're stressed at work and on your lunch break). In fact, Volpe shares that an active sympathetic nervous system often results in indigestion, nausea, heartburn, reduced nutrient absorption, and fatigue.

"Deep breathing is a quick and effective way to switch our nervous system out of the sympathetic fight or flight stress response (survival mode) into the parasympathetic rest and digest relaxation mode," says Volpe. "Our nervous system can only be in one of those states at a time."

While eating naturally nudges your 'parasympathetic nervous system (hence: rest and digest), deep breathing before a meal can help move things along. For instance, deep breaths can stimulate the vagus nerve, which is involved in regulating the nervous system and gut. The parasympathetic nervous system also promotes salivation and restores normal blood flow to the organs that aid digestion.

Even though eating has the ability to slow your fight or flight response, a few deep breaths before eating gives you the chance to be more mindful throughout the meal, according to Cindy Tsai, MD. This is nothing to be ashamed of, but deep-breathing is a great strategy for someone who wants to eat slower, chew more thoroughly, or just get more enjoyment out of their meal.

Not only is deep-breathing good for switching off the body's fight or flight response, but it also allows you to be more mindful while you eat. "When we do this before we eat, we are more likely to chew more slowly and have more mindful awareness while eating," says Coral Dabarera Edelson, MS, RD. Chewing slowly can make a huge difference for people with digestive issues, and it is one of the first things to work on when dealing with stomach tightness, gassiness, and acid reflux, Edleson says. As you slow down your mind and body before you eat, you can become more aware of things like chewing, swallowing, and the speed at which you eat.

No one wants breathing to become a mealtime stressor, and both experts suggest you give yourself grace as you try to develop a ritual. Practice makes perfect, but you don't have to meditate for an entire hour before a meal to experience the benefits.

Keeping things simple at first is the best way to reap the rewards of deep breathing before you eat, according to Dr. Tsai. She recommends that you sit quietly and feel your feet on the ground. "Take a slow inhale through the nose and count to four, as you feel your abdomen expand," she says, adding that you can put your belly on your hands to feel it fill up when you inhale.

"Hold your breath for 2 seconds if you can," Dr. Tsai explains. "Exhale slowly through your mouth (count to six) as your abdomen deflates. Repeat three to five times."

Remember that this shouldn't replace any clinical treatment or medications but can instead help your digestion as an added practice. Volpe also adds that you should avoid deep breathingwhileyou eat because it can cause bloating or choking. Before and after eating are ideal.

These bodily processes happen on their own if you're not paying attention, so there's no reason to feel bad if you haven't been deep-breathing before a meal. This is an opportunity to improve your digestion and calm your system before you eat.

Oh hi! You look like someone who loves free workouts, discounts for cutting-edge wellness brands, and exclusive Well+Good content. Sign up for Well+, our online community of wellness insiders, and unlock your rewards instantly.

Original post:
Heres Exactly How Deep Breathing Can Improve Digestion, According to an RD - Well+Good

AUSTIN, TX MARCH 12: Greg Tate attends I Am Richard Pryor Premiere during the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Stateside Theater on March 12, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Nicola Gell/Getty Images for SXSW)

Greg Tate was a giant. He was a stone cold genius who he tossed off brilliant thoughts as small talk and at the same time he was a teddy bear. He was humble, sweet, approachable, avuncular.

Tate was the embodiment of cool; I mean, like, he was always chill. Nothing raised his blood pressure. He had a large body and a mind that contained multitudes. He talked like a jazzman would play, he wrote like a funk god would rock, he thought in a way that was soulful and deep and intellectual. He could write about music, film, literature, visual art, comedy, politics, and everything under the sun.

Tate could find a way to analogize Rakim and James Joyce or George Clinton and Romare Bearden or Zora Neale Hurston and Cardi B.

He once wrote, Pronouncing the death of Miles Davis seems more sillyass than sad. Something on the order of saying youve clocked the demise of the blues, the theory of relativity, Ulysses, or any other definitive creation of this century. That, I think, we can now say about Tate. Saying hes dead at the young age of 64 seems crazy because hes one of the definitive creations of the century a critic whose work makes him as much of an artist as the artists.

I love, also, how his list of the centurys definitive creations casually puts Ulysses, one of the great novels, on par with the theory of relativity, one of the great scientific concepts, and on par with the blues, one of the greatest forms of music ever created. But that list says without screaming it a downhome Black invention is just as deep, just as brilliant, and just as important as some of the canonical stuff that White academic eggheads go gaga about.

In that same goodbye to Miles essay Tate also wrote, A friend of mine once said that you could not love being Black and not love Miles Davis because Miles was the quintessential African American. African American, not as in two halves thrown together, but a recombinant entity born of sperm and egg to produce a third creature more expansive that either. That was also Tate. A quintessential African American in that he was thinking diasporically and domestically and living in a headspace that combined that two to create a higher plane.

Imagine Wakanda located just outside of Harlem. I mean, the man was extremely Black in the corners of his mind he had destroyed the last scintilla of a colonized mind a long, long time ago. He was beautiful. In 1986 he wrote, My mission is clear. The future of Black culture depends that this generation brings forth a worldly-wise and stoopidfresh intelligentsia of radical bups who can get as ignant as James Brown with their Wangs [computers] and stay in the Black. Give me such an army and well be talking total cultural Black rule by the time the eco-system collapses, SDI bottoms out Fort Knox, the Aryan Brotherhood is officially in the White House, and Wall Street is on the moon.

A sentence like that makes him seem like Negrodamus, I mean Trump already been in the White House and the climate is about to collapse any minute now. But I digress. The man wrote with a sense of mission to inspire sisters and brothers to take the Blackness that a James Brown, a Nina Simone, a Marvin Gaye brings to their art and put that on the page. Thats what Gregory Ironman Tate did and he wanted us all to do that, too.

Tate loved Black culture deeply and never thought that it wasnt the best thing in the world. He knew how to talk about the artists he loved with a style that elevated his pieces to art his work was routinely more artful than the work he was writing about. His love of Black culture was deep and it was wide, too he revered jazz, both classic Miles and electric Miles, he loved rock (he founded the Black Rock Coalition), he lived for the funk (P-Funk was one of his cultural North Stars), and he was an early adopter of hip-hop, too.

He was a Boomer and many in his generation were freaked out when young Gen Xers got on the mic and said F**k singing, Im here to rhyme. Tate was among the first at The Village Voice to pronounce that he loved rap and understood it deeply and put it on par with everything else Black culture had ever birthed. In 88, when I was still unable to convince my parents that rap was not a fad, Tate wrote:

If Rakim (pae Miles Davis) is a rap ninja walking on eggshells, then Chuck D is the musics answer to the sheets of sound oratory [Amiri] Baraka bequeathed to the Black poetry movement for love of Coltrane And Flavor-Flav is a surefire professor of ignance whose mismatch with the mainman derails the tradition of cult-nat loudmouths who dont know how to laugh at themselves. In just two sentences hes referenced hiphop, jazz, poetry, and activism, and given respect to all including Flav, or at least the place that Flav plays on Chuck Ds stage set. Which is not to say Tate just loved everything. He sliced open Michael Jackson in 87 when he realized how much plastic surgery the man had had. Theres a fine line between a Black entertainer who appeals to white people and one who sells out the race in pursuit of white appeal. Berry Gordy, Burgermeister of crossovers Bauhaus, walked that line with such finesse that some Black folks were shocked to discover via The Big Chill that many whites considered Motown their music. Needless to say, Michael Jackson has crossed so way far over the line that there aint no coming backassuming through surgical transmutation of his face a singular infamy in the annals of tomming.

In the New York I grew up in, the New York of the 90s, there was a large crew of Black culture writers who were defining hip-hop in The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, and other publications. We were a quietly competitive bunch I know we all wrote with a chip on our shoulder trying to show each other who was the best of the bunch just as the MCs we wrote about were trying to prove that they were the best. But just like jazz or golf or the NBA, we all knew who was the best. Tate was the best. No one questioned it. No one was anywhere close to his spot.

Tate was the smartest, the funkiest, the illest. His sentences were beautiful, his observations were dead on, he was the GOAT. Everyone knew this. The first issue of Vibe opens with an introductory essay from Tate and that was perfect because of course the benediction for the new Black magazine had to be done by Tate the high priest of the Black writer community.

I dont remember the moment I met him, it feels like I always knew him, and when I was a baby I mean when I was in my early 20s I would call him on a Friday or Saturday night with nothing to say but after a few seconds I was listening to him talk for two or three hours and we never used the word mentorship but thats what it was. I didnt really ask him questions, I just listened to him spit his inner monologue, just listened to his ideas about culture and writing and dealing with editors and being Black and moving through life and I just tried to soak in his genius, like, OK this is how a genius thinks how do you bring a bit of that into your work?

Years later, I had a house party that he came to and he saw my copy of his collection Flyboy In the Buttermilk and he laughed its dog-eared and highlighted in different colors and the margins are all scribbled in because I have re-read that book hundreds of times at different points in my life looking, again, to understand how a genius approaches things. I read that book the way pro-basketball players watch Michael Jordan or the way Questlove watches old Prince. Flyboy In the Buttermilk is one of the formative texts that birthed me as a writer.

He was a friend, a mentor, a big brother, a man who was critical to the formation of how I thought about writing and about Black culture and I cant believe Ill never again talk to him.

Tour is the host of the podcast Toure Show and the podcast docuseries Who Was Prince? He is also the author of seven books.

Have you subscribed to theGrio podcastsDear CultureorActing Up?Download our newest episodes now!

TheGrio is now on Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Roku. Download theGrio.com today!

The rest is here:
Greg Tate was the GOAT of Black cultural writing we could all learn from his genius - TheGrio

One of the reasons artificial intelligence is such an interesting field is that pretty much no one knows what it might turn out to be good at. Two papers by leading labs published in the journal Nature today show that machine learning can be applied to tasks as technically demanding as protein generation and as abstract as pure mathematics.

The protein thing may not sound like much of a surprise given the recent commotion around AIs facility in protein folding, as demonstrated by Googles DeepMind and the University of Washingtons Baker Lab, not coincidentally also the ones who put out the papers were noting today.

The study from the Baker Lab shows that the model they created to understand how protein sequences are folded can be repurposed to essentially do the opposite: create a new sequence meeting certain parameters and which acts as expected when tested in vitro.

This wasnt necessarily obvious you might have an AI thats great at detecting boats in pictures but cant draw one, for instance, or an AI that translates Polish to English but not vice versa. So the discovery that an AI built to interpret the structure of proteins can also make new ones is an important one.

There has already been some work done in this direction by various labs, such as ProGen over at SalesForce Research. But Baker Labs RoseTTAFold and DeepMinds AlphaFold are way out in front when it comes to accuracy in proteomic predictions, so its good to know the systems can turn their expertise to creative endeavors.

Meanwhile, DeepMind captured the cover of Nature with a paper showing that AI can aid mathematicians in complex and abstract tasks. The results wont turn the math world on its head, but they are truly novel and truly due to the help of a machine learning model, something that has never happened before.

The idea here relies on the fact that mathematics is largely the study of relationships and patterns as one thing increases, another decreases, say, or as the faces of a polyhedron increase, so too does the number of its vertices. Because these things happen according to systems, mathematicians can arrive at conjectures about the exact relationship between those things.

Some of these ideas are simple, like the trigonometry expressions we learned in grade school: Its a fundamental quality of triangles that the sum of their internal angles adds up to 180 degrees, or that the sum of the squares of the shorter sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. But what about for a 900-sided polyhedron in 8-dimensional space? Could you find the equivalent of a2 + b2 = c2 for that?

An example of the relationship between two complex qualities of knots: their geometry and algebraic signature. Image Credits: DeepMind

Mathematicians do, but there are limits to the amount of such work they can do, simply because one must evaluate many examples before one can be sure that a quality observed is universal and not coincidental. It is here, as a labor-saving method, that DeepMind deployed its AI model.

Computers have always been good at spewing out data at a scale that humans cant match but what is different [here] is the ability of AI to pick out patterns in the data that would have been impossible to detect on a human scale, explained Oxford professor of mathematics Marcus du Sautoy in the DeepMind news release.

Now, the actual accomplishments made with the help of this AI system are miles above my head, but the mathematicians among our readers will surely understand the following, quoted from DeepMind:

Defying progress for nearly 40 years, the combinatorial invariance conjecture states that a relationship should exist between certain directed graphs and polynomials. Using ML techniques, we were able to gain confidence that such a relationship does indeed exist and to hypothesize that it might be related to structures known as broken dihedral intervals and extremal reflections. With this knowledge, Professor Williamson was able to conjecture a surprising and beautiful algorithm that would solve the combinatorial invariance conjecture.

Algebra, geometry, and quantum theory all share unique perspectives on [knots] and a long standing mystery is how these different branches relate: for example, what does the geometry of the knot tell us about the algebra? We trained an ML model to discover such a pattern and surprisingly, this revealed that a particular algebraic quantity the signature was directly related to the geometry of the knot, which was not previously known or suggested by existing theory. By using attribution techniques from machine learning, we guided Professor Lackenby to discover a new quantity, which we call the natural slope, that hints at an important aspect of structure overlooked until now.

The conjectures were borne out with millions of examples another advantage of computation, that you can tell it to rigorously test your hypothesis without buying it pizza and coffee.

The DeepMind researchers and the professors mentioned above worked closely together to come up with these specific applications, so were not looking at a universal pure math helper or anything like that. But as Ruhr University Bochums Christian Stump notes in the Nature summary of the article, that it works at all is an important step toward such an idea.

Neither result is necessarily out of reach for researchers in these areas, but both provide genuine insights that had not previously been found by specialists. The advance is therefore more than the outline of an abstract framework, he wrote. Whether or not such an approach is widely applicable is yet to be determined, but Davies et al. provide a promising demonstration of how machine-learning tools can be used to support the creative process of mathematical research.

The rest is here:
AI proves a dab hand at pure mathematics and protein hallucination - TechCrunch

As the woman watched the slide show, the scanner tracked patterns of activation among her neurons. These patterns would be analyzed in terms of voxelsareas of activation that are roughly a cubic millimetre in size. In some ways, the fMRI data was extremely coarse: each voxel represented the oxygen consumption of about a million neurons, and could be updated only every few seconds, significantly more slowly than neurons fire. But, Norman said, it turned out that that information was in the data we were collectingwe just werent being as smart as we possibly could about how wed churn through that data. The breakthrough came when researchers figured out how to track patterns playing out across tens of thousands of voxels at a time, as though each were a key on a piano, and thoughts were chords.

The origins of this approach, I learned, dated back nearly seventy years, to the work of a psychologist named Charles Osgood. When he was a kid, Osgood received a copy of Rogets Thesaurus as a gift. Poring over the book, Osgood recalled, he formed a vivid image of words as clusters of starlike points in an immense space. In his postgraduate days, when his colleagues were debating how cognition could be shaped by culture, Osgood thought back on this image. He wondered if, using the idea of semantic space, it might be possible to map the differences among various styles of thinking.

Osgood conducted an experiment. He asked people to rate twenty concepts on fifty different scales. The concepts ranged widely: BOULDER, ME, TORNADO, MOTHER. So did the scales, which were defined by opposites: fair-unfair, hot-cold, fragrant-foul. Some ratings were difficult: is a TORNADO fragrant or foul? But the idea was that the method would reveal fine and even elusive shades of similarity and difference among concepts. Most English-speaking Americans feel that there is a difference, somehow, between good and nice but find it difficult to explain, Osgood wrote. His surveys found that, at least for nineteen-fifties college students, the two concepts overlapped much of the time. They diverged for nouns that had a male or female slant. MOTHER might be rated nice but not good, and COP vice versa. Osgood concluded that good was somewhat stronger, rougher, more angular, and larger than nice.

Osgood became known not for the results of his surveys but for the method he invented to analyze them. He began by arranging his data in an imaginary space with fifty dimensionsone for fair-unfair, a second for hot-cold, a third for fragrant-foul, and so on. Any given concept, like TORNADO, had a rating on each dimensionand, therefore, was situated in what was known as high-dimensional space. Many concepts had similar locations on multiple axes: kind-cruel and honest-dishonest, for instance. Osgood combined these dimensions. Then he looked for new similarities, and combined dimensions again, in a process called factor analysis.

When you reduce a sauce, you meld and deepen the essential flavors. Osgood did something similar with factor analysis. Eventually, he was able to map all the concepts onto a space with just three dimensions. The first dimension was evaluativea blend of scales like good-bad, beautiful-ugly, and kind-cruel. The second had to do with potency: it consolidated scales like large-small and strong-weak. The third measured how active or passive a concept was. Osgood could use these three key factors to locate any concept in an abstract space. Ideas with similar cordinates, he argued, were neighbors in meaning.

For decades, Osgoods technique found modest use in a kind of personality test. Its true potential didnt emerge until the nineteen-eighties, when researchers at Bell Labs were trying to solve what they called the vocabulary problem. People tend to employ lots of names for the same thing. This was an obstacle for computer users, who accessed programs by typing words on a command line. George Furnas, who worked in the organizations human-computer-interaction group, described using the companys internal phone book. Youre in your office, at Bell Labs, and someone has stolen your calculator, he said. You start putting in police, or support, or theft, and it doesnt give you what you want. Finally, you put in security, and it gives you that. But it actually gives you two things: something about the Bell Savings and Security Plan, and also the thing youre looking for. Furnass group wanted to automate the finding of synonyms for commands and search terms.

They updated Osgoods approach. Instead of surveying undergraduates, they used computers to analyze the words in about two thousand technical reports. The reports themselveson topics ranging from graph theory to user-interface designsuggested the dimensions of the space; when multiple reports used similar groups of words, their dimensions could be combined. In the end, the Bell Labs researchers made a space that was more complex than Osgoods. It had a few hundred dimensions. Many of these dimensions described abstract or latent qualities that the words had in commonconnections that wouldnt be apparent to most English speakers. The researchers called their technique latent semantic analysis, or L.S.A.

At first, Bell Labs used L.S.A. to create a better internal search engine. Then, in 1997, Susan Dumais, one of Furnass colleagues, collaborated with a Bell Labs cognitive scientist, Thomas Landauer, to develop an A.I. system based on it. After processing Groliers American Academic Encyclopedia, a work intended for young students, the A.I. scored respectably on the multiple-choice Test of English as a Foreign Language. That year, the two researchers co-wrote a paper that addressed the question How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? They suggested that our minds might use something like L.S.A., making sense of the world by reducing it to its most important differences and similarities, and employing this distilled knowledge to understand new things. Watching a Disney movie, for instance, I immediately identify a character as the bad guy: Scar, from The Lion King, and Jafar, from Aladdin, just seem close together. Perhaps my brain uses factor analysis to distill thousands of attributesheight, fashion sense, tone of voiceinto a single point in an abstract space. The perception of bad-guy-ness becomes a matter of proximity.

In the following years, scientists applied L.S.A. to ever-larger data sets. In 2013, researchers at Google unleashed a descendant of it onto the text of the whole World Wide Web. Googles algorithm turned each word into a vector, or point, in high-dimensional space. The vectors generated by the researchers program, word2vec, are eerily accurate: if you take the vector for king and subtract the vector for man, then add the vector for woman, the closest nearby vector is queen. Word vectors became the basis of a much improved Google Translate, and enabled the auto-completion of sentences in Gmail. Other companies, including Apple and Amazon, built similar systems. Eventually, researchers realized that the vectorization made popular by L.S.A. and word2vec could be used to map all sorts of things. Todays facial-recognition systems have dimensions that represent the length of the nose and the curl of the lips, and faces are described using a string of cordinates in face space. Chess A.I.s use a similar trick to vectorize positions on the board. The technique has become so central to the field of artificial intelligence that, in 2017, a new, hundred-and-thirty-five-million-dollar A.I. research center in Toronto was named the Vector Institute. Matthew Botvinick, a professor at Princeton whose lab was across the hall from Normans, and who is now the head of neuroscience at DeepMind, Alphabets A.I. subsidiary, told me that distilling relevant similarities and differences into vectors was the secret sauce underlying all of these A.I. advances.

In 2001, a scientist named Jim Haxby brought machine learning to brain imaging: he realized that voxels of neural activity could serve as dimensions in a kind of thought space. Haxby went on to work at Princeton, where he collaborated with Norman. The two scientists, together with other researchers, concluded that just a few hundred dimensions were sufficient to capture the shades of similarity and difference in most fMRI data. At the Princeton lab, the young woman watched the slide show in the scanner. With each new imagebeach, cave, foresther neurons fired in a new pattern. These patterns would be recorded as voxels, then processed by software and transformed into vectors. The images had been chosen because their vectors would end up far apart from one another: they were good landmarks for making a map. Watching the images, my mind was taking a trip through thought space, too.

The larger goal of thought decoding is to understand how our brains mirror the world. To this end, researchers have sought to watch as the same experiences affect many peoples minds simultaneously. Norman told me that his Princeton colleague Uri Hasson has found movies especially useful in this regard. They pull peoples brains through thought space in synch, Norman said. What makes Alfred Hitchcock the master of suspense is that all the people who are watching the movie are having their brains yanked in unison. Its like mind control in the literal sense.

One afternoon, I sat in on Normans undergraduate class fMRI Decoding: Reading Minds Using Brain Scans. As students filed into the auditorium, setting their laptops and water bottles on tables, Norman entered wearing tortoiseshell glasses and earphones, his hair dishevelled.

He had the class watch a clip from Seinfeld in which George, Susan (an N.B.C. executive he is courting), and Kramer are hanging out with Jerry in his apartment. The phone rings, and Jerry answers: its a telemarketer. Jerry hangs up, to cheers from the studio audience.

Where was the event boundary in the clip? Norman asked. The students yelled out in chorus, When the phone rang! Psychologists have long known that our minds divide experiences into segments; in this case, it was the phone call that caused the division.

Norman showed the class a series of slides. One described a 2017 study by Christopher Baldassano, one of his postdocs, in which people watched an episode of the BBC show Sherlock while in an fMRI scanner. Baldassanos guess going into the study was that some voxel patterns would be in constant flux as the video streamedfor instance, the ones involved in color processing. Others would be more stable, such as those representing a character in the show. The study confirmed these predictions. But Baldassano also found groups of voxels that held a stable pattern throughout each scene, then switched when it was over. He concluded that these constituted the scenes voxel signatures.

Read this article:
The Science of Mind Reading - The New Yorker

UP photo by Sierra Kondos.

As a single-mother, graduating college student, journalist and small business owner, I know that day-to-day stress takes a toll on the human mind. However, a few months ago, I learned the hard way that the effects of stress are not limited to the brain.

A few months ago, I hit my breaking point. The day began like any other. My alarm went off, I slowly removed myself from my bed so not wake up my son, grabbed my robe and sneaked out of the room. However, I noticed that my neck was hot and burning at the base. It was uncomfortable but I chose to ignore it.

The kitchen is my happy place and I began the morning ritual of counting the scoops of coffee and pouring them into the filter, and once that was done, I hit the strong button before walking to my home office located in the living room. This has been my routine since 2013, beginning my mornings in a quiet house with the only loud noise coming from within, as I tick off my to-do list for the day.

Before I made it to opening my laptop to catch up on my homework for my last semester of college, my sons nana knocked on the door. I welcomed her in, offered coffee and sat down in my favorite green chair. I could tell that she was unhappy. I had been receiving texts throughout the week about her unhappiness. I knew this was coming just not before coffee.

Before she began, she motioned behind me, and I realized my son had woken up silently and had gotten dressed. She asked him to walk next door to go help his grandpa. I knew this was not going to be good. It never is when you send a child away but she also knew that I do not burden my child with adult matters.

Before I show her in a negative light, or make her the villain of this story, I would like to take note that she has a lot on her plate as I do. We have a common trait, even though she isnt my mother, of shouldering a lot of responsibility. Not because we want to, but because we have to. I already knew what she was angry about, but I let her begin the speech.

She was mad that my dog, Mathieu, got out of the pet cage and killed the neighbors cat. I am aware that my dog turns wild when I let him run loose in the country. He also ran loose with grandpas dogs and they hunted rabbits and squirrels. I knew Mathieu killed the cat there was no doubt in my mind. However, that was the breaking point for us both.

The speech got out of hand very quickly and I felt trapped not just in the situation but in my body. And quite suddenly, I was extremely hot. The heat spread quickly from my neck throughout my body and I thought I was about to combust. I ran to the bathroom and I discover I was covered in a red, whelped-up rash from my face to my toes.

It happened so fast, that in my panic, I grabbed my keys and drove from Kirbyville to Jasper to the urgent care without even changing my pajamas. By the time I arrived, I had to wait an hour and a half for the doctor to come back from lunch. My panic did not cease and my face had swollen so tight that my eyelids and ears looked as though they would split down the middle from the pressure.

When I was finally seen, the doctor thought I was having an allergic reaction but to what, she did not know. She gave me a steroid shot and a prescription and said if it got worse to go to the hospital. I drove to Walmart to wait on my prescription, but to my horror, the rash got angrier than before and I felt like ripping my skin off other shoppers steered clear of me like I was a leper. I left the prescription at the store, drove home to pick up my son and drove to the hospital in Jasper.

I was admitted at once and the doctor took one look at me and gave me Benadryl. They did not urine or blood test me they just sent me home. I called my mother, thinking She will know what to do. and asked her to come help me. She had never seen anything like it either. I was literally trapped inside a burning hell.

It took a week and a half for the rash to fade. However, the burning stayed under my skin and still makes appearances in random places every day. The weeks that followed, I had my blood and urine tested, nothing unusual was found. I had to give up drinking coffee, the most sacred part of my morning ritual, and replace it with white teas.

I took Benadryl every three hours and covered my body in calamine lotion until the rash disappeared and I still take one pill every day to keep the rash at bay. My ears were swollen for so long that I was deaf in my left ear. The doctors at the Lamar University Speech and Hearing Department scheduled me twice, which was free of charge because I am a student, and they made sure my ear drum was not damaged.

They explained that the swelling went from outside to inward which caused the earwax to impact. The solution was to switch between swimmers ear drops and regular ear wax removal drops to remove the wax. I have hearing in both my ears now.

The doctor that read the lab reports finally diagnosed me with a stress rash. I was under so much duress, from graduating college to trying to make my bookstore successful again that my body had finally had enough. The rash on my neck was the warning to get my stress under control, or it was going to get worse.

I researched the types of things that irritate a stress rash which range from foods high in histamines to working out and getting hot. My normally smooth skin now has a textured appearance and that makes me feel insecure that I could rash out at any moment.

To reduce stress, I listen to white noise while I concentrate on my deep breathing or when I go to bed my go-to is thunder and rain.

This incident changed my life in a very inconvenient way, but I took this as a learning opportunity to finally listen to my body and to just slow down.

I believe my need to be in control of everything and to make people happy all the time is physically impossible and my stress was warning me that I could only handle so much and the best kind of control is self-control.

We all struggle with day-to-day stresses, but we need to take time to decompress unless we end up in a mystery show about spontaneous combustion.

Continued here:
Stress affects more than the mind - University Press