I choose to be Happy

Research reveals that being happy, staying happy and flashing that million dollar smile more often, may help to keep our heart in good health. A research led by Dr. Karina Davidson, Herbert Irving Associate Professor of Medicine & Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center, New York showed that being a happy person and adopting the attitude of being happy can provide powerful protection against coronary heart disease.



Hmmm, very interesting! Not really because I want to live a longer life; but because I want to live a quality life regardless of its length. Today, January 1, 2011, as this year begins, I’m treating all my disappointments, frustrations and pains as things in the past already and choose to be happy throughout the year... and beyond. To share the findings of that research, here’s a re-post from http://www.suite101.com/content/being-happy-can-prevent-coronary-artery-disease-a206869.

Positive Affect Can Protect you from Coronary Heart Disease

In her study, Dr. Davidson and her team examined 1739 healthy adults (862 men and 877 women) who were randomly selected to participate in the 1995 Canadian Nova Scotia Health Survey. The investigators reported that, “Positive affect was associated with a reduced risk of 10-year incident coronary heart disease.” Wow! That's amazing is it not? So, there's a lot to be understood then about the healing power of a smile and experiencing the joy of living and loving life in working as a powerful preventive measure against coronary heart disease.

It appears that positive affect contributes to having better moods, staying more relaxed and less affected by stressful conditions. Staying happy and being happy can work as a powerful stress buster. So, it's important to cultivate the attitude of being happy.

The simplest way to get into a positive mood and begin being a happy person and experiencing positive emotions would be to interact with positive people, look for positive influences and positive effects, watch positive TV that has a positive impact and adopt positive management styles at your workplace.

Practice Being Happy Right Now!

Of course, it is important that you don't wait for events to happen and things in your life to fall in place before you decide to be happy. You can experience those positive emotions right now. Be happy now.
You don't have to wait till your favorite sports hero wins gold at the winter Olympics or until your favorite film star wins an Oscar or your favorite singer wins a Grammy to be happy. And certainly you don't have to wait for the roses in your garden to bloom or wait for that year end dream holiday in the Alps mountains or in Switzerland to materialize to be happy. The time to be happy is now and the place and space to be happy is here, right where you are.

How You React Can Affect Your Heart

Remember, angina – the choking chest pain that happens when a blood vessel in the heart gets partially blocked and which can send you rushing to the nearest medical center can be prevented, if you take care to listen to your heart and spend time cultivating joyful emotions. There's strong medical evidence to support this statement.

Dr. Davidson and her team found that after taking into account age, sex, other cardiovascular risk factors and negative emotions, “over the 10-year period of observation, increased positive affect was associated with less risk of coronary heart disease by 22 percent per point, on a five-point scale measuring levels of positive affect expression (ranging from none to extreme).”
Dr. Davidson's study published in the current issue of the European Society of Cardiology’s European Heart Journal, is the first to show a relationship between positive emotions and coronary heart disease.

Always have it in mind that some of the risk factors for coronary heart disease, besides a high fat, meat and dairy rich diet and sedentary lifestyle include leading a very hectic and stressful life and experiencing a lot of negative emotions like anger, hurt and grief.

You can choose to be happy even if you are in a tough spot and facing a challenging situation. It doesn't matter whether you are stuck in a traffic jam, caught in a hectic work schedule, firefighting a critical, on the edge 11th hour work project or playing conflict resolver for an out of the blue marathon family feud. That's because happiness is a state of the mind over which you can exert control.

Celebrate Many, Small Happy Moments Everyday

There are good scientific reasons for spending small periods of time everyday cultivating, warm, sunny thoughts and doing the things that make you happy. A month long study on 86 people asked to maintain daily reports of their emotions, that was carried out by Professor Barbara Fredrickson, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UNC's College of Arts and Sciences and Principal Investigator of the Positive Emotions & Pscychophysiology Laboratory has had very positive outcomes.
In their study, the researchers tested the hypothesis - that positive emotions help people to build lasting resources. They tested this hypothesis by measuring emotions daily for one month and assessing life satisfaction and trait resilience at the beginning and end of the month.

The investigators found that the daily expression of positive emotions can contribute greatly to building resilience and can act as a powerful emotional lifebuoy for those caught in the storms of disturbing events and negative emotions. The investigators also observed that, “it is in-the-moment positive emotions, and not more general positive evaluations of one’s life, that form the link between happiness and desirable life outcomes.”

Talking about the impact of experiencing positive emotions, the investigators report in their paper that, “Induced positive emotions produce wider visual search patterns, novel and creative thoughts and actions, more inclusive social groups, and more flexible goals and mindsets.”

Stay Happy and Gift Your Heart a Natural Heart Tonic

What Professor Fredrickson's research findings imply is that you can stay protected from hypertension, stroke, fatal heart conditions like coronary heart disease along with the choking symptoms of angina, heart attack and emergency cardiovascular surgery simply by taking time off to participate in and celebrating simple, small acts of happiness everyday.

Small happy moments experienced throughout the day can help you to build emotional resilience and stamina which can act like a reserve source of positive energy that you can draw upon when conditions get tough. So, starting now, take time off everyday, to indulge in your hobby or to do the things that make you happy...because that's going to work as a great tonic for your heart.
If you are already suffering from coronary heart disease, following Dr. Dean Ornish's method of adopting a fat, free, dairy free, vegetarian diet along with time spent in yoga and meditation and staying happy, positive and relaxed may even help to reverse heart disease. Do check out Dr Dean Ornish's Programme for reversing heart disease. It's a beautifully designed and remarkably effective programme for helping you stay healthy and your heart functioning well.

Worldwide, 17 million people die each year of cardiovascular illnesses. One simple step you can take to help your friends, relatives and colleagues stay protected from coronary heart disease would be to share this article and spend some happy moments with them.

LET’S ALL CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY!

Old clips

I was reviewing my old video clips captured through my old cellphone. Here are few of the ones i really like...

Twilight Hideaway

Sitting by the beach before twilight comes has been my favorite hideaway for quite sometime now. The refreshing afternoon breeze; the calming waves sounds; the warm sand on my butt; and the scenic cloud formations blending with the sunset hue in the far away horizon always give me a feeling of inner peace. I guess this is how I cope now with the stresses of life, helping me to be calm about the uncertainties of tomorrow.

One afternoon, while on my hideaway stunt, I was tempted to browse on the notes I previously scribbled on my mobile. There were notes about hopes, trials, failures, challenges but this one commanded a pause and introspection: “I love watching the sunset. It reminds me that all days, bad or good, will end.” No wonder, being alone in the beach has been so momentous to me.



Then I noticed two people approaching where I was seated. They looked so engrossed with each other and romantically held each other while walking along the beach, on the spot where the waves kiss the sand. Sweeettttt.!

Red AIDS is now PINK in the Philippines

It’s been over a year since my last post in this blog site. I can still recall how enthusiastic I was when I started blogging. My life’s circumstances have somehow dimmed the blazing fire within. Nonetheless, I’m now trying to get back into writing some stuff, either sensible or otherwise.


So, what brought me back here? It’s my article “When Red AIDS becomes PINK”. Over a year back, the National Epidemiology Center (NEC-DOH) noted a sharp increase of HIV among the MSM (males who have sex with males) population. The basis then was merely the cumulative monthly reports at NEC which suggest a reversing trend of the Philippine HIV epidemics – i.e., from dominantly heterosexual (men-women-men) to dominantly homo/bi-sexual (men-to-men) transmission. From that trend, NEC projected a bad picture of exponential rise of recorded cases in the years to come if nothing indubitably significant will be done to slow down if not halt the momentum.

True enough, the projection held water. Results of the 2009 Integrated HIV Behavioral and Serologic Surveillance profoundly proved the premise. HIV in the Philippines is now officially PINK! What has been found-out? A stunning 65% of the confirmed HIV positive cases represent the MSMs. This is (almost) consistent with the cumulative recorded cases in 2009: 73% of 804 reported cases are MSMs. And here’s is another stunning story. Davao City is now considered to be one of the cities with high HIV prevalence among MSMs. And I’m talking about 4% of the 300 who participated in the 2009 IHBSS.

Let’s just say, six of the twelve cases have been HIV positive for the past five years or so, and at minimum, those 6 guys infected 3 partners in a month. That would be 6 (guys) times 3 (infected in a month) times 60 (months) = 1080 cases. This is really a very conservative projection, considering that some MSMs claim to have around 30 partners in a month. Please take note that I am just talking about 6 infections to start with here. And it did not end there. Many of the MSMs we surveyed have female partners also. Can you imagine the upcoming disaster? Ohh lala!

So why did this happen? The answer is simple. There has never been enough effort exerted to prevent an HIV outburst among the MSMs in the past couple of years. The increasing number of men pumping it up with another men and the rise of anal-sex-also preference over oral-sex-only have never been monitored and confronted. Obviously, condom use has never been in the picture, otherwise we would not see this thing happening.

So what would happen now? I’m seeing an increase of stigma and discrimination (again) for the MSM population (again). And as history has a vicious reputation to repeat itself, AIDS will again be associated to being a GAY DISEASE, like what happened in the early 80’s. Sad but true.

When Red AIDS becomes PINK

I was invited by the AIDS Society of the Philippines to present my organization’s experience in implementing an innovative approach to reach the men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) for HIV prevention during the 9th National AIDS Convention held at SEAMEO INNOTECH in Quezon City on October 23-24,2008. Having implemented a model project, I presented “LIVE CHAT”: Online Education Counseling for MSM. This project with support from ASP-UNFPA and the Friends of WAVES in Northern Ireland used the internet, particularly live chatting to interact, share information, counsel or refer chatters to appropriate reproductive health services such as STI diagnosis/treatment and HIV testing. Under Session Six, my presentation came after Dr. Enrique Tayags’, the head of the DOH National Epidemiology Center and Dr. Jose Narciso Melchor Sescon, president of ASP.

Well, this blog is not really about my presentation. I’d like to talk about Dr. Tayag’s presentation. His task was to answer the question “Why Philippines needs to intensify MSM programs?”. To get his message accross, he flashed a couple of slides showing the data from the AIDS registry. What was startling about his data was the sharp increase of confirned HIV infection among MSM for the last three years. The latest cases are mostly MSM which constitute 69% of the total HIV infections since 2005. This trend comes as a big surprise because in the past, MSM just represented less than 30% of the total recorded cases. If this trend continues, it looks like MSM will dominantly characterize the HIV epidemic in the Philippines in few years time. And Dr. Tayag warns that this could be dangerous because of the broad inclusion of the MSM population. While there are so many “obvious” MSMs - the effeminates and the cross dressers, there are an unaccounted number (probbly double) of “discreet” MSMs - those who look and act so manly. The latter is difficult to reach for education because we don’t know who they are and their sexual activities are done so covertly as well.

With the current absence or very minimal effort and investment for MSM-targeted interventions, there is a big possibility that the color RED of AIDS campaign will turn PINK (supposed to mean here gay) in the coming years.

The Man who Inspires Me

I’ve never been so interested about politics in the USA until the advent of the 2008 presidential race. The reason for the sudden turn around is unmistakably obvious - Barack Obama. His name and his color were enough reasons to stimulate my curiosity about the person. First, his name. Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t seem to sound a conventional American but more of a middle-east, Arab name. What makes it even more intriguing is that, Obama almost sounds like (with only letter “b” that spells the difference) “Osama” - the man responsible for tearing down one of the important landmarks in the USA, the World Trade Center and killing thousands of unsuspecting economic workforces. Secondly, his color. History tells us that black people in the US had terribly suffered decades of oppression and maltreatment from their white lords. Although the situation has considerably changed in these modern days, the divides between them still manifest from time to time. Obviously, possessing those two undeniably notable attributes make dreaming the US presidency sounds very ODD for him. Furthermore, being young by age and stint in the political arena made his experience looks substantially inferior compared to the rest of the presidential hopefuls.

But this guy with an unusual name in a dominantly white nation possesses the guts, the wit, the self-worth and the audacity to believe in the possibility of his dream, coupled with his mesmeric charisma to convince millions that he embodies their collective desires for change, for a sustainable progress, and for a better world.

True enough, his oddity gained countless of smear campaigns against him - linking him to terrorists, to communists, to opportunist lobbyists, to extremists, etc.. but his charisma prevailed. He successfully engineered the best campaign machinery ever, raised the biggest campaign fund ever, organized the most numerous volunteers ever and pulled off the ‘modernest’ campaign strategy ever. In the process, he was touching and inspiring millions of Americans, regardless of color, profession, religion and age and another millions of non-Americans across the globe, regardless of faith, region and race.

Starting from the primaries, I have been an avid follower of Obama. Almost every day, before I open my e-mails, I read about the progress of his campaign and sometimes listen to his speeches. And I have been so inspired since then - amazed by his eloquence in speech, amused by his pragmatism in views, convinced by his sincerity in spirit and subscribed to his reasonable liberalism.

Obama for me is an epitome of a person who pursues his dreams despite all odds; sees the rays of the sun behind the dark raging storm; perseveres the coldness of the night ’til the beautiful sunny morning comes; and never ceases to inspire others to believe in their capacity to do great things and receives the same inspiration in return.

Playing God?

I often admire people who are good at writing short stories which are very moving and inspiring at times. I guess over 90% of these stories are carrying some religious or spiritual themes. Presumably, the writers are people of deep spiritual conviction who are so eager to share their faith/beliefs, whether solicited or otherwise. And stories of this type flood our inbox everyday.

How good the stories might be, it always iritates me when at the end part, the writer would ask you to forward the message to your friends with a promise of “miracles” or “blessings” if you do and some “curse” if you don’t. What a ___! Isn’t it obvious that these people are playing the role of God? What is more disturbing is that many seemingly logical and sane people (whom we call friends!) are more than willing to participate in the “Playing God” scheme. What I usually do when I get these mails in my inbox? Go to the end of the story first and if the “forward instructions” are there, delete the mail without reading the story. Tell me bout your story, of course, related to this post, hehehe. ‘Til next…