Excerpt from "Choosing Happiness" by Stephanie Dowrick

Have you had the experience of getting up after a long evening relaxing in front of the TV or computer and find that you are feeling low in mood or irritable? Have you sometimes spent a longed-for morning with the newspaper, only to feel empty rather than energized and renewed?

Living breathlessly, many of us ache for "free" time and the chance to be spontaneous. But the truth is, as appealing as such time can be, without a sense of purpose and goals, with nothing to motivate us, to stimulate and shape our thoughts, most of us do poorly. Rather quickly, we feel bored. Then depressed. When shapeless days loom ahead into an indeterminate future, we may despair.

Worthwhile pursuits can lift our spirits. And psychological research has shown that the more worthwhile it is, the more alive we feel, whether it's volunteering at a camp for underprivileged kids, serving food at the homeless shelter, or helping clean a park.

This doesn't mean that chilling out, reading a trashy novel, watching some mindless TV or "doing nothing" is bad. In small doses, it may be fine. But our hungry minds need more. "Activity" can include times of stillness and silence, reading, thinking, meditating, daydreaming: all of these can be uplifting and highly constructive. It's the content that counts. And the variety.

When it comes to exercise, we each determine what we can or cannot do, and how hard we push ourselves. Some follow the all-or-nothing principle, believing that if exercise is good for you, it has to be hard, even painful.

This is a myth and far from the truth. In the 1990's, a shift occurred with exercise recommendations, as experts began to recognize the benefits of "moderate -intensity" activity.

So before you go out and break your back trying to get in some hardcore exercise, relax and develop a workout that you might actually stick with and enjoy. After all, if you enjoy an experience-such as exercise-you are more likely to want to repeat it.

If you've been keeping up with the news about hormone replacement therapy (HRT), you may have heard Oprah recently discussing the benefits of bioidentical HRT. This positive press, along with new scientific evidence, is leading some women and their healthcare practitioners to reconsider the 2002 mandate to stay off of HRT.

"What's changed since the negative results of the Women's Health Initiative?" Read the article below to learn more...

The bath trick came from combining two other classic tactics for your own MFR: the heat of a bath, with the pressure of a ball. But the result is more than the sum of the parts.

Absurdly simple instructions for myofascial release in the bath:

1. Simply run a hot bath
2. Climb in and get nice and warm and comfortable
3. Then bring in a firm 4" ball, (one that won't get destroyed by the water, like one of ours. )

The bath trick works particularly well because the pressure is easy to control.

Often people find that the full weight of their body trapping a tennis ball against the floor is simply too much - the pressure is too intense, and they're unable to achieve a relieving sensation. But in the bath, you are much lighter! You have much better control and a moderate intensity of pressure. While the heat relaxes you, your buoyancy in the water allows finely tuned control over moderate pressure on your soreness. Applying a little more or less pressure is as simple as rising up in the water a little, or submerging more of yourself.