Brain Wave, Health and medicine

Take Care Of Your Ears For A Clearer Tomorrow!

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The WHO estimates that there are 360 ​​million people in the world who have hearing problems or are deaf (5.3% of the world’s population). At least half of all hearing loss cases can be prevented, including good ear care practices. Being in control of your health is vital. Hearing loss can impair your quality of life, limit your ability to make contact with others, cause misunderstandings and fatigue, increase stress and “filter” the thousands of sounds that give pleasure and meaning to life. Also, hearing loss can create a safety issue or even depression. But perhaps the biggest problem is how we view hearing loss both as a culture and as individuals. Hearing loss has always been something of a stigma compared to vision problems. For example as a society, we prioritize our hair loss over our hearing loss and whilst all issues are important to us one way or another, it’s important to be on top of your hearing health and act quickly.

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There are many types of hearing loss and these may be caused by a number of reasons. The most common causes of hearing loss are:

1. The constant exposure to noise at work

Prolonged exposure to constant and loud noise can cause permanent hearing loss. Items such as motorcycles and power tools can also damage your hearing over time. If you can, avoid noisy activities or take a break.

2. Injuries or changes in pressure

A serious head injury can dislocate part of the ear or cause nerve damage, causing permanent hearing loss. Sudden changes in pressure – such as flying or diving – can damage the eardrum and the inside of the ear.

3. Medication

Some drugs are known to cause hearing loss as a side effect. These drugs include certain antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs. Regular use of aspirin can also increase the risk of hearing loss, but usually the side effects subside with discontinuation of the medication.

4. Chronic diseases

Some chronic diseases that are not directly related to hearing can cause its loss. For example, it may be a damage due to the interruption of blood flow to the inside of the ear or to the brain. Heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and diabetes are some of the causes of hearing loss, as well as autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.

5. Childhood diseases

Many childhood diseases can cause hearing loss. Infections, for example, fill the ears with fluid and cause hearing loss that usually goes away when the infection heals. There are also diseases known to affect hearing in children, including chickenpox, encephalitis, influenza, measles, meningitis and mumps.

Looking to the future

If you have been diagnosed with hearing loss, then life can change dramatically and you may need to look at new ways around things. With hearing loss recovery, you can certainly get more in control. It is also important to be positive and ensure that you follow some of the most important tips to keep your ears safe. These may include:

  • The production of “wax” in our ear serves its defense against infections and other harmful factors (eg insect entry). Normally, with the chewing movements, the “candle” is pushed and comes out to the external auditory canal.
  • Our ears have the function of “self-determination” from the cell (“wax”) produced in the skin of the external auditory canal.
  • Cotton swabs or anything similar used to clean the ear are not medically permitted. Their introduction into the external auditory canal can lead to accumulation of “wax” but also to various accidents (skin injury and otitis, cotton retention in the pore, drum perforation, etc.).
  • Never put anything in the ear (such as a finger or a cotton swab).

  • Use the hair dryer on the lower scale to completely dry your ears.

  • Do not attempt to remove a cell yourself. The intervention of the otolaryngologist is necessary in cases where there is sufficient accumulation of alveoli.

Check your hearing often and be in control. Unlike most medical examinations, the tests that measure hearing are relatively quick and painless. An otolaryngologist will probably perform 3 or 4 simple tests that may include:

  • Otoscopy, or examination of the ears with a special lens
  • Audiogram, a sound control that produces a mapping or graph of hearing ability
  • Tympanogram, which measures the pressure of the inner ear and evaluates the mobility of the eardrum.

These tests are performed at the doctor’s office and usually take less than an hour to complete. With the information from these tests, your doctor will be able to make an accurate assessment of your hearing skills and advise you on all of the options for treating it. Be sure to take control today.

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Brain Wave, Money matters

4 Ways to Free Yourself From Debt

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Debt is something that everyone will experience, and it will likely follow you through life until you finally get to the point where you can pay it all off, however long that might take. But debt isn’t just a fact of life, whether credit card debt or student loans, it can also have a severe effect on your mental and physical well-being, which is why it is vital to try to escape and free yourself from debt.

Pay Off More Than The Minimum

One common reason that people struggle to escape debt is that they will only pay off the minimum amount each month, and if you’re working with thousands of dollars in credit card debt, 20 bucks every month is not going to make much difference. Even paying twice the minimum will slash the amount of time you need to repay in half, so if you can afford to do so, consider changing your monthly payment to slightly more. Ideally, you want to pay off as much as possible while still having money to live and save, but if you can double, triple, or quadruple your monthly repayment, you will free yourself from debt much faster.

Snowball It

Snowballing is a technique where you analyze your finances and identify what you owe. They start paying off the smallest costs to reduce the payments while still making minimum payments on everything else. Once the smallest debts are paid off, they move to the next and so on until they are only left with the most substantial charges. While there is still some way to go, they at least don’t need to worry about defaulting on payments, and all of their excess funds can go directly into paying these charges off, which will speed up reducing the balance.

Cut Your Expenses

We all have expenses that we deem necessary to survive, but the reality is often quite different from this. It’s possible you have plenty of monthly charges for services you don’t even use, so you’ll need to get rid of these before anything else. Once you have achieved this, consider things you could cut out of your daily life, such as a morning coffee from Starbucks, or even your cable TV, especially considering you can access unjust information about everything online nowadays.

Seek Lower Interest Rates

Seeking lower interest rates from your lender is something many people explore when they cannot handle the extortionate interest rates. Considering Mark of Freedom says all banks are a scam, high-interest rates are no surprise. However, some lenders may take pity on you and allow you to negotiate a reduction to help you manage your money better.

Freedom

Paying off all of your debt and finally being free is not something you can achieve overnight, but the feeling you will get when you see your credit card balance at zero is hard to beat. It will take time, and it will take plenty of discipline with a few bumps along the way, but with these methods, you can start the process of freeing yourself from the nasty clutches of debt in all its forms.

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Brain Wave, Careers, Freelancing and Self-Employment

Thinking Of Going Freelance? Don’t Forget These Risks.

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Freelancing has become an attractive prospect for workers across many industries in recent years. However, anybody thinking about this career path should take it in a responsible manner. Appreciating the risks and taking the necessary precautions to avoid them is vital.

Here are five of the most common obstacles that you could encounter, along with how to stop them from harming your progress.

#1. Distractions

When working as a freelancer, you have to show discipline. Otherwise, you will see a major disruption to productivity. Whether working for clients or consumers, this will severely harm your revenue generation. Creating the right home office space is particularly important. Not only does it allow you to shut yourself away from the distractions of housework or Netflix. It also allows you to maintain a positive relationship with the home. When you’re not in the office, you’re able to relax.

#2. Instability

Many freelancers work for at least one client on a continued basis, which delivers some stability. However, most contractors or self-employed workers find that their income can go up and down. Therefore, setting aside a little money to cover the troughs is vital. Crucially, you need to be prepared for a complete loss of earnings due to injuries or circumstantial changes. You should protect your income with disability insurance and other safety nets. It’s better to be safe than sorry. Not least for your sanity. Otherwise, you’ll be living in fear.

#3. Unforeseen Expenses

Going freelance often means that you’re responsible for all of your overheads. While an accountant can help you claim back the tax deductions you’re due, you need the capital to buy products. A broken laptop, vehicle breakdown, or alternative fault could cost you a significant fee. Sadly, if you do not have the capital reserves to cover those issues, your earnings will be hit hard. Once again, it’s best to be prepared for the worst at all times. You can also take proactive steps by preventing theft or unnecessary damage by protecting your home and assets.

#4. Bad Clients

Whether your freelance endeavors are B2B or B2C doesn’t matter. A percentage of your clients will try to take advantage, assuming that they can because you’re just one person. The use of non-disclosure agreements can protect your intellectual property. Meanwhile, you may want to verify who people are before doing work for them. Likewise, credit checks on purchases may be necessary for B2C connections. When working with B2B, legal action can be taken against the company if it refuses to stump up the monies owed.

#5. Life Balance

When working as a freelancer, you can technically pick the jobs that suit you. In that sense, you get to choose when the work starts. In reality, though, most freelancers struggle to actually stop the work. An established balance is vital for your sanity and personal life, but can also aid your long-term workflow. The whole purpose of freelancing is presumably to enhance your quality of life, and this must extend to every facet. If you continue to skip this phase, direct success in the job will be futile.

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Brain Wave, Money matters

Tips To Help With Your Savings This Year

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Savings are something we can all benefit from having in our life. You never know what’s around the corner and what you might need to be financially prepared for. Here are some tips to help with your savings this year.

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Try To Avoid Using Your Savings

Firstly, it’s important to try and keep your savings as savings until you need to use them for bigger expenditures and things that might be very meaningful. You should be spending it like any spending money you have available for the month ahead. Try to avoid having that attitude towards your savings and instead make your savings hard to access so that you’re only going to end up using them when it’s really necessary to do so. If you’re treating your savings like another spending pot, then you’re not going to have any savings left, so use them wisely. For bigger expenditures that you might want to hold onto your savings, you can always look to apply for Installment Loans so that you’re not having to spend all your savings on things when you could pay it off in parts.

Save Something Each Month Regardless

It’s always good to try and save some money each month, even if it’s only just a small amount. A little bit here and there is going to make all of the difference when you’re trying to build your savings pot. Look at how you could save more and try to set aside some money, whether you get paid at the end of every month or whether it’s every week. If you’re saving anything, it’s going to help you improve your attitude towards saving money, so try and do more of it where you can.

Create A Better Budget

Budgets are good to have when you’re trying to save money, and whether you’ve got one already or not, you can always make it better. We can always cut down luxuries and find ways to make your money stretch further. Think about how you can set out a budget if you’ve never made one before and if you already have one, is there anything that you can wiggle in order to help you save more money? Be strict with your expenditures and try to direct as much as you can towards your savings pot.

Find Ways To Make Extra Money

We’d all like to earn extra money and for some, it can be easier than others. However, with the online world, there’s so much out there where you can make extra money. It’s all about being aware of what’s out there and what you could with the opportunities that you’re presented with. There are plenty of ways to make extra money, so think of what you can take advantage of, whether it’s starting a blog and making a living from it or selling your services to the local community in your area.

There are lots of ways that you can help improve your savings, so do what you can to help make a difference to your savings.

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Brain Wave, Health and medicine

Health And Well Being Has An Affect On Our Confidence

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When we get dressed to go to work or perhaps to the bar, we always check our appearance in the mirror. Some of us, more than others. But we can all agree that our appearance is important to our well being. Our mental health is directly linked to our physical health. If we don’t work out and keep in shape, we tend to gain a soggy stomach and fat where we don’t want it to be. But what do we do about it? We tend to see fixing something that has taken a long time to come to fruition to be too hard and time-consuming. But at the end of the day, we’re not happy. We can make big changes to our lives if we accept that we can only regain our confidence if we take a holistic approach to our health and well being. It’s not just aesthetic, far from it actually. Let’s take a look at the types of things you can do right now.

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Why do you have blotchy skin?

Our skin is the largest organ in our body. It’s also the most sensitive to the elements, so the sun, rain, wind and cold, all play a pivotal role in the well being of our collagen bonds and general aesthetics. But what happens when you have blotchy skin is very misunderstood.

  • It does have something to do with a lack of good circulation. However, it isn’t directly linked to being unfit.
  • It doesn’t have anything to do with any makeup that you put on your face.
  • Blotchy skin is more so about your lifestyle and how you are treating your skin.
  • Don’t over-exfoliate your skin. Exfoliating does hydrate and clean your skin but it also damages the top layer. Wiping away the natural oils is like taking away the protection that your skin puts on, to shield you from the rain and sunshine.
  • You need to improve your circulation by doing exercise and getting massages if you can.
  • Stop eating foods that damage your skin, such as alcohol, fatty foods, and carbs.

Don’t buy skincare products that have a lot of chemicals in them. Stick to natural ingredients and go for products that have an organic label. Chemicals in products are nothing new, but it’s not good for your skin to be bombarded with liquids or creams that have been concocted in a lab somewhere. The less blotchiness you have the more confidence you’ll feel. You won’t have uneven toned skin which is something many women loathe. Men too should follow this advice if they have blotchy skin, although it’s not as prevalent in men as it is in women.

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Brain Wave, Work at Home

Interesting Ways To Create A Home Office

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More and more people are working from home these days, and if you are one of them then you are probably going to need to have a good place to work. If you have the space, then building and creating your own home office is obviously a good way to go, and it is something that you are going to want to consider if you want to work well in your own home. But how do you actually go about creating your own home office? In this article, we are going to take a look at some of the best ways to do so, so that you can start building your business or doing your freelance work from home much more easily.

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Get Creative

One of the things you might want to consider is to find creative ways to make it a true office. There are a lot of things you can do here. If you are looking for some way to be able to brainstorm ideas, then you could use some dry erase paint and create an entire whiteboard out of a wall, and that is something that is really going to be beneficial for getting those ideas flowing. If you put your mind to it, you will be able to come up with other creative ideas like this, and create an office which is going to be as functional and enjoyable as possible.

Don’t Forget Comfort

Even as you try to create a practical office space, you should never overlook the fact that you also need to try and be as comfortable as possible. There are a lot of ways to ensure that you do this, and it is something that you are going to want to think about in many areas. Mostly, it’s about ensuring that you find the right furniture, but it also goes into the design of the room in a more basic sense too. As long as you provide yourself with plenty of space to move around, you are going to be much more comfortable – but be sure not to overdo it on space either, as that can prove to be problematic in other ways, and could mean that you end up feeling it is not really a proper home office at all.

Converting An Outhouse Or Shed

One of the most common ways that people make home offices is by converting an outhouse or shed in the garden into an office. If you have the means, you can do that, even if it means you have to build the shed first. The beauty of this is that it is slightly apart from the rest of hte home, and therefore you are not going to be disturbed or disturb anyone else, and you can make it a kind of sanctuary in this way. That is going to really make a difference to your experience of it, and will help to ensure that you can work from home much more easily.

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Brain Wave, Self-Care Corner

3 Tips for Making Your Home Serve Your Well-Being

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There are various roles that a home should serve, assuming everything is going well.

For one thing, your home should obviously be comfortable, and should help you to relax on your weekends or after a long day of work.

For another thing, your home should serve as a place where you can adequately and reasonably store your various belongings, without too much fuss.

Perhaps the most important function of the home, however – beyond keeping the rain from reaching your bed – is serving your overall sense of well-being and contentment.

Here are a few tips for making your home serve your well-being:

Invest in “ease of use” and accessibility features and tools

If you find that carrying out everyday tasks around your home is a lot more frustrating than you would like it to be – and that things seem to be “hard work” more often than not – this might be a good sign that it’s time to invest in some “ease-of-use” and “accessibility” features and tools, for your home.

These features might take the form of structural adaptations such as an ADA ramp, or they might take the form of smaller-scale things like a stable and convenient footstool for reaching the high shelves in your kitchen.

Whatever the particular situation, you should take steps to ensure that you can navigate your home with relative ease, and without putting yourself at risk, or straining yourself when carrying out everyday chores.

Keep the place as organised as possible – clutter and mess can significantly undermine your sense of well-being

If your home is a very chaotic and messy place, with a lot of clutter, and with things frequently being out of place, the overall effect is likely to be a significant undermining of your sense of well-being.

When your home environment is very messy and cluttered, it signals on a deep psychological level that you aren’t really in control of the place, and that everything is a bit haphazard, unpredictable, and distracting.

By contrast, if you’re able to give your home the “Marie Kondo treatment,” or something like it, and can do a good job of decluttering and organising it, you’ll likely find that you have far more mental space and energy, and a greater sense of calm, than you did before.

Make space for the hobbies and pastimes you want to engage in most, and make the unhealthy ones harder to access

It’s one thing to sit down and enjoy a film, or an episode of a TV show you enjoy, or to spend half an hour surfing the web.

But an issue with these sorts of activities is that they can very easily consume hours at a stretch, and are often explicitly designed to do this. For example, certain online streaming services automatically play the next episode in the series without you even having to get up off the sofa, largely so that you spend as much time as possible engaging with the service.

Your sense of well-being will probably not be in great shape if you feel that you waste a lot of your time each day.

So, make space in your home for the hobbies and pastimes you want to engage in the most – things like reading, or writing, exercising, or doing arts and crafts – and make the “unhealthy” ones harder to access. You could, for example, unplug your games console and pack it away in a cupboard when you’re not using it.

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