Secret To Attracting Great Relationships

 The Secret To Attracting Great Relationships

 

 

Our relationships with others impact our lives in many ways, including how we see ourselves and the choices we make. And while we can’t choose every person we interact with, the close relationships we decide to nurture should fill our lives with love, positivity, guidance, and a sense of mutual respect.

So when was the last time you took inventory on your close relationships? With your friends? Your family? Your colleagues or even a romantic partner? Do they inspire you and keep your energy high, or do you find yourself feeling drained or depleted when interacting with those closest to you?

If you think you could be entertaining a toxic relationship or are simply looking for ways to attract healthier, happier, and more honest relationships into your life, here are a few things you can do:

 

1. Love yourself first

Achieving loving, supportive relationships starts with you! No matter what type of relationship you are seeking to attract or build with someone else, loving yourself first is essential. When you love yourself first, you are setting the foundation for the healthy and happy relationships you want to manifest.

Also, when you fully love and accept yourself, you have the self-confidence to let go of people that don’t meet your standards, and you will attract individuals into your life who treat you with the respect you deserve.

2. Know yourself and your values

While self-love is crucial to attracting healthy relationships, it’s also just as important to stay connected to your values. It’s one thing to love others for who they are, but not to the point where you are sacrificing your values and morals. If you want to create quality relationships, you should first feel confident in who you are and what you stand for.

I want you to take a moment to think about your 5 closest relationships right now. Do these people support your core values or do you find yourself making excuses for certain people or situations? For example, do you ever feel uncomfortable with a friend’s behavior, but instead of speaking up, you choose to look the other way? Or have you ever wished your partner was on the same page as you with an important topic such as finances or children, but you don’t bring it up in fear of an argument?

You see, we often allow those closest to us to act or speak in ways that don’t line up with our values, because we want to maintain the relationship, but this can be unhealthy! If you’ve noticed any of these patterns, it may be time to get better clarity on your own values to understand if you are being honest with yourself about what you want.

Comedian Amy Poehler once said, “You attract the right things when you have a sense of who you are.” Being honest and firm with your values helps to position you with both the self-confidence and self-awareness to stay true to yourself and to be honest with others.

 

3. Understand that you are deserving of happiness

In plain terms, the Law of Attraction states that what we focus on, we attract. So positive or negative thoughts can welcome positive or negative experiences in a person’s life, especially with personal relationships. Dwelling on negativity or unhappiness will lower your mental vibration and make it much harder to  invite the healthy relationships you want into your life.

Instead, when you believe and reaffirm that you are truly deserving of happiness, the Universe sees this as a signal to send more happiness to show up in your life and your various relationships.

4. Communicate how you want to be treated

Healthy communication is key for others to clearly understand how you deserve to be treated. Instead of looking to fit in or behave in ways to appease others, it’s totally okay to teach others how to treat you, using words that are respectful yet firm.

When it comes to attracting new relationships, being explicitly or implicitly open about how you deserve to be treated can actually act as common ground and a way to bond. You may find that you have more in common with someone simply by being honest about what you want from the start.

5. Know your boundaries

Setting healthy boundaries is one of the most important aspects for attracting and maintaining healthy relationships. As I discussed earlier, it can be easy to let things slide with people we are close to, but this can lead to resentment and frustration in the long-run. In order to maintain healthy relationships, make sure you’re communicating honestly with those around you.

It’s a good idea to write out your boundaries beforehand and bring them up when both parties are calm, focused and have time for a conversation. Boundaries should be set for any relationship - between friends, partners, colleagues or family members - to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Practicing honest communication with those closest to you will help your relationships thrive, so give it a try!

Cure Knee Pain

 Cure Knee Pain with Irish Potatoes

1. Cut slices of raw potatoes.

2. Cover the area of knee pain with sliced raw potatoes. Use a bandage to hold these sliced raw potatoes in place for 1 hour.

3.  After 1 hour, remove sliced raw potatoes from the knee area. Wipe dry.

4. Repeat these steps , daily. After a few weeks, knee pain gone. 

Recommended method for any elderly folks who are suffering knee pain. 👌🏽

Irish potatoes are not Irish at all. The shrubby perennials with edible tubers, grown as cool-weather annuals in rows, raised beds, or containers, are native to the South American Andes. Though introduced to the world by early European explorers only in the past four hundred years,

Why Talking About Our Problems Helps So Much (and How to Do It)

There’s more to the age-old advice to just “talk it out” than there seems. Here’s some of the evidence that explains why it is so helpful.

When your car breaks down, you either know how to fix it or how to find someone who can. Emotions, on the other hand, are a little harder to fix. There is no wrench you can grab or repair shop you can take your feelings to. But you do have one tool in your kit you can always use: talking about your feelings. Even just speaking about your feelings out loud to another person can help. So why do we avoid it or believe it doesn’t work?

There are a lot of reasons talking about our problems can be difficult. Some people (especially men) are socialized to internalize feelings, rather than give voice to them. Sometimes the very emotions you’re dealing with — like guilt over something you did, or shame about how you think you’re perceived — can feel so overwhelming that you can’t get up the motivation to talk it out.

Regardless of the reason you might keep it in, talking has powerful psychological benefits that might not be obvious. “Talking about it” is a broad phrase, though, so let’s clarify a bit. When we discuss talking about your problems, it can take a few forms.

Venting to a trusted friend. Sometimes you just need to let out how you’re feeling with no real plan for a solution. “I had the worst day at work!” can be the start of a conversation that helps you process the stress of a hard day.

Discussing a conflict with a partner. Fights happen in relationships. But keeping your feelings to yourself can cause issues between you and your partner to fester. While working toward constructive solutions to your relationship problems is always a good thing, just being able to be open about your feelings with your partner can make your communication healthier as well.

Talk therapy with a licensed therapist. There’s a reason people will pay money to talk through problems with a therapist. Whether you need to discuss a mental illness you’re struggling with, are in couples counseling to work on your relationship or just need someone to talk to who knows how to handle stress, a good therapist can help you hash out your emotions.

Being open about your struggles. Sometimes venting to no one in particular can help not just you, but others as well. For example, in 2015 Sammy Nickalls, a writer, started the social media hashtag #TalkingAboutIt to encourage people to be open about their struggles with mental illness. The act of sharing what daily life is like can help you and others with the same struggles realize that you’re not alone and that what feels overwhelming is actually normal.

What all of these forms have in common is that they are conversations specifically designed to examine and express the emotions you are having, rather than building to a specific solution. Figuring out things you can do to improve your situation is certainly good, but just verbalizing how you’re feeling can, itself, be part of the solution as well.

Why does talking about it help?

Getting a new job, breaking up with a bad partner or investing in your own self-improvement are all practical things you can do to solve problems in your life. But what good does just talking about it do? When you’re fighting the exhausting uphill battle against your own negative feelings, it can seem as if talking about it is the least productive thing you can do.

In reality, your brain and body get a lot out of talking.

When you are feeling very intense feelings — especially fear, aggression or anxiety — your amygdala is running the show. This is the part of the brain that, among other things, handles your fight or flight response. It is the job of the amygdala, and your limbic system as a whole, to figure out if something is a threat, devise a response to that threat if necessary, and store the information in your memory so you can recognize the threat later. When you get stressed or overwhelmed, this part of your brain can take control and even override more logical thought processes.

Research from U.C.L.A. suggests that putting your feelings into words — a process called “affect labeling” — can diminish the response of the amygdala when you encounter things that are upsetting. This is how, over time, you can become less stressed over something that bothers you. For example, if you got in a car accident, even being in a car immediately afterward could overwhelm you emotionally. But as you talk through your experience, put your feelings into words and process what happened, you can get back in the car without having the same emotional reaction.

Research from Southern Methodist University suggested that writing about traumatic experiences or undergoing talk therapy had a positive impact on a patient’s health and immune system. The study argues that holding back thoughts and emotions is stressful. You have the negative feelings either way, but you have to work to repress them. That can tax the brain and body, making you more susceptible to getting sick or just feeling awful.

None of that is to say that talking about your problems, or even talk therapy with a licensed therapist, will automatically fix everything and immediately make you happy and healthy. But, like eating better and exercising, it can contribute to overall improvement in your well-being. More important, it can help you understand how and why you feel the way you do, so you can handle your emotions more effectively in the future.

How can we do it better?

Crucially, not every form of talking about problems aloud can help. In fact, multiple studies examining college students, young women and working adults suggest that co-rumination — or consistently focusing on and talking about negative experiences in your life — can have the opposite effect, making you more stressed and drawing out how long a problem bothers you. To talk about your problems more constructively, there are a few key things you can do.

Choose the right people to talk to. If you’ve ever talked about how you’re feeling and it seems as if you got nothing out of it, you might be talking to the wrong person. Having a trusted friend who will support you (without enabling bad habits like co-rumination) can help. If you need specific advice on a problem, find someone who has faced similar problems and, ideally, has resolved them. And if you need a lot of talk time, try spreading your conversations out to multiple people. One person can get worn out, and having a broad social support system lets you distribute that load.

Choose the right time to talk. Just as important as choosing who to talk to is when you talk to them. Your friends may want to support you, but they have their own lives. Asking if they have the time and energy to talk before unpacking your emotional bags can help you both be better equipped for the conversation. This also means being courteous about their time. Sometimes crises happen and you might need to interrupt someone, but most supportive conversations can wait.

Find a therapist, even if you’re not mentally ill. Therapists often have a reputation for being necessary only if you have a mental illness. This isn’t the case. You can go to therapy if you are feeling overly stressed, if you are not sleeping well or if you just want someone to talk to. Think of it less like seeing a doctor and more like a personal trainer. Also, remember that just as with doctors, mechanics or anyone else you hire, there are good ones and bad ones (or bad ones for you), so if you don’t have success the first time, try someone else.

Give yourself an endpoint. Not all conversations about your problems need to lead to a plan of action for tangible change, but they do need to lead to something other than more complaining. Give yourself space to vent about your feelings and, while doing so, focus on how you are feeling throughout the process. If you are getting more worked up, take a break. If you find yourself talking about the same things over and over without gaining any new understanding or feeling any relief, try something else to process how you are feeling. You may not be able to fix the external problem that is bothering you, but the goal should at least be to improve your mood about it.

Talk about the good as well as the bad. Expressing how you’re feeling is healthy. Expressing yourself only when you feel bad isn’t. Whether you are talking to friends, partners or on social media, be sure to share your good experiences and feelings when they come up. Talking about these experiences can reinforce them in your brain and make it easier to break out of negative thought patterns later. Plus, it helps build your relationships with the people you are close enough to talk to.

Of course, this process can still be messy. Some days, talking about your problems may just be complaining about something that happened at work, but others it may involve crying into someone’s shoulder for an hour. It can feel embarrassing or uncomfortable the first few times, but the more you open up, the easier it will get to share how you feel.

Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father’s voice. “I’ll hold your hand, O.K.?” Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: “Don’t cry!… Aw, big boy! High five, high five! Say you’re a man: ‘I’m a man!’ ” The video ends with the whimpering toddler screwing up his face in anger and pounding his chest. “I’m a man!” he barks through tears and gritted teeth.

The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger. More immediately, it captured, in profound concision, the earliest stirrings of a male identity at war with itself.

This is no small thing. As students discover in this course, an Honors College seminar called “Real Men Smile: The Changing Face of Masculinity,” what boys seem to need is the very thing they fear. Yet when they are immunized against this deeper emotional honesty, the results have far-reaching, often devastating consequences.

Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own stereotypes.

In many ways, the young men who take my seminar — typically, 20 percent of the class — mirror national trends. Based on their grades and writing assignments, it’s clear that they spend less time on homework than female students do; and while every bit as intelligent, they earn lower grades with studied indifference. When I asked one of my male students why he didn’t openly fret about grades the way so many women do, he said: “Nothing’s worse for a guy than looking like a Try Hard.”

In a report based on the 2013 book “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools,” the sociologists Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann observe: “Boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity than with anatomy, hormones or brain structure. In fact, boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these cultural activities are often denigrated as un-masculine by preadolescent and adolescent boys.”

Throughout elementary school and beyond, they write, girls consistently show “higher social and behavioral skills,” which translate into “higher rates of cognitive learning” and “higher levels of academic investment.”

It should come as no surprise that college enrollment rates for women have outstripped men’s. In 1994, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, 63 percent of females and 61 percent of males enrolled in college right after high school; by 2012, the percentage of young women had increased to 71, but the percentage of men remained unchanged.

By the time many young men do reach college, a deep-seated gender stereotype has taken root that feeds into the stories they have heard about themselves as learners. Better to earn your Man Card than to succeed like a girl, all in the name of constantly having to prove an identity to yourself and others.

The course “Real Men Smile,” which examines how the perceptions of masculinity have and haven’t changed since the 18th century, grew out of a provocative lecture by Michael Kimmel, the seminal researcher and author in the growing field of masculine studies.

Dr. Kimmel came to my campus, Towson University, in 2011 to discuss the “Bro Code” of collegiate male etiquette. In his talk, he deconstructed the survival kit of many middle-class, white male students: online pornography, binge drinking, a brotherhood in which respect is proportional to the disrespect heaped onto young women during hookups, and finally, the most ubiquitous affirmation of their tenuous power, video games.

As Dr. Kimmel masterfully deflected an outpouring of protests, the atmosphere grew palpably tense. A young man wearing fraternity letters stood up. “What you don’t get right is that girls are into hooking up as much as we are; they come on to us, too,” he said. Dr. Kimmel shook his head, which left the student clearly rattled.

His voice quavering, the young man stammered something unexpected from a frat brother, about how women can be as insensitive and hurtful as guys. He sounded like a victim himself. But afterward, when I asked him if he had reached out to any of his guy friends for advice or solace, he stared at me, incredulous, his irises two small blue islands amid a sea of sclera. “Nah, I’ve got this,” he said.

I wanted the course to explore this hallmark of the masculine psyche — the shame over feeling any sadness, despair or strong emotion other than anger, let alone expressing it and the resulting alienation. Many young men, just like this student, compose artful, convincing masks, but deep down they aren’t who they pretend to be.

Research shows what early childhood teachers have always known: that from infancy through age 4 or 5, boys are more emotive than girls. One study out of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital in 1999 found that 6-month-old boys were more likely to show “facial expressions of anger, to fuss, to gesture to be picked up” and “tended to cry more than girls.”

“Boys were also more socially oriented than girls,” the report said — more likely to look at their mother and “display facial expressions of joy.”

This plays out in the work of Niobe Way, a professor of applied psychology at New York University. After 20-plus years of research, Dr. Way concludes that many boys, especially early and middle adolescents, develop deep, meaningful friendships, easily rivaling girls in their emotional honesty and intimacy.

But we socialize this vulnerability out of them. Once they reach ages 15 or 16, “they begin to sound like gender stereotypes,” she writes in “Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection.” “They start using phrases such as ‘no homo’ … and they tell us they don’t have time for their male friends, even though their desire for these relationships remains.”

As women surpass men on campus, the threat felt by thin-skinned males often reveals itself in the relationships where they feel most exposed. “Boys are not only more invested in ongoing romantic relationships but also have less confidence navigating them than do girls,” writes the sociologist Robin W. Simon in The Journal of Health and Social Behavior. That’s problematic, because “romantic partners are their primary sources of intimacy,” whereas young women confide in friends and family.

Some cultural critics link such mounting emotional vulnerability to the erosion of male privilege and all that it entails. This perceived threat of diminishing power is exposing ugly, at times menacing fault lines in the male psyche. Experts point to sexual assaults on campus and even mass murders like those at a community college in Oregon and a movie theater in Colorado. These gunmen were believed to share two hypermasculine traits: feelings of profound isolation and a compulsion for viral notoriety.

With so much research showing that young men suffer beneath the gravity of conventional masculinity, men’s studies is gaining validation as a field of its own, not just a subset of women’s studies. Hobart and William Smith Colleges has offered a minor in men’s studies since the late ’90s. The Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities was established in 2013 at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York, and plans to offer its first master’s degree program in 2018. Last year, the center hosted the International Conference on Men and Masculinities, where topics included fatherhood, male friendships and balancing work and family life.

So why don’t campuses have more resource centers for men?

Some universities offer counseling services for men of color and gay men, and some sponsor clubs through which male members explore the crisis of sexual violence against women. Only a precious few — the University of Massachusetts and Simon Fraser University among them — offer ways for all men to explore their shared struggles. And these don’t exist without pushback. Talk of empowering men emotionally yields eye rolling at best, furious protest at worst — as when the Simon Fraser center was proposed, in 2012, and men and women alike challenged the need for a “safe space” for members of the dominant culture.

But wouldn’t encouraging men to embrace the full range of their humanity benefit women? Why do we continue to limit the emotional lives of males when it serves no one? This question is the rhetorical blueprint I pose to students before they begin what I call the “Real Man” experiment.

In this assignment, students engage strangers to explore, firsthand, the socialized norms of masculinity and to determine whether these norms encourage a healthy, sustainable identity.

The findings result in some compelling presentations. One student interviewed her male and female friends about their hookups and acted out an amalgam of their experiences through the eyes of a male and a female character; another explored the pall of silence and anxiety that hangs over campus men’s rooms; two students gleaned children’s gender perceptions in a toy store. One of the most revealing projects was a PowerPoint by a student who had videotaped himself and then a female friend pretending to cry in the crowded foyer of the university library, gauging the starkly different reactions of passers-by.

“Why do you think a few young women stopped to see if your female friend was O.K.,” I asked him, “but no one did the same thing for you?”

He crossed his arms, his laser pointer pushing against his bicep like a syringe, and paused. Even at this point in the semester, the students, some of whom had studied gender issues before, seemed blind to their own ingrained assumptions. So his response raised many eyebrows. “It’s like we’re scared,” he said, “that the natural order of things will completely collapse.”

AnneMarie Rossi: Why Aren’t We Teaching You Mindfulness

Harvard conducted a research study and they tracked more than 1,000 people from birth until age 32, looking for what made someone successful. What common characteristic or trait was seen in a successful individual? It wasn’t their race, what language they spoke, what neighborhood they grow up in, or how much money their parents had.

It wasn’t how well they did on standardized tests, or even their IQ. It was self-control. Those who were successful, who had good careers, financial stability, loving relationships, and physical health, were the ones who could focus, pay attention, and regulate their emotions. They were the ones to practice mindfulness. It doesn’t matter if I give you all the shiniest new iPads, and Stephen Hawkings is teaching you Math, if you can’t focus and pay attention, how well will you do?

Mindfulness is the foundation for all other learning, for all success you will have throughout your entire life. So I ask you, why, if we know that this is the single most important predictor of success for human beings, why aren’t we teaching it to you? Mindfulness exercises are designed to train your brain to have focus, attention, and emotional regulation. There’s mindful listening, eating, breathing, movement; it’s a way of engaging in the present moment, without attachment and without judgment.

Mindfulness is grounded in more than 30 years of scientific study, most major universities in the world, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge, just to name a few, teach and/or research this practice. In fact, Oxford has a Master’s Degree in mindfulness. This isn’t religion, this isn’t hippie nonsense, this isn’t some idea I came up with in my backyard.

This is science. There exist literally thousands of studies that show us that mindfulness practice decreases depression, anxiety, and stress; increases overall feelings of well-being, happiness, focus, attention, and academic achievement.

So, I ask you again: why if we know this, why aren’t we teaching mindfulness to you? We are inundated with distractions; our phones, our tablets, all the sights and sounds that surround us. The never ending dialogue our brain is having with itself. The ability to focus on one thing at a time for an extended period is a skill and it requires practice.

You all know what I’m talking about. You’re sitting in your class, and you’re pretty sure you heard the teacher say the words ‘important’ and ‘quiz’. But then that girl you met over the weekend texted and while you have to respond, you want to sound cool and interested, but not too interested, I mean you’re not desperate. And then a breeze blows through the window and whoa, what is that smell? Has that girl always been in this class? She’s got pretty hair Man, I like a girl that smells good! Wait, do I smell good? Did I put on deodorant today? Am I sweating? Sweating is weird.

It’s like your body’s crying smelly tears. And then the bell rings and you have missed all of class and you definitely have absolutely no idea what’s important and what’s on the quiz. The ability to turn your attention to the class, to focus on something that frankly might not be that interesting – like algebra – it’s a skill, and it requires practice.

Mindfulness is how we get there. I find it funny when people tell me that they don’t need to practice mindfulness, “Oh, I got this!” Really that is so strange because I’m pretty sure Kobe Bryant already knows how to play basketball, but he’s still practicing.

He also practices mindfulness. Mindfulness isn’t just about the ability to focus and pay attention, it’s also able to feel emotions like pain, anger, frustration, anxiety, and fear and not react to them. Mindfulness gives us space between our emotions and our responses, so that we can actually think first. Sometimes we forget that our emotions are ever-changing, that joy and pain come and go like ocean waves. Mindfulness allows us to surf, rather than drown.

And sometimes we forget that we’re not the only ones feeling pain. Look around the room, look at the person next to you, in front of you, behind you. They have all experienced pain. Every one of you have all experienced pain. Pain is inevitable.

Suffering? Well, that’s a choice. We may not be able to choose all the uncontrolled circumstances that life presents with us any more than we can choose the weather, right? But we can choose not to be victims to our circumstances, because we can choose our reactions. Pain and anger, well, they’re just not good excuses because they’re a part of every human experience. If we respond to anger with anger, we only make the situation worse. The harsh truth is that it doesn’t matter how righteous and justifiable your emotions may be, it is irrelevant, because you’ll be judged based on your reactions and not your reasons.

Mindfulness allows us to be reflective and not reactive. It’s not about running from our emotions or not feeling our emotions, it’s allowing us to not be overwhelmed by our emotions. It’s not about controlling our thoughts and emotions, but rather not having our thoughts and emotions control us. I have two teenagers; I teach teenagers and I was once, 900 years ago, a teenager myself.

The struggle to deal with your emotions is real and overwhelming. The part of the teenage brain that regulates emotions, that hasn’t fully yet developed. But the part that feels emotions, that’s the size of a full grown adult. So something small can really easily turn into something big. You’re walking in the hallway and you see your friend, they look right at you, and you’re like, “Hey, what’s up?”, and they ignore you like a Casper.

So you walk into your next class, and you spend the entire time trying to figure out why this person hates you now. You’ve texted all of your other friends, and nobody’s responded, you’ve replayed the last three conversations you had with them in your head, and you still have no idea what went wrong. So you decided that, well, you hate them too, now, I mean, who are they to ignore you, right? Or you decided that, well, gosh, they ignored you and nobody’s responded to any of your text messages, and man, this must mean that actually nobody likes you and really, you don’t have any friends, and no one’s ever going to love you, and you’re definitely going to die alone with a hundred cats. Obviously Right? Clearly.

Look this right here, this is called taking a left turn down crazy lane. And we are all guilty of it. Mindfulness allows us to stop at the intersection of reality and crazy lane; choose which path we want to go down. With all of the no needs and benefits of mindfulness practice, I ask you again, why are we not teaching it to you? Well, part of that is because for a long time, mindfulness practice has been a privilege offered in well funded schools or through expensive individual instruction CEOs, celebrities, world famous athletes, they flock to the trainings, paying as much as 10,000 dollars to learn the secrets of success.

It’s important that we have mindful leaders, but we are missing great thinkers, innovators, and doers, those who can’t afford to pay for the skills required to succeed. Do we really think all the best and brightest happen to be born with money? And what about those born in poverty, I mean poverty is traumatic. We’re born into generational poverty, whose parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, sisters, and brothers, all live in poverty. They’re surrounded by the trauma of poverty and stress to contagious disease. It doesn’t just affect the adults, it affects everyone living in the home.

We know that poverty is traumatic, we know that trauma changes the brain and so without practices like mindfulness, gifted children are left behind. I believe that mindfulness practice should be offered in every school, in every county, in every district, in every state. It should not be about whether or not — Thank you — It shouldn’t be about whether or not your parents can afford the instruction or they can afford to move you to the right ZIP code in the right school district. I believe that mindfulness practice can reverse generational poverty, and we can move kids up and out.

I had a fourth grade student who grew up in generational poverty, his parents were in and out of prison, drug use, he was considered a trouble maker, academically behind, he even had to repeat a grade. He would get so frustrated, he would throw his desk across the room, run out of the classroom building, out of the school, and all the way down the street multiple times a week.

Now, two years later, he practices mindfulness every day. He has no more classroom or behavioral issues, and he’s in the gifted and talented programme. He would tell you that it wasn’t until someone taught him how to deal with his emotions, that someone taught him mindfulness practice, that he was able to change his whole life.

We know one of the number one predictors for a student dropping out of high school is behavioral issues. We know that if you drop out, you’re four times more likely to live in poverty. So we create these very specific rules and consequences, but do we really think little Timmy doesn’t know he shouldn’t poke little Tommy in the eye? Or does he not know how to stop himself? Has he never learned how to manage his emotions? And for some, those emotions can become so overwhelming they can feel permanent.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death in children ages 10-24, 4,800 succeed in taking their own lives every year and 157,000 are treated for self inflicted injuries, just in the US. In a study looking at 320 schools, students ages 13-17, they found that nearly half, 495% met the criteria for suffering from at least one mental health issue: anxiety, depression, ADHD, eating disorders. We know that schools are the number one provider for support for students, we know you’re struggling, we know that mindfulness works, so I ask you again, why aren’t we teaching it to you?

It’s with this in mind that I conducted a research study with the University of Colorado in Denver on the impacts of mindfulness instruction on fourth grade students in a low income school here in Denver. We looked at the teachers’ perception of the students’ ability to regulate their emotions, engage in pro-social behavior, and academic achievement. Those students who went through mindfulness practice scored 250% higher on emotional regulation, 600% higher on pro-social behavior, and 550% higher on academic achievement than those who did not go through the class.

We then asked the students, well, what do you think of mindfulness class? 100% anonymously self reported that they enjoyed the class, they benefited from the practice, they will continue to do it, and they believe all other children should learn it. They saw the greatest improvements in their ability to calm down, focus, and avoid fights, as well as feeling happier at school and at home. The teacher rated the class a 10 out of 10 and said that she believed mindfulness instruction actually led to an increase in teaching time between 11 and 20 minutes.

Mindfulness practices are exercises designed to help you become a more mindful human being, one who can focus and pay attention and miss a distraction, one who can feel intense emotions, and rather than react, reflect and respond. Mindful listening? Man, that’s going to be important to every relationship you ever have, for your entire life.

Mindful eating? That’s going to determine your physical and mental health, and mindful breathing allows you to find calm and focus, peace in a chaos. These practices ultimately lead to compassion, generosity, kindness, altruism. We need the world to be more mindful, we need you to be more mindful.

First, you have to decide that you want to be the change that you want to see in the world and then go about being it. Throughout this talk, I’ve asked you why you aren’t being taught mindfulness.

I will end with asking you to take personal responsibility for your life. If you believe, as I do, as many, many, many others do, that the path to your success, the path to a better world, lies in the practice of mindfulness, then ask your teachers and administrators to bring in experts to give you the skills that you need to have to succeed. You need to take ownership over your future. Change will happen; by choice, not by chance. We will change the world, one mind at a time.

And it starts with yours. Thank you.

Self-Transformation Through Mindfulness

TRANSCRIPT:

Dr. David Vago – Cognitive neuroscientist

Thank you.

We are all born with a brain that has 86 billion neurons. And throughout our life, we make relatively few new neurons. In fact, we lose about 2 billion neurons throughout the course of our lifetime.

So you may wonder: if we’re losing billions of neurons and we’re not making a lot of new neurons, what’s changing in the brain to support all those mental habits and behaviors that make up our self-identity?

Well, the answer is activity-dependent plasticity. This is the function by which the brain is continually modified through the 150 trillion cell-to-cell synaptic connections that are made in response to your everyday experiences.

One main point that I hope you take home today is that not only are they contributing to your self-identity, but they are continually changing your brain and they are strongly influencing your health and longevity.

I hope to also demonstrate that a systematic form of mental training involving meditation can potentially transform your Self and your mental habits in a positive way.

In 2002, I was a graduate student in cognitive neurosciences — that was me. I was studying the brains of rats to better understand the neural circuitry of learning and memory.

And activity-dependent plasticity was a really important concept for studying memory, but I was interested in how that concept could be applied towards a neuroscientific understanding of the self through the lens of meditation and mindful awareness.

Now, mindful awareness can be simply thought of as a way of paying attention in a way that is continually watchful and discerning for what is arising and passing in our minds and in the external world.

Now, when I was in graduate school, there was barely any science of mindfulness. In fact, before the year 2000, there was the grand total of 39 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the topic.

So for good reason, maybe, my mentor sat me down one day and said, “Dave, you will not be successful in academia by focusing on meditation. Forget about all that Zen stuff.”

And I walked out of his office feeling rather disappointed, discouraged. But it did not deter me from this calling.

Fast forward 10 years, I was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, studying meditation in a neuroimaging laboratory. And about that time, I was invited to present my research directly to the Dalai Lama, along with five other emerging leaders in the field from around the world.

Thank you. That is very kind.

Yes, this was really an amazing opportunity. And the advice he gave the six of us is something I will never forget for my lifetime. He said, pointing his finger at each one of us:

“You each have the great responsibility for helping to build a happy, peaceful world. Millions of people want a happy, peaceful world but are lacking the knowledge of how to do so. Through carrying your experiment month by month, year by year, you will gain evidence to convince others. I will watch you, whether you are really — whether you are really helping to build a happy, peaceful world or not.”

He then jokingly threatened, hopefully, that he would be watching from beyond the grave and that even if he were in hell, he would come back as a demon and hunt us down to make sure we were doing this work.

No joke. Well, hopefully.

Now, when the Dalai Lama points his finger at you and threatens you in that way — or challenges you, really — you can’t really say no.

So aside from providing a sense of purpose and meaning for me, that experience really provided a pretty solid research career plan for the next 30 years.

So fast forward to 2016. I was provided the opportunity to come here to Nashville, to Vanderbilt University, to direct research at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

So my interest in the Self through the lens of meditation comes back full circle to today, where I have the resources and the support to do the science I originally intended to do back in graduate school. I’m currently leading a team of scientists to continue mapping the meditative brain or meditative mind and to better understand what a flourishing mind, brain, and body looks like from the neurobiological, the psychological, and social levels.

So as we contemplate the self together today, I want you — well, I invite you to think about how all of your life experiences, even the guy all the way up there, have led to who you’ve become today and to explore how all of your thoughts and emotions that you’re having right now, today, may lead to who you become tomorrow.

The Dhammapada, one of the greatest known collections of the Buddha, describes

“Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.”

The basic idea here is from birth to the present day, our self, our experience of being someone, our wants, our fears, our desires, our hopes, our values, our expectations, our whole self-identity is continually constructed by a string of moment-to-moment processes of selfing.

(Selfing – A String of Moments)

And these moments can be further broken down into processes of perception, sensory awareness, and evaluation, all of which happen on a timescale of half a second, 500 milliseconds.

And through neurophysiological research, it’s been found that the brain stem and the subcortical regions are helping to filter out information that is irrelevant to you and to prepare your mind for action.

Now, this part of our mental experience is all happening without conscious awareness.

In the second half of each moment, our primary sensory cortices, located throughout the outer surface of our brain, is integrating information coming from perception and awareness and preparing inferences and predictions to inform our behavior.

And only by the end of each moment — around 300 to 500 milliseconds — does awareness arise, and then we begin to evaluate what it is we’re experiencing. And that evaluation takes place in aspects of our prefrontal cortex.

So this string of moments is sustaining our mental habits and dispositions that are self-conditioning and self-perpetuating through repetition. It’s continually informing our present state of awareness and coloring our memories for the past and making predictions for the future.

And this basic idea here really supports the idea that this little guy here has had about 3 billion moments in 42 years to become the guy who’s standing before you today. And somewhere along this string of moments, I developed a bad habit — maybe you can relate.

When I was eight years old, my mother gave me a punching bag to deal with my anger and frustration. Thank you, Mom. This was effective on the short term.

I would go down in my basement and hit that bag every time I got angry or frustrated. Then, eventually, as you can imagine, that punching bag broke and got thrown out with the trash.

But the conditioning did not go away. I never hit any people, but I continued to hit walls and doors and windows. I even have a scar on my hand to go with it.

A little over a decade later, when I was 20 years old — my sophomore year of college — I had the opportunity to go on a meditation retreat — a 10-day silent meditation retreat. First time.

Not because of my anger but more so for my curiosity about Buddhism and my interest in studying the mind. This was a profound experience for me on multiple levels.

For one, it provided a signpost in my life, leading me to the path that I’m on today. It also provided a mindfulness-based skill of meta-awareness of my mental habits.

Now, meta-awareness refers to an awareness of where our attention is and where it’s going at any moment. And when we practice using a mindfulness-based approach, it acts as a wedge to open up our minds and provide insight into the mental habits that are arising again and again.

And for my anger, it provided awareness to all the triggers and impulses and feelings and thoughts that are associated with my anger.

Now, the state of mindfulness is often described as that wedge of meta-awareness, and if inserted deeply enough into our minds, as described by Buddhist scholar Andy Olenski, it will open our minds up to wisdom.

And wisdom is subtly different from awareness in the sense that it can be described as the direct experience with our mental habits. For my anger, it was the sensory awareness in my body: it was the tightness, the clenched fists, the impulse or readiness to act. That was my anger.

The idea here is that when we practice mindfulness, the awareness and the wisdom work together, helping to reduce the time spent in judgment and evaluation, to be situated in the present moment with our sensory awareness, and to allow the emotions like anger to arise and pass without the impulse to act.

Now, aside from anger, there are other thoughts and emotions that can have negative impacts on our health and well-being. Anxiety, fear, worry, and sadness… all have the tendency to be destructive mental habits and dispositions, but only when they are happening with great frequency, when they put the people around you, including yourself, at risk for injury, or they interfere with your social functioning.

It turns out that these three dispositions, specifically, have the most extensive scientific data to support their role as risk factors for the onset of clinical levels of depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, and have even been shown to increase the rate of cellular aging at the level of your DNA.

One study by the Centers for Disease Control found that an angry disposition increases your chances — your risk — of dying prematurely of a heart attack by 2.5 times.

And there’s a whole number of studies showing that these three dispositions and the associated chronic stress can have negative effects on your immune system functioning, on sensitization of pain pathways, and atrophy — shrinking of the brain regions responsible for regulating these negative emotions.

So it becomes this really bad cycle because if you don’t have the ability to regulate the emotions, well, it’s going to be much harder to regulate them in the future.

So one of my studies that I wanted to share with you today introduced mindfulness training to a group of women diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain disorder associated with widespread muscular tenderness and chronic fatigue as well as a host of other clinical symptoms.

We found that these patients had a high level of anxiety and fear associated with their pain. And when we gave them mindfulness training, we found that there was dramatic improvement in all their clinical symptoms. So that was good.

But we were interested in what the mechanism was that may be contributing to this clinical improvement. So we gave these patients a behavioral task that assessed how they paid attention to pain-related words at the non-conscious perceptual level and the more conscious evaluative level of processing.

We could do this by varying the duration of time that we showed them the words. When we showed them the words for 100 milliseconds, they did not have a lot of time to process the words consciously, but we could observe whether or not they looked towards or away from the words.

At 500 milliseconds, they did have time to process the words consciously, and we could observe whether they got stuck thinking and ruminating upon the words.

So we found two major differences between the groups that got exposed to mindfulness training and those who did not.

Those who were untrained avoided those pain-related words at the nonconscious perceptual level. And those who were trained in mindfulness looked towards the words, suggesting that they had less fear and avoidance and more approach-related behavior towards their pain.

This is the stage of processing that they didn’t have any awareness that they were doing this. The untrained group also had a tendency to ruminate or get stuck at the later stages of processing, whereas those trained in mindfulness were able to see the word, let it go, and complete the task more readily.

So these results demonstrate that mindfulness training has the ability to improve our mental habits of attention at both the conscious and nonconscious levels.

When we do neuroimaging, we take a modern neuroimaging and a first-person, introspective methods approach in our lab and in others, and we can call this a neurophenomenological approach to mapping the meditative mind. And this identifies the brain networks and systems of functioning that are supporting mindfulness-based practices.

Now, I said before that there weren’t many studies on mindfulness before the year 2000. Well, since 2000, there have been close to 4,000 studies on the topic. And of those 4,000 studies, 21 have looked at changes in brain structure and 80 have looked at brain function in a cross-section of novices who have been trained for the short term and expert meditators.

And although there have been some reported differences between styles of meditation practice and between novices and experts, I want to bring to your attention the most common and most consistent findings that are found across all the studies in four brain regions — to make it easy — that are changing in brain structure and function.

The frontopolar cortex is the most anterior part of our brain, right behind your foreheads. It is also thought to be the most highly evolved part of the human brain and responsible for supporting meta-awareness.

And in conjunction with the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, these three regions work together in a complex attentional network, referred to as the frontoparietal control network, to allow yourself to be continuously aware of your body sensations and to flexibly switch between internal mental processing and thinking in the outside world. Okay?

And so one really interesting finding here is that we find in our lab that the more one meditates, the more activity one gets in this network of brain regions.

And other labs have found that the more one meditates, the more protected these regions are from the normal age-related atrophy that we all get. Unfortunately, all our brains are shrinking in size after age 20. Sorry. But if you meditate, you protect them.

And one other region that you see decreases in activation is the posterior cingulate cortex, or PCC. That’s a major node in a larger functional network associated with self-reflection and rumination.

So meeting the challenge set forth by the Dalai Lama, the science is beginning to emerge to support a role for mindfulness and meditation in improving meta-awareness and decreasing an emphasis on ruminative types of processing, especially in the context of high cognitive demand, and also to transform the brain and our mental habits.

So we’ve learned that every thought and emotion is leading to transforming our brain, literally re-sculpting our brain, at every moment. And although we do not have any control of what has happened in the past, we have the power in this moment and going forward to choose how you pay attention to your thoughts and emotions.

Every moment then becomes an opportunity for you to change the way we perceive the world and ease the burden by which there is potential for destructive emotions like anxiety, anger, and sadness.

So I leave you with the question: What will you fill your mind with?

Thank you.

Ultraviolet Light Could Help Stop The Spread Of Coronavirus

Coronavirus has devastated the global economy and killed more than 270,000 people as it spread exponentially.

As conversations shift towards reopening the country and getting people back to work, proper sanitation in high traffic and public spaces will be key to getting back to normal.

In places like China, robots and drones are being used to spray disinfectant in public spaces. Airlines and companies like Amazon have been using fogging as a sanitation technique to keep their facilities clean.

But there is another option.

UV light is an effective disinfectant that has been used for decades in hospitals and operating rooms. The global UV disinfection equipment market was valued at $1.1 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach $3.4 billion by 2026.

President Trump recently brought up using ultraviolet light to fight the coronavirus.

(Video clip: President Trump: Supposing we hit somebody with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. – Video ends.]

Though powerful UV light cannot be used on the human body, it can help prevent the spread of the virus. And technological breakthroughs could see UV light become a key piece in returning to normal in a world with a looming Covid-19 threat.

Ultraviolet light was discovered more than 200 years ago. It was first used for disinfecting surfaces in 1877, for water in 1910 and for air in 1935.

It was discovered because of its antimicrobial, antibacterial properties. And actually in health care became pretty widely adopted in an effort to try to disinfect the air and ensure that people who were in that environment were not getting exposed to tuberculosis.

UVC has been known for more than 100 years now to be really, really good at killing microbes, bacteria and viruses both.

Ultraviolet light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes things like gamma rays, x-rays, infrared light, microwaves, visible light and radio waves.

Ultraviolet light is grouped into three categories based on the light’s wavelength. There’s ultraviolet A, ultraviolet B and ultraviolet C. The sun produces all three types of UV radiation, but we only experience A and B on Earth’s surface.

UVC does not penetrate the clouds, so it doesn’t hit us here on Earth. UVA and UVB light do. That’s why people go outside and they can get sunburns and things like that. So everybody’s familiar with the power of ultraviolet light.

Within the spectrum of ultraviolet light, UVC, which sits at 200 to 280 nanometers, is in the germicidal disinfecting range.

What we experience as sunlight here on earth is mainly UVA and a little bit of UVB. And they are actually much less efficient at killing microbes than UVC. UVC is by far the more efficient way of killing microbes.

We know that ultraviolet light is effective against many different kinds of viruses, many types of bacteria and even some very hardy bacteria that can produce spores with thick coatings on them. Ultraviolet light can be effective against those and effective against fungus also.

UVC light can be quite dangerous. It can burn exposed skin and damage your retina. The World Health Organization issued guidance not to use UV lamps to sterilize hands or other parts of the skin.

The issue with UVC, though, is that it’s a health hazard. So you can really only use it when people are not around.

UVC light interferes with and destroys the nucleic acids, the DNA or RNA, of bacteria, viruses and other microbes.

What it does is it causes chemical bonds that aren’t supposed to be there to form within the genes of the microbe. And those new chemical bonds prevent the microbe from replicating. And because the microbe can’t replicate any longer, it effectively kills it off.

It breaks open the protein shell of a pathogen. So imagine a pathogen and everybody’s seen a cell under a microscope. Imagine it like an egg and you’re cracking an egg. And once you’ve cracked the egg, you can’t put the egg back together. That’s what we’re doing o n a microscopic level.

Ultraviolet light can kill microbes in many different environments. It has been used for several decades to disinfect drinking water, wastewater, air, pharmaceutical products and surfaces against the whole suite of human pathogens.

Despite all of its uses, there are a few things that limit its effectiveness.

If there is organic material, so if there’s essentially dirt on a surface, the dirt impacts how much of that ultraviolet C light is able to get to the microbes. And because of that, it works best if the surfaces are cleaned first and then the surfaces are exposed to the UVC light.

Another important point is that if you try to disinfect a room with UVC Light and you have, let’s say a telephone sitting on a bedside table, the area under that telephone is not going to be effectively decontaminated.

UVC light has been used to combat other coronaviruses such as MERS and SARS, and it was used against Ebola. It’s been proven effective and is expected to also work against the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

Because we know it’s effective against the coronavirus family and there’s structural similarities between all of the viruses in the coronavirus family, everybody expects that ultraviolet C light will be very effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

UVC light has been increasingly used in health care environments to prevent infections in hospitals.

As we started to see more drug resistant bacteria and drug resistant fungus, there is really a growing interest in the use of ultraviolet C light to help disinfect our health care environments.

Xenex is one company that built a UVC robot to sanitize hospital rooms. The company says its LightStrike robot is disinfecting somewhere in the world every 4.7 seconds.

Just in the United States, 2 million people a year go to the hospital and get an infection from going to the hospital. And then 100,000 of those 2 million die each year from those infections. In the hospitals that have used our robots, they’re dropping their infection rates 50%, 70%, even 100%.

That’s really what we focus on, is how do we reduce the infection rates and make it the hospitals a safer place for patients to go.

UV light is efficient as a disinfectant tool and it just needs electricity to work. As long as they have the robot and a box of bulbs, they can take energy, electricity and convert it into disinfection. It’s faster and less labor intensive than cleaning by hand. It also reduces the need to clean with powerful chemicals.

So you could just use more bland soaps for the cleaning and then rely on UVC for a chemical free disinfection. It’s hard to get to all the surfaces in a 15 or 20 minute room turnaround time.

The second thing is, is the chemicals end up being very corrosive on the surfaces. You need to leave surfaces visibly wet for several minutes to kill viruses. They’re only to be used on hard, non-porous surfaces and they’re also only to be used in well ventilated areas.

Cleaning staff can also miss areas.

There was a number of studies that came out in the early 2000s showing that housekeepers, and they do an incredible job. They would miss about half of the high touch surfaces.

One other thing that’s worth adding is there’s been recent publications that have demonstrated that in Italy, the hospitals actually became the agents of infection. So the hospitals were so pathogenic that they were passing the pathogen from patient to patient.

Ultraviolet light could be a powerful tool in the fight against Covid-19. And in some instances, it’s already being used. China is disinfecting entire buses with UV light and banks are using UVC on currency.

The Pittsburgh International Airport became the first airport in the U.S. to deploy autonomous cleaning robots equipped with ultraviolet lights for disinfection.

Dimer has a device designed specifically to disinfect planes called the Germfalcon. It’s the size of a drink cart and has articulating arms that extend over the plane’s seats.

Using ultraviolet C lights like they use in hospitals. You push it up and down the aisle, the wing hovers over the seatback tops and you can disinfect the whole plane really quickly.

Dimer claims it can kill 99% of germs in three minutes and that it takes 30 to 45 minutes to clean an entire wide body airplane. We’re primarily focused on viruses like Influenza, Norovirus, Ebola. And right now we’re dealing with coronavirus.

UVD Robots makes the only fully autonomous UVC disinfection robot on the market. After mapping out the environment, it moves around autonomously guided by Lidar. The company claims it can kill 99.9% of bacteria and viruses in 10 to 15 minutes, and its robots are dispatched in over 50 countries around the world.

There are some newer products that we are already seeing in use in some areas outside the United States, where it’s essentially a Roomba-like device with ultraviolet C bulbs on it. It’s able to autonomously navigate into a room and treat that room.

Texas-based Xenex has a UV robot called LightStrike. It delivers germicidal UV from 200 to 315 nanometers, killing bacteria and viruses in five minutes. And the company recently verified that its robot is effective against SARS-CoV-2.

It puts out the entire spectrum of germicidal light. And by doing that, different germs, different pathogens are more vulnerable to different wavelengths of light. Because it’s broad spectrum, no matter where they’re vulnerable, a LightStrike robot will get them.

Xenex is sending its robots to China and Italy, as well as using them in Houston. The company says it has thousands of robots already in operation and is ramping up U.S. production.

Before the Covid crisis, we already had over 500 hospitals with thousands of robots around the world. Covid hit and all of our international partners really started calling us right away. And we started shipping 50 to Italy and 30 to Japan, Singapore. All of these countries were really hard hit by Covid infections before the United States experienced it.

Since then and as the cases have grown in the United States, both our existing customers and new customers have come to us to use this. Hospitals need it and they’ve been requesting it like unbelievable amounts.

The CDC and the International Ultraviolet Association are looking at how UVC could be used to disinfect PPE at hospitals, extending the life of disposable masks.

Xenex is the first manufacturer to verify with 3M that its masks are safe after being disinfected with its LightStrike robot. 3M had issued guidance against using other UV devices on the masks. We sent them our device. They tested our device. They said we didn’t cause material damage. They passed the use of Xenex for N95 masks.

There are even consumer products on the market like UVC water bottles, small light wands and disinfectors for phones. But one of the biggest challenges we face is how to keep public, high traffic areas clean.

As we get back to work in the next few months and we’ll be in rooms much closer to each other than we were before. There’s a concern again about transmission of viruses from one person to another.

UV robots are effective, but they can only be used in the absence of people. There is, however, promising potential for a new breakthrough in ultraviolet tech that could help.

Researchers are experimenting with a shorter wavelength type of UVC, which could be safe for human exposure but still effective against microbes.

This is light with a wavelength of 222 nanometers. And it’s been shown to be not only effective against microbes, but also it’s been shown, I think fairly convincingly, to be safe to even have people potentially in that environment where that light is being used.

What we’ve been working on is a type of UVC light which not only will kill viruses, but is safe for human exposure. This technology was initially developed to help mitigate the spread of influenza, but it’s expected to be effective against SARS-CoV-2.

So our first studies were with these seasonal coronaviruses. And in fact, the far-UVC light was very efficient at killing them. And our next step, which is actually what’s been going on at the moment, is to look at these SARS-2 virus. The virus that’s actually causing the current crisis.

There’s no reason to think that they will respond any differently from any other coronavirus. So we’ve every expectation that far UVC light will kill the current coronavirus.

Far-UVC lights are in the process of being tested on mice and initial safety results are promising. We use what are called hairless mice. These mice have been sitting in the UVC light for nearly a year now. We give them skin tests every couple of weeks. We give them eye exams every couple of weeks. And absolutely nothing, they’re perfectly fine.

Far- UVC lights could be permanent fixtures in public places like offices and airports to prevent the spread of viruses and other microbes. The sorts of public spaces we have in mind are hospitals, subways and trains and planes and buses, restaurants, for example, food stores. Anywhere where people are going to be clustered in the same room.

The main roadblock at the moment is producing the lamps.

The problem is how do you scale it up right now to the level where you make it a practical technology? There are a couple of companies at the moment that are really ramping up to produce large numbers of these lamps. But I think it will be the autumn before the lamps are produced in really large numbers. And the sorts of numbers we’re talking about are hundreds of millions.

Costs could be high at first until large scale manufacturing helps bring it down. Maybe we’ll be in time for the famous bubble of the Covid-19 crisis if it really happens. And we’ll certainly be in time for the next Influenza epidemic next year. And we’ll certainly be in time for the next pandemic whenever it should occur.

We’ve seen a huge amount of interest from places like hotels, from gymnasiums, from schools, from office buildings. People have wanted to disinfect ambulances. We’ve seen a lot of interest from airports and airlines.

And not to mention old age homes, nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities. Covid has really brought the importance of disinfection home to almost everybody all over the world.