The Value of Taking Breaks During the Day

My oldest daughter sent me a recent article from Today.com. It was about how the Eagle Mountain Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas went from giving its kindergarten and first-grade classes one twenty-minute recess per day to four fifteen-minute recesses per day. At first some of the teachers were skeptical. As Donna McBride, a first-grade…

Telling Someone to Relax Usually Increases their Stress Level

An article by Sue Shellenbarger, which recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal, pointed out an interesting paradoxical fact: “When someone is getting stressed out, one of the least effective (and perhaps most annoying) things to say is ‘Relax.’” She goes on to say that while the person communicating this directive may have the best…