The most powerful pharmacy in the world is right between your ears!  Thoughts are things. They can heal or harm. Beliefs mold your brain.

Other than eating breakfast regularly, and eating more fruits and vegetables, the one characteristic that is present in all healthy older people is resiliency – that hard-to-measure quality of adapting to change, shifting with changing tides, and seeing the glass half full.

This is because your thoughts have real and measurable effects on your body and brain. Every cell in your body listens to your thoughts. Your immune cells know your deepest feelings.

Your stem cells are wired to your brain and help you repair and regenerate. But they ONLY turn on and make new brain cells when you relax!

Have you ever said, “it’s only a dream”? While we often dismiss dreams, or fail to make room for them in the hurry of our daily lives, dreams can be a fabulous source of guidance, healing and juice for any day. Dreams offer us nine tremendous gifts.

1. We solve problems in our sleep
Jeff Taylor woke in the middle of the night from a dream in which he created an electronic bulletin board that was lit up with eager job-hunters logging in from all over the map. He scrawled the phrase “Monster board” on a pad in the dark, then rushed to an all-night coffee shop and roughed out the plan for what became the stunningly successful internet job agency, Monster.com

This book is about the revolutionary discovery that the human brain can change itself, as told through the stories of the scientists, doctors, and patients who have together brought about these astonishing transformations. Without operations or medications, they have made use of the brain’s hitherto unknown ability to change.

Some were patients who had what were thought to be incurable brain problems; others were people without specific problems who simply wanted to improve the functioning of their brains or preserve them as they aged. For four hundred years this venture would have been inconceivable because mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy was fixed.

Here are some reflections on what science has to say about gratitude, which has been called the “forgotten factor” in happiness research.

Psychologists Robert Emmons at the University of California at Davis, and Michael McCullough, at the University of Miami, are foremost researchers in field of gratitude. What they have learned so far is that gratitude is good for you, really good for you.

In an experimental comparison, people who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). It doesn’t end there.