Did you know that you can love what you do? Your job doesn’t have to be something you hate when you’re there and dread when you’re not. In fact, staying in a job or line of work you don’t love can cause excessive stress and anxiety, decreased energy and motivation, and other mental health consequences.

Yes, changing careers often requires time and money, which can be especially challenging when you’re supporting a family. Moreover, you may feel like you need to stick it out to get the most out of the education and/or training you paid for to prepare for your job. But if you don’t see a way that your current job can bring positive fulfillment to your life, it might be worth considering a change.

When you’re passionate about something, you become more motivated to get through awkward beginning phases and other challenges down the road. It also means that you probably know quite a bit about your desired field and may even have a certain level of education required for it. And if not, then the passion will likely enable you to learn fast.

At BodyMindWisdom.com, we strive to help each of our customers live a life of wellness. That’s why we’ve provided five quick tips for improving your well-being by taking the leap into a new career:

1. Form a business
If your dream is to start a business, start preparing now for your business formation. Your business structure will determine many factors, including the taxes you pay and your personal liability. Working with a formation service will make the entire process much less stressful for you, as such a service will take care of all the paperwork and documents necessary in your state.

2. Research
Begin researching what it will take for you to succeed in your desired career and industry. Learn what education, training, and certifications will be needed. Study the most successful companies in the industry and research how they operate. Learn everything you can before diving in.

3. Talk to others
It can also help to bring others in on your plans for a career change. For example, talk with a mentor, or consider hiring a career coach to help you map out a plan for how you can navigate what lies ahead. You could also find people who currently work (or have recently worked) in the field/industry you’re considering. Along with picking their brains on how they got their foot in the door and what education/training they acquired, ask them to describe a typical day in the office.

4. Network a lot
Networking is critical, no matter what kind of career you’re aiming for. Go to as many conferences and meetings as you can, especially ones that are related to your desired industry. This will help you build meaningful connections with potential mentors, bosses, co-workers, and/or business partners. Engage in networking sites like LinkedIn to meet other professionals and build your online presence.

5. Get your feet wet
Finally, don’t assume that you’re going to leave your current job on Friday and start your dream career on Monday. Most of the time, it doesn’t work out quite like that. Even if you’re still working your current job, start getting your feet wet before diving in. Volunteer, take on an internship, work part-time for a business in your desired industry, and/or follow a mentor around on their job. Anything you can do to get a sense of what to expect and how you can improve your knowledge and skills will help you in the long term.

You don’t have to stay in that dreadful job for the rest of your life. If you’re ready to take the plunge into a new, more satisfying career, then start making your preparations today. Along with following the tips listed here, keep researching how you can plan for a smooth transition into a fulfilling career. It probably won’t take long before you realize you made the best move you could have made!

Would you like more helpful advice on how to live your best life? Or are you looking for the highest-quality holistic health products on the market? Check out the BodyMindWisdom products and blog today.

by Haim Factor

It’s that time of year again—when everything seems full of hope and love; that seemingly universal time for goodwill to all. Dismissing for a minute all of the commercial aspects and the insincere frills, you can sense the feeling in the air and you can feel it among people. You can hear and see the strong emotions all around. It’s that unique period for a better life for all us.

Of course, we can see on TV those troubling pictures and sounds of Iraq, Palestine, Africa, Korea, and other “trouble spots” throughout the world. But somehow, our hope and feeling at this time of year is that things can somehow work out and that all men and women will live in peace…

But did you ever wonder, I mean REALLY wonder, about what all those other people throughout the world think and feel—especially at this time of year? For them, many who are not Christians or, for whatever reason are not an integral and active part of our Western culture and Christmas-time traditions, this wonderful feeling may just not be there. For many of them, this time could be just another 4-5 week period of cold or misery—if they are located in the northern hemisphere—or maybe another period of heat and misery, if they’re in summertime south of the equator.

Take for example, the hundreds of millions in the Muslim world. A special month of joy and hope for abundance just ended a few weeks ago, as the major month-long holiday period of Ramadan came to a close. And for those of the Jewish faith, many people would be surprised to learn that although the holiday of Hanukah usually coincides with Christmas-time, Hanukah shares few if any of the central themes of Christmas. As a matter of fact, for many other cultures and beliefs throughout the world, this time of year may have a very different significance—or even no significance at all.

I know, you may smile and ask, “How can that really be?”. How can it be that this beautiful, universal feeling doesn’t permeate the entire world and at this same time?

Well, of course, this time of year is special—that is, if your tradition and culture embrace it. But many times, others simply don’t feel and think what we do, when we do. Period.

This is a sobering thought; one that could allow the chills and long shadows of this time of year to creep into our minds and our hearts, even as there is so much seeming hope around us. After all, if the beautiful and rich feelings of this time of year aren’t shared universally by all mankind when we feel them—then what hope do we have? Where do we go from here?

But there is hope.

And like in many other cases, we can find this hope not necessarily in the way we imagine or feel things, or in the way we frame our lives and beliefs. Read on.

The spirit of “this time of year” is, of course, real. No doubt about it. But this “time of the year” may not be their time. And this “spirit”, in our tradition and meaning may not be their spirit. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not proposing we all start to learn non-stop about other peoples and cultures, or that we begin to travel around our country and the world to learn about other places. (Although in my heart, I believe that’s not such a bad idea.)

What I am proposing is that we widen this spirit in feeling. I propose we stretch this “time of year” to encompass not just 4 or 5 weeks, but to have it spread to include nearly 52 weeks of every year. It’s not an easy job, though.

Because when the Christmas lights go out and after the New Year celebrations die down, that’s when the hard work really begins. That’s when all of us, each in his own way, has to keep some spirit alive. That’s when our strong emotions of universal hope and a better life for all us face perhaps the greatest challenge. That’s when it could be their time—even if it’s not our time of year.

In other words, that’s when it may count the most—during the entire year. (I may want to write in the future about what tools we can use to keep this spirit alive.) In the words of Charles Dickens: “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year”.

May this season—and all the seasons of the New year which follow —bring joy and hope to us all.

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NOTE: This article was originally posted in mid-December 2004, just before the Tsunami disaster which struck South Asia in late December 2004.©2020 BodyMindWisdom.com

You are welcome to copy, forward, and republish this article, but only in its entirety and unedited, including this information.

by Bob Vaughan

(Read below for more information on the author.)

Another great article describing side effects of electromagnetic pollution. Many people are sensitive to this kind of radiation and can became seriously ill. You can find out more about a man, who became healthy, slept better after he protected himself against these harmful waves. Read this article because it can help you improve your sleep. Many sleepless night may be caused by EMF that are constantly disturbing the harmony in your body and cause ill health, in worst case cancer. There are some options that a person can protect himself against these waves and in the future I will publish videos where I have been measuring the EMF radiations of power lines, mobile phones, home appliances and other sources of EMF.

Kevin Byrne is a man in the prime of his life who feared he had an old man’s problems. Last summer, he was devastated by chronic back pain and thought his hips were about to give out.”I’m thinking, gee, I’m 47 years old and I’m going to need hip replacements already,” he said.
The hip pain was the beginning of a strange personal odyssey for Mr. Byrne, a technical writer who lives in Newcastle, a bedroom community east of Toronto. He is now convinced his ailment wasn’t a sign of premature aging, but an allergy to one of modern society’s ubiquitous substances: electricity.

No one knows how many people are sensitive to electricity. Scientific debate is intense over whether the condition exists or is a figment of people’s imagination. Some estimates place the number afflicted at a handful out of every million. Others view it as more common but still a tad unusual, perhaps a few individuals out of every thousand.

Mr. Byrne counts himself among those unlucky few. He began researching the topic when a neighbour expressed the belief that electricity was dangerous. In an act of desperation brought on by constant pain, he did something he initially thought was off-the-wall. He spent $1,000 on filters that, much like surge protectors on a computer, clean up fluctuations and surges in the electricity flowing in the wires around his home.

“When you’re in a lot of pain, you’ll do just about anything. So I was sort of grasping at non-medical straws,” he said. “I didn’t think they would work, to tell you the truth. I thought I was probably wasting my money.”

But within a couple of days, after months of pain for which his doctor could find no cause, he started feeling fine again. “I said to my wife, ‘This has got to be the placebo effect,’ ” he said, referring to the well-known medical phenomenon of patients reporting that they are cured of illnesses after being given a sugar pill doctors suggest will help them.

Mr. Byrne also noticed another odd health effect after he cleaned up his power, convincing him that electricity was at the root of his problems. Both he and his wife suddenly began to sleep more soundly and his dreams became “incredibly real and very vivid.”

Stories such as Mr. Byrne’s are not isolated tales. In fact, they’re becoming increasingly common, rising in lockstep with homes filled to the brim with electronic gadgets and the proliferation of wireless technologies. Symptoms of electrical sensitivity include the joint pain Mr. Byrne experienced, but also a bewildering array of other common problems most everyone feels at one time or another, such as fatigue, headaches, poor sleep quality with frequent wakefulness, ringing in the ears, depression, difficulty remembering things, and skin rashes. The list of symptoms has created speculation that some cases of sick building syndrome, where people working in buildings complain of nausea and headaches, might be due to electrical sensitivities.

Madga Havas, an associate professor at the Environmental Studies Department of Trent University who is an expert on the health claims about electricity, says she receives “almost a call a day” from people who say electricity is making them ill and they can’t find help in the medical system. “It’s not just from Canada. It’s usually from the States as well,” she says. She thinks the condition is more widespread than commonly thought, and speculates that for some people, exposure to electricity causes physiological stress, producing symptoms of tiredness, difficulty concentrating and poor sleep.

The possibility of such a widespread health impact from electricity is greeted with skepticism in the electricity industry, where such an effect would have wide-ranging consequences. “We don’t have support to suggest that there is electro sensitivity in members of the population,” says Jack Sahl, a manager of safety and environmental issues at Southern California Edison, a large U.S. electricity provider. The industry position has been bolstered by studies showing that most of those who say they have allergies to electricity are unable consistently to detect the presence of electric currents in laboratory experiments. Medical authorities and scientific researchers have consequently been baffled over these wide-ranging claims of ill health, not only in Canada and the United States but in Britain and other European countries. In Sweden, the electrically sensitive are so numerous they have established their own self-help and lobby group.

Those with the condition bristle at suggestions their symptoms are imaginary. “This is not psychosomatic at all. . . . We’re not delusional,” says Susan Stankavich, who lives near Albany, N.Y., and says her problems developed after a large cell phone tower was erected near her home. She’s had debilitating headaches, among other symptoms, and can barely tolerate being under fluorescent lights.

Reacting to this rising tide of claims of a new illness, the World Health Organization issued a fact sheet in December on the allergies, which it dubbed “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” and likened it to multiple chemical sensitivities.
The WHO says the “symptoms are certainly real” and “can be a disabling problem for the affected individual.”
Reports about sensitivity to electricity began with the introduction of computers, predating the recent spread of Wi-Fi and cell phone towers, which release a related but more powerful type of electromagnetic energy than that produced around electric wires. There have been long-running concerns about the possible health effects of electricity because it is a source of both electric and magnetic fields, invisible lines of force that surround all power lines and any power-consuming device, from the lowly kitchen toaster to a computer. Electric fields are always present near power wires and appliances, even when devices are turned off, but magnetic fields are generated only when devices are on.

The nerves in living things work on electrical impulses. So do other biological processes, such as the voltages in hearts detected using electrocardiographs. This has given rise to worries that man-made electricity fields, to which humans were never exposed before the modern era, might be biologically active, just like chemical pollutants.
The WHO has been looking at electrical sensitivity as one aspect of a larger investigation into the health effects of the *censored*tail of electromagnetic fields enveloping people in modern societies via everything from power lines to cell phones. It says that exposure to electromagnetic fields represents “one of the most common and fastest growing environmental influences, about which there is anxiety and speculation spreading.”
Until now, most of the medical researchers looking at electricity and health have searched for links to cancer, rather than the fatigue-related symptoms the electrically sensitive claim.

The cancer research has linked childhood leukemia to power-line magnetic fields. About 5 per cent of the U.S. population is regularly exposed to fields of the strength associated with leukemia in children, a percentage that is probably similar in Canada. For adult leukemia and brain tumours, some studies have found links to electricity, as they have with Lou Gehrig’s disease, but the research is less conclusive than that for childhood leukemia.

Richard Stevens, an epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, has been studying electricity for nearly two decades, and first advanced the hypothesis that the use of electricity is a factor behind the rise in some cancer rates in developed countries. He says there is strong evidence linking the use of night lighting to cancer because exposure to light at night disrupts people’s production of the hormone melatonin.

But he’s unsure what impact the fields around electric wiring and devices might be having. Some studies have found that magnetic fields suppress melatonin in animals, something that might explain the allergy-like symptoms, but this effect hasn’t been observed in humans. “Whether or not magnetic fields have any effect at all, I do not know,” Dr. Stevens says.

The allergy-like symptoms are a far different medical condition than the cancers Dr. Stevens studies, and some researchers are speculating that a possible culprit is the recent deterioration in the quality of electricity flowing in power wires.

Power quality is a well-known problem in the utility business, caused by the proliferation of computers, lighting dimmer switches, energy efficient bulbs, and other modern electronic gadgets. These new devices cause a more complicated use pattern for electricity than old-fashioned items such as incandescent bulbs, producing negative feedback involving high-frequency peaks, harmonics and other noise on electric wiring.

The way to picture the quality effect is to imagine that electricity is like water flowing in a pipe. An incandescent bulb uses electricity steadily, just like an open tap allows a constant flow into the sink. Computers and other modern devices use power in variable amounts, similar to turning the tap on and off, or any setting in between, causing water pipes to clang.

This deterioration in power quality has been going on for years and would have likely escaped public notice, except that when home computers became popular in the 1990s they would frequently crash or malfunction because of it.

The change in power quality means more variable electromagnetic fields, and possibly more biologically active ones, are associated with electricity than there used to be. This is a possible explanation for the rise in electro sensitivity complaints in the view of Denis Henshaw, a professor at the University of Bristol in Britain, who is an international authority on the health effects of power transmission lines.

He says that if electricity were flowing in a constant way, most people’s bodies would likely adapt, but with all the interference from modern devices, the resulting fields are too variable for people to get used to. “We just don’t get to adapt to these because they don’t have any special pattern to them,” he said. “There is no proof of this, it’s just an opinion.”

In Canada, Dr. Havas has been investigating whether the deterioration in power quality has led to sensitivity. To this end, she’s been installing filters that clean up the interference on electrical wires to see if people notice.
In 2003, she installed filters in a Toronto private school where a student was electrically sensitive for a six-week test, three weeks with the devices and three weeks without them. Half of the teachers who responded to her questionnaire said they felt health improvements, such as being able to concentrate better and feeling less tired, when the filters were in place. Even more unusual, the teachers, who were not told what the research was about, reported that 60 per cent of their classes showed improvements in student behaviour when the filters were installed.

Based on this finding, Dr. Havas estimates that perhaps half of the population may have some sensitivity to electricity. In another test, she installed filters in the homes of people with multiple sclerosis, a disease that might be reactive to electricity because it is associated with poor sheathing on nerves. Brad Blumbergs, 29, says his MS improved so much last year that he could walk without shaking and could even run again. “It allows me to retire my cane,” he said. “It hasn’t cured me, but my symptoms are a percentage of what they used to be,” Mr. Blumbergs said.

Dr. Havas has presented some of these findings at scientific conferences on electro sensitivity, but the work hasn’t appeared in the gold standard of research, the peer-reviewed scientific journals that would confer more legitimacy on the results.

The utility industry’s Mr. Sahl is skeptical about efforts to improve power quality, which generally cost about $1,000 to handle one home, and calls them a “waste of money.”
He agrees that the action may make some people feel better, but only because they’re affected by the power of suggestion and not by the power of electricity. “I hate to be blunt about it, but there is this well-established effect in science and we’ve studied it over and over and it’s called the placebo effect.”

That doesn’t ring true to Mr. Byrne. He says his sensitivity might have been prompted by his decision last year to conserve energy by replacing much of his home’s simple incandescent lighting with high-efficiency compact fluorescent bulbs, some brands of which cause the power-quality problem.

He’s become so convinced that electricity can make people sick that he’s set up a website, offering tips to fellow sufferers on how to alleviate their symptoms, such as urging them to throw out their dimmer switches and limiting exposures to electronic gadgets. When it comes to electricity, Mr. Byrne says, “I think people should automatically begin changing their lifestyles.”

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Bob Vaughn has contributed this article. See his site at: Alternative Complemetary Medicine