To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero | Capitalism Has Plans for Menopause | Brushing Teeth: Is It Better Before Breakfast or After? | Opinion | The Strange Omission of Slavery from a Charleston Ghost Tour

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To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero - Scientific American

From Gilgamesh to Star Wars, the narrative blueprint underpinning many heroic tales can offer a powerful way to reframe experiences

What do Beowulf, Batman and Barbie all have in common? Ancient legends, comic book sagas and blockbuster movies alike share a storytelling blueprint called “the hero’s journey.” This timeless narrative structure, first described by mythologist Joseph Campbell in 1949, describes ancient epics, such as the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and modern favorites, including the Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series. Many hero’s journey stories have become cultural touchstones that influence how people think about their world and themselves.

Our research reveals that the hero’s journey is not just for legends and superheroes. In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we show that people who frame their own life as a hero’s journey find more meaning in it. This insight led us to develop a “restorying” intervention to enrich individuals’ sense of meaning and well-being. When people start to see their own lives as heroic quests, we discovered, they also report less depression and can cope better with life’s challenges.

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Capitalism Has Plans for Menopause - The Atlantic

These attempts to Make Menopause Happen are largely positive; the subject has always been taboo, because it is that lethal combination of having to do with women’s bodies (ugh) and with aging (ugh). Everyone who starts having periods will one day stop having them, and that transition involves a drastic change in hormone levels that can affect the entire body: night sweats, tinnitus, joint stiffness, hair loss, heart palpitations, brain fog. Managing these symptoms alongside unexpected—and unexpectedly heavy—periods is a huge challenge for working women. Like pregnancy, menopause is not an illness. But that doesn’t mean it is easy, so good employers should make accommodations for it.

What concerns me is the likely outcome of all the recent awareness raising: stealth marketing in lieu of actual help. Capitalism has gotten its hooks into menopause and wants to shake it until money falls out. To take one example: Is Gwyneth Paltrow selling menopause supplements that have not been evaluated by the FDA and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease? You bet your Madame Ovary pills she is!

In reality, scientists don’t know enough about what the symptoms of menopause are, or the best way to treat them: Hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) was welcomed, and then demonized—for its association with higher rates of breast cancer—and is now inching back into favor again. A more open discussion of the subject benefits the millions of women who have been disbelieved by their doctors or bosses. “Imagine that some significant portion of the male population started regularly waking in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, a problem that endured for several years,” Susan Dominus of The New York Times wrote earlier this year, also mentioning memory lapses, painful sex, and exhaustion. “Imagine that many of their doctors had received little to no training on how to manage these symptoms—and when the subject arose, sometimes reassured their patients that this process was natural, as if that should be consolation enough.” In the use of that weasel word natural, you can find an echo of traditional discussions around childbirth: The female body is beset by painful, mysterious tides, reflecting women’s subordinate position in the world, and that’s just how it is.

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Brushing Teeth: Is It Better Before Breakfast or After? - The New York Times

Q: Is it better to brush my teeth before or after breakfast? Some dentists say it’s better to brush before, some say after — which one is it?

Everyone knows that you should brush your teeth at least twice a day: once in the morning and once before bedtime. But when it comes to your morning routine, is it better to brush before or after breakfast?

The truth is that few studies have looked into this question and their results have been mixed and limited, so there isn’t a definitive answer, said Dr. Apoena de Aguiar Ribeiro, a pediatric dentist and microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But, she and other dentists said, there are pros and cons for each option to keep in mind.

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Opinion | The Strange Omission of Slavery from a Charleston Ghost Tour - The New York Times

I had come to Charleston, S.C., in search of ghosts. So I signed up for one of the many “haunted Charleston” nighttime walking tours of the “Holy City.” A few hours later, I wandered through the historic French Quarter, flanked by other tourists searching for a thrill. Gas lights flickered over decaying structures, cobblestone alleys, and houses that were at least a century old.

I’ve found that ghost tours can be a creepy, fun way to spend an evening, but also to get to know a city. They tend to focus on the notorious underside of a place: its gruesome criminals and tragic socialites; the terrible scenes of violence that might otherwise be forgotten. Ghost tours like the one I went on in Charleston offer a kind of history that might not be found in a museum; they can also tell you how a city sees itself.

Having taken ghost tours in a number of Southern cities — New Orleans, Richmond, Va., and Savannah, Ga., among them — I’ve come to notice a curious sameness to many of them.

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