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For centuries, humans have been obsessed with beauty and youth. We have tried everything from practices we still use today to some off the wall things that might make one cringe in order to maintain a youthful appearance. With the technology that we have at our disposal now, looking and feeling great is almost down to a science! Even now, scientists are uncovering new tips and tricks to maintaining a youthful appearance that will help us to stay confident and enhance our lives.

While the saying is true that beauty is only skin deep, many people find that maintaining a youthful air is important to keep going on with our routines. The working world is competitive in more ways than one, and it also helps us to stay confident with our friends and partners if we can manage to look younger than our age. It is one of the best compliments one can receive, and this book will help you to uncover several anti-aging hacks that will help you to stay at the top of your game.

The most important thing about focusing our lives on anti-aging is the fact that we are doing everything we can do within our power to view our bodies as machines that are either going to work in our favor or against it. So when does the body work mostly in our favor? When we supply it with the vital components that it needs in order to stay at its peak form. Our bodies will work in our favor when we are getting the essential vitamins and nutrients, it will work in our favor when we are drinking enough water, and it will work in our favor when we are exercising.

When does the body work against us? When we stop accepting responsibility for the things that we do to our bodies and what we put into them. When we decide that we can cut corners and that we can continue to go on paths full of vices and habits that are going to make it difficult for us to remain healthy. Our bodies will work against us when we are giving ourselves an excuse to make bad decisions that will harm us rather than becoming proactive and stepping up to the plate to give ourselves the reason and the motivation to make the choices that are best for our bodies and lives. If we aren’t making choices that are going to help us to embrace a youthful life, then we are not going to live a youthful life. It is that simple.

Whether your goal is to keep an edge in the working world or simply to make sure you are feeling as confident as possible, there are several different things that one can implement in order to prevent aging from marking its course and diminishing our confidence. We don’t have to accept aging at face value! We can take control over our bodies and lives and do everything possible to prevent aging from taking over our lives. This book will show you how!

When most people think of anti-aging, most of the time what they really want is to make sure that their skin does not show the typical wear and tear that naturally come with growing older. Over time, we often develop habits that make our bodies suffer and eventually we begin to see the results of these poor choices. Fortunately, there are many ways that we can begin to address the bad habits that can cause our skin to look more aged than we are comfortable with. This book will cover these antiaging hacks in the chapters to come!

The first and foremost of these tips, however, is to do everything possible to take care of your skin and keep it hydrated. If you are not using a good skincare regime now, then it is something to seriously consider for the future. Our skin is what shows the appearance of age, probably more than most other things besides perhaps gray hair. If you want to have the appearance of youth, what you do and don’t do for your skin will really make a difference! Everything that we do has a consequence. If we aren’t taking care of our bodies to the best possible extent, then ultimately there will be consequences for that. Make sure the consequences that you manifest are the most positive possible!

Our skin is made up of three very important layers. The external layer is called the epidermis, and contains the protein keratin, which is what eventually continues to grow as our skin cells die and are removed in flakes. It also contains Lagerhans cells, which are a preventative measure our bodies take to ward away bacteria and viruses, along with other things that could ultimately end up making us sick. Our skin insulates us, protects us from water and intense temperatures, and keeps our inner workings safe from sun damage. It also gives the brain signals through our nerve endings when everything is operating fully. Ultimately, it is one of the most important organs in our body (although it can easily be argued that every organ in our body is pretty important!)

The layer of skin below the epidermis is called the dermis and it is also very important. It is more to do with the way things work beneath the surface, such as with the temperature regulation by controlling our blood flow. For example, when it’s cold outside, our skin will constrict the flow of our blood, while when it is hot, it actually allows the blood to circulate more quickly so that heat can escape through the surface of our skin.

Our bodies can cool themselves using natural thermodynamic methods, including sweating. However, when we sweat it releases toxins from our bodies that can stay trapped on the skin unless we deal with them quickly. That is why it is so important to keep our skin clean, especially if we want to reduce signs of aging!

Knowing the importance of our skin and how it works can be a vital element in preventing aging from showing up on it. When we understand just how important skin care really is in our daily regimen, and caring for our bodies in general to help us get ahead of aging before it’s too late, then we will have the tools at our disposal to live a life with the vitality of youth and the confidence to match it! This book will show you how.

Many, many people go through life feeling the pressure to look a certain way in order to feel confident and be accepted by their peers. We want to be attractive, youthful, and confident, and a lot of people find that one of the aesthetics they thrive for is to be tan.

Tanning is a natural process that a lot of people in the Western world have succumbed to encouraging. Sitting out in the sun, rubbing oils on the body so that the sun’s rays are attracted to our skin to give it that pleasing, darkened glow, is something so common that it’s almost bizarre to consider that it could be harmful.

Unfortunately, the UV rays from the sun’s rays can actually cause damage to the skin and cause wrinkles. It can also, over time, cause skin cancer. The negative effects are enhanced greatly if you end up getting sunburnt frequently. This can dry out your skin and cause untold damage to it that can present itself as you age in the form of wrinkles and other blemishes.

When you do get sunburnt, it is important to deal with it immediately. Using things like aloe-vera cream will help you to heal your skin and keep it hydrated despite the damage that has already been done. It will help to do some damage control and provide some relief from the pain of the sunburn as well.

Overall, it is incredibly important to make sure that you are smart about your sun exposure. You want to keep your skin hydrated whether you are in the sun a lot or not, but to prevent wrinkles and dryness, making sure to moisturize becomes even more important. When you go outside, you could try to make sure that you only do so during hours when the suns rays are not as extreme in temperature. Another thing that you can do is to wear clothing that will protect your body from the harmful U rays of the sun. Wearing hats, long sleeve shirts, sunglasses, and even carrying a parasol, can be good ways to keep your skin smooth and pristine and prevent yourself from having to suffer from the consequences of negative UV ray exposure.

UV rays are a threat to anybody who gets sun exposure. It is difficult to predict when or how one might get cancer, but skin cancer is more prevalent in those who spend a lot of time out in the sun. Don’t make the mistake of using suntanning oil over sunscreen. Don’t purposefully expose yourself to tanning beds or natural UV rays for a temporary attempt at glowing and beautiful skin. Instead, do everything that you can to keep your body safe from the harmful rays. Even if you don’t get skin cancer, it will still damage and dry out your skin and could ultimately cause wrinkles and contribute to age spots.

Our society has a tendency to glorify the people who look vibrant and tanned without really getting into the details about how damaging the sun can be for our skin. It is a dangerous industry and we will have more long-term beauty if we are able to avoid overexposing ourselves to the sun’s rays. Instead of spending money on trying to heal the damage caused by years of sun overexposure, do yourself a favor and prevent it, starting now!

A lot of us have habits that we perform daily without even thinking twice about it. We may not even think of them as bad habits and simply functions that we perform in order to go about our days. However, did you know that rubbing your eyes is actually considered dangerous to your skin, especially for those who are concerned about the effects that aging can have on their appearance?

Well, it’s true! When we rub our eyes regularly, it can actually cause the damage to the skin around our eyes. This is because it is so thin there that when we rub it, we can easily damage the blood vessels surrounding it. This can lead to decreased blood flow in one of the most sensitive areas on our body and a place that is highly prone to showing the effects of aging on the body. It can have several different consequences, including a darkened effect around the eyes, or the thickening of the skin around the eyes as it works to consistently repair itself after our thoughtless habits. It can even lead to a lackluster effect that decreases the vibrancy of one of the most captivating parts of our bodies! It’s best to avoid rubbing our eyes if at all possible because we don’t want to help our bodies age faster than it is necessary!

If you have been prone to rubbing your eyes in the past, have no fear. While it can be true that our past habits can affect us in the present moment, the sooner we address our bad habits and do away with them, the faster we can begin preventing any further damage from occurring. Knowledge truly is power! Especially when we use it wisely.

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Introduction

Maintaining your focus in a noisy and distracted world can be tough. There is so much pulling our attention in every direction that it seems almost impossible to focus on the tasks that are truly important. From social media to text messages and calls and even people stopping by to talk, there is always something that can take our attention away from getting work done.

The result is that we feel like we are behind. When we spend most of our day checking notifications on Facebook or responding to unimportant emails, we find that there is very little time left to get projects and other work done. This can leave us feeling overwhelmed and may drive us to overwork ourselves, while feeling like we get nothing done.

This guidebook is here to change all that. The goal is to learn how to focus our attention and manage our time so we no longer have to stay at work late to finish projects or waste time away from our loved ones. Inside, we will learn that we are the ones in control over our time, not the clock, and that we can actually get things done based on a schedule of our own choosing.

As we work through this guidebook, we will learn the importance of setting goals, minimizing distractions, and even taking breaks.

When it comes to focusing, we can work with some of the best time management techniques, including the Pomodoro Method and Eat the Frog to help us get more done. Slowly, by implementing some of these tips in one at a time, you can start to turn these ideas into habits and improve your focus when getting work done.

Stop letting this noisy and distracting world get the best of you. Stop being a slave to the clock and feeling like nothing gets done. Take a look through this guidebook and see the exact steps you can use to reclaim your time and your focus!

Chapter 1: The Psychology of Staying Focused

When we think about how many things are vying for our attention right now, the list seems endless. From a long to-do list to our phones, emails, family members and more, it seems almost impossible to keep up. While modern technology is amazing and has helped improve our world so much, there is the side effect of always getting our attention.

Think about your phone. It is common to see one notification after another popping up and distracting us from the things that we need to get done. All of a sudden we have wasted an hour and have a ton of work left to do. This continues to happen throughout the day and makes it impossible to get ahead.

You are not alone in this problem. The average office worker will find a distraction every three minutes. And Research from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University says that it can take almost 25 minutes to get back on task after a distraction. Basically, it is easy to lose focus and hard to get it back. We may not have a problem with too much work, but rather a problem with too many distractions.

How the Brain Chooses What to Focus On During the day, your brain is always on and trying to gather and take in important information. This means that it has to sort through the noise and decide what it wants to focus on. This is called selective attention and there are two main forms that come with it:

Top-Down

This is also known as voluntary focus and it is one of the best types. With this focus, you pay attention to your goals. You look at the bigger picture and come up with a plan that helps you get there. You know that your phone and emails keep you from reaching these goals so you ignore them. You get stuff done on time, if not ahead of time.

Bottom-Up

This is more of a stimulus-driven focus. When a thought starts to creep up to you or a notification shows up on the phone and you get distracted, this is a sign that you work with bottom-up focus. You have to pay attention to what is going on around you, rather than the thing that deserves the most attention for you.

What’s the Problem Here?

The ultimate goal is to become a top-down thinker. This allows us to focus on what is important and avoid all the rest. Unfortunately, because of our natural instincts, we are often bottom-up focusers instead. Willpower and focus are finite resources, which means that the more you are distracted, the harder it is to get back on track. And since we are bottom-up focusers, every little thing is enough to distract us from our goals.

Since most of us can be easily distracted by little things like emails and notifications on our phones, we need to prepare for this. We need to be aware of it and limit the amount of distractions that we have during the day. Turning your phone off and staying away from social media, for example, can help keep the distractions down so your brain will not even realize they are there and you can focus on your work.

There is just too much that is adding to our focus problem and trying to draw our attention away from what is important. Those notifications, those emails, and those little things have a way of drawing us in, even if they are not that important at all. We think we just give them a few moments of our attention, but it does not take long for them to take over and then we get nothing done during the day.

Notifications are Just as Distracting as Phone Calls In the past, we would not know anyone was trying to contact us on our phones unless it rang. This was less frequent because most people had to have something important to talk about before they would go through the effort because it took some time for a phone conversation. Today, our phones often do not ring as much. But we may here a single beep or a vibration for a text or a Facebook message. And since these take the sender just a few moments, we may get a lot of them during the day.

A study from three researchers at Florida State University suggest that getting one of these notifications, no matter how small they may be, could distract us as much as responding to a text message or a phone call, even if we do not respond to it.

During this study, there were about 150 students who had to complete a test of sustained attentional performance. During this test, the subjects are given a series of single digits on a screen and a new digit will show up every second.

During this, the students are meant to tap on the keyboard each time the digit changes, unless the new digit is a 3. Each person did the test two times. The first time they did it without their devices there to interrupt them. The second time, they could have their phone and assistants to the test would text or place phone calls to these phones.

Through this, researchers found that the performance for that assessment suffered if the student receive audible notification on their phone of any kind. Each type of phone distraction, whether it was a phone call or a text, was destructive to how well they did. It didn’t seem to matter if the student didn’t answer the phone or ignored the text. If they got the notification, they still knew they had that notification and their performance suffered.

This is telling to our focus and it is an example of how bottom-up thinking works. Something as small as a text notification is enough to send our focus out the window and can make our performance suffer. Recognizing this and finding methods to limit the impact it has on our work can be critical if you want to improve how well you do at work.