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“Our study suggests that active music making has some training effects that resemble those of physical exercise training,” researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center’s Department of Cardiology reports in the Netherlands Heart Journal.

The researchers found blood pressure was significantly lower among the musicians, and their heart rate “tended to be lower” than those in the non-musical group. They attribute this to the musicians’ higher levels of “somatosensory nerve activity,” which “beneficially modulate the autonomic nervous system.”

“It is likely that similar effects will be found in older persons, and possibly even diseased persons, because of the parallels with physical exercise,” they add.

Meanwhile, a recent study from Britain found senior citizens who are “actively engaged with making music exhibited higher levels of subjective well-being, as compared to those engaged in other group activities.” If these results from the Netherlands can be replicated with a larger sample, it will indicate that the benefits of playing music are physical as well as psychological.

Cognitive distortions are distorted or dysfunctional ways that we think about events in our lives. For many of us, engaging in negative thought patterns (whether we are aware of them or not) often result in fatigue and high levels of stress.

Sustaining a balanced perspective about what is currently transpiring in your life is often difficult to do when nothing in your world seems positive. There are 3 major patterns of thought I believe humans engage in while under extraordinary stress and emotional strain:

1. Magnification (you exaggerate the importance of things). […]

2. Emotional reasoning (you assume that the way you are feeling, truly reflects the way things are). […]

3. Should statements (this is basically “self-talk” and can really influence your emotions). […]

The above cognitive distortions are very typical and can result in a reduction in your level of confidence and hope. Distorted thinking patterns are narrow and do not allow a balanced view of the events occurring in your life. However, there are things you can do to combat the 3 major poor thinking patterns above:

1. Reflect: Take time to reflect on the situation and your thoughts. Challenge yourself by questioning whether there is “evidence” for how you view the situation. Is the evidence sound evidence? Could you possibly perceive the situation in another way?

2. Move: Engaging in exercise (yoga, Zumba, aerobics, jogging, etc.) is a great way to free your mind and free yourself from the chains of worry, stress, and depression.

3. Eat : Healthy eating is essential especially for about 80% of the time. Try to eat something healthy with each meal to start off slow (yams, spinach, greens, wheat, oats, etc.) and then add healthy food to your diet 80% of the time and have treats 20% of time time. This has worked for me!

4. Groove : Music and dance are great expressions of emotion and have a way of removing you from stress and worry. Turn on something you like and let the music take your mind away from you present moment.

5. Self-sooth : Activities such as warm baths, walking slowly in the park, covering up in a soft blanket, hugging a stuffed animal, etc. are self-soothing techniques that can offer comfort.

Distorted thoughts can truly affect your emotions, outlook, and behavior in negative ways. Try to combat this with things you like to do and can easily implement into your weekly schedule. Try to treat yourself well during times of extreme stress, worry, depression, and anxiety.

Although it’s probably a waste of time trying to interpret a doodle, could the act of doodling itself still be a beneficial habit for attention and memory in certain circumstances?

Crucially, these participants were pretty bored. They’d just finished another boring study, were sitting in a boring room and the person’s voice in the message was monotone.

Looking at the results the beneficial effects of doodling are right there. Non-doodlers wrote down an average of seven of the eight target names. But the doodlers wrote down an average of almost all eight names.

It wasn’t just their attention that was enhanced, though, doodling also benefited memory. Afterwards participants were given a surprise memory test, after being specifically told they didn’t have to remember anything. Once again doodlers performed better, in fact almost 30% better.

Andrade speculates that doodling helps people concentrate because it stops their minds wandering but doesn’t (in this case) interfere with the primary task of listening.

Obviously doodling is not a task you want to indulge in while concentrating on a complicated task, but it may help you maintain just enough focus during a relatively simple, boring task, that you can actually get it done better.

Research on doodling might sound a little trivial but it’s fascinating because it speaks to us about many facets of human psychology, including mind wandering, zoning out, attention and the nature of boredom. Plus it’s a really nice idea that doodling has a higher purpose, other than just wasting time and paper.

Studies suggest that music helps us get the most from exercise - but the fast-paced dance tunes favoured by gyms up and down the country isn’t necessarily the best.

Instead, classical music may produce better results. The advice comes from neuroscientist Jack Lewis who scoured reports of research in the field to come up with a list of musically-themed advice for those who are trying to get fit.

‘Classical music is extremely interesting. It has obviously been around for a lot longer than all the other genres, consequently hundreds of brilliant composers have experimented with all sorts of different moods they can create in the mind of the listener.

‘Within that large corpus it is possible to have high tempo tunes that have the same tempo as dance music, yet complex harmonies and a much more sophisticated structure.’

Dr Lewis also recommends matching music with heartbeat - with faster beats better as a session gets harder.

A faster beat is not only more motivating, it also ‘instructs’ the brain to energise the body. Dr Lewis suggests Michael Jackson’s Rock with You for a heart rate of 116 beats per minute - the sort of rate typically seen when warming up.

Other tips from Dr Lewis, who was commissioned by music streaming website rara.com, include listening to music before exercise, as well as during, and choosing tunes that have sentimental value.

He said: ‘Try to choose songs that mean something to you personally - ones that remind you of something motivational or inspiring.

‘Research shows that the premotor cortex, an area of the brain involved in the planning of movement, is stimulated when subjects have been played music that is beautiful to the ear.

‘Tracks we are not so keen on are less effective in stimulating this region.’

You might not care much about fine dining or coffee. But you probably do value the skills of the artisan and might well believe that food is one of the ever-dwindling number of domains where individual human flair and creativity cannot be bettered by the mass-produced and mechanised. If so, you should care about the challenge to your assumptions that the rise of capsule coffee represents.

Mechanised production can be wonderfully democratising, turning all sorts of things that were luxury, bespoke items into things everyone could afford, like the car, central heating, and computers. In the gastronomic utopia of the future, no one need be condemned to thin, dishwater coffee, or pies with pastry like wet cardboard.

For most epicures, it is almost an article of faith that this will never happen, because food needs to be cooked with love, flair and passion. While this might conceivably be true at the very peak of culinary art, in most cases mechanisation is competing not against the artisanal best but against the human mean. So, even if the very best coffee is still made the traditional way by a skilled, human barista, all Nespresso need do is produce better coffee than the majority of baristas, whom most coffee fanatics describe as incompetent anyway.

The claim that handcrafted is better does not stand up a priori. It needs to be put the test. And for coffee, that’s exactly what I did.

Surely we appreciate the handmade in part because it is handmade. An object or a meal has different meaning and significance if we know it to be the product of a human being working skilfully with tools rather than a machine stamping out another clone. Even if in some ways a mass-produced object is superior in its physical properties, we have good reasons for preferring a less perfect, handcrafted one.

We are not simply hedonic machines who thrive if supplied with things that tick certain boxes for sensory pleasure, aesthetic merit, and so on. We are knowing as well as sensing creatures, and knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them.

Of course, we need to think about yield, efficiency and environmental impact. But we also need to think about what kind of world we want to live in. And if we do, most of us would say that we would prefer food chains that preserve human links between consumer, farmer, land, and animals, in a landscape that combines functionality and beauty as much as is possible.

It is not that handmade is always best, of course. Much technology is itself a testimony to human creativity and ingenuity. Apple has got very rich through supplying technology that is beautifully designed by humans who are as gifted as the best artisans. There is plenty that we should happily allow to be mechanised, for the obvious benefits that brings. But there is plenty else we will continue to prefer to be handmade, because what matters is not just the result, but the process by which you get there. Humans are imperfect, and so a world of perfection that denies the human element can never be truly perfect after all.