Respond to Sky post

Creating A SMART goal will insure you will achieve said goal. It puts your goals into perspective on achievability and the time frame needed to accomplish it. It also simplifies your goals, having a specific goal rather than a vague one makes it simpler to achieve.

I think I need to work on the specify step of SMART goal making. My goals tend to be vague and having a more specific goal would help me better understand where to start to reach that goal. Getting a better understanding of why I want to accomplish that specific goal is also helpful for me to know if it is a goal I want and can achieve.

I feel a current stressor I have is the amount of responsibilities I currently have and trying to keep up with them. This gets in the way of me being able to achieve some goals because I already have a lot going on and it can feel overwhelming adding extra goals such as achieving my degree. I think a strategy I can use to better cope is setting a better schedule and making sure I stick with it. This will organize my time better so I don’t have so much going on in a day and I can make time to work on achieving my goal.

When responding to your Holly and Shiloh posts, consider the following: Is their reasoning clear? Does it make sense to you? Where might there similarly be room for interpretation in your own post, and how might you clarify?

Holly post

I chose the article “Smiling really does give you a positive outlook” because I believe this to be true. Through my own experiences, I have always maintained a positive outlook, despite the many challenges life has thrown at me. I also have seen how smiling at others has an impact on them and how it makes them feel. As I said in my previous discussion post, I do believe that happiness is a choice and how important it is to enjoy every moment we have in this life. I do believe that a smile can change the world.

To summarize the article, there is study done to mimick a smiling motion by holding a pen in your mouth. The participants covert smile not only altered the recognition of facial expressions but also body expressions, with both resulting in postive emotions. Furthermore, when you force a smile, it stimulates the emotional center of your brain stimulating neurotransmitters to encourage an emiotionally positive state. In short, when your muscles are happy you are more likely to look at the world around you in a positive way. The article also touches on how this mechanism could potentially be used to help boost mental health.

Shiloh post

I chose the article “Cancer Cells Take Over Blood Vessels To Spread”. Scientists used a functional 3D blood vessel and grew breast cancer cells nearby to understand how cancer spreads. With this structure, they observed how the cells would reach out and attach itself to part of a blood vessel wall. The cells were able to reshape, destroy, and even mix with the blood vessel. Once they attached themselves to the blood vessel, the cancer cells would release themselves there, spreading through the blood stream.

The scientific and personal study of this is all in one for me. All my questions for this subject fall under both of those categories. There have been several people in my family struck with cancer. I have heard about it since a young age, but frankly, did not understand much until my grandmother fell ill. I have a lot of questions about cancer, one of them being, how is cancer spread? This article tells me what the scientists discovered with how breast cancer spreads. Does it spread the same way with the rest of cancers? Are there certain genes that are prone to cancer? Can we come up with a better way to treat the pain? Are scientists looking at new ways to treat and prevent cancer? Watching from the outside what cancer can do to someone sparked my interest in this what and how, so seeing this article, it drug me in.

I have attack my journal with comments along with the worksheet