Many people think of guys as being carefree when it comes to their appearance. But in fact, a lot of guys spend plenty of time in front of the mirror. They care just as much as girls do about their body image.

    Body image is a person's opinions and feelings about his or her own body and physical appearance. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}You appreciate your body for its capabilities and accept its imperfections.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}Here are some ideas.

    Recognize your strengths. Different body types are good for different things. What does your body do well? Maybe your speed, strength, or coordination makes you better than others at a certain sport. That may be basketball, table tennis, mountain biking, dancing, or even running. Or perhaps you have non-sports skills, like drawing, painting, singing, playing a musical instrument, writing, or acting. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Exercise regularly. Exercise can help you look well and feel good about yourself. Good physiques (体形) don't just happen. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} A healthy habit can be as simple as exercising 20 minutes to 1 hour three days a week. Working out can also lift your spirits.

    Respect your body! Practicing good habits regular showering; taking care of your teeth, hair, and skin; wearing clean clothes, and so on can help you build a positive body image.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Your body is just one part of who you are. Your talent for comedy, a quick wit (智慧) and all the other things make you unique. So try not to let small imperfections take over.

    Something happens to many children when they are out of school over the summer months. It is called the “summer slide.” This may sound like a ride at a water park. But it's not. Summer slide is when children forget much of what they learned during the latest school year.

    To fight the effects of summer slide, teachers often give students homework over the summer. Many parents may send children to all kinds of camps or find other activities to keep them learning. Some even try to build up their children's strengths by getting them into extra tutoring.

    However, experts say keeping children busy all the time is not good for them. The result is often a tired child with an overcrowded schedule. This keeps a child's brain active constantly—learning, gathering information and preparing for the next event. And this may have the opposite effect the parents are not hoping for.

    What should parents do instead? Nothing. According to Lea Waters, a psychologist specializing in positive psychology and positive education, slowing down actually helps children become the best they can be. Machines need to be reset, while kids need to goof off（偷懒）. She says that goofing off really allows kids to have some downtime, when they're not focused on a specific task but are free to do something that they're interested in doing and that they can do more automatically and get enjoyment from, like shooting baskets or listening to the music.

    She also adds that goofing off does not mean the brain isn't working. It just goes into this default network mode（默认网络模式）and uses that time to process all the information it had during the day, to integrate（整合）new information. It makes a kind of decision about what information to put into memory and what to get rid of, which in fact helps to improve memory.

Guilt, a positive use for a negative emotion

    Guilt is one the most painful emotions that humans experience but also one of the most common. Nobody enjoys feeling guilty, but this emotion serves an important purpose: it alerts a person when he or she has done something wrong. This makes it possible for the person to make amends and it can also motivate people to avoid making similar mistakes later.

    Nevertheless, guilt can be destructive if not dealt with in the right way. It can cause people to avoid others because they are too embarrassed to apologize for their actions or inaction. Some try to avoid the pain of guilt by turning to other worse habits. Others try to cover up their guilt by blaming others or becoming angry.

    What makes it more complicated is that sometimes people feel guilty about things that they can't control. One example of this is survivors' guilt, when people who survived a disaster feel guilty because they escaped death while others didn't. Other people experience false guilt because of too high expectations for themselves.

    The proper response to guilt depends on what kind of guilt you're dealing with. For false guilt, it's important to recognize that guilt does not reflect an actual ethical failure. For example, some false guilt focuses on failing to meet expectations you had for yourself. In this case, it's important to remind yourself that you have limits. No one is perfect, and no one can do everything, so admitting your limits is actually a sign of humility.

    It's also important to acknowledge what you are feeling. Even when you don't need to feel guilty, these feelings are real and normal. Try to balance them with positive thoughts, but realize that it often takes time for feelings to change.

    It's possible that you feel guilty because you actually did something wrong—or didn't do something you should have .If so, don't try to hide it. Apologize and ask for forgiveness, working to heal relationships that were damaged by your actions, which will make your guilty feelings fade.

    Guilt is painful, but it can serve a good purpose if you use it well.

    Every summer, hundreds of thousands of students travel to other countries looking for work and adventure. Most of the opportunities are in seasonal work, mainly connected with tourism and agriculture. The pay is usually poor, but most people work abroad for the thrill of travel. You can pick grapes in France, work on a family campsite, entertain kids on American summer camps, and of course, there are always jobs in hotels and restaurants.

    But it is not as easy as it used to be to find work. "Unless you speak the language of the country will, there will be very few openings." Says Anthea Ellis, an adviser on vacation work for students. "If you work as a nanny with a family in Italy, then of course you'll have to speak Italian. When you arrive to wash dishes in a restaurant in Paris, the owner will expect you to speak French."

    Not everyone enjoys the experience. Sarah James was an assistant responsible for a summer camp group of forty America children in Europe. One child lost his passport; another became seriously ill and was flown home; four children were lost in Madrid for a whole day; the whole group was thrown out of one hotel because of the noise they made. "I did visit a lot of new places," she says, "but it wasn't worth it. The pay was awful and really was a 24-hour-a-day job. The kids never slept!"

    "The trouble is, students expect to have an easy time of it," Anthea Ellis points out. "After all, they see it as a holiday. In practice, though, you have to work hard. At the same time, all vacation work is casual work. You'll have a job when the hotel, the restaurant, or the campsite is busy and you have few employment rights. As soon as the holiday season finished, they'll get rid of you. If you don't work hard, or if your employer doesn't like you, you'll get fired."

    Tests can be worrying even for the most prepared students. When some students take tests, their minds don't work as well as usual. They may experience something called test anxiety (焦虑), which can have a negative influence on their performance. Well, the following tips can help you pass your next test more easily and achieve more success!

    Get Enough Sleep

    6 hours of sleep or less can slow your mind and thus has negative effects on your performance on tests, even if you spend those missed hours of sleep studying. So, it's very important for you to get a good night of sleep before your big day.

    Study Smarter

    How do you study 'smarter'? Make a list of the things you need to learn in order of importance. That way, if you don't have enough time, you can still hit the items at the top of the list. Make a list of all the work you have to do, judge how much time each item will take, and compare that with the number of hours you have available; this will tell you whether you can read carefully or just skim, how much time you can spend checking papers, and tell you other ways to pace yourself so you can get everything done. If your time is still limited, it's important to learn to let go of being perfect.

    Visualize (想象) Success

    Before you fall asleep each night, it is a great way to visualize yourself taking the tests and doing wonderfully. Detailed visualizations can help you feel like you're really experiencing something，and visualizing yourself doing well is a way to 'practice' success in a way that can help you perform better and feel confident. Visualizations can also help you to remember the facts.

    Stay Calm

    Anxiety can harm your memory, so it's important to stay calm before and during tests. While that's easier said than done, there are several techniques that can help you calm down quickly whenever you feel nervous. For example, breathing exercise has been shown by research to reduce test anxiety, and can be very effective in helping you relax: just take deep breaths and let the anxiety come out.

    How to deal with your test anxiety

    This time of year, thousands of college applicants wait for e­notices and auspiciously(吉利地) sized envelopes from schools, under terrible pressure from their parents, friends, teachers, and themselves. As to this, I offer some advice, which comes not only from a bit of experience, but also a bit of research: just cool out and continue, okay?

    Many parents and students think there is a world of difference between the lifelong outcomes of an A­minus student who gets into, say. Princeton, and an A­minus student who applies to Princeton but "only" gets into some less selective school, like Penn State or the University of Wisconsin. They assume that a decision made by faceless Ivy League admissions officers, to some extent, will mark the difference between success and failure in life.

    There are two important things to say about this stress. First, to put the anxiety into context, the kids applying to these schools are already doing quite well. Seventy percent of 29­-year-­olds don't have a bachelor's degree, and the majority of BAs are earned at non­selective schools that accept a majority of their applicants. Many of the applicants have already won life's lottery.

    But if that doesn't ease the nerves of the 40,000 people waiting on Stanford or Penn, here is a more encouraging conclusion from economics. For most applicants, it doesn't matter if they don't get into their top choice, according to a paper by Stacy Dale, a mathematician at Mathematica Policy Research, and Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton University. They tracked two groups of students——­one that attended college in the 1970s and the other in the early 1990s. They wanted to know：Did students attending the most elite colleges earn more in their 30s. 40s. and 50s than students with similar SAT scores, who were rejected by elite colleges? The short answer was no. Or, in the author's language, the difference between the students who went to super­selective schools and the students with similar SAT scores rejected by those schools and went to less selective institutions was "indistinguishable from zero."

    What does that mean? It means that, for many students, "who you are" is more important than where you go. It's hard to show that highly selective colleges add much earning power, even with their distinguished professors and professional networks. In addition, the decision of admissions officers isn't as important as the sum of the decisions, habits, and relationships students have built up to this point in their young life.

    For the elite colleges themselves, the Dale­Krueger paper had additional, fascinating findings. It's found that the most selective schools do make an extraordinary difference in life earning for minority students from less-­educated families who are more likely to rely on colleges to provide the training and job networks with great influence. Getting into Princeton if your parents went to Princeton? Fine, although not a game­changer.  But getting into Princeton if your parents both left community college after a year? That could be game­changing. Whatever the results, it's more important to choose a university that is suited to the college applicants.