Do you want to take time to get in touch with yourself, your feelings, your dreams, and a good, healthy life? Here are some tips:

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Sometimes it seems as if our culture has begun to view the need for sleep as a sign of weakness. But your body was genetically(基因地) programmed to spend a third of its life on sleep, and this affects thinking, memory, growth, your immune(免疫的) system and even your weight.

    Begin the day in thankfulness. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} Name each person and hold them in your thoughts. The sense of thankfulness you experience will set a peaceful tone for the entire day, and reduce a day's stress that can lead to sleeplessness that night.

    Strike a balance. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Think about tai chi, prayer, yoga(瑜伽)—any daily activity that allows you to develop a peaceful center and a sense of balance.

    Play with friends. The "tend and be friend studies", as they are called, conducted by UCLA researcher, Shelly Taylor, Ph.D. indicate that when women are stressed, they tend to their children and play with other women. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Use guided imagination. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} The tone of your voice, pacing, music, and pictures will persuade your nervous system that it's time to calm down.

    You want to be happy, who doesn't? However, whether you procrastinate(拖延), feed negative self-talk, or don't rest your mind, you lower your potential to create happiness.

Procrastination

    You aren't in deadly danger if you procrastinate, but your system doesn't always take this information on board. You still react as though you are anxious and produce stress chemicals.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Your ability to see the big picture of life is reduced when you procrastinate. Therefore, you don't see as much joy.

Negative self-talk

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#} Taking notice of what goes on in your head and putting positive change in action makes negative self-talk useful. Nevertheless, most people don't recognize negative self-talk as a pointer; they feed it until it grows out of control.

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    Your mind contains an incredible amount of information and is more powerful than any computer many times over. However, if you give it too many tasks, you shut out peace of mind.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Thought-overload results in physical symptoms, like a racing heart and shortness of breath. Additionally, you might have sleeplessness, digestive problems and other symptoms of stress that reduce your happiness.

    If you want to increase the odds of being happy, don't procrastinate. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Similarly, don't overload your mind, give it a rest and you will soon notice you are happier.

    “Urgent action required”, “Do you still want to hear from us?”, “We've updated our privacy policy”, “Should we stop sending you updates? If not, act now!”

    Many of us will have received emails like this during the past few weeks. Triggering this flood of emails is something called GDPR that comes into effect in just under two weeks' time. Often the emails warn that if you don't respond, you will be removed from the company's database, which raises a lot of questions. What action, if any, do you need to take? Could it affect you financially?

    GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation, has been described as the biggest overhaul（彻底检查）of online privacy since the birth of the internet. It is designed to give all EU citizens the right to know what data is stored on them and to have it deleted, plus protect them from privacy breaches（破坏）. It comes into effect on 25 May.

    The new rules encourage the requirement for explicit and informed consent before data is processed. As a result, companies and organizations around the world are contacting users to check they are happy to carry on receiving their emails.

    However, many of us seem to be going down with “GDPR fatigue（厌倦）”: one article last week claimed that the “reconfirmation rate” - the proportion of people saying they want to continue receiving a company's emails - at UK micro-businesses was averaging just 10%, which meant “they could lose 90% of their subscribers - the life-blood for their business”. So it's no wonder some firms have adopted policies such as offering to enter people into a prize draw in return for them going in and updating their communication preferences.

    The average adult is said to have about 100 “data relationships” — companies and organizations that hold our personal data. Meanwhile, the reason why the company that occasionally emails you newsletters is now asking for your consent is perhaps because you never explicitly gave it permission to send you stuff. Maybe you only get its emails because you went to an event it organized ages ago or you once downloaded something from its website. Under the new regime, that almost certainly wouldn't count as explicit and informed consent, hence it's getting in touch now.

    The bottom line is that if it is a company or organization that you want to continue hearing from, you should probably click the button or log in to ensure you keep getting its emails. If it doesn't hear from you, it may decide to take you off its database.

How to Do Man-on-the Street Interviews

    The man-on-the-street interview is an interview in which a reporter hits the streets with a cameraman to interview people on the spot. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} But with these tips, your first man-on-the-street interview experience can be easy.

    When your boss or professor sends you out to do man-on-the –street interviews for a story, think about the topic and develop a list of about ten general questions relating to it. For example, if your topic is about environmental problems in America, you might ask, "Why do you think environmental protection is important in America?" {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Hit the streets with confidence. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Say, "Excuse me, I work for XYZ News, and I was wondering if you could share your opinion about this topic," This is a quick way to get people to warm up to you.

    Move on to the next person if someone tells you she is not interested in talking on camera. Don't get discouraged.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Each interview that you get on the street shouldn't be longer than ten minutes. As soon as you get the answer you need, move on to the next person. Make sure that as you go from interview to interview, you are getting a variety of answers. If everyone is giving you the same answer, you won't be able to use it. A safe number of interviews to conduct is about six to ten. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    If your news station or school requires interviewees to sign release forms to appear on the air, don't leave work without them.

A. Limit your time.

B. As you approach people, be polite.

C. If you don't own a camera, you can buy one.

D. For new reporters, this can seem like a challenging task.

E. To get good and useful results, ask them the same question.

F. That number of interviews should give you all the answers you need.

G. With a question like this, you will get more than a 'Yes" or "No" reply.

Help Migrant Workers

    There is nothing like going home. More so if it is for the Spring Festival family reunion. For a migrant worker it perhaps means even more. To be able to set out on a homeward journey with money from a year's toil in his pocket is the best thing he can think of. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} They had to press hard for their defaulted payments, the salaries that were failed to pay up.

    About 200 million migrant workers nationwide are something left behind by economic reforms and opening up due to their contributions in the past three decades. It is almost impossible to imagine life in these places without them. However, they still form a disadvantaged group. Their rights are violated in different forms. Among other things, unpaid salaries are the most painful of such violations that are likely to drive a migrant worker to desperate actions. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}They have taken measures to prevent employers from holding back payments to them. Yet, as the financial crisis bites deep, some small enterprises that are struck the most try to reduce their economic losses by laying off migrant workers or refusing to pay them. So it is particularly important for governments at all levels to do an even better job in helping villager-turned-workers recover their unpaid salaries before the Spring Festival.

    It is good news that quite a number of local governments have organized special taskforces to conduct inspections in those labor-intensive enterprises to make sure they have paid their migrant workers in a timely and fair manner. Construction commissions in almost all provinces have published hotlines for farmer-turned-construction workers to lodge complaints against their employers for withholding their salaries.  {#blank#}4{#/blank#} But we need to look for solutions that will work at all times. We need to put in place a mechanism that will effectively prevent employers from holding back salaries to workers.

A. Some have reportedly climbed up chimneys to jump to their death unless they get their defaulted salaries.

B. It is something every Chinese look forward to as the traditional gala draws near.

C. Unfortunately, weeks preceding the Spring Festival have turned out to be hard times for migrant workers.

D. Hopefully, these efforts will send more workers on a happy journey home for the Spring Festival with their salaries in their pockets.

E. However difficult the situations they are in, it is too cruel and unfair for employers to hold back salaries they should pay their migrant workers.

F. Objectively speaking, governments at various levels have done a great deal in helping these workers recover their defaulted salaries.

    If there is one word to describe the progress made in the last 100 years, it's connectedness. From the telephone to the radio to the TV to the Internet, we have found ways to bring us all closer together, enabling，constant worldly access.

    I don't think I need to highlight the benefits of all this. But the downsides are also beginning to show. Beyond the current talk about privacy and data collection, there is perhaps an even more detrimental side-effect here: We now live in a world where we're connected to everything except ourselves. According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, and we dread boredom and instead choose aimless distraction and use the noise of the world to block out the discomfort of dealing with ourselves.

    However, we ignore the fact that never facing ourselves is why we feel lonely an anxious in spite of being so intimately connected to everything else around us.

    Fortunately, there is a solution. The only way to avoid being ruined by this is to face it. It's to let the boredom take you where it wants so you can deal with whatever it is that is really going on with your sense of self. That's when you'll hear yourself think, and learn to engage the parts of you that are masked by distraction.

    The beauty of this is that, once you cross that initial barrier, you realize that being alone isn't so bad. Boredom can provide its own stimulation.

    When you surround yourself with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn't allow. The world becomes richer, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity.

    You learn that there are things you are capable of paying attention to than just what makes the most noise on the surface. Just because a quiet room doesn^'t scream with excitement like the idea of immersing yourself in a movie or a TV show doesn't mean there isn't depth to explore there.

    Sometimes, the direction that this solitude leads you in can be unpleasant, especially when it comes to introspection (内省)—your thoughts and your feelings, your doubts and your hopes—but in the long term, it's far more pleasant than running away from it all without even realizing what you are.

    Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That's ironic because it^'s more important than most of the ones they do.

    Solitude may not be the solution to everything, but it certainly is a start.