February blahs and blues, whatever you want to call it, Seasonal Affective Disorder, or, ‘SAD’, can rear its ugly head with many symptoms that can sometimes drag into March.  Many people experience them during the winter months when there is less exposure to sunlight. Some signs of SAD are mood swings, sluggishness or exhaustion, lack of interest, and weight gain.

Melatonin is a hormone produced in the body. One of its roles is to help regulate sleep. The amount produced depends on how much light there is in a 24 hour day. When it’s dark, the body naturally produces more Melatonin to induce sleep.

With the decrease of light in the winter, the body maintains a higher level of melatonin throughout the day, which is why many feel tired, and get moody during winter days. Your body thinks it should be sleeping.

Some are affected more than others. You can help yourself through this period by drinking plenty of water, continuing to exercise, and watching your diet. Cutting down on, sugar, refined carbs, and high-fat foods is a great start.

Getting out into the light slows the body’s production of Melatonin. Long walks, taking in the fresh air, and leaving sunglasses off to get as much light through as possible is rejuvenating, refreshing, and helps to keep the production of Melatonin at a manageable level.

Serotonin is another hormone produced by the body. Widely known as the ‘feel-good’ hormone, or the body’s self made tranquilizer. The more the body produces, the more relief you can get from your symptoms of SAD. A meal with a healthy dose of simple carbohydrates also increases the production of serotonin, which also leads to a better sleep, and positive attitude. What better way to start your day. By testing saliva, Medical research has also shown a rise in serotonin levels in individuals after Massage.

There’s another natural way to ease stress, and leave you with that feel-good feeling. Oxytocin, also called, the ‘cuddle hormone,’ is another feel good hormone. I think of it as “feeling the love”. Just spending time with friends and/or lovers, releases this powerful elixir. So eat, drink, sleep, dance, do the ‘hug thing’—lots—and feel that positive hormonal buzz to get your body, mind and soul, out of the ‘SAD’ness doldrums of the winter months.

Tim Horton’s is as Canadian as you can get. It’s a headquarters for business meetings, social meetings and even dating meetings. Canadians love to go to Tim’s and love the social life there.

Now, one Tim Horton’s store has a special happening to entice you into their Oakville store: a group of men who sing Barbershop a Capella have started spontaneously crooning during their visits to Tim Horton’s. Imagine if you scurried through the freezing winter air and shook yourself as you opened the door to a Tim Horton’s near you and thought, wow, what’s going on here?

What’s going on is an Oakville group known as The Entertainers. They are men singing Barbershop and have been Barbershopping for the last 44 years. It’s their habit to sing at their local donut shop every week following their rehearsals. What’s outstanding about these men and their group is that a videographer taped a Tim’s performance and posted it on YouTube a couple of weeks ago on January 7. Since then, the video has had—are you sitting down—206,000 views.

We all love to see spontaneous things happen, don’t we? It makes us feel that we’re part of something special. So imagine sitting in a coffee shop and suddenly this group of men starts singing out loud. It’d certainly get my attention.

It’s a beautiful little serendipity to experience during your ho-hum day. There is magic and there is a wonderful warm feeling that you’ll take away with you after you’ve lingered too long over coffee just because this was such an enchanting moment.

Some people might wonder if this could be a publicity stunt. Now, come on. Ditch your attitude by listening to a group that probably makes big bucks singing for free. Singing just for the pleasure of singing. Singing because it feels so good.

Perhaps the generosity of this group of singing for free just highlights how much more rewarding our days might be should we all adopt this attitude.

The original YouTube video that garnered 206,000 views of this wonderful group featured them singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from The Lion King.

Yeah, I can.

When you hear the word “detox,” does it conjure up images of unappealing juices or thoughts of dragging yourself around feeling drained, achy or nauseated?

If a really uncomfortable detox has been your experience, it was likely too severe and overwhelmed your body’s detoxification pathways. It is essential that your body is able to effectively eliminate the toxins that get released, which does not always happen if you go too hard right out of the gate. Another issue that can arise from fasting cleanses that last more than a couple of days is nutrient deficiency. The body requires protein plus numerous vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients to sufficiently detoxify and function normally.

With all of that to deal with, why worry about detoxification? Perhaps you’ve avoided trying one because it seemed to be too much of a hassle and isn’t that what bodies do anyway? It is, and the liver is particularly active in this regard, but these days the toxic exposure is exponentially higher than previous generations faced.

In addition to the natural by-products from bodily processes that have to be dealt with, consider the following sampling of toxins to which the average person is exposed every day:

Dietary: antibiotics and hormones in meat and dairy, mercury in fish, pesticides and herbicides in non-organic foods including animal feed, over-the-counter and prescribed pharmaceuticals, food additives like colours, flavours and preservatives, chemical components from packaging (e.g. BPA in plastics and food can linings), contaminants in water, coffee, alcohol

Environmental: air pollution, chemical exposures at the workplace, household cleaning and “freshening” products, personal care items, perfumes and cosmetics, off-gassing from carpets and furnishings, cigarettes

And the lists go on. Supporting the body’s natural, daily detoxification processes is a fundamental part of a healthy lifestyle and can keep you sleeping well, full of energy and on the path to long-term good health.

A formal detox period can also be a useful tool in kickstarting weight loss or as part of a yearly or semi-annual cleanup. Spring is a good time to undertake this in keeping with the natural rhythms of the changing season. Once the detox is over though, choosing not to go back to old habits and instead keeping the cleaner food intake is perhaps the most important part of all.

Visit again tomorrow for some simple tips for a gentle starter detox.

This week has been one hell of a week. My father is once again seeking contact and this time he’s attempting to do so through a lawyer; my little brother was in an accident; and work has been bananas. Needless to say I’m taking a lot of deep calming breaths in between shots of whiskey.

I don’t handle certain types of stress well. Work is something I can handle; I am an expert in my field and I know how to deal with any situation that comes my way, but family stress is something that sends me off the rails. Through everything Mr. Unexpected has been a star. He is calm and understanding, lets me rant until I’ve exploded crazy all over the room and not once has he told me to stop because he understands that I need to let the crazy out.

When I first told him about the lawsuit he was a little blown away, understandably so, but it wasn’t long before he was helping me devise a plan to get through it. He is my calm in the storm; he is the reason that I am still standing instead of sitting in a puddle of sad on the floor.

I’ve never been in a relationship like this. I’ve had great love but I’ve never had a real partner, I’ve never had someone that I knew would be there for me whatever the situation.

There is a huge difference between having a man-friend and having a partner. Knowing that you have someone there who will help you, support you and love you is what makes the online dating, the terrible first dates, the heart stopping break-ups and the devastating loss all worth it. For the first time in my life I am not afraid to ask for the treatment I deserve and I’m not afraid that asking for it will make him run in the opposite direction.

Love isn’t enough to sustain a relationship; love without support is all heat and no substance.

This week has felt like a bit of a nightmare. If I didn’t have the support network that I do I think it would have swallowed me whole, but according to Mr. Unexpected giving up is not an option and that is non-negotiable.

I’m grateful to all the men that came before. They gave me perspective and that stops me from taking my relationship for granted. I am incredibly lucky to have someone in my life that not only loves me but supports and respects me.

So, world, what else have you got for me? Whatever it is, I can take it.

Here’s another story of weird news that leaves me shaking my head.

I’ve just read about The Psychometrics Centre, a Strategic Research Network of the University of Cambridge. The first thing I had to do was to look up the meaning of psychometrics: “Science of psychological measurement. Psychometricians design and administer psychological tests both to generate empirical data on mental processes and to refine their understanding of measurement techniques and the statistical analysis of results. Major concerns include test reliability and validity and standardization of results.”

In other words, Strategic Research Network = a new kind of spying. It turns out that Michal Kosinki and David Stillwell of the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge could accurately predict, with varying degrees of success, whether someone used drugs, smoked, had divorced parents and leaned liberal or conservative.

And they can accomplish this all from your “likes” on Facebook! And incidentally, this Psychometric Centre page on Facebook, which I often use as a barometer of success, has only 375 “likes”. I’m not sure that small number will add a lot of credibility to this whole weird concept.

The study took the Facebook “likes,” which stay embedded in a social network page, of 60,000 volunteers in the United States. It looked at “photos, friends’ status updates, pages of products, sports, musicians, books, restaurants or popular Websites. The volunteers had from one to 700 likes each, with the average at 170.

The team was able to predict with 95 per cent certainty what race a person was, 93 per cent for gender, 88 per cent for sexual orientation, 82 per cent for religion, 73 per cent for smokers and 60 per cent for divorced parents.

Their findings? “The best predictors of high intelligence include ‘thunderstorms,’ ‘The Colbert Report,’ ‘science’ and ‘curly fries,’” the study said. “To be honest, we were mind blown when we saw the results for the first time,” Kosinski told Lesley Ciarula Taylor, news reporter at the Toronto Star.

Oh, really.

So, what does it mean if I love thunderstorms but hate science? And don’t even get me started on Stephen Colbert. And if I like straight cut fries instead of curly fries, am I suddenly not so smart anymore? What kind of science do I have to like? The science of psychological measurement perhaps, or would that be too incestuous?

Or what does it mean if I like curly fries and I am Stephen Colbert? Has anyone asked Mr. Colbert this important stuff? Does he realize that his quest for stardom has just been moved ahead several points with these survey findings? How does he feel about curly fries?

Graduates of Cambridge University have won a total of 65 Nobel Prizes, the most of any university in the world. But Kosinki? Don’t buy your ticket to Sweden just yet.

The social scientist in Kosinki imagines a day when a person’s Smartphone will be able to predict what they want far more accurately than a spouse, something he finds exciting “but also creepy.”

Creepy. Right.

Yesterday afternoon the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) unveiled its latest report, entitled “Strategic Regional Research: A Region in Transition.” The report comes as a result of Strategic Regional Research’s (SRR) belief that governments in the Greater Toronto Region are planning to follow an old industrial model that cannot respond to the ever-changing needs of developers, employers or employees.

The report says that the key to solving the Greater Toronto Area’s (GTA) transportations problems is a comprehensive planning vision that links transportation and employment. It found that the GTA’s serious levels of congestion can largely be explained by complex commuting patterns.

As of the release of this report more than 500, 000 jobs in the GTA are located in isolated offices parks beyond the Region’s transit networks. Many of these office parks are built on former industrial sites, set aside in the post war era, that were never designed to accommodate such a large workforce. As these clusters continue to thrive and their workforce expands, even greater stress is placed on already congested employment areas and the transportation areas the serve them.

Over the next 30 years, SSR believes the GTA can create another 500, 000 jobs, many of which will be housed in buildings that have not yet been built. The quality of life for those workers will be dramatically impacted by where those buildings are built and the transportation and infrastructure policies implemented today. If the GTA continues to see jobs concentrated in locations that do not have adequate transit service these areas could become less attractive to potential investment and employment opportunity.

The report recommends bringing together planning, economic development and infrastructure investment. SSR asserts that this is critical to preserving the competitiveness of the GTA and quality of life for commuters. It details potential policy solutions and describes what can occur to avoid making the mistakes of the past.

Three critical issues:

•Provincial policy promotes a comprehensive vision for intensification and connectivity; however, there currently exists a disconnect between regional and municipal policies affecting the location of distribution of employment.

•SSR believes that approximately 100 million square feet of office space, accounting for approximately 500, 000 jobs, is not connected to the GTA’s network of high order transit. There is currently no planning to address this issue.

•The next 30 years will see the creation of 500, 000 new jobs. There is currently a lack of coherent strategy for where the 100 million square feet of office space needed to house the jobs will be located.

“At present, there are two starkly different choices for the region’s workforce with dramatically different expectations for the quality of working life,” says Iain Dobson, a founding partner of Real Estate Search Corporation (RESC) and one of the report’s authors. “One is for jobs located in mixed use, pedestrian friendly, well connected areas like downtown Toronto and in locations adjacent to the subway; the other is for jobs located in isolated, low amenity office clusters beyond the reach of higher order public transit. Ways must be found to bring the positive attributes of both areas to the other.”

Dobson makes it clear: governments, developers and the private sector must work together to build transit and develop the economy in GTA. Further, this must be done in a non-partisan and non-bordered manner. Glenn Miller, a vice president with the CUI and co-author of the SSR report, makes the point that years ago Swiss politicians on the left and the right concluded that the environment was too important an issue to be divided among partisan lines. He believes transit and employment fall into the same category. All it would take is for local councils and governments of all levels to put aside their differences.

But do they have the political will to do so?

Only time will tell.