vacations help to destress and give relaxation to your muscles and brain

Still others benefit by arrangements that allow them to enjoy a series of four-day or five-day vacations, taken perhaps four times the more each year. 1f it is possible for you to have such flexibility, it could be well worth-while. 

Before You Go on Vacation It's a good idea to see your doctor before you go off on an extended vacation-so you won't have to see him after it is over. In fact, just before a vacation can be an especially suitable time for having your regular periodic checkup.

For one thing, your doctor can tell you how much and what kind of exercise you should undertake. If he finds you are not in condition to climb mountains or play tennis, you can select a place where you won't be tempted to engage in such activities. You will have more fun perhaps lying on a beach or sitting in a boat pulling in fish. 

Deciding where to go on your vacation can be important if you have a health problem such as hay fever, for example. Your doctor can advise about avoiding certain places at certain seasons. If you have a heart or lung problem, he can advise about altitudes and their possible effects.

Tell your physician not only where you plan to go but how you will get thereby train, plane, ship, or car. If you have any tendency to motion sickness, your physician can prescribe medication to help prevent it. Depending upon where you plan to go and the availability there of medical facilities, your physician may suggest that you take along a first-aid kit. 

A minimum one, under some conditions, might include the following items, and your physician can provide prescriptions for those that require them: Aspirin-for headache, fever, muscle aches and pains Antiseptic, such as hydrogen peroxide, tincture of iodine, or benzalkonium chloride Skin lotion-to protect against sunburn and windburn Anti-Nauseant for motion sickness Antacid-for mild stomach upset Sedative for emotional upset, overstimulation, or nervous upset Broad-spectrum antibiotic-effective against a wide range of bacteria, in case of serious illness; to be selected by your physician and used precisely as he instructs container of small bandages Sterilized gauze squares Roll of adhesive tape, one-half inch wide A pectinkaolate compound such as Kaopectate, or paregoric, or Lomotil for diarrhea and "tourist trots" 

Sleep and Good health - Sleeping Pattern and Sleeping process

SLEEP

SLEEP IS fundamental to good health and yet, it would appear, many of us need a refresher course in sleeping. According to recent surveys, about half of all men and women in the United States have trouble sleeping at night, and about one fourth of the population use some form of sleeping medicine. Before considering how sound, healthy sleep may best be encouraged, let's get some basic understanding of this long-mysterious process which has come in for scientific exploration only in recent years.

How much sleep do you need? Have you ever really tested yourself over a period of time?

What is the nature of sleep?

Are sleeping patterns inborn or acquired habits?

What happens in sleep?

THE SLEEP PROCESS

As you have discovered when you do not get adequate sleep, sleep is necessary for both physical and psychological well-being. Even now, however, scientists are unable to explain why about one third of our lives must be spent in sleep and why in our sleep we dream. In trying to get sound insights into the mysteries of sleep, investigators in many sleep laboratories use volunteers to whose scalp they tape electrodes to detect tiny currents in the brain.

 Amplified many hundreds of thousands of times, the impulses are registered on graph paper as an electroencephalogram (EEG).

 In addition, equipment records pulse, eye movements, breathing, body movements, and muscle tensions while the in sleep, it is now known, is not a state of oblivion, of complete.

Rather, it is a progression of rhythmic cycles.  Equipment, scientists have been able to establish that sleep. That a newborn baby alternates between sleep and wakefulness at about hourly intervals; that gradually, as the child grows older, the cycles stretch out until eventually they becomes 90-minute cycles in adulthood.

 These 90-minute cycles are beyond conscious control. It used to be thought that we fall into deeper and deeper sleep during the night until we arrive at a turning point, and then sleep lightens progressively until we wake up. But it is now clear that this is not so. Instead, throughout the night, we shift from one gradation of sleep to another and are even awake several times during the night without necessarily remembering the wakefulness.