This article was written by By Hannah Seo and originally published in the NewYork Times

Here’s what we know about this essential vitamin’s effects on well-being.

Q: Does vitamin B6 boost mental health?

When it comes to the B vitamins, you’re probably most familiar with vitamin B12, which helps prevent anemia and maintain bone health, and B9 (folic acid), which is necessary for a healthy pregnancy.

But vitamin B6, in some ways, is “the forgotten vitamin,” said Dr. Reem Malouf, a neurologist at the University of Oxford who has studied B6’s effect on cognition. As with the other B vitamins, like B12 and B9, it is an essential nutrient, yet scientists don’t fully understand how it affects mental health, and it’s less well known than the others.

That doesn’t make it any less crucial for the body’s functioning, said Katherine Tucker, a nutritional epidemiologist at UMass Lowell. Vitamin B6 is involved in a number of chemical reactions that are important for nervous system and brain function, including the synthesis of proteins, amino acids and chemical messengers of the brain, as well as proper functioning of the immune system.

It’s also critical for pregnancy and postnatal care — helping to relieve morning sickness and necessary for fetal and infant brain development. And deficiencies in vitamin B6 have been linked with several neuropsychiatric conditions, including seizures, migraine, anxiety, depression and impaired memory.

What role does vitamin B6 play in mental health?

“Vitamin B6 affecting mental health is not a new concept,” said Jess Eastwood, a doctoral student in nutritional psychology at the University of Reading in Britain. In one study of nearly 500 university students published in July, for instance, Ms. Eastwood and her colleagues found that those who took high doses of vitamin B6 — 100 milligrams per day for about a month — reported feeling less anxious than those who took a placebo. Their findings also suggested that B6 might play a role in tamping down the increased brain activity that can occur with certain mood disorders....

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It is essential to be inspired because it helps you create something that makes you happy. You can use inspiration to give yourself the motivation to continue with your work. Finding inspiration in everyday life can help you achieve a sense of peace and happiness.

Inspiration comes in many different forms – whether from people, books, movies, music, or just sitting outside looking at nature. Here are six simple ways to find your inspiration.

Go on a Walk

Walking is a terrific way to find inspiration because it is a simple, low-impact activity. Walking, especially out in nature, helps you clear your mind to come up with innovative ideas. It works because it allows the brain to get out of the linear flow of thought that it usually follows.

Listen to Music

Music is a powerful tool for inspiration because it can make you feel good, energized, and creative. A song can motivate you to work harder or help you relax and enjoy your day. Research shows that listening to music can help people feel better, be more productive and creative, and improve their mood. Music can also make you feel more connected with the world around you.

Enjoy Your Hobbies

Doing the activities that you love the most, such as your favorite hobbies, is a fantastic way to unwind and de-stress. Focusing your mind on other things allows you to relax and find more confidence in your ability to be creative.

Create a Vision Board

Having a visual representation of your goals in the form of vision boards is one of the most effective ways to find inspiration. The vision board will remind you what you want in life. You can create them by collecting images, quotes, affirmations, and anything else that drives you to take action and achieve your goals.

Use Inspirational Card Decks

Inspirational card decks are like a set of personal affirmations. They can be used to motivate you to take action, grow your self-confidence, and unwind after a stressful day. These facts alone are why they make a great inspirational tool.

Spend Time with Loved Ones

Gaining the perspective of others while also relaxing and breaking the system of anxiety, work together to inspire you. It won't be hard to feel inspired when you are no longer stressed and have feel-good hormones running through your brain.

Inspiration is not difficult to find with these tips and activities. It can be found through just about any activity, people, or thing. So, stop looking or wishing for it and take action instead. Through these activities, you will gain the inspiration you need to achieve your goals.

Stress wreaks havoc on many areas of your life, including your health, relationships, and career. It clouds your judgment, making it difficult to make proper decisions and effectively communicate with those around you.

In addition, many studies have shown stress to increase the risk of developing obesity, heart disease, depression, and even diabetes. This means that proper stress management techniques are essential to prevent these health risks. Not only that, but stress management can also improve or benefit your life in many other ways.

The following are four benefits to adopting proper stress management techniques.

More Effective Sleep

Stress is a common culprit that steals many hours of sleep each night. Anxious thoughts and increased cortisol levels can affect your blood pressure, cause inflammation and disrupt your breathing patterns – resulting in poor sleep as your mind stays aware and alters throughout the night. In other words, if you want better sleep, find effective ways to reduce your stress before you get some rest.

Increased Happiness and Sense of Purpose

Inflammation and increased cortisol levels caused by stress can also lead to symptoms of depression or affect your overall mental health altogether. However, proper stress management techniques can help you stay grounded and focus on the things you love the most. Daily meditation, journaling, or spending time outside with sunlight are three great stress management ideas that can help you connect with yourself better.

Enhanced Focus and Productivity

Decreased cortisol and inflammation, as well as proper air and blood flow, are vital to your brain and mental health. Your judgment is clouded when your brain lacks good oxygen and necessary resources, making it harder to make the right choices. Proper stress management techniques like breathing exercises or meditation can mitigate these risks.

Weight Loss or Maintenance

Another great benefit to stress management is weight loss and maintenance. Research shows that increased cortisol levels can decrease willpower and make it harder to shift excess weight. Unfortunately, this means you are more likely to make unhealthy choices when anxious or stressed out to get some instant relief.

Improved sleep, increased happiness and productivity, and enhanced health are essential benefits of proper stress management techniques. If you don’t limit or control the excess stress, you can decrease your life expectancy and satisfaction. In addition, stress prevents you from achieving your goals and experiencing happiness. With proper stress management techniques such as breathing exercises, meditation, and exercise, you can be sure this doesn’t happen.

Reasons to Stop Sweating the Small Stuff

Sweating the small stuff or worrying only consumes valuable time and resources. Likewise, replaying mistakes in your mind, fretting over a misunderstood conversation, or simply regretting small mistakes is a waste of time. All this worry is not worth the time and effort spent thinking them over and hashing them out.

While it may be challenging to clear these thoughts from your mind, it is an important practice to learn in order to prioritize your time better and identify what truly matters most to your life. In other words, sweating the small stuff only clouds your judgment and prevents you from achieving success.

Here are three reasons to stop sweating the small stuff.

To Reduce Chronic Stress and Fatigue

Stressing over things that don’t provide value only drains you, ultimately keeping you from taking action. When cortisol levels rise, so do inflammation and blood pressure. This can lead to heart disease, diabetes, and mental disorders such as depression and anxiety.

To Achieve More and Live Successfully

Managing stress and controlling your thoughts means you get to take control and lead the life you want. A healthy mind and body will foster and inspire you to continue taking the steps to a happier and successful life, whatever that may mean to you. A simple change in focus can make all the difference. Just try to remember what you value the most. Then, if you need to, write it down.

To Be Happier

It’s a fact; improved mental and physical health increases happiness. Only focusing on things which you can control, and ignoring thoughts of others who have no control of your life, brings more empowerment and joy to yours. The only thing you can control is how you respond or take action. When you are free of these negative thoughts, you can better focus on the more important and valuable things in your life.

As you can see, sweating the small stuff is not an effective use of your time. It only invites in more stress and keeps you from achieving your goals or aspirations. Instead, focus on your actions, learn to manage your emotions, and live authentically to free yourself of this bad habit. Most importantly, trust yourself and remember what you want the most. The more you choose to focus on what really matters, the happier and stronger you will be.

• How to Unlock the Power of Choice

You are the only one with unique control over whether you reach your goals and experience your dreams or not. It is about unlocking the power of choice and using it daily to achieve your dreams. You can choose your behavior, response, and direction of your life and actions as long as you truly want to. The more you understand and commit to the idea that you have a choice no matter what obstacles, the more empowered and successful your life will be.

Here are four steps to follow to unlock the power of choice.

Step One: Start with Positivity and Mindfulness

To recognize the choices in front of you, you can’t let negativity cloud your judgment. So often, negativity depicts situations that are not actually there, making you react poorly. Using mindfulness can help clear your mind so you can see what is truly in front of you.

Step Two: Be Ready for and Embrace Change

Next, it’s important to understand that life is about change. You can always count on the fact that what is today will be different tomorrow. It sounds frightening, but change is not something to be afraid of. Instead, embrace change and find the beauty within it. You can grow and seek the experiences you need to live a happier and more successful life with change.

Step Three: Seek Education and Understanding

The next thing to do is to dive into understanding yourself and what you want from the world. How do you define success, and what do you need to get there? Unlocking the power of choice means discovering the information you don’t know yet. Education is the one thing in life that allows you to seek your ultimate fulfillment.

Step Four: Pursue Your Passions

Finally, use the power of choice to do the things that truly make you happy. What is your main reason for living your life? Is it your career, hobby, or family? Whatever it may be, take action to pursue your passions as often as you can to live a truly happy and rewarding life.

Overall, unlocking the power of choice is about committing to mindfulness and deciding to direct your life. It’s setting boundaries and sticking to them. It’s taking charge instead of sitting and waiting.

When you follow these steps, you see just how easy choosing what you want from life becomes. Unlocking the power of choice is within your reach as long as you want it, are willing to participate, and pay attention.

Four Reasons Why Accepting Criticism Is Key to Success

Constructive criticism is feedback that you get from others, intending to build you up and provide you with more information or tools to do better or improve in some way. It is not meant to harm you or be personal or feel like an attack. If it sounds like an attack or is too personal, then it is not constructive criticism.

Proper criticism can open up doors and opportunities you may never have been aware of before, thus leading you to more success and happiness – as long as it is provided respectfully and correctly.

Here are four reasons why accepting constructive criticism leads to more success.

It Improves Your Awareness and Focus

When others provide criticism, it unlocks key bits of information you may have otherwise overlooked. Over time this can help you notice of these vital details on your own, thus improving your skills and understanding to be more successful. The more information you have, the more you can improve.

It Inspires Personal Growth and Improvement

When you know that others will provide valuable feedback, it motivates you to do better before the information is even given. In addition, consistent feedback improves your awareness, which fuels your determination to keep improving and growing to achieve your dreams.

It Increases Your Understanding of Yourself

Within the constructive criticism there are likely to be variables that detail who you are as a person. For example, your boss may have noticed how you deal with completing an important assignment. It may not ultimately affect the result but they want to provide you with tools to help you get the results more efficiently in future. In addition, your actions can easily affect other areas of your life or work assignments, so the feedback gives you richer knowledge of who you are and where you need to improve.

It Inspires You to Take More Action

Without action, there is no success. You need to take consistent steps in order to live the life you want for yourself. No one else can provide this – only the actions you take can. Taking action is the most difficult step and process to overcome. However, receiving constructive criticism can be a great reminder of just how important the right steps are, and can provide you with the inspiration or wake-up call you need to keep going or make better decisions.

Overall, these benefits point to the fact that not all criticism is harmful or should be avoided. In fact, you should seek it from those you admire the most and those you know have your best interest at heart. The more knowledge and perspective you gain from others in a healthy way, the more tools and resources you can use to empower yourself and achieve more in life.

What Does It Mean to Find Inner Peace?

Finding inner peace is about being in a state of contentment, calm, or happiness. Having inner peace means that your journey will not be the same as that of your friends, family, or peers, and it means that you are okay with that idea. You know who you are, what you want, and how to make it happen without breaching your own principles, morals, and values in the process.

Some people find inner peace through meditation and working towards their passion. Others find it through demanding work and dedication to their career. Finding inner peace takes a deep understanding of yourself in all areas of your life.

Here are four ways to achieve inner peace and how it improves your life.

Declutter Your Mind and Environment

Whether it’s your brain or your room, it's really hard to feel peaceful if you have a lot of clutter around. Studies show that clutter, whether it’s in your environment or in your head, causes anxiety and stress. If you want to relieve it, clean it up.

Let Go of Past Mistakes and Learn to Love Yourself

Everyone makes mistakes. Unfortunately, perfection and perfect people don’t exist, so you may as well accept yourself as the human you are. Self-acceptance goes a long way when you have a grueling day or mountains to climb.

Value Your Time and Live Authentically

Everyone is given the same time each day. So, take care to choose how you spend your time wisely. You don’t know how long you have to live, so you may as well live as your authentic self. It’s only in living authentically that you will find true contentment in life.

Spend More Time Alone and in Nature

Liking yourself is an important part of finding inner peace. Being by yourself outside in nature is very special. You are, after all, a mammal, and due to that, you need to get out in nature so you can become grounded as the natural person you are.

While finding inner peace is different for everyone, we can all take similar approaches to find it. Freeing your mind of stress, expectations, and perfection is the first step. Then you need to let go of your past and learn to love yourself now, imperfections and all, to unlock your truest self.

The more you search for, realize, and discover yourself, the more peaceful and happy you will be. This inner peace will show through every interaction you have with other people, whether personal or business related.

Five Benefits of Expressing Your Emotions

Processing and expressing emotions are two main functions your brain experiences daily as you go through life. This information is used to make daily decisions and actions that can affect the trajectory of your life – meaning understanding and expressing your emotions is an important skill to improve if you want to achieve and do more of the things you wish to in life, both personally and professionally.

If you don’t learn how to read and express your emotions properly, you may never achieve the goals or desires you want to live a fully happy life. Here are five benefits of properly expressing and embracing your emotions and what you can do to manage them:

To Establish Clear Boundaries

Everyone has personal boundaries that must be established in order to form strong connections and relationships. They allow for better communication and for everyone to feel comfortable, respected and cared for.

To Live More Authentically

Bottling up your emotions means you don’t allow yourself to live a truly genuine life. It clouds your judgment, leading to poor decisions both personally and professionally, and further stopping you from being who you are.

Sharing your emotions can be done in a respectful way where both parties feel heard, respected, and valued, without feeling like they have to compromise their boundaries to get there. In other words, keeping emotions to yourself means you sacrifice being genuine.

To Have a More Successful Life

Expressing emotions means you no longer use time worrying or feeling down. It means you have the clarity to tackle your goals with persistence and determination. Expressing your emotions allows you to understand better what you want or need in life, too. All this provides you with more resources to create the goals you need to live a more successful and fulfilling life.

To Reduce Anxiety and Ease Depression

It’s simple; releasing your emotions prevents you from feeling anxious or sad. You simply can’t know how other people will react or what resources they can provide if you don’t share the information – leaving you to feel sad or stressed out when you really don’t need to be.

To Live with Clarity and More Control

When you bottle up emotions, you lose your focus and direction on what truly matters in life. The more you share, the more control and clarity you gain to achieve the things you need and want from life.

As you can see, learning to express your emotions is a vital tool for life. It can affect you, the people around you, and what you do each day. This means that you need to take the time to understand others and what the proper responses are in any given situation. The more you learn and improve, the better your overall chances of living a happier and more successful life.

Four Effective Exercises to Boost Your Courage

Courage is a desirable skill that many successful people are often said to possess. This is because courage is required to push through many of the difficult challenges life faces. No success is achieved without going through or breaking down some type of obstacle or challenge.

Courage is about pushing through your fears or limitations in order to keep taking the steps required to achieve your dreams and aspirations. Just like most skills, this one can be practiced and improved on. The more you practice it, the stronger it becomes, leading you to a more successful and fulfilling life.

Here are four exercises to add to your daily or weekly routine to help boost your courage:

Remember, Fear Is Just a Chemical Reaction

The first exercise is simple. It is the understanding of what prevents you from being courageous in the first place and then changing your current perspective on it. Courage is usually prevented due to some fear. However, it is important to note that fear is just a chemical reaction that your body has simply because of lack of information – information you can easily learn.

Meet New People or Try a New Hobby  

You can gain more of the information you need to experience courage by meeting new people or trying new hobbies. Knowledge and experience provide power and kicks fear to the side -- easily increasing your courage and allowing you to achieve more of the things you need and want in life.

Experiment with Your Wardrobe and Style

This is a fun way to learn who you are and embrace yourself fully. Being authentic and ignoring what others think about you is key to building courage. You can’t have courage if you can’t be yourself or know what you want. This exercise also teaches you that differences make the world enjoyable. Even if you don’t agree with something or someone, life can still be satisfying – providing you with more tools to reduce your fear so you can keep being yourself and trying.

Embrace the Unknown and the Uncomfortable

Nothing in life is constant. Happiness, achieving goals, or anything you want in life requires consistent action. There will always be moments of discomfort, but that doesn’t mean you won’t learn anything valuable from it.

Be sure to add these exercises to your weekly or daily routine to see positive results. Courage is never improved or found overnight, nor is it a constant feeling. Even the most successful and courageous people have moments of weakness, but they know what to do to get back on the right track.

Five Habits Preventing You from Fully Enjoying Your Life

Taking the time to evaluate your personal habits, strengths and weaknesses, and other habits you have in life, is essential to living a happier life. It’s a secret and powerful tool to gain more control of your life to do more of what you want.

While life may sometimes seem out of our control, there are likely many habits you are doing that have more effect on your life than you realize. This could be because you are focusing on the wrong areas. In other words, it is important to only focus on what you can control or change to improve the projection of life.

The following are five habits that can prevent you from fully enjoying your life, with some tips on how to overcome them:

Poor Diet and Exercise Routine

A poor diet and sedentary lifestyle encourage fatigue, symptoms of depression and anxiety and negatively affect your happiness and mood. All human bodies need certain nutrients and movement to stay healthy and live sustainable lives. The more you avoid your diet and exercise routine, the more likely you are to feel and be unhealthy.

Living without a Plan or Goals

Developing a plan with short-term and long-term goals allows you to feel more in control and provides a sense of direction. It is only natural to feel lost or confused if you don’t know where you are going in life. Therefore, writing down specific goals that are genuine to you provides clarity and purpose.

Negative Self-Talk and Keeping Your Emotions to Yourself

Being negative and harboring your emotions will only keep you down. Managing your emotions does not mean you should avoid them or always share them with others. It is about finding healthy boundaries and sticking to them – with yourself and others. This includes avoiding negativity even when no one is around.  

Making Excuses and Not Taking Accountability

You will fail or make mistakes. We all do. You cannot avoid it unless you don’t take any action at all, which is the last thing you should be doing if you want to live a more enjoyable life. Owning up to your mistakes allows you to grow and become a better person. If you do something wrong, it’s not a tragedy. It just is what happened, and you can learn from it. However, you can stall it if you don’t take accountability.

Inaction

Waiting for others to help or for something to magically come your way will never bring you the joy you need in life. Anything you want in life will require you to take action.

If you are guilty of any of these habits, be sure to lead with forgiveness and understanding, and follow the tips to improve. Unfortunately, it is only natural to fall into these habits. However, as long as you do the work to avoid or enhance them as much as possible, you will continue on the right path to living a more enjoyable life.