Coping with climate anxiety: 9 tips for personal resilience
Reading the news and keeping up to date about the changing climate can make it difficult to maintain a positive attitude. Climate anxiety has become a very real thing, particularly among young people who will have to one day carry the torch of environmental stewardship. The American Psychological Read More...
Composing a smellscape: how your brain interprets scents
Scent is the sense most commonly associated with memory. We all have a great, or a gross, smell that brings us right back to childhood and all the feelings that come with it. How does that happen, though? How does the brain interpret smells and link them to good, bad, or nuanced feelings? A Read More...
How do you fix seasonal allergies? These 8 foods are a good start
Just like allergies keep coming back every year, The Optimist Daily comes back to write more on how you can handle them. There are a lot of tricks to getting ahead of your allergies or remedies for a stuffy nose, and you can even fight allergies as easily as settling in and cooking a good Read More...
This former coalmining town is revitalizing itself with eco-tourism
While coal is very harmful to the environment, phasing it out of use has left an economic hole in many communities. People used to rely on coal as a means of living. Now, communities are going green, energy sources are going renewable, and these formerly coal-powered communities are Read More...
The chemical compound of love: oxytocin turns lions into kittens
Love’s effect can sometimes be mystifying. A tender embrace from a friend or the adoring eyes of a pet can bring us back from anger or sadness at almost any time. Affection soothes the beast inside all of us, and it can even be tracked scientifically. What we feel when we experience love is Read More...
Chile joins the legislation green wave
A beautiful thing about democracy is that it is inherently self-correcting. Democratic constitutions survive because they change with the times. They adapt to new environments. That’s why they’re called “amendments” to the constitution. Chile is joining a wave of constitutional change in Read More...
“The Cramm” by Olivia Seltzer: giving Gen Z context for the news
Our society often forgets to involve youth as an equal voice in our discussions about how our world ought to function. Young minds are our future artists, entrepreneurs, and legislators, and they need to learn to care about what’s going on in the world today so they can further our work tomorrow. Read More...
Archaeologists examine ancient Egyptian tomb by smells
If you were asked to smell inside a sarcophagus, do you think you’d be excited? After a recent discovery in Egypt, though, more archaeologists certainly are excited and turning to smell as a viable tool to learn more about the past from what survived into the present. Tomb of the architect and Read More...
Study finds forests on indigenous lands sequester twice the carbon
We have written at length, in great volume, and with great enthusiasm about the importance of green spaces in cities, carbon sinks, and environmentally helpful trees in general. Forests are absolutely essential to sequestering carbon and our continued adaptation to a changing climate, but some Read More...
Achieving quality along with quantity: an Optimist’s View on aging
“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” - Betty Friedan By Oliver Kammeyer I live on a bike path, and just a half-mile east of my place there’s a coffee shop that’s always packed. It seems every day the customers compete to see who can wake up earliest to Read More...