There is a lot of good to come from social media, but with the good comes the bad and you might find you need to take a break from it. Experts say we all should consider it.

Maintaining friendships and keeping informed are great benefits, but too much time online has been found to lead to depression, anxiety and stress and unhealthy relationships with social media platforms can form.

So how do you know if it’s the right time to take a break from social media?

• If you’re compulsively checking your phone, that’s probably sign #1. If it affects your job or family time, that’s a big problem.

• If you fall asleep feeling “off” or if you find you’re waking up worried about something you saw the night before, you might need to set up some boundaries.

• When real-life interactions suffering at the expense of getting wrapped up in online arguments, reassessing priorities may be in order.

• And if you’ve started viewing yourself negatively and comparing yourself to others online, a break may be in order.

The benefits or social media breaks can lead to new opportunities – picking up hobbies you’ve been interested in or practicing self-care, and less screen blue light can improve sleep and productivity.

Limiting your time online, getting outside now that it’s warm, and saying no to notifications are an easy way to start rather than completely cutting yourself off. A good way to view things – think of social media like food consumption, and limit your digital calories.

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If you have high blood pressure, your doctor will likely suggest going for walks to bring it down. But there may be a better option – and something you can do just as easily. Stretching.

A new finding shows that those with hypertension show be stretching more. High blood pressure is a leading risk factor for cardiovascular disease and is among the top preventable risk factors affecting your lifespan. And most of us think that stretching is simply about your muscles, but stretching also stretches the blood vessels, including all your arteries.

Doing that will cause less resistance to blood flow and that will lower blood pressure.

Previous studies have shown that before, but this was the first time stretching head-to-head with walking to see which was more effective.

using two groups of adults – one group did a whole-body stretching routine for 30 minutes a day five days a week; the other group briskly walked for the same duration – and the group that stretched was found to have far lower blood pressure at the end of the 8 weeks.

But walking still does your body good – the walkers lost more body fat off their waists.

The doctors recommend for those walking to reduce blood pressure to continue to do so, but to add in stretching – it does not even have to be at the same time – the stretching can be done wherever you find the time, even when watching TV at night instead of just sitting on the couch.

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You ever feel like it’s getting harder than ever to remember important info – or even what you need to get at the grocery store? Just because it’s easy to put things down in the Notes app on your iPhone, if you really want to remember things – use the old tried-and-true method of writing it down on paper.

A new study shows that writing on physical paper allowed students to retain the information an hour later as opposed to other methods like taking things down on a laptop.

Researchers found that paper was more useful to our memories because each sheet of paper is physically unique – as opposed to a screen which stays the same, only what appears on it changes.

Also, those participating in the study who used paper completed tasks 25% faster than those who used digital tools.

They also tested differences between using physical pen and paper or using a tablet with a stylus and because the paper allows for uneven strokes or variations of letters, or even folds in the paper, and our brains retained the info from paper more.

So if you really want to remember what you need to grab at Stop and Shop…grab a pen!

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