Scientists have found that generally the world feels brighter when you wake up.

People start the day in the best frame of mind in the morning, but end in the worst, at about midnight, the findings suggest, with the day of the week and the season also playing a part.

Mental health also tends to be more varied at weekends but steadier during the week, according to the study led by University College London.

“Generally, things do seem better in the morning,” the researchers concluded.

Mental health and wellbeing are dynamic in nature, and subject to change over short and long periods. However, few studies have looked at how they might change over the course of the day.

Scientists wanted to explore whether time of day was associated with variations in mental health, happiness, life satisfaction, sense of life being worthwhile and loneliness.

People in the study answered questionnaires, with questions such as: “In the past week, how happy did you feel?”, “How satisfied have you been with your life?”, and “To what extent have you felt the things you are doing in your life are worthwhile?”

Factors such as age, health conditions and whether people worked were taken into account.

The results showed that happiness, life satisfaction, and worthwhile ratings were all higher on Mondays and Fridays than on Sundays, while happiness was also higher on Tuesdays. There was no evidence that loneliness differed across days of the week.

There was clear evidence of a seasonal influence on mood. Compared with winter, people tended to have lower levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms and loneliness, and higher levels of happiness, and feeling that life was worthwhile in the three other seasons.

Mental health was best in the summer across all outcomes. But the season didn’t affect the associations observed across the day, however.

This was an observational study, so it cannot establish cause.

The Guardian.com. February 5, 2025. Adaptado.

THANKSGIVING FOOD REVEALS A LOT ABOUT THE COUNTRY

What was on the table at the first Thanksgiving?

Much of the way that Americans remember the first Thanksgiving in its elementary school presentation is a myth. There were complex relationships among the British colonists and the Wampanoag Indigenous people they encountered, and later fought against, in what is today southeast Massachusetts. The idea of a huge breast-forward turkey and apple pie on those original tables is also a myth.

There are two primary-source historical records that give us a clue as to what was part of the 1621 feast. They suggest that the feast likely consisted of wild turkey and other fowl, venison, cod, bass, and corn. These are foods that would have been indigenous to the Americas, and the Northeast in particular, before the so-called Columbian Exchange that promoted cross-fertilization between the Americas on the one hand and Europe, Asia, and Africa on the other.

Apple pie, for example, wouldn't have been there because apples' botanical origin is in central Asia. They had barely been brought to the Americas by the time of the 1621 feast.

How did Thanksgiving evolve into the holiday it is today?

After that first Thanksgiving, the event receded from memory for two centuries. Then, in the early 1800s, some shaky historical evidence of that 17th century meal was unearthed. Amid a lot of tension over slavery and immigration, some leaders sought to elevate the bit of Colonial history as a unifying project that could bring a divided nation together. From there, the influence of home economics, advertising, industrial food production, animal science, factory farm breeding, and other transformations have made the Thanksgiving meal into one of abundance, standardization, and shortcut home cooking.

Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of a very popular women's magazine called Godey's Lady's Book, wanted to create a Thanksgiving celebration as a project of national unity. For many years, she petitioned sitting presidents to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. She finally succeeded with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, when he passed the Thanksgiving Proclamation in October 1863.

Lincoln doesn't actually reference the 1621 event at all, but he suggested that the Thanksgiving holiday was about national unity in the midst of the Civil War—a project I think we can all get behind.

Why are foods such as turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie Thanksgiving dinner staples?

Godey's Lady's Book was a major platform for Hale's advocacy on behalf of Thanksgiving, and the magazine published recipes and suggestions for ways readers could celebrate the holiday, even before it was official. Many of the Thanksgiving foods recommended in the magazine were those that have become very popular:roast turkey, herbed dressing, creamed onions, mashed potatoes.

American food tastes became more standardized around the turn of the 20th century with the rise of the field of home economics. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School was a leading precursor of the movement. A November 1908 issue of the Boston Cooking-School Magazine, for example, featured dishes ideal for Thanksgiving, such as roast chickens, a garnish of fresh cranberries on the stem, and mashed potatoes.

Some popular foods, like pumpkins and cranberries, do have some links to Indigenous foods with botanical origins in the Americas. They became much more available due to the rise of companies that produced and processed these products.

Why is food such an important part of Thanksgiving?

First, at least in much of the US, it's one of the last fall holidays before winter begins. We acknowledge the fleeting harvest and the dark days to come. Even in a modern society where food is plentiful, it harkens back to the period in all of the preceding human history when winter was a time of scarce resources and often of hunger. So filling up with good food with what remained from the end-of-summer and fall harvests was a way to celebrate.

Thanksgiving is one of the few remaining occasions on which many people cook meals at home—even if they're often relying on mixes and packaged ingredients. The need to coordinate oven schedules, to give real thought to thawing times, to prep ingredients in advance, to devote significant time to cooking—this is all the kind of labor, especially women's labor, that had long been the mainstay of the American kitchen. In this way, food as part of Thanksgiving connects us back to the full spectrum of experience around cooking.

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Companies know how we think

Companies can now find out exactly how you think through the science of neuromarketing. Advertisers are currently collaborating with scientists to test their products directly on our brains. Some experts believe that one in ten TV commercials have already been designed using neuromarketing.

The reasons are obvious. The technique allows companies to discover exactly what people like about their products. For example, when we eat a type of potato chip, it may be the color, the flavor, or the pleasant noise it makes when you crunch it in your mouth that we like most.

In order ............ tap into what’s going ............ in consumers’ brains, it all begins ............ laboratories and office buildings.

Groups of volunteers submit themselves to a simple process. Wearing a special headset called an electrode cap, they watch commercials or test products. The caps allow researchers to monitor brain activity. When something attracts the attention of the volunteers, this is highlighted on a computer. They literally use this device to read the minds of their volunteers. This may sound a little scary, but advertisers are just tap-ping into our existing thoughts and desires. And that’s what advertisers have always tried to do.

Previously, companies would give people a survey or questionnaire to complete in order to research their customers. The problem was that people didn’t always tell the truth. They may not want to be critical of a product or advertisement because they don’t want to upset the interviewer. The electrode cap overcomes this problem. It shows when someone really is interested in something.

Neuromarketing is also used to develop packaging for the world’s most famous brands. The aim is to make their products stand out in a busy marketplace. This will become standard as more companies capitalize on the technology. With millions invested in advertising, companies simply cannot afford to hope that their ads and products will be a success. If they can find out what we think first, and change their products to make them more successful, they will quickly pay off the high cost of neuromarketing and dominate their market.