Coffee Talk from Honor Credit Union – Wednesday, June 16

coast-coffee-talk-flipper
coast-coffee-talk-flipper
TODAY IS:
  • World Tapas Day: A good day for tiny plates of food
  • Fresh Veggies Day: A good day to eat your veggies
  • Fudge Day: A great day to stop by your favorite fudge place and indulge!

Are simple things like going out to dinner with friends making you downright giddy? You may be experiencing post-pandemic joy. Mental health experts say the happiness people are feeling as they head out into the world again is very real. Reconnecting with people – and being out and about without worrying you might get sick – is releasing a whole lot of the feel-good hormone oxytocin in the brain — and making people downright euphoric. (Healthline)

Get ready for a shortage of teachers … A new survey found that 25% of teachers said they may leave their jobs at the end of the school year. That’s up from before the pandemic, when about 17% of teachers said they wanted to leave their jobs. Seems teachers were already stressed before the pandemic, and that stress increased during COVID. The survey also found that teachers were twice as likely to experience job-related stress than other working adults and three times as likely to experience symptoms of depression. (Market Watch)

Can’t sleep? Try lettuce water. The latest trend sweeping TikTok is drinking lettuce water to help with insomnia. Seems you boil some lettuce leaves and then drink the water – and it’s supposed to make you sleepy. Can it be true? Maybe. According to Dr. Christopher Winter, of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine and author of the book, The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How to Fix It, lettuce contains something called lactucarium, which can make you feel drowsy. Lactucarium is that milky substance you see at the base of some types of lettuce – like romaine.
“It has a similar structure to opium, and has some sedative properties,” Dr. Winter says. That said, you would need a “tremendous” amount of lettuce to get the effects, according to the doctor. “The amount of lactucarium you’re getting from four to five lettuce leaves is unlikely to do much,” he says. But he does say that the warmth of the water could help make you sleepy – not to mention the placebo effect. If you do decide to try it, the good news is that drinking the water of boiled lettuce isn’t harmful. (Health)