11 Pieces of Invaluable Life Advice We Learned From Watching ‘Downton Abbey’

Drink in these quotes to live by from the residents and staff of TV's most beloved manor house.

Robert Crawley, Lord Grantham

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"There is no such thing as a marriage between two intelligent people that does not sometimes have to negotiate thin ice."

Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"Principles are like prayers. Noble, of course, but awkward at a party."

Sybil Crawley

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"It's the gloomy things that need our help. If everything in the garden is sunny, why meddle?"

Mrs. Hughes

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"My advice, Daisy, is to go as far in life as God and luck allow."

CONTENT CONTINUES BELOW AD

Hugh "Shrimpie" MacClare, father of Rose

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"Love is like riding or speaking French. If you don't learn it young, it's hard to get the trick of it later."

Cora Crawley, Lady Grantham

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"I think accepting change is quite as important as defending the past."

Carson

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"In my opinion, to misquote Doctor Johnson, if you're tired of style, you are tired of life."                                

Isobel Crawley

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"Cousin Violet has never let a matter of convenience stand in the way of a principle."

CONTENT CONTINUES BELOW AD

Mrs. Patmore

©Carnival Film & Television Limited

"If you must pay money, better to a doctor than an undertaker."

Branson

Proven By Science

Proven By Science

Can't stand a lazy partner? Or one who talks too much? Science says we may rely more on negative traits than positive ones when choosing a mate.

                                                  In recent research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, experts from five American and European universities conducted six separate studies, surveying more than 6,500 people total, about relationship “deal breakers”—traits or habits that would cause them to stop seeing someone.

The study is unique for a couple of reasons. First, while many studies have focused on partner preferences—that is, the positive traits that men and women value in each other, the present research centered on undesirable traits, and the power that these characteristics have to break up relationships.

And perhaps more importantly, the current study speculates that the so-called deal breakers have a bigger impact on the future of a relationship than positive traits, or deal makers.

In one of the studies, scientists gave 5,541 single adults a list of 17 negative traits and asked each of them this question: “When considering a committed relationship with someone, which of the following would be deal breakers to you? (select all that apply).”

So, What Were the Worst Deal Breakers?

Overall, a disheveled or unclean appearance was the top-ranking deal breaker, though women ranked laziness slightly higher. Other top deal breakers included a partner who was too needy, lacked a sense of humor, lived more than three hours away, or lacked self confidence.

For women, concern about a potential partner watching too much TV or playing video games too often appeared in the top ten.

Men found “low sex drive” and “talks too much” to be bigger deal breakers. But more women rated “bad sex” as a nonstarter than men did.

Overall, the study concludes that having deal breakers in place is a good thing:

“It’s likely that deal breakers function as efficient, cost-sensitive cognitive mechanisms designed to cull inappropriate potential patterns, allowing mating preferences to operate within a reduced target of desirable mates,” the authors write.

In other words, when deciding on a long-term partner, use “deal breakers” to narrow down the pool of potential mates. Then, focus on their positive traits!

Holiday Safety Mistakes You Probably Don’t Realize You’re Making

Holiday Safety Mistakes You Probably Don’t Realize You’re Making

                                                                 Whether you're hanging Christmas lights or questioning poinsettias, protect your home and family by approaching holiday decorating safely.

Mistake: You let the dog drink water from the tree stand.

That tree stand is probably filled with water that’s far from fresh. Tree preservative, often made with fertilizer and fungicides, can cause vomiting or upset stomach in pets; bacteria can also multiply in the standing water. Snugly wrap a tree skirt around the trunk to make the water harder for your pet to get to.

Mistake: You hang a few “indoor” lights outdoors.

Many holiday lights manufactured today are intended for both indoor and outdoor use, but you may come across some that are location specific. Indoor lights aren’t as resistant to moisture, which may cause electrical shorts and damage in wet weather. Many products tested for safety in the United States are labeled with a UL tag (for Underwriters’ Laboratories, a certification company that inspects such products). Indoor lights have a tag marked with a green UL. Outdoor lights are marked with a red UL.

Mistake: You keep poinsettias in reach of your kids and pets.

This one is actually not as risky as you might think. Despite its “poisonous” reputation, the plant is only mildly toxic. A 50-pound child would need to eat more than 500 poinsettia leaves to reach potentially toxic levels, and no deaths have been documented from consumption. A child may get queasy or throw up after eating, say, five poinsettia leaves—but not much more will happen. (Plus, the leaves taste unpleasant, so it’s unlikely many would be consumed.) The plants may cause drooling, vomiting, or diarrhea in cats and dogs, but medical treatment is rarely necessary unless symptoms are severe. To be safe, keep poinsettias out of the reach of pets and young children, but there’s no need to banish your favorite holiday plant.

Sources: nfpa.org, christmastreeassociation.org, realsimple.com, doityourself.com, webmd.com, petpoisonhelpline.com, medicinenet.com, lifehacker.com, chicagotribune.com, energy.gov

7 Clever Ways to Shamelessly Regift This Holiday Season

7 Clever Ways to Shamelessly Regift This Holiday Season

Three-quarters of us think it's OK to recycle gifts, according to an American Express survey. Here's how to regift like a pro.

First, Say Thank You

iStock/gpointstudio

Even if the original gift-giver missed his mark, it's still the thought that counts. Be gracious, send a thank you note, and keep in mind that even those with the best intentions occasionally resort to unimaginative or what-was-she-thinking gifts. If you know you'd like to exchange the gift, you can casually ask where it was purchased. (Many stores will accept returns without a receipt; check their policy first). If you receive a gift card to a store you never visit, log onto a site like Card Pool to get a percentage of its face value.

Stay Organized With Sticky Notes

iStock/drflet

Mark each present you plan to regift with a sticky note stating who gave it to you and for what occasion. When it comes time to find a new recipient for your castaway, choose someone outside of the original gifter's social circle. That way, there's a smaller chance of them stumbling upon their gift to you in someone else's home.

Don't Give Away Meaningful Gifts

iStock/lechatnoir

Family heirlooms, handmade gifts, and anything else a relative or best friend might ask you to wear or show off in the future (an expensive piece of jewelry from grandma, or a scarf your friend might ask to borrow), are all off limits for regifting. Before making a decision, consider how you would feel about a particular gift if you found out it had been given away.

Ask If the Gift Makes Sense to Give

iStock/Neustockimages

Never regift presents just to get rid of them. Only use an item that is in great condition and worth owning, but just wasn't for you. Think: clothing that isn't your style, but would look terrific on a friend, or a kitchen appliance you already have, but know your aunt has been hoping for.

CONTENT CONTINUES BELOW AD

Make It Unique

iStock/knape

Creatively re-package your regift to make it more special. For example, if you're gifting a coffee-table cookbook, include a nice piece of kitchenware to go with it. Or if you've got one too many crystal picture frames lying around after your wedding, add a photo of your best friend to one, and wrap it with a thoughtful note. Always unwrap the gift completely (stopping short of the store's packaging), and re-wrap it in a way that aligns with the new occasion.

Scour It for Signs of Previous Ownership

iStock/knape

Check and double-check your regift for anything that might give it away. Your gift should be in pristine condition and look as though it's come straight from the store. Make sure there are no hidden notes, engravings, monograms, or pieces of wrapping paper attached. Also check for tags, receipts, or anything else that might be hidden inside its packaging.

Throw a Regifting Party!

iStock/andresr

• Each guest brings one wrapped gift (it's important that they're all regifts. No first-time gifts allowed!)
• Guests draw a number.
• The guest with the lowest number chooses a regift and opens it in front of everyone.
• The person with the next lowest number can either take the opened gift or choose a different wrapped gift. If they select a new gift, they too open it for all to see.
• This goes on until each person has either unwrapped a new gift, or taken any of the regifts already opened.
• If a gift is taken from someone, that person immediately chooses a new gift to open, or they can take someone else's already opened gift.
• When all the regifts have been opened, the person with the lowest number gets to trade with anyone or keep the rejected regift they ended up with.

9 Bizarre Facts About Newborn Babies That Doctors Don’t Tell You

Babies can't taste salt, don't shed actual tears, and are missing kneecaps! Here, more weird facts about our littlest humans.

They can't taste salt

                                                             iStock/skhoward

Young babies are born with a well-developed sense of taste, but not for salt. Studies show that babies can't taste salt until they're about four months old. They can taste other flavors as well as adults can, especially sweet, bitter, and sour flavors (which might explain all the "baby tastes lemon" videos on YouTube), and maybe even better: some studies indicate that babies actually have more taste buds than adults do.

They cry ... but don't shed tears

iStock/NuStock

Newborns cry an awful lot, but they can't shed tears: they don't have functional tear ducts until they're between three and twelve weeks old. (They can, however, produce "basal tears," the nonemotional tears we produce constantly to keep our eyes moist.)

They have no kneecaps

iStock/gianliguori

Really! Well... sort of. If you X-ray a baby's legs, you likely won't see anything where the kneecaps should be, or if you do, it'll just be small, smudgy spots. Reason: all bones start off as cartilage, and they harden, or ossify, over time. Kneecaps take an especially long time to form (from three to five years) and because cartilage doesn’t show up on X-rays, babies appear to have no kneecaps. That lack of hard kneecaps is a good thing, because the spongy tissue serves to absorb some of the abuse toddlers take during their crawling months and from their frequent falls.

They have more bones than adults do

iStock/darrya

Way more: about 300, compared to our paltry 206. The reason is related to why they lack real kneecaps: some of a baby's separate bones fuse together into single bones as they ossify in the months and years after birth. Example: the skull starts off as several separate bones that fuse together into one large bone by about the age of two.

CONTENT CONTINUES BELOW AD

They menstruate

iStock/Yuri

While still in the womb, babies are exposed to high levels of the female hormone estrogen. At birth, when the baby becomes "disconnected" from mom, as it were, those estrogen levels fall rapidly and in girls can cause what is known as pseudomenstruation, similar to menstruation in young and adult women. (Sharp drops in estrogen and related hormones are in fact what triggers menstruation in adult women.) Mothers unaware of this phenomenon often freak out when they see a little blood in their babies' diapers, but it's very common and happens in about a quarter of all female babies, usually in the first seven days of life.

They lactate

iStock/MichaelDeLeon

The drop in hormone levels that causes psueudomenstruation can also cause galactorrhea, a phenomenon in which newborns develop tiny breast buds, and actually lactate, producing tiny amounts of milk from their nipples. It can happen in boys as well as girls. Like pseudomenstruation, it's not dangerous or uncommon, occurring in about 5 percent of all newborns, and can persist for up to two months. (In old European folklore, milk from the breasts of newborn babies was referred to as "witch's milk" and was thought to have magical powers.)

They've drunk their own pee

iStock/IvanJekic

Babies start urinating in the womb just a few months after conception. Where does it go? They drink it! More precisely, the urine mixes with the amniotic fluid surrounding the baby in the uterus. And by the third trimester of pregnancy, a fetus swallows about a liter of amniotic fluid every day. Since a fetus does not need hydration or nutrition in the womb (that comes from mom via the umbilical cord) experts say this serves mostly as practice for swallowing and digestion. This means that every last one of us spent several months of our lives drinking our own pee. (Fetal pooping is rare.. .but it does happen sometimes. And that's all we're going to say about that.)

They can remember what they tasted in utero

iStock/gilaxia

As we told you earlier, newborn babies cannot taste salt, but they can taste other flavors, and they can taste those flavors while they're still in the womb, starting from about four or five months into pregnancy. Amniotic fluid is believed 
to be affected by the food the expectant mother eats, which, in turn, is believed to affect a baby's flavor preferences after birth. If a pregnant mom eats a lot of garlicky foods, for example, the baby will taste that in her amniotic fluid in the womb, and will have a good chance of being drawn to garlic-flavored foods after birth.

CONTENT CONTINUES BELOW AD

They're hairy

iStock/jrroman

Sometimes babies are born with just a few tufts of hair on the top of their heads, or a fine "peach fuzz" all over their tiny domes. This isn't what we're talking about. As it develops in the womb, a baby's entire body becomes covered in a thin layer of hair called lanugo. Child development experts say that the hair helps regulate a body temperature in utero. So, if your baby is born looking like a werewolf-in-training, don't worry: it's perfectly normal. The hair will gently fall out on its own over the first few weeks of the newborn's life. If your baby wasn't born covered in lanugo, well, it already fell off toward the end of gestation, and the baby ate it

3 Reasons Strict ‘Time Management’ Actually Ruins Your Productivity

Trying to be better at scheduling your time? Stop. It doesn't make you happier or more productive.

By Tony Crabbe

Claire Benoist for Reader's DigestImagine your life without a constant sense that you’re running behind. Imagine not wishing for more hours in the day. We haven’t always been this obsessed with time. In fact, before the Industrial Revolution, clocks were largely irrelevant. People had jobs to do, and so they did them in the natural order, at the natural time. This worked for an agricultural society.

However, the factories of the Industrial Revolution needed to coordinate hundreds of people to get them working at the same time. Businesses imposed clock time on their workforces.

Cast the clock forward 250 years. We don’t need managers to impose time discipline upon us—we do it ourselves because we’re so busy. We schedule and cram our time, squeezing all the efficiency we can out of each day. Time management, we believe, is the solution to our busyness: If we could organize our time better, we’d be less overwhelmed, happier, and more effective.

But we’re wrong, and it’s damaging our careers and the rest of our lives. Here are three reasons why.

1. You Just Get Busier

Research shows that if you increase people’s awareness of time—by placing a big clock in front of them—they do more stuff. (Think about how much work you get done on the day before vacation.) It makes sense that by getting more done, we’d feel more in control. More than that, it’s one of the great fantasies of time management: If you get more organized, you will get on top.

However, that works only in a finite world. We haven’t lived in that world for quite a while. In our infinite world, we will never be able to get on top of everything. When we complete more tasks, more take their place—send more e-mails, get more replies. If we do more as a result of better managing our time, we just become busier.

2. Your Attention Suffers

Our smartphones allow us to communicate in real time and juggle multiple to-dos, swatting away incoming demands like some supercharged task ninja, potent and efficient. As we seek to maximize our time, we slice and dice it into ever-smaller increments. But when we scatter our attention across a thousand mini activities, we prevent ourselves from engaging deeply or thinking properly.

Conversations with loved ones are disemboweled with frequent “productive” glances at the inbox; our ability to think is decimated by the distraction of the ping and the ring. We maintain a state of chaotic mental activity that is the opposite of the optimal psychological state of flow, where attention is allowed to sink into an activity without distraction, where we bring our thoughts, actions, and goals into perfect synchronicity. Flow doesn’t happen in splinters of time but in great big lumps of attention.

Think about your past few weeks. All the moments you had of real insight or happiness came when you focused your attention, with reckless abandon, into the moment. In maximizing our time, we rob our moments of their color.

3. You’re Less Effective

You may still think that you’d be willing to feel busier and less happy as long as you could be effective. Effectiveness comes from two core factors: prioritization and achievement. When we prioritize well, we choose to do the right things, not just the obvious things. Yet a strong time awareness makes us prioritize the urgent and immediate rather than the important and strategic. Research by Microsoft, for example, suggests that 77 percent of U.K. workers feel they have had a productive day if they have emptied their inbox. It horrifies me to see the number of blogs and books that focus on getting to an empty inbox or zero tasks, as if either achievement were worthwhile. No business or life was changed by an empty inbox.

Perceived time pressure also lowers our ability to achieve. Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile has shown that increased focus on time reduces our problem-solving abilities and our capacity to generate imaginative solutions. We don’t think as well under the shadow of the clock.

Claire Benoist for Reader's Digest

Beyond Time Management

It is true: We will be able to do more stuff if we focus on managing our time, but we don’t need more repetitive, synchronized activity as we did in the Industrial Revolution. We need more thinking, creativity, and problem solving. Time management was a brilliant invention that helped to transform society 250 years ago.

Now it’s time for us to develop a different strategy—one that starts from the recognition that, in our overloaded world, the greatest shortage is not of time but of attention.

The 36 Questions That Can Make You Fall In Love With Anyone

              

 Can you really fall in love with anyone? In a 1997 SUNY Stony Brook study, psychologist Arthur Aron explored whether intimacy between two perfect strangers could be accelerated by having them ask each other the 36 personal questions below.

Set I

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

Set II

13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?

14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

16. What do you value most in a friendship?

17. What is your most treasured memory?

18. What is your most terrible memory?

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

20. What does friendship mean to you?

21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.

23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Set III

25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling … “

26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share … “

27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.

29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.

32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

Since Dr. Aron created the quiz, he’s even seen it rekindle romance in long-term relationships. “when you’re first in a romantic relationship, there’s an intense excitement, but then you grow used to each other,” Dr. Aron told Berkeley News. “If you do something new and challenging, that reminds you of how exciting it can be with your partner, it makes your relationship better.”

The three sets of questions take about 45 minutes to complete, with each becoming increasingly personal and intense. Dr. Aron and his wife Elaine, a psychologist who also studies love and relationships, have also used the quiz to bond with couple friends (platonically) over dinner dates.