Confessions of a happy person

It's been two weeks since I officially left my old lab and one week since I've been in Washington. In two more weeks I'll be starting my new post-doctoral position (meaning more research). People have been asking me if I'm excited about graduating and starting my new job.... I think I'm mostly just focusing on relaxing and recover from feeling burnt out as much as I can. No one can ever truly warn you about what adult-hood or graduate school is like, so I think these feelings are just a part of that. I can't really explain what it is I'm feeling, it's just that when I'm done with one thing, I'm on to the next thing on my never-ending checklist called life. I take breaks/vacations and I try to enjoy and stay in the moments, but you just know in the back of your mind that you have something big coming up soon that you have to plan for (new job, getting married, kids, etc). Even during this month off, I have to write a small proposal for w...

Year 1-2 YAY SCIENCE! Year 2-3 I suck at science Year 3-4 Science is sifting through the crap that is my data and trying to find something useful and that makes sense Beginning of Year 4- I've gotten a lot more science done than I thought To be continued...

Last month, I wrote an entry comparing mental illness to cancer ( http://honyinchiu.blogspot.com/2015/09/what-do-cancer-and-mental-illness-have.html ) which led me to start wondering if our immune systems (which helps our body fight against disease and the area in which my graduate study is in) might be involved in mental illness.  Digging further, I then spent a crazy two days reading scientific research reviews and papers (even in prominent journals like Nature and Cell) and uncovered this whole field of study that has been around for 20 years known as psychoneuroimmunology which studies the interactions between the immune system and the nervous system (our brain, spinal cord, nerves and sensory organs) and how these interactions affect both our mental and physical health.  I was surprised to find that it's actually been pretty well established for about 20 years that depression is an inflammatory disease. ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0...

We often look at things in terms of black and white You're good or you're bad You're introverted or you're extroverted You're wrong or you're right But if you dig deeper, we often realize that things aren't as clear cut as we think. It's more of spectrum and constant balancing between the two opposite ends. Illness is the same way. (You're either sick or you're not... wait what?) I'm going to use cancer as an example. Cancer by definition is "the disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body." But if you ask anyone that studies cancer, they'll tell you that we all have these "abnormal cells" that could potentially develop into this disease. These abnormal cells are formed as a result of regular every day cellular functions (if you want to know more  click here  and here ). There's just no way to avoid it. The reason we don't all have cancer though is that our bod...