A friend of mine and I were sitting by a window in an excellent restaurant. My friend explained to me the importance of believing good things will happen. She called this “manifesting”. There are many books on how to “manifest” success. According to these books, you need to imagine success strongly, and then you will succeed.

My friend had a wonderful job. Thanks to it, she had traveled to many interesting places and had enjoyed countless good meals. There were people with the same skills as she had, but many of them just do boring, low-paying jobs. My friend, instead, achieved these things because she in her own words had imagined that she would achieve them.

“Manifesting” can help people face difficult challenges. People who “manifest” believe that success will come to them, and this gives them the courage to move ahead. But it can also help people feel better about their lives. They expect success, and so they feel successful. This, I think, is close to the placebo (安慰剂) effect. In studies of new medicines, researchers often give some patients sugar pills and say the pills are medicine. This helps them find out how well the medicine truly works. Many people use something similar to a placebo in their daily lives. College kids often choose a special shirt or baseball cap to wear during exams. They feel it will bring them good luck. Here in China, one of the newest placebos is “Einstein’s brain”. It’s on sale on shopping sites. Customers are told that after paying a little money, they will develop a brain like that of the famous scientist. Do buyers really believe this? Of course not. But by “manifesting” a super-quick brain, they may feel relaxed and, as a result, think more clearly during exams. After studying enough, they may find this kind of trick to be a great help.

Well, “manifesting” works in some way, however, if you don’t do anything, how can you ever have any good luck simply because of “manifesting”?

New data (数据) coming out recently shows that over half of Chinese students have experienced hair loss problems during their university years. According to a survey by China Youth Network, nearly 56% of respondents (调查对象) from 643 colleges across the country said they were experiencing hair loss.

Reasons for the trouble can be many. Some doctors believed staying up late, long-time mobile phone use and too much junk food were main causes. Huge pressure from work and school could also lead to receding hairlines (发际线).

Today, baldness (秃头) is becoming increasingly common among university students in China. A report earlier found that 250 million Chinese were troubled by hair loss. Most of them were aged between 20 and 40. Among this population, men were 160 million. That’s nearly 23 percent of Chinese men. And many of them started to deal with hair loss at 30, twenty years earlier than the generation (一代) before. “Many people around me worry about hair loss,” said a college student in Beijing. Yet she believes that many young people do not actually meet baldness. Instead, they use the words as a way to joke about their stressful lives.

According to the American Hair Loss Association, going bald is now a global problem. It says that 66 percent of US people started to lose their hair before the age of 35.

It’s 11:00 pm and I’m still sitting here writing this article for the school magazine! I’ve had two weeks to write it and my teacher wants it tomorrow. She’s always complaining that I leave things to the last minute. Well,I don’t want to be like that, but it seems hard to change.

I’ve just read an article on a website and I’ve discovered that it isn’t my fault（过错）!In fact, it isn’t anyone’s fault. It is our brains. They are programmed to make it difficult to break bad habits. For example, you are sitting up late playing games, you know you’ve got an important test tomorrow, so why don’t you just turn off the computer and go to bed? As I said, it’s your brain’s fault. Scientists have done experiments that show we use one part of our brain when we think about ourselves, and another when we think about other people. However. when we think about ourselves in the future, we use the same part of the brain that we usually use to think about other people. In other words, the brain sees the “future you” as a different person to your “present you” and that’s why we don’t always find it easy to make right decisions for ourselves in the future.

Scientists have also discovered that it takes around ten weeks to form a good habit. And once you stick to it to ten weeks, everything becomes a lot easier. That’s because ten weeks is the amount of time the brain needs to change and accept new habits as part of everyday life. But ten weeks is a really long time, so it's easy to give up on your plans sooner.

So maybe we want to change our ways and become better people, but our brains won’t let us, or is this just an excuse?