Imagine what your life would be like if your hands were always dripping in sweat: You'd make up excuses after giving a clammy handshake. You'd worry about your touch devices slipping out of your hands.

You'd avoid reading print editions of the newspaper to prevent staining your skin and clothes with ink. And you may even shy away from holding hands with your sweetheart.

Sophia Wastler, 36, of Virginia Beach, Va., has lived through all these situations. "You just think you're a weird freak and you suffer in silence," she admits.

Wastler also recalls being asked to go barefoot in modern dance class, and feeling embarrassed after leaving huge puddles at her feet and mortified when wiping them up.

It took Wastler until she was 31 to learn why her underarms, palms and soles of her feet were constantly soaked. She had gone to see a new doctor (not because of the sweating), and instead of giving her usual excuse after shaking his hand and leaving it moist, she blurted out, "My hands are always sweaty."

Then the doctor told her, "You have hyperhidrosis." That's the first time Wastler heard of a medical condition that causes excessive sweating.

"Primary focal hyperhidrosis is when you're sweating excessively for the physiological requirements at that time, and it's not related to any other medical problem or a side effect of a medication," explains Dr. Dee Anna Glaser, a professor of dermatology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

For example, if you're sitting indoors, watching TV, and you're drenched in sweat -- far more than others around you -- that's not healthy sweating, which is simply keeping your body cool. It's extreme and excessive perspiration.

Extreme sweating, when it's from diabetes, night sweats or menopausal hot flashes, typically occurs all over the body. But in primary hyperhidrosis, a person sweats profusely in certain areas, most commonly the armpits, palms or face. It may also occur on the scalp, soles of the feet, in the groin area or along the breast tissue.

Hyperhidrosis often begins in childhood or adolescence, and it tends to run in families. "But there's such a negative stigma about sweating that people often don't talk about it or think it's them -- they need to shower more or find the right deodorant," explains Glaser.

"Most people don't realize that excessive sweating is a condition and there's treatment for it," she says.

Hyperhidrosis sufferers have normal sweat glands, in terms of their size, number and function. So researchers suspect the cause has something to do with the signal coming from the brain, which is telling the sweat glands to produce wetness when it's not necessary, points out Glaser.

Treatment often starts with clinical strength antiperspirants available over the counter or by prescription. Botox injections every six or seven months into the affected are also effective.

That's what did the trick for Wastler and is currently keeping her hands dry. She also uses moisture-absorbing insoles for her feet.

"Life began for me at 31," Wastler admits, which is why she also recommends finding a doctorwho knows and understands hyperhidrosis. 

Here are some interesting facts about the condition: 

• People with hyperhidrosis may sweat 4 to 5 times more than normal.
• Athletes perspire more than other people because their bodies have become super efficient at keeping cool.
• Men sweat more than women, although both men and women suffer equally from hyperhidrosis. (But more women seek out treatment for it.)
• It's OK to use antiperspirant on your hands and feet if you tend to sweat a lot there.
• Consider applying antiperspirant before bedtime so the active ingredients soak into your pores and block morning sweating.

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When you think you're eating something indulgent, you feel satisfied sooner than when you consume a food that's supposedly better for you, reveals a new study.

Yale University researchers wanted to find out if your frame of mind -- your beliefs and expectations -- while eating a food could influence your body's physiology more than its actual nutritional value. So, they measured levels of ghrelin, a hormone released in the stomach in response to hunger.

When the blood has high levels of ghrelin, the "hunger hormone," it sends signals to the brain to let it know you want food. As you chow down, ghrelin levels decrease, which reduces appetite and makes you feel full.

To see whether ghrelin levels were affected by a person's expectations of a food, they rounded up 46 normal weight or plumper volunteers (ages 18 to 35). Participants were told they would be testing two new milkshakes: One was labeled as a high fat, 620-calorie "indulgent" shake; the other was a no-fat 140-calorie sensible, or "sensi-shake."

The trick was that both were the same 380-calorie french vanilla milkshakes disguised in different packaging.

While volunteers rated the "sensi-shake" as healthier than the "indulgent" shake and had a good-for-you mindset before drinking it, their bodies told a different story. Ghrelin levels were flat or slightly higher while tasting it, suggesting they were not physiologically satisfied with the beverage.

When participants drank the "indulgent" shake, whose label described it as "heaven in a bottle" and the "decadence you deserve," ghrelin levels steeply increased in anticipation of it, followed by a dramatically steep decline after consuming the creamy drink. This indicates they craved the drink more and were more satisfied afterward. Interestingly, though, hunger levels showed little change after either drink. A large drop in ghrelin levels should be accompanied by a large drop in hunger levels.

Researchers had expected that drinking the sensible shake would produce a sharper reduction in ghrelin levels, but the exact opposite occurred.

"The mindset of 'sensibility' or 'restraint' when eating -- no matter what we're eating -- might be compromising our body's physiological response, counteracting our hard work at dieting," says Alia Crum, a clinical psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and the study's lead author.

And that's the mindset often adopted when trying to lose or maintain weight. "People should still work to eat healthy," suggests Crum, "but do so in a mindset of indulgence." By this she means believing a food will be enough to indulge your nutritional and hunger needs.

Unhealthy foods that market their healthy virtues (think: multigrain snack chips or chocolate-covered granola bars) may be doubly damaging. Their labels may be misleading and inaccurate but they can also affect people's perception of the food and the body's response to it, explains Crum.

This study appears online in Health Psychology.

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What if you could take a pill and erase painful memories? Most of us would probably choose not to lose parts of our past, but for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, such a pill might bring welcome relief.

In a study that sounds very much like a scene from the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” researchers have shown that the right medication might actually help rub out wrenching remembrances. 

For the new study, researchers rounded up 33 university students and asked them to watch a video presentation that told the story of a little girl who has a horrible accident while visiting with her grandparents. While the girl and her grandfather are constructing a birdhouse, one of the little girl’s hands gets caught in a saw. One of the pictures shown to the study volunteers is of her mangled hand.

Though the girl’s hand is eventually saved at the hospital and the story ends fine, the presentation is tough to sit through and tends to cause viewers emotional distress, explains the study’s lead author Marie-France Marin, a doctoral student at The Center for Studies on Human Stress at the University of Montreal. “It’s not fun to watch,” she says. “It induces a lot of emotion.”

Before the video, Marin had instructed the volunteers to watch and listen very carefully to the presentation. Afterwards, she and her colleagues collected saliva samples to measure levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Then the 33 were sent on their way.