Today and Thursday I'm sharing a great article written by Belle Beth Cooper, posted August 6, 2013. I found the information so interesting - I just had to share it with you. :) Rita
Happiness is so interesting, because we all
have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It’s also no surprise
that it’s the Nr.1 value for Buffer’s culture, if you see our slidedeck about it. So naturally we are obsessed with it.
I would love to be happier, as I’m sure
most people would, so I thought it would be interesting to find some ways to
become a happier person that are actually backed up by science. Here are ten of
the best ones I found.
1. Exercise more – 7 minutes might be enough
You might have seen some talk recently
about the scientific 7 minute workout mentioned in The
New York Times. So if you thought exercise was
something you didn’t have time for, maybe you can fit it in after all.
Exercise has such a profound effect on our
happiness and well-being that it’s actually been proven to be an effective
strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor’s book, The
Happiness Advantage, three
groups of patients treated their depression with either medication, exercise,
or a combination of the two. The results of this study really surprised me.
Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness
levels to begin with, the follow up assessments proved to be radically
different:
The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate.
Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into
depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better,
with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the
exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent!
You don’t have to be depressed to gain
benefit from exercise, though. It can help you to relax, increase your brain
power and even improve your body image, even if you don’t lose any weight.
A study
in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies, even when
they saw no physical changes:
Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females
before and after both 6 × 40 mins exercise and 6 × 40 mins reading. Over both
conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image,
however, improved after exercise compared to before.
We’ve explored exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains,
such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier, as you can
see in the image below.
2. Sleep more – you’ll be less sensitive to
negative emotions
We know that sleep helps our bodies to
recover from the day and repair themselves, and that it helps us focus and be
more productive. It turns out, it’s also important for our happiness.
In NutureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain
how sleep affects our positivity:
Negative stimuli get processed by the
amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep
deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that
sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy
memories just fine.
In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to
memorize a list of words. They could remember 81% of the words with a negative connotation,
like “cancer.” But they could remember only 31% of the words with a positive or
neutral connotation, like “sunshine” or “basket.”
The BPS Research Digest explores another
study that proves sleep affects our sensitivity
to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task over the course of a day,
the researchers studied how sensitive participants were to positive and
negative emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap
became more sensitive late in the day to negative emotions like fear and anger.
Using a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified reactivity
to anger and fear emotions across the day, without sleep. However, an
intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to
anger and fear while conversely enhancing ratings of positive (happy)
expressions.
Of course, how well (and how long) you
sleep will probably affect how you feel when you wake up, which can make a
difference to your whole day. Especially this graph showing how your brain
activity decreases is a great insight about how important enough sleep is for
productivity and happiness:
Another
study tested how employees’ moods when they
started work in the morning affected their work day.
Researchers found that employees’ moods
when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early
mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to
customers’ moods.
And most importantly to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on
performance, including both how much work employees did and how well they did
it.
Sleep is another topic we’ve looked into
before, exploring how
much sleep we really need to be productive.
3. Move closer to work – a short commute is worth
more than a big house
Our commute to the office can have a
surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to do this
twice a day, five days a week, makes it unsurprising that its effect would
build up over time and make us less and less happy.
According to The
Art of Manliness, having a long commute is
something we often fail to realize will affect us so dramatically:
… while many voluntary conditions don’t affect our happiness in the long
term because we acclimate to them, people never get accustomed to their daily
slog to work because sometimes the traffic is awful and sometimes it’s not. Or
as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, “Driving in traffic is a
different kind of hell every day.”
We tend to try to compensate for this by
having a bigger house or a better job, but these compensations just don’t work:
Two Swiss economists who studied the effect of commuting on happiness found
that such factors could not make up for the misery created by a long commute.
4. Spend time with friends and family – don’t
regret it on your deathbed
Staying in touch with friends and family is
one of the top
five regrets of the dying. If you
want more evidence that it’s beneficial for you, I’ve found some research that
proves it can make you happier right now.
Social time is highly valuable when it
comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have
found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference to how
happy we feel, generally.
I love the way Harvard happiness expert Daniel
Gilbert explains it:
We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and
almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of
getting more family and friends.
George Vaillant is the director of a
72-year study of the lives of 268 men.
In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects,
Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?”
Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your
relationships to other people.”
He shared insights of the study with Joshua
Wolf Shenk at The
Atlantic on how the men’s social connections made a
difference to their overall happiness:
The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment
better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships
seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had
been close to a brother or sister when younger.
In fact, a study published in the Journal
of Socio-Economics states than your relationships
are worth more than $100,000:
Using the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase in the
level of social involvements is worth up to an extra £85,000 a year in terms of
life satisfaction. Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little
happiness.
I think that last line is especially
fascinating: Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little
happiness. So we could increase our annual income by hundreds of thousands
of dollars and still not be as happy as if we increased the strength of our
social relationships.
The Terman study, which is covered in The
Longevity Project, found that
relationships and how we help others were important factors in living long,
happy lives:
We figured that if a Terman participant
sincerely felt that he or she had friends and relatives to count on when having
a hard time then that person would be healthier. Those who felt very loved and
cared for, we predicted, would live the longest.
Surprise: our prediction was wrong… Beyond social network size, the
clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others. Those who
helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to
live to old age.
5. Go outside – happiness is maximized at 13.9°C
In The
Happiness Advantage, Shawn
Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness:
Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one
study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted
positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory…
This is pretty good news for those of us
who are worried about fitting new habits into our already-busy schedules.
Twenty minutes is a short enough time to spend outside that you could fit it
into your commute or even your lunch break.
A UK study from the University
of Sussex also found that being outdoors made people
happier:
Being outdoors, near the sea, on a warm, sunny weekend afternoon is the
perfect spot for most. In fact, participants were found to be substantially
happier outdoors in all natural environments than they were in urban
environments.
The American
Meteorological Society published
research in 2011 that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our
happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average
temperature over the course of a day. It also found that happiness is
maximized at 13.9°C, so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading
outside for your 20 minutes of fresh air.
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