1. Exercise more –
7 minutes might be enoughYou 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! 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: 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
emotionsWe 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. 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 houseOur 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 deathbedStaying 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°CIn 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.
6. Help others – 100 hours a year is the magical
numberOne of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make
yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours per year (or
two hours per week) is the optimal time we should dedicate to helping
others in order to enrich our lives.If we go back to Shawn Achor’s
book again, he says this about helping others:…when researchers
interviewed more than 150 people about their recent purchases, they found that
money spent on activities—such as concerts and group dinners out—brought far
more pleasure than material purchases like shoes, televisions, or expensive
watches. Spending money on other people, called “prosocial spending,” also
boosts happiness. The Journal of Happiness Studies published a
study that explored this very topic:Participants recalled a previous
purchase made for either themselves or someone else and then reported their
happiness. Afterward, participants chose whether to spend a monetary windfall
on themselves or someone else. Participants assigned to recall
a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier immediately
after this recollection; most importantly, the happier
participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on
someone else in the near future. So spending money on other people makes
us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. What about spending our time on other people? A study of volunteering
in Germany explored how volunteers were affected when their opportunities
to help others were taken away:Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but
before the German reunion, the first wave of data of the GSOEP was collected in
East Germany. Volunteering was still widespread. Due to the shock of the
reunion, a large portion of the infrastructure of volunteering (e.g. sports
clubs associated with firms) collapsed and people randomly lost their
opportunities for volunteering. Based on a comparison of the change in
subjective well-being of these people and of people from the control group who
had no change in their volunteer status, the hypothesis is supported that
volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life satisfaction. In his
book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and
Well-being, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman
explains that helping others can improve our own lives:…we scientists have
found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary
increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
7.
Practice smiling – it can
alleviate painSmiling itself can make us feel better, but it’s more effective
when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to this study:A new
study led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests
customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood
and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But workers who smile as a
result of cultivating positive thoughts – such as a tropical vacation or a
child’s recital – improve their mood and withdraw less. Of course it’s
important to practice “real smiles” where you
use your eye sockets. It’s very easy to spot the difference:According
to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us
perform better on cognitive tasks: Smiling makes us feel good which also
increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically.
When this idea was tested by Johnson et al. (2010), the results showed that
participants who smiled performed better on attentional tasks which required
seeing the whole forest rather than just the trees. A smile is also a good way
to alleviate some of the pain we feel in troubling circumstances:Smiling is one
way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation. Psychologists call
this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile when we don’t feel
like it is enough to lift our mood slightly (this is one example of embodied
cognition). One of our previous posts goes into even more detail about the
science of smiling.
8. Plan a trip – but don’t take oneAs opposed to
actually taking a holiday, it seems that planning a vacation or just a break
from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the
journal, Applied Research in Quality of Lifeshowed that the highest spike
in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as employees enjoyed
the sense of anticipation:In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation
boosted happiness for eight weeks.After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped
back to baseline levels for most people.Shawn Achor has some info for us on
this point, as well:One study found that people who just thought
about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by
27 percent.If you can’t take the time for a vacation right now, or even
a night out with friends, put something on the calendar—even if it’s a month or
a year down the road. Then whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind
yourself about it.
9. Meditate – rewire your brain for
happinessMeditation is often touted as an important habit for improving focus,
clarity and attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It turns out
it’s also useful for improving your happiness:In one study, a research
team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the brain scans of 16 people
before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness
meditation. The study, published in the January issue of Psychiatry Research:
Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, parts of the
participants’ brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, and
parts associated with stress shrank. Meditation literally clears your mind and
calms you down, it’s been often proven to be the single most effective way to
live a happier live. I believe that this graphic explains it the best:According
to Shawn Achor, meditation can actually make you happier long-term: Studies
show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm
and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. And, research
even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise
levels of happiness.The fact that we can actually alter our brain structure
through mediation is most surprising to me and somewhat reassuring that however
we feel and think today isn’t permanent.
10. Practice gratitude – increase both happiness and life
satisfactionThis is a seemingly simple strategy, but I’ve personally found it
to make a huge difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice
gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you’re grateful for, sharing
three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, and
going out of your way to show gratitude when others help you.In an
experiment where some participants took note of things they were grateful
for each day, their moods were improved just from this simple practice:The
gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though
not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the
comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust
finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional
and interpersonal benefits. The Journal of Happiness studies published a
study that used letters of gratitude to test how being grateful can affect
our levels of happiness:Participants included 219 men and women who wrote three
letters of gratitude over a 3 week period. Results indicated that writing
letters of gratitude increased participants’ happiness and life satisfaction,
while decreasing depressive symptoms.Quick last fact: Getting older will make
yourself happierAs a final point, it’s interesting to note that as we get
older, particularly past middle age, we tend togrow happier naturally. There’s
still some debate over why this happens, but scientists have got a few
ideas:Researchers, including the authors, have found that older people shown
pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on and remember the happier ones
more and the negative ones less. Other studies have discovered that as people
age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods — for instance,
pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down.
Still other work finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and
disappointment over unachieved goals, and hew their goals toward greater
wellbeing.So if you thought being old would make you miserable, rest assured
that it’s likely you’ll develop a more positive outlook than you probably have
now.
Source:Higher Perspective
Domenic Ciraulo, MD, chair of psychiatry at Boston University School
of Medicine (BUSM) and David H. Barlow, PhD, professor of psychology at
Boston University (BU), have collaborated to study the effect of
behavioral and medication treatments on patients with alcoholism and
anxiety.
According to the researchers, while anti-depressant medications may
help to control anxious feelings, the ability to acknowledge and respond
to such intense feelings may be one reason that CBT is effective. This
may be why the addition of an anti-depressant to CBT did not lead to
improved outcomes.
