By happier.com expert Todd Kashdan, Ph.D.

I lied. Studying the ins and outs of hotel maids provide absolutely no insight into cancer.
Besides lying to you, I have no idea what the politically correct term is for women who clean hotel rooms. Maid? chambermaid? housekeeper? female room attendant? If I offend anyone, my apologies for failing to master the appropriate terminology. But everything else is true and rather inoffensive. In this brief  post, you will learn a single secret to physical fitness and mental health that might translate into longer, better living.

Hotel maids are notorious for waking up at ridiculously early hours to start working. They also are confronted with unwanted flesh at surprising intervals and in surprising situations. There’s the man who refuses to make a peep while sitting on the toilet until spotted. There’s the man who opens the front door with swinging genitalia lacking a single synaptic connection to the idea of covering up. There’s the guest’s drunken friend who rests peacefully face to the ground, ass in the air, burrowed behind the curtains. I’m not being sexist. 97 out of 100 encounters, the naked being will be male. But I digress.

Hotel maids are stressed out and thus, have little time for a formal workout. If you don’t believe me, go ask a hotel maid how often they go the gym or jog in the park. They certainly do enough bending, lifting, climbing, and moving to burn off calories. Which begs the question- what if maids were made mindfully aware and open to the idea that a fitness routine is embedded into their job? Could changing their mindset lead to actual changes in their physical and mental health? A few researchers sought to find out.

As the most minimal of interventions, one group of hotel maids were informed about the importance of daily exercise and how their regimen of climbing stairs, vacuuming, cleaning linen, and scrubbing tables and tubs affects their body. They were given exact details, for example, a 140-pound women burns 50 calories after vacuuming for 15 minutes. They were told that their typical workday far exceeds the exercise recommendations of the Surgeon General. A second group of hotel maids were given the same information about the benefits of exercise but weren’t told anything about how their work effort is in fact, exercise. With this comparison group, the researchers could determine whether there was some unique benefit to being mindful about what constitutes exercise.

So what happened when these maids were tracked down a month later? After only 4 weeks of learning that work might serve as exercise, the maids lost an average of 2 pounds, lowered their blood pressure by an average of 10 points, and trimmed their body fit even though they didn’t change their diet or add any exercise to their routine. The only thing that changed was that how they attended to their physical exertion at work. That’s it! As for the comparison group, they basically remained in the same shape as when they started.

Yet another testament to how our mindset can alter our bodies. We can’t always feel good but we can almost always be profoundly aware and open to what we do. Being fully alive during these moments are the building blocks to a life well lived.

Here’s a question that we should all be asking- what do I fail to notice in my daily routine that’s important to my physical, mental, and social well-being?

And tell your hotel maid how muscular her arms are looking so she can live a long, healthy life….

Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. He is the author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more about his books and research, go to www.toddkashdan.com

happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.

Scientists have it in for television. On the surface, television seems to be a big, bad creature that corrupts youth. Promising athletes are transformed into immobile, morbidly obese balls of flesh. Courtesy of Showtime, kind, compassionate children become violent, sex-crazed lunatics. If your kid is typical, television plays a big part in their life, so pay attention.

According to new study in the October 2009 issue of Child Development, television is destroying our families. Here is the press release:

A new study looks for the first time at the effect of background TV on interactions between parents and young children. Using an experimental design, researchers found that when a TV was on, both the quantity and quality of interactions between parents and children dropped. This study challenges the common assumption that background TV doesn’t affect very young children if they don’t look at the screen.

Gulp! Keep your television and you are killing your family, one conversation at a time. This study, just like similar studies, received a ton of media attention. The consensus is that one of the easiest ways to improve the quality of our life, our children, and our family, is to turn off the TV.

But let’s get into the details. Because if there is one thing I learned about the media and research, it’s that the details make all the difference and they are often the first to go. In this particular study, scientists observed 50 kids between the ages of 1-3 and their parents for one hour. For half of the one-hour session, parents and children were in a playroom without TV; for the other 30 minutes, parents chose a program to watch. Now let’s go back to the conclusion. Watching TV interferes with the quantity and quality of conversations between parents and children. No $#@! I have some titles for other studies:

“Books are bad for kids- Tell them to stop reading, now!”
- after all, if kids have a book open and they are immersed in the story, this will make it hard to talk to their parents and friends.

“The neglected, untreated cause of erectile dysfunction- Iphones!”
- Even when naked on top of another adult, checking your email and reading the latest news on your iphone is going to harm your sexual performance. Go ahead, see for yourself.

Personally, I don’t mind if researchers want to study whether television is harmful. What I suggest is that they ask the right questions. Instead of fighting the content of what people do, scientists should focus on the function. If someone watches television to recharge their batteries after intense socializing (because perhaps they are highly sensitive) and it works, then I say let them keep their strategy. If watching television helps an active, social child unwind at the end of the day and transition into their nighttime routine of brushing teeth, getting into their pajamas, and going to sleep, so be it. Sounds like a perfect strategy to regulate their mood. The reasons that people watch television can range from the helpful (learning about astronomy, recharging their energy supply) to the unhelpful (procrastinating from studying for an exam, avoiding other people because socializing is anxiety provoking).

Let’s move beyond the silly argument of how much television people should watch and focus on the motives behind the movements. If you are a parent, the amount of hours your children watch television should not be yet another area for you to stress about. There are enough important, stressful areas that warrant your attention. Let this be your mantra- focus on function, not content.

Science should speak for itself but if the questions are silly then the data and the conclusions are going to be silly. In the absence of good research, nobody should be turning to scientists for opinions about how to have fun. Once scientists move outside their area of expertise, they are just as stupid as anyone else. Myself included.

Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. He is the author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more about his books and research, go to www.toddkashdan.com

happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.

This post comes from happier.com expert Todd Kashdan, Ph.D.

I was a horrible football player in high school. Terrified of losing my expensive non-disposable contact lenses, I made the unwise decision to remove them before walking onto the field. As you might expect, I was often crushed to the ground without even seeing who hit me. Friends and family in the stands witnessed brutal breaks in my shoulder and torn ligaments in my neck. When my pain tolerance wore thin and I relented to surgery, the next several months were spent with an arm wed to my torso under plaster. When the cast was removed, besides physical therapy, I saw a chiropractor. And it seemed to work. The pain disappeared, my shoulder and neck felt supple, and so I continued going to chiropractors for years.

Impatient to become bigger, stronger, and faster, I never let my body heal on its own terms. When I finally did, I realized that I felt better without my trusty chiropractor.

Why do I share this story? Because when someone is in chronic pain, unable to function, they are susceptible to charismatic people who claim to have the answers. Skepticism disappears. Consumers aren’t to blame. This is an age of unprecedented information overload. Who has the time to read the science on whether chiropractic care works? Chiropractic care must be effective. After all, why would health insurance companies pay for visits? I mean, if someone suffers from crippling depression, their insurance only pays for 10-15 visits to a therapist (even though most treatments require at least 3 months to be effective!).

Despite my narrow focus on chiropractic care, I could just as easily be talking about other alternative approaches such as reflexology (the unproven idea that there are connections between the foot and nearly every organ in the body and applying pressure to the right spots on the foot can alleviate ailments and even diseases).

As a clinical psychologist and scientist, I wanted to share three red flags that an intervention is likely to be a scam or sham on the horizon:

1. Jargon. If a practitioner knows what that they are doing, they should be able to explain why their services are needed and how they work so that an 11-year old can understand. Don’t ever blame yourself if you are confused by wacky terms, practitioners should be able to describe your problem and their plan in everyday language. If your chiropractor tells you that subluxations of the bones and joints (misalignments) are responsible for an illness or disease, don’t be content with this gobbledygook. I kid you not, this is the exact same thing that Daniel D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic care, wrote about in 1895! Palmer thought that subluxations were the cause of nearly every problem suffered by humankind. Haven’t we learned a few things about the human body in the past 115 years? After all, in 1895, scientists had just learned that little microbes called germs can cause disease and perhaps its a good idea if surgeons wash their hands before reaching inside your body cavity.

Moving beyond chiropractors, there are proponents of magnetic therapy who claim that wearing their brand of necklace or bracelet will change the body’s magnetic field, aligning or changing electrons, which in turn stimulates healing. Sounds really interesting until you ask how this magnetic field works. How do little trinkets know exactly which electrons and body parts need to be changed and which to leave alone? And how did this magnetic field get out of whack in the first place to lead to health conditions such as headaches, sinus problems, arthritis, insomnia, and cancer and heart disease? All of which are supposedly healed by magnetic therapies (a multi-billion dollar industry)!

2. Evidence. Following the mantra of Carl Sagan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But let’s be generous, how about evidence showing that a group of people receiving alternative medicine fare better than people who exercise regularly, sleep well, and eat healthy over a 6-month period?

Gushy testimonials are not enough. What do you think happens after a reflexologist gives you an intense foot massage or a chiropractor stretches the joints and tissues that join vertebrae to one another? You’re going to feel real good, much better than when you came in. And you are going to attribute this relief, this feeling of hope, to chiropratic care or reflexology. And in a few days when you return to how poorly you felt before, you are going to schedule another appointment.

On top of this, we often attempt to justify the time, effort, and money devoted to therapy by saying that it’s helpful. These reactions are often automatic. That is, we don’t deceive ourselves on purpose, it happens outside of conscious awareness. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. Before your first ever visit to a chiropractor, you might be 60% confident that it’s going to help. Asked again after spending hundreds of dollars on dozens of visits, you are likely to be 70, 80, even 100% certain that the treatment is working. There are hundreds of studies to document this process. Our knowledge about ourselves is more flawed than we think. This is just one of many reasons why anecdotes do not quality as acceptable evidence that medicine works.

Ask your practitioner for stronger evidence. Ask about published research. Ask for details about the research such as what other possible explanations could exist for why people ended up better after treatment. You want to know if their treatment is better than waiting and letting the body heal on its own. You want to know if their treatment better than exercise. You want to know if their treatment is better than taking pain relievers. You want to know what exactly is going to be changed that is relevant to the problem being treated. And while you’re asking questions, carefully observe your therapist. Look for signs of resistance, look for signs that they’re comfortable (vs. being pissed off) with your curiosity, and look for signs that they are more interested in your health instead of selling their wares. Any good therapist should welcome an engaged, skeptical consumer walking through their doors…unless they have something to hide or something to be afraid of.

3. Change should be observable and measurable. There should be some clear, objective way to know that the treatment is doing what is supposed to do. I’m not talking about feeling good after being touched in a gentle way on the feet or back. Feeling good doesn’t mean a treatment works. Our feelings are affected by the weather, hormones, music, colors, and a thousand other features that have nothing to do with being treated for an ailment.

If a chiropractor says that a subluxation is the cause of your problem, then you should be able to gauge the steady, systematic decline of a subluxation. If you are taking part in magnetic therapy, you should be able to observe changes in your magnetic field and the alignment of electrons and ions. Ask your practitioner how they are going to measure what your magnetic field looks like before treatment and how they are going to notice whether there is improvement. If there is no way to tell that you improved except by what you feel then there is no evidence that their work is responsible for any gains. Can you see it on an X-ray? in a blood test? in a brain scanner? a test of flexibility, stamina, or physical strength? Do other people notice a difference (who don’t know you are being treated)? You can never rely solely on anyone’s so-called words of expertise. They have plenty of economic incentives to tell you that you are getting better or that you need to be patient and continue what you are doing with them to get better.
Yes, I’m concerned when people offer treatments that lack evidence. I’m concerned when people in pain or who are sick, weak, or desperate for help are preyed upon. When someone invests their limited time and money in a treatment that doesn’t work, there is an opportunity cost. That is, they are being pulled away from treatments that can really help them. When this happens, everyone loses.

Here’s a simple idea for health care reform, only support treatments that work. When it comes to the spinal manipulations of chiropractors, magnetic therapies, and reflexology, there is little evidence that they are effective in the treatment of any medical condition. And as for lower back pain, headaches, or neck pain, these procedures have yet to be shown to be any better or worse than any other standard intervention that consumers are confident in. This includes massages and exercise. So if you want to get rid of some pork and help prevent problems in the first place, remove chiropractic care from health care plans and support people to exercise regularly….

Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. He is the author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more about his books and research, go to www.toddkashdan.com

happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.

This post comes from happier.com expert Todd Kashdan, Ph.D.

While on vacation, I had a pivotal moment with two cousins aged 7 and 11. In a rare moment of conversation (instead of riding ocean waves or playing football), I asked them what they think are the ideal qualities for being successful in life. Without taking a breath, my 7-year old cousin blurted, “Running fast; I can run faster than my mom”. You could see the pride in his facial expression, a little Tigger ready to race anyone, anytime. Now running fast probably lands no higher than 180 on the chart of successful traits but then again, this wasn’t a game of Family Feud and he took this in stride. Being precocious little creatures, they asked me what I meant by this thing called personality that I kept referring to. Little did they know that scientists continue to ask the same question…

If you’re anything like me, you listened to psychologists when they talked about a rigid, unchanging thing called personality. From early childhood to the grave, people remain essentially the same. How did they know? Historically, researchers gave people a slew of questionnaires asking them to rate how much they agree with statements such as “I’m an even-tempered person” and “I try to be courteous to everyone I meet.” A few months or even years later, people were given the same questions and guess what? Their answers were similar to what they said the last time. This oversimplified approach perpetuated the myth that our personality crystallizes into stone by the time we reach our twenties. This might be very satisfying if people describe you as being cheerful, playful, and charismatic. But if people describe you as neurotic, disagreeable, and closed-minded, this could be disheartening―forget self-help books and the gobbledygook of therapists because your personality is bred in the bone. Thankfully, recent research has overturned this oversimplified thinking.
Of course there is some continuity in how we think, feel and behave. Problems arise when we form an idea about who we are, say pessimistic, and then fixate on this idea, ignoring and discarding moments that fail to fit in. The problem is just as bad when we label our lovers, friends, and acquaintances. Nobody wants to be boxed in because you happened to witness them do something silly, annoying, or immoral. Do you want to label children as unintelligent because they fail a test or a single class? Do you want to label an adult as shy because they said little at a party where they barely knew anybody? Researchers have found that we define a stranger’s personality after a mere 10 seconds. With this thin slice of information, we start to think and act differently toward them. If we label them as open-minded and curious, we prefer to spend more time with them; if we label them as disagreeable and neurotic, we prefer to keep our distance. An entire pattern starts to form after a mere 10 seconds!

When we think of ourselves and other people in rigid, immutable terms (“I am not funny,” “She is cold and emotionless”) this paves the way for a self-fulfilling prophecy. But more importantly, it’s simply wrong. Rigid terms can’t do justice to describe a person. I like to think of personality as a series of buckets. Every time you think something, feel something, or do something, there is a moment to be placed in a bucket. Think of moments as something tangible, perhaps a golf ball. When we say someone is sociable, what we are saying is that they have a large number of golf balls in the bucket for being sociable (when they are talkative and comfortable around other people). But everyone (I mean everyone) has moments when they prefer to be by themselves or worry about being rejected or judged harshly by other people. When this happens, a golf ball goes into the solitude or socially anxious bucket. Sure, the majority of golf balls land in the sociable bucket, but don’t forget that in a given month or year, a sizeable number of golf balls are going to fill the solitude bucket and the socially anxious bucket.

What this means is that at any given moment, you “may be” or “could be” sociable, but you also might want to be alone or you might feel uncomfortable around other people. This idea of personality is far closer to the truth about who we are and what other people are about. It also opens up the possibility for all of us to be free, alive, and creative. When we recognize that everyone has a little bit of every personality trait, we become open to change and we become tolerant and accepting.

Try to avoid the trap of using rigid terms for yourself and others. We can laugh and tease friends at “happy hour,” and we can be solemn and assertive when trying to get an errant late fee waived by a stubborn credit card representative. When we recognize the breadth of our personality, we essentially gain access to a greater variety of strategies to get the possible outcome in a situation.

When we believe that traits such as intelligence, compassion, and perseverance are fixed, that there are only so many golf balls we can add to these buckets, we feel powerless to change. We start to view failures as personal flaws instead of stemming from difficult situations or a lack of effort. When we view our personality as a fluid quality that changes depending on what we do and the situation we find ourselves in, we become more energetic, productive, creative, and successful in life.

As a starting point to improving your quality of life: be aware that there is a bucket for every side of every single personality trait that you can conceive and there are at least a few golf balls in each. Each and every bucket is a part of your personality and with certain intentional strategies, we can being adding more golf balls into buckets that reflect characteristics that you admire, strengths that work well for you, or behaviors that energize you.

It’s fun to contemplate the master list of personality traits that enable people to be particularly happy and successful. This includes assessing how many of these traits are in our personal arsenal. However, this exercise is one step removed from reality. Our lives are full of possibility when we are aware of the multiple sides of our personality and that we are still evolving. This flexible mindset sets the stage for a life well-lived.

Interested in specific strategies for how to add more golf balls to particular buckets? Do you want to build strengths and become more psychologically flexible? Discover dozens of exercises based on cutting-edge research in my latest book, Curious?
Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. He is the author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more about his book and research, go to www.toddkashdan.com.

Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/toddkashdan

happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.