By guest contributor Gloria Park Perin
When chronic exercisers are asked about the top reason they engage in physical activity, the #1 reason they cite are shifts in mood, namely increases in experienced positive emotion. Unfortunately, exercise isn’t instant gratification, and most people won’t experience the mood-boosting effects of exercise until they have developed a regular routine for several weeks.
Keep an exercise log. Record the date and time of activity, the intensity, and the length of each session of physical activity. Also note if you were alone, or with a friend, and how much you enjoyed the activity. Free tools are available online and even on your iPhone.
Monitor your mood. At the end of each day, log into Happier and use the Positivity Test or Authentic Happiness Index to track changes in your positivity ratio or happiness levels. Record your scores in the exercise log.
Use feedback to revise your strategy. After several weeks, go back and review the log. Are there specific types of activities that boost your mood over others? Does the time of day for exercise seem to have an impact? Take note of these patterns and adjust your routine.
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.
By guest contributor Gloria Park Perin
Taking on an approach versus avoidance mindset can do wonders for motivation. Sure, dropping the saddlebags and squeezing into a bikini are great goals for exercise, but instead of focusing on some aspect of yourself that you want to change or lose, why not ask yourself what you might gain in terms of vitality and the physical capacity to pursue a good life?
Create a vision of the future. Start by thinking about what is most important to you and work from there. Are your children the most important to you? Or developing your entrepreneurial endeavors? Write down what you envision as your best possible future.
Think about the tangible rewards. Articulate what you could potentially gain in these areas of your life by becoming more active: More energy to run around and play with your children? Increased ability to handle daily stressors in managing and growing your business?
Finally, set positively worded goals. “I will” vs. “I won’t” or “I hope to gain” vs. “I hope to lose”. Write these down and revisit them frequently.
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.
By guest contributor Gloria Park Perin
What if there was a pill that you could take every day to effectively prevent diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and certain forms of cancer? And what if the same pill would effectively reduce nearly every risk associated with all cause mortality? Would you take it? Would you urge your families and friends to take it?
These are questions Dr. Robert Sallis posed as I listened to him describe the new “Exercise is Medicine” initiative by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the American Medical Association (AMA). Amid fiery debate over escalating costs and declining accessibility to healthcare, this groundbreaking partnership intends to push exercise and physical activity into the forefront of the public healthcare management discourse and introduces them as an integral aspect of disease treatment and prevention.
What if this pill was also a powerful tool in warding off dementia, anxiety, and depression? What if it improved self-esteem, cognitive functioning, and boosted your mood?
Exercise is a low-cost, accessible, and self-directed activity, and the truth is, most of us know that exercise is both medicine and therapy. So why aren’t we doing more of it? We all hear the Surgeon General’s warnings about smoking, sedentary lifestyles, and the dangers of eating fast food, yet we still sit in front of our televisions watching incessant advertisements for the latest antidepressants, channel surfing with our greasy French-fried fingers, then wake up to a breakfast of Camel lights and coffee.
We need more than just information – we need motivation! Until an Exercise is Therapy initiative is developed, follow some of the simple tips in this blog series to get you on the path toward adopting a healthier and HAPPIER lifestyle, which begins like anything else: Just one step at a time.
*For more great tips, check out “Move Your Body: Tone Your Mood” by Dr. Kate F. Hays.
Sallis, R.E. (2009). Exercise is medicine and physicians need to prescribe it! British Journal of Sports Medicine, 43, 3-4.
By guest contributor Gloria Park Perin
Optimism can help us look toward the future, but unreasonable optimism can be your worst enemy when you’re setting goals for exercise. If you start by reaching too high, falling short of your initial goal may ultimately serve to make you feel discouraged, rather than inspired to exercise. Even worse, overdoing it can bring harm or injury to your body.
Take stock of your life. If you’re already working full-time, raising two children, and taking night classes, then aspiring to exercise for three hours every day is probably unrealistic. Ask yourself: Based on what my life looks like right now, what is a goal that seems manageable and attainable?
Give yourself permission to be human. We all fall off the wagon, sometimes three or four times, when we’re trying to adopt a good habit (or break a bad habit). Be disciplined and make plans for following through on your schedule, but if an emergency comes up, don’t beat yourself up. Sit down, take a breath, and create an alternate plan, which can be as simple as promising to take the stairs to your 14th floor office in the morning.
Be flexible. In exercise, think None-or-Something, rather than default to the All-or-Nothing thinking that can be one of the greatest barriers to physical activity. Even brief bouts of physical activity spread through the day can bring similar physical and psychological benefits. Remember this next time you want to can your workout for the day just because you can’t run the entire 6 miles.
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.
Sally Augustin, Ph.D. is a guest blogger for happier.com and a member of the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory.
Scientists have identified important links between personality (how a person behaves and thinks) and the design of places in which people are most comfortable. If you’re house hunting, you can use info about the relationship between personality and place design to streamline your search.
Read on to fine-tune the list of design parameters you share with your realtor – or keep what you learn about your place-based needs in mind as you pour through ads on your own.
Are you extraverted or introverted? Extraverts get a lot of energy from the world around themselves, while introverts focus more on their internal worlds than extraverts. Both introverts and extraverts can have many friends or few friends or be socially adept or socially awkward – the difference between extraversion and introversion really boils down to how a person gets charged up or chooses to focus.
There are place-related implications of being an extravert or an introvert that you should share with your realtor:
1. If you are an extravert, you prefer a more open floor plan in your home, if you’re an introvert, you favor a layout with more clearly defined rooms, particularly if some of those rooms can be closed off with doors.
2. Extraverts prefer to use couches for seating in living rooms and family rooms, while introverts prefer single person chairs. So, whether you are an extravert or an introvert influences your preferred furniture, and that furniture influences appropriate room shapes and sizes.
3. Introverts are much better at processing sensory information than extraverts, so they are more likely to get overwhelmed by it than extraverts. Extraverts enjoy being in spaces that are more sensorally stimulating – make an extravert happy with brightly painted walls, intense lighting, mirrored walls, textured rugs – you get the idea. Homes that extraverts have “energized” are not likely to be homes where introverts can be happy – without some remodeling.
Another aspect of personality that has a big influence on how you respond to the world around you is whether you feel more in control of your own destiny, or whether you feel that fate or external forces have more influence on the course of your life than your own actions.
4. If you feel more in control of your own destiny, you like more rectilinear sorts of spaces and objects, while if you feel that external forces control your life, you prefer more curved objects and spaces. People in the second group prefer rounded archways and curving grand staircases, while people in the first group would like those arches and staircases squared off.
5. If you feel more in control of your own destiny, you are apt to “take charge” of a space and modify it to meet your own needs, while people who feel more controlled by external forces are more likely to accept their environment as it is. If you’re the “take control of a space” type, things work out better if a place can be used in several ways (because your needs may change), while people in the other group don’t require the same flexibility – their dining room will stay a dining room, no matter what sort of hobbies they adopt and a built in china cabinet will continue to usefully serve the same function as long as they live in the house.
Some people are more territorial than others – you probably know if you’re territorial, but if you’re confused: In a public space such as a movie theater, do you tend to sit at the end of a row of chairs, even if there are other available chairs toward the middle of the row? If you do, and there aren’t extenuating circumstances – you’re not over 6 feet tall or you don’t have a broken leg – you are probably pretty territorial.
6. If you are territorial, or the people who will share the house with you are, make sure there are spaces in the house that can be claimed as individual territories. Nothing defines an individual territory as well as a door that closes, but in a pinch a window seat (particularly if it can be closed off with curtains), or a section of a room with a lower ceiling than the rest of the room, for example, can be pressed into service as territories.
Environmental sensitivity also varies from person to person.
7. If you are the person who hears the mouse scampering in the next room or who knows when the neighbors change the wattage of the bulbs in their backyard lights, you are probably environmentally sensitive. You would prefer a home that is a little more isolated than people who are not so environmentally sensitive. When you are doing something that requires concentration sensory shielding is particularly important – so it is very important that your home office be acoustically and visually separate from the main living areas of your home.
Have you ever bungee jumped? Do extreme sports intrigue you? Would you ever consider skydiving? If you answered “yes” to these questions you are what is know in the psych biz as “high in stimulus seeking.”
8. If you are a high stimulus seeker, you prefer spaces that are complex or unpredictable – you want to get a thrill out of opening your own front door.
Is it important to you to make a unique statement with your home? If you owned a VW Bug, would you want to find a really unusual flower – or something else – to put in the bud vase that comes standard with each Bug? If you reply positively to these questions, then you have a high need for uniqueness.
9. People with a high need for uniqueness need a home that is different from the conventional home, somehow, and it is best if that difference is visible from the curb.
People can also differ in the strength of the link that they feel to the natural world.
10. If you have an affinity for the natural world, make sure that the houses you visit with your realtor are surrounded by nature, and that you have a view of nature from the places in the home where you are most likely to be harried (for example, your home office).
Knowing a little bit about how personality and place experiences are related can make your next search for a place to live more efficient – and increase the odds that the new house you select will become a home.
For additional information about designing with science, contact Sally Augustin, PhD.
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.
