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.
At happier.com, we were pleased to hear about the new workbook and study guide: Positively Speaking. We asked coach and consultant Paul Z. Jackson, the guide’s author, to explain to us the solutions-focused approach that characterizes his work.
What is solutions-focused coaching?
One of the managers I have been coaching complained that her meetings often began (and indeed continued) on a negative note. In an atmosphere of moaning and blame, she was finding it nearly impossible to shift the conversations from such ‘problem-talk’ into discussion of what was wanted and what could be done.
We decided that she would start the next meeting with a warm-up round of introductions, with each participant invited to state one thing that they were looking forward to during the day. She tried this and reported that the meeting was transformed. It turned out that her colleagues were delighted to engage in ‘solution-talk’ – they simply needed to be nudged out of their habits and into a more constructive way of working together.
This skill of shifting conversations from problem-talk to solution-talk can save you and the people around you a great deal of time, reduce stress and generate more positive collaborations. Learn more about these skills with the Positively Speaking workbook.
Paul Z Jackson is an inspirational consultant and coach, who devises and runs training courses and development programs in strategy, leadership, teamwork, creativity and innovation.
Co-director of The Solutions Focus www.thesolutionsfocus.co.uk, Paul is a popular keynote speaker and workshop presenter at conferences around the world.
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.
People who feel isolated may spread mistrust of social connections
Staying socially connected may be just as important for public health as washing your hands and covering your cough. A new study suggests that feelings of loneliness can spread through social networks like the common cold.
“People on the edge of the network spread their loneliness to others and then cut their ties,” says Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School in Boston, a coauthor of the new study in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “It’s like the edge of a sweater: You start pulling at it and it unravels the network.”
This study is the latest in a series that Christakis and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego have conducted to see how habits and feelings move through social networks. Their earlier studies suggested that obesity, smoking and happiness are contagious.
Credit: Cacioppo et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
The new study, led by John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, found that loneliness is catching as well, possibly because lonely people don’t trust their connections and foster that mistrust in others.
Loneliness appears to be easier to catch from friends than from family, to spread more among women than men, and to be most contagious among neighbors who live within a mile of each other. The study also found that loneliness can spread to three degrees of separation, as in the studies of obesity, smoking and happiness. One lonely friend makes you 40 to 65 percent more likely to be lonely, but a lonely friend-of-a-friend increases your chances of loneliness by 14 to 36 percent. A friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend adds between 6 and 26 percent, the study suggests.
Not all networks researchers are convinced. Jason Fletcher of the Yale School of Public Health says that the studies’ controls are not good enough to eliminate other explanations, like environmental influences or the tendency of similar people to befriend each other. Fletcher has published a study (in the same issue of the British Medical Journal that reported that happiness is contagious) showing that acne, headaches and height also appear to spread through networks even though they are not likely to be transmitted socially.
“We’re on the side that [social contagion] exists — we’re not naysayers,” Fletcher says. “We just think the evidence isn’t clear enough on many of the outcomes.”
Despite its shortcomings, some researchers are enthusiastic about the study.
“I think this is a groundbreaking paper in loneliness literature,” says Dan Perlman, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who specializes in loneliness. “Maybe there are people who are skeptical, but this is important work. I think that it should get a pat on the back.”
Christakis and Fowler examined data from a long-term health study based in Framingham, Mass., a small town where many of the study’s participants knew each other. The Framingham study followed thousands of people over 60 years, keeping track of physical and mental heath, habits and diet.
Each participant also named friends, relatives and neighbors who might know where they would be in two years, when it was time for the next exam. From this information, Christakis and Fowler reconstructed the social network of Framingham, including more than 12,000 ties between 5,124 people. The researchers plotted how reported loneliness, measured via a diagnostic test for depression, changed over time.
The results indicate that lonely people tend to move to the peripheries of social networks. But first, lonely people transmit their feeling of isolation to friends and neighbors.
Feeling lonely doesn’t mean you have no connections, Cacioppo says. It only means those connections aren’t satisfying enough. Loneliness can start as a sense that the world is hostile, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Loneliness causes people to be alert for social threats,” Cacioppo says. “You engage in more self-protective behavior, which is paradoxically self-defeating.” Lonely people can become standoffish and eventually withdraw from their social networks, leaving their former friends less well-connected and more likely to mistrust the world themselves.
Because loneliness is implicated in health problems from Alzheimer’s to heart disease, Cacioppo says, reconnecting to those who have fallen off the network may be vital for public health.
Angie LeVan is a resilience coach, positive psychology consultant and an associate of Positive Psychology Services, LLC. Angie has studied the science of well-being in the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program at University of Pennsylvania, and she is a blogger on the topic of resilience for psychologytoday.com. See her profile in our practitioner directory.
Stress has a bad, bad rap – fair criticism or the product of paranoia? Or perhaps both? While chronic stress can definitely wreak havoc on our minds and bodies, research shows that some stress is actually healthy. Unfortunately, these days, we do everything we can to either avoid it or mute it – from spa treatments to stress management programs to a frosty cold beer. While I certainly agree that managing stress is a smart and useful tactic, I also believe that by going to great to great lengths to avoid it, we’re actually doing ourselves a great disservice. We may be stunting our opportunities for growth. Even when we’re faced with ‘bad’ stress, we have healthy, protective mechanisms for coping with it. In fact, we have the ability to thrive despite and even because of challenge.
In the world of academics, thriving is “characterized by the individual displaying less reactivity when faced with stressors, and resulting in a faster recovery or consistently higher level of functioning”. To the rest of us, thriving is Sweaty Magic – the ability to spin hardship, whether unexpected adversity or self-imposed challenge, into positive growth! But how does one do that, you ask? Interestingly enough, there are many research-supported tricks of the trade for thriving. Above all, Thrivers are masters of challenge and change and grow through challenge and hardship. They know how to lean into stress, how to approach it, relying on their self-resources! Here are a few of the tricks Thrivers use to turn adversity, hardship and challenge into gold-medal value!
1. Thrivers use Positive Illusions
Findings in social cognition research indicate that there are three different types of positive illusions people use towards growth: 1) self-enhancement; 2) unrealistic optimism; and 3) an exaggerated perception of personal control. Researcher Shelly Taylor and colleagues “suggest that the ability to maintain positive illusions provides the individual with reserve resources” for managing everyday stressors as well as in helping people cope with extremely stressful circumstances. According to these psychologists, positive illusions act as buffers and may even help people find meaning, which may later lead to positive growth.
2. Thrivers use Positive Reinterpretation – they look for something good in what has or is happening. For example, when Dan lost his job this past May, he decided to look at it as an opportunity to reassess his career path as well as his life values. In doing so, Dan found a new job he truly enjoys, and he now has more time to spend with his family.
3. Thrivers have a sense of Self-Efficacy (the psychological phenomenon – “I think I can”) – they believe they are capable of handling stressful situations, whether positive or negative, and they also believe that they can succeed in many different areas of life. Hence, the old adage “If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right” holds more than a grain of truth, especially when it comes to thriving.
Not only are these tricks vital for growing through hardship, they’re also crucial to achieving your best life through overcoming obstacles in achieving goals and cultivating positive change.
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.
Emiliya Zhivotovskaya is a member of the happier.com Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. “Using a scientifically based and integrative approach (positive psychology, neurology, yoga and alternative therapies) to enable the Mind, Body, Spirit and Will to flourish.”
It’s the day before Thanksgiving, I get on the phone with my weekly client. She’s feeling guilty that she’s not feeling grateful. She met a woman the night prior whose son was handicapped and was able to walk a little bit. Her outpouring of gratitude, made my client feel worse about her depleted attitude of gratitude. She said she couldn’t even think of what she was grateful for.
When I encouraged her to make her list, she immediately asked if she could make her “not grateful for” list. I said, “Of course.” Positive psychology is not about solely focusing on positive emotions and denying the negative. Here is the exercise that I did with my client that enabled us to work through the negative events she was facing and honor the positive.
- We made two lists: 1) Things she is grateful for in her life and 2) Things she is NOT grateful for in her life.
- She tallied both lists. She had 12 things we was grateful for and 13 things she was not grateful for.
Keeping Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build Theory in mind, I knew that my client needed to be above a ratio of 3 positive to every 1 negative emotion in order to flourish or feel better about her life. This required increasing her gratitude list.
- I asked her to go back to the list of things she was grateful for and find 24 more things. I explained that anything could be a source of gratitude; it was just a matter of shifting perspectives. At first it was difficult for her, but quickly gratitude for the garbage man, memories of Lake George and knowing that her dog has a good new home, made it to the list.
- Then we addressed the “NOT grateful for list.” One by one we looked at the things that essentially were not working in her life and reframed them as things that she was wanting. So she was, “not grateful for her friends all starting to move out of the neighborhood.” This discontent alludes to her “wanting strong connections to friends who live nearby.” Her feeling not grateful for her son treating her rudely indicates her strong desire to have a respectful and communicative relationship with her children.
- I asked her to read back to me her 36 Gratitudes and 13 Wants list.
In my practice, measuring the effectiveness of my work with clients is important. Prior to the start of this exercise I asked her to rate her positive mood on a scale of 1-10 (1 being dismal and 10 being highly positive). She rated herself at a 3 or 4. At the end of this exercise, she gave herself a 5.
Again, I was not trying to create a positive-disillusion in a situation. I was honoring where my client was and using basic tenets of positive psychology to find the area of her life where did have control over, and work there.
After this exercise, she remembered there was a writing class going on in a week that she wanted to register for. Without my prompting, she committed to registering for it as soon as we got off the phone. She was far from being in “peppy land”. However, she had stepped out of her negative rut and seemed to have a handle on some of the negative circumstances of her life.
Negative emotions are beautiful because they alert us to what we are wanting. Reframing “not grateful for lists” in the form of wants enables us creatively problem solve what to do about them. Use this exercise to take control of your reality and your thanks this thanksgiving.
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.
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.
