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Wednesday, June 25, 2008Top Ten Stimuli to Exercise Your Body
This article is © 2009 PositivePsychologyNews.com - Marie-Josee Salvas Shaar
Fields as diverse as kinesiology, psychology, physiology, medicine, and neuroscience assert that physical activity helps prevent and treat mental health problems, increases subjective well-being, reduces stress, boosts self-esteem, sharpens thinking and improves overall quality of life. For most of us however, fear of loss is a stronger motivator than the attraction of gain. When it comes to undertaking exercise, the fear of “losing” time, experiencing initial low self-efficacy and dreading physical effort and discomfort may all weigh heavier than the perspective of feeling better, losing weight, and enjoying increased energy. That’s why mustering the motivation to regularly put on one’s sneakers seems an insurmountable challenge for so many.
So if I tell you that exercise has also been found to stimulate brain cell growth, I expect non-exercisers to maintain the status quo. However, if I say that recent progress in the field of neurobiology has found that both physical inactivity and stress shrivel and whither our brain – yes, not exercising actually speeds up aging and decreases the ability of your CPU - are you now tempted to go push a few pounds of iron?
The choice is yours. Usually, though, the difficulty resides not in understanding why we should exercise, but in finding and maintaining the motivation to get it done. If you need extra help committing to an exercise routine, here are my top 10 recommendations, based on positive psychology research, to help you overcome the challenge:
1. Sleep enough and eat nutritiously. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate that sleeping enough and eating nutritious foods including complex carbohydrates that give pre-exercise energy are clearly part of the equation.
2. Get into a good mood. Sonja Lyubomirsky describes that happy moods help us be more productive, more active, healthier and more resilient. These are all ingredients that facilitate exercising. Before you jump in your sneakers, make sure to add a skip into your step by listening to upbeat music or calling your funniest friend.
3. Other people matter, says Christopher Peterson. Those who are new to exercise do better when accompanied by a training buddy. My recommendation here is to find more than one: if your usual partner can’t make it tonight, there’s somebody else to keep you motivated and accountable!
4. Use your strengths, states Tom Rath. High on hope? Reach for small, achievable goals that will boost your self-efficacy. Known by your friends for leadership? Focus on the example you are setting for your loved ones. Love to learn? Investigate a new exercise at each visit to the gym. There are endless ways to express your strengths via exercise.
5. Enjoy the burn. I observe that many newcomers to the gym only make a half-hearted effort, hardly break a sweat, and quickly get discouraged because they don’t feel the benefits they signed up for. Loehr & Schwartz write that unless your doctor advised otherwise, don’t be afraid to feel your heart rate go up and learn to love the burn in your muscles. Just like some people enjoy the burn of spicy foods and others don’t, it’s mainly a question of choice.
6. Involve your mind. Many people say that training is too repetitive and therefore boring. Keep learning. Once you learn more about all the training areas (cardiovascular, endurance, strength, and flexibility), you’ll be stimulated to find the most effective exercise combinations.
7. Measure. As Chris Peterson puts it: “What is valued gets measured, but what is measured also gets valued.” Start measuring your training. Mark a calendar with your workout days on it. Keep a journal of your training routine. Build a chart showing your progress. Measure whatever works for you, but keep track of what gets done and congratulate yourself when you are doing well.
8. Get in flow. Foster flow by breaking down each session into smaller episodes, matching the challenge to your skill set, regularly assessing your progress, and applying your full concentration to the activity, suggests Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. For example, if you aim to run a total three miles, rather than worry about the full distance, think of it as three times one mile and try to achieve your personal best on each.
9. Use the peak-end rule. Barry Schwartz describes that we remember how much we like an event by how much we liked its peak and its end. By managing your routines so you love their end, you are more likely to remember your sessions favorably and therefore to repeat the experience.
10. Get good mind fuel after exercise. Exercise facilitates brain cell growth, shows John Ratey, and while your muscles are recuperating after the effort, your brain is actively busy building new synapses. What you do post-exercise is therefore essential to reaping the full benefits of your activity. Capitalize on how potent the next hour is by filling up on what you deem worthwhile – and avoiding what is not.
Next time you’re about to turn on your TV, take a minute to review this list and find something to get you into your gym gear. Most of the excuses for why we don’t exercise - the need to relax, the lack of energy, or the desire to put our children first - are actually reasons why we should.
In the end, if none of what I’ve written here nor anything you’ve ever heard about exercise sufficed to convince you to try it out, I’d like to suggest you give the following a quick thought: “The difference between tenacity and stubbornness is that one comes from a strong will and the other from a strong won’t.” – Anonymous.
Enjoy your workout!
Images: Workout stamp, Hot sauce, TV set image.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperPerennial.
Loehr, J. & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Free Press: New York. Quote used above: pp. 3-5.
Lyubormisky, S. (2007) The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York: The Penguin Press.
Peterson, C. (2006). Lecture prepared for MAPP students, University of Pennsylvania.
Ratey, J. (2008). Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Rath, T. (2008). Lecture prepared for MAPP students, University of Pennsylvania.
Posted By: Marie-Josée Salvas @ 8:41:47 AMTop
Show All » FULL ARTICLES » Balance & Fulfillment
Wednesday, June 25, 2008Greatness over Busyness
This article is © 2008 PositivePsychologyNews.com - Marie-Josee Salvas Shaar
On the outside, busy seems to rhyme with happy. Busy people seem more successful, needed and important. Busyness is, after all, serious business!
Yet on the inside, busy is often synonym of misery. We make it through the day, race though the week, shorten our night’s sleep, miss our workout, and finish off what is left on our to-do list over the weekend. We often describe our workloads with adjectives like “crazy” and expressions like “no time to breathe.” Before we realize it, our lives pass us by and we forget to verify whether what we are doing makes us into the person we want to be.
Also interesting to note, we discuss time in very financial terms - we save it, spend it, waste it, and never have enough of it! Time is now seen as a non-renewable resource, and as such, it is scarce and precious.
But is time really our most precious resource? When facing increasing demand, given time is limited, our best response is to augment capacity. Therefore, disposable energy - not time - is our most precious resource.
Loehr and Schwartz, authors of bestseller The Power of Full Engagement, suggest a new and interesting paradigm. Rather than go through life as if it were a marathon, they recommend we approach it as a series of sprints. The focus shifts from managing our time more efficiently (most of us are already proficient at it with fancy blackberries and ever-shorter texting strategies!) to managing our energy more effectively.
In concrete terms, the skillful management of energy means avoiding both over and under-use.
In an economy driven by the capacity of its workers to innovate, rather than making our mind the sole driver of performance, their model recognizes that energy comes from four related sources: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Neglecting one source will have repercussions on the others, as we now know not only from personal experience, but also from empirical research.
While this equilibrium seems very much intuitive, it uncovers the less obvious conclusion that constant busyness impedes greatness.
Building Competence
To build higher competence, we need to push beyond our usual limits, thus setting them further back. Following the effort, rest is necessary not only for our subjective wellbeing, but also for our body and brain to process and register that a new boundary was established. In this model, downtime is not an unproductive indulgence, but a necessary step that prepares us for the next effort.
This technique works for your workouts – it is the exact technique professional athletes of many disciplines have used for years and years. Ask any personal trainer and you’ll hear all about the benefits of interval training and periodization. The method is equally effective at the office – it is no wonder most people are most productive in the morning (following a real period of rest), or getting back from a vacation.
This new approach certainly deserves consideration. If your small voice inside is begging you for a rest, I suggest you pay attention. You will engage and perform better after recovery.
We are fascinated but the concept of peak performance, but we easily forget that by definition, between two peaks, there is necessarily a valley… Performance, health and happiness are all grounded in the skillful management of energy. Let’s learn to honor intervals of rest; it will pay back big time!
References:
Boniwell, I. (2006). Positive Psychology in a Nutshell. London: PWBC.
Loehr, J. & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Free Press: New York.
Posted By: Marie-Josée Salvas @ 8:40:27 AM
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