One example: While I'm definitely into finding ways to improve personal productivity (whether a one-day burst, or a lifetime, or things you should not do every day), probably the best way to be more productive is to just be happier. Happy people accomplish more.
Easier said than done though, right?
Actually, many changes are easy. Here are 10 science-based ways to be happier from Belle Beth Cooper, Content Crafter at Buffer, the social media management tool that lets you schedule, automate, and analyze social media updates.
Here's Beth:
1. Exercise: 7 Minutes Could Be Enough
Think exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out the 7 minute workout mentioned in The New York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.
Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it is 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 medication, exercise, or a combination of the two. The results of this study are surprising: Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels early on, 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.
You don't have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though.
Exercise can help you relax, increase your brain power, and even improve
your body image, even if you don't lose any weight.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.
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
minutes exercising and 6 × 40 minutes reading. Over both conditions,
body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image,
however, improved after exercise compared to before.
Yep: Even if your actual appearance doesn't change, how you feel about your body does change.2. Sleep More: You'll Be Less Sensitive to Negative Emotions
We know that sleep helps our body recover from the day and repair itself and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out sleep is also important for happiness.
In NutureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects 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 throughout the course of a day, researchers
studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative
emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap
became more sensitive 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.Another study tested how employees' moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire 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.3. Spend More Time With Friends/Family: Money Can't Buy You Happiness
Staying in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying.
If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too.
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.
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 men's social connections made a difference to their overall happiness:
Men's relationships at age 47, he
found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable.
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 we would if we increased the
strength of our social relationships.The Terman study, 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.
In 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 57 degrees (13.9°C), so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading outside for your 20 minutes of fresh air.The connection between productivity and temperature is another topic we've talked about more here. It's fascinating what a small change in temperature can do.
5. Help Others: 100 Hours a Year is the Magic Number
One 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. But 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.
Smiling 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. (You've seen fake smiles that don't
reach the person's eyes. Try it. Smile with just your mouth. Then smile
naturally; your eyes narrow. There's a huge difference in a fake smile
and a genuine smile.)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 reduce 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).
As opposed to actually taking a holiday, simply planning a vacation or break from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as people enjoy 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.8. Meditate: Rewire Your Brain for Happiness
Meditation 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 life.
According to 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.9. Move Closer to Work: A Short Commute is Worth More Than a Big House
Our commute to work can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to commute twice a day at least five days a week makes it unsurprising that the 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.
This 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 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 three 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.
As we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to naturally grow happier. There's still some debate over why this happens, but scientists have 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 focus their
goals on greater well being.
So if you thought getting old will make you miserable, it's likely
you'll develop a more positive outlook than you probably have now.http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/10-scientifically-proven-ways-to-be-incredibly-happy-wed.html
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