Browsing the archives for the Habits category.
Subscribe via RSS or e-mail      


Free Online E-mail to Help You Keep a Clean Inbox

Habits

Back in February I posted the article “How I’m Keeping My E-mail Inbox Empty” after applying many of the things I’ve learned in researching organization and self-motivation, particularly David Allen’s excellent book Getting Things Done. Since then I’ve had no trouble keeping my inbox empty, especially with tricks I learned since (see My Empty E-mail Inbox, 10 Weeks Later), except that, since I often read and answer e-mail on the go, I haven’t been able to use desktop e-mail applications I used to use like Outlook and Apple Mail. The problem with using these is that if I look at the same e-mail account with more than one system, I have repeat all my organization and inbox cleaning in every one of those–which means that it just won’t get done. Who wants to get home from a trip, for instance, and have to reorganize two hundred e-mails that were already organized on a laptop while away?

Failed (and not-so-failed) free e-mail options

I’d mentioned I was using a Web-based e-mail application provided by my ISP, but I’ve been disappointed to find that this application, although it has most of the features I want, is buggy and sometimes intolerably slow. So I’ve been searching for a replacement program I could use, something freely available on the Web that I could also recommend to my readers here.

[Added after the original post: If you’re interested in using GMail with this approach, please see the comments, where D. Moonfire offers a potential solution to the problem I’m about to describe.]

You’d think I’d go with GMail, since it’s robust and efficient and feature-packed, but GMail is fundamentally unsuited to the task of keeping an empty inbox, because it doesn’t use folders: instead, it uses tags and categories. Rather than moving something off into a folder, you tag it with the folder name. This seems handy, and can be, and it also allows a single message to be categorized in more than one way, but since nothing can ever be moved out of the inbox, that means that there is no way to reap the organizational and psychological benefits of a clean inbox with GMail at all. Instead of facilitating a clean inbox, it assumes you’ll never be able to keep your inbox organized and doesn’t even provide the means to manage it. If it were a human being, we’d call it an Enabler, which in this case is not a good thing.

There may be ways around this in GMail; I’ll present them if I come across them.

One that works: Hotmail
The system I found that does work and that is free to all comers is Hotmail, a.k.a. Microsoft Live Mail. If you despise all things Microsoft, of course, this won’t appeal to you, but otherwise it does the job fairly well. You can set up Hotmail to receive e-mail from other accounts and can organize all your incoming e-mail into folders.  They even recently added a feature that gives you a little congratulatory message if you empty out your inbox (though I have a feeling this isn’t a message very many people see.) Hotmail is easy to use, has drag-and-drop functionality, and is very responsive.

There are a couple of drawbacks. One is that Hotmail doesn’t allow subfolders, so I can’t make categories out of my folders and collapse them when I don’t need them. It also doesn’t allow very long folder names. This is inconvenient, but I’ve worked around it by naming folders things like Read_offers instead of having an “offers” folder within my “read” (as in “already read”) folder. I also had to place underscore symbols at the beginning of the names of my utility folders so that they would be listed together at the talk, as Hotmail always shows folders alphabetically.

The other drawback is that it often seems to take about 10 minutes (very roughly) for an e-mail to arrive from an external e-mail account. Normally this doesn’t matter much, but it’s a big obstacle if you’re having a semi-real-time e-mail conversation with someone, if someone sends you something while talking with you on the phone, or if the correspondence is time-sensitive. This delay doesn’t occur with the free account you get from Hotmail itself, though.

So while I can’t recommend Hotmail wholeheartedly, I can say that for the month-and-a-half or so I’ve used it, administrating my e-mail has been easier than it ever has been before because Hotmail supports the “empty inbox” approach very well.

Any readers who have recommendations of other free or very affordable Web-based e-mail systems they would recommend for this purpose are very much encouraged to mention them in comments.

http://www.lucreid.com/?p=1430
2 Comments

Immediate Willpower?

Habits

I’ve often pictured a sudden mental transformation, fantasized that some particular idea would click into place and immediately, some behavior I’d been wanting to change for a long time would change without any further great effort required from me. Can willpower really work that way?

Generally speaking, the answer is no. Habits are ingrained over a long period of time: neural connections in our brains don’t change in large ways all of a sudden except in the case of brain damage. Habits reflect repeatedly strengthened neural connections–basically, we’ve done something over and over so much that it becomes hardly any effort to keep doing it.

There are exceptions, but they’re special cases. For instance, if I go to the doctor and find out that I will drop dead the next time I have a bite of ice cream (fortunately, not a very likely diagnosis), then I can pretty much guarantee you I will never have a bite of ice cream again. But these kinds of changes in behavior are fueled by drastic, unavoidable consequences based on clear-cut behaviors. Most goals don’t fit that description.

But even though we usually can’t experience immediate habit change, we can experience immediate behavior change. If we adopt tactics that help us be mindful of what we’re doing and that keep us in close touch with the consequences, we can see progress right away. While this isn’t the kind of dramatic change many of us would like, it does yield immediate benefits and lead to the end we have in mind, even as it gets easier and easier over time to repeat the good acts we’re learning.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

2 Comments

18 Ways to Get a Good Night’s Sleep

Habits

Author and fellow Codex member Elaine Isaak posed this question:

So as I was tossing and turning last  night, it occured to me that the one area where I’m not sure I *can* effectively apply my willpower is in getting a good night’s sleep.  I can’t WILL myself to sleep the way I might will myself to get up on time to start writing or to go to the gym.  I wondered if you have come across any research that tackles this, or have any tools to suggest?

I have to agree with Elaine on not being able to will ourselves to sleep by sheer determination, but fortunately I do know of a number of ways to get to sleep and to sleep better, based on research. Understanding that serious problems with insomnia are worth seeing a doctor about and that these recommendations are not professional medical or psychological advice … here they are:

Long-Term Habits

1. Plan your schedule so that you can get to sleep at a decent hour and still be able to wake up if you want to. If there are things you need to do before going to bed, do them earlier in the evening to make sure they don’t push your bedtime back.

2. Figure out how much sleep you actually need by keeping track of how much sleep you’re getting each day and whether that turned out to be enough. This may change over time, or under different circumstances (such as in stressful periods or with more or less exercise).

3. Get on a steady schedule with your sleeping hours. Staying up late on weekends or going to bed at different times every night, for instance, can sometims interfere with your body’s attempts to establish a natural sleep schedule.

4. You may need to make your bed an environment you associate mainly with sleeping (and, if appropriate, sex). Take activities like reading, using a laptop computer, or watching TV out of bed if your bed doesn’t feel like a place that naturally relaxes you.

5. On mornings when you don’t have to get up right away, if any, don’t sleep in for long periods, as this may tend to muck with your ability to sleep that night. More sleep isn’t always better.

6. Take steps to make sure you have the physical comfort you need, to the best of your ability: a firm, comfortable mattress; good ventilation; a comfortable temperature; etc. For me, one of the most relaxing features of my bedroom in summer is a fan pointed at the bed. You may also find it more comfortable to use a non-illuminated bedroom clock, although this is admittedly inconvenient if you are up in the middle of the night and want to know what time it is.

Daily Habits

7. Watch out for caffeine and consider cutting it out for a little while if you’re having sleep problems. Remember that in addition to regular coffee, most sodas, black/green/white tea, and chocolate contain caffeine, and that even decaf coffee and decaf tea contain some caffeine–just a reduced amount. Other stimulants to be careful of include ginseng and nicotine.

8. Exercise during the day! Be active! Regular exercise contributes to very good sleep.

9. Watch out for alcohol: while it can help you fall asleep more quickly, it also can cause sleep problems. According to MayoClinic.com, “it prevents deeper stages of sleep and often causes you to awaken in the middle of the night.”

10. Don’t eat or drink a lot late in the evening. Either can cause physical discomfort that keeps you up at night or that can interrupt an otherwise sound sleep.

Before bed

11. Stretch, either doing yoga or basic stretching techniques. Stretching will release tension and improve blood flow.

12. Before bed, steer clear of things that might stir you up, like watching television, reading a suspenseful novel, or taking on stressful tasks. Relaxing activities will help settle you down so that you can sleep more easily. These can even include things like picking up and cleaning around the house to set things in order, or gathering things you’ll need the next day. The relative mindlessness of these tasks, the mild physical activity, and the way this prevents you from having to worry about getting things done in the morning are all conducive to good sleep.

13. Consider meditation, for instance body scan meditation, in which you focus your attention on each part of your body in turn and allow it to relax. Meditation can help still mental chatter and create a serene state of mind.

14. Ask a romantic partner, family member, or friend to give you a massage in the evening. This is an excellent means to rope someone into giving you a free massage, so don’t miss out.

In the moment

15. If you find yourself kept up by specific worries or general anxiety, try idea repair, journaling, or talking things out with someone who cares about how you’re doing.

16. Soft earplugs are great if you’re having trouble with noise. There’s a picture of the kind I like in this post.

17. If you’re obsessing about making yourself sleep, you may want to get out of bed, go sit on the couch, and read a book or listen to music or watch a movie that you’ve already seen, turned down low. These kinds of activities can engage your attention in a more relaxed way that may allow you to fall asleep more easily. Just make sure to have a comfortable couch.

18. In bed, listen to low music or a relaxation CD. Like the tactics mentioned in the previous item, this can help relax you when your mind is overstimulated.

Photo by babblingdweeb

No Comments

How Are Your Friends’ Habits Changing You?

Habits

One of the books I’m reading at the moment is  Tom Rath and Jim Harter’s Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, which summarizes the findings of ongoing research by Gallup over a number of years on the subject of wellbeing and happiness. In the section on social wellbeing, Rath and Harter point out an important influence on our lives that’s often ignored: our friends’ habits.

Habits of friends have a profound effect on us, often even more than habits of parents or spouses. For example, when I was much younger (and more foolish), I smoked, though not heavily. When I moved to a new town where I’d be spending time constantly with friends who didn’t smoke–and who didn’t like smoking–I stopped. I literally smoked right up until the day I moved, then quit cold turkey and never picked up the habit again.

There are some useful ideas that emerge from understanding the power of friends’ habits, ones that impact our own self-motivation and give us more tools to help people who are close to us.

1. Buddying up makes habit change easier
Working together with a friend who wants to make some of the same improvements you do helps encourage habit change in at least three ways: first, any kind of social support makes us more likely to follow through with the changes we want to make in our lives. Second, any gains our friends makes help encourage and influence our own improvements. And third, changing habits together with someone whose company is enjoyable makes the change and the new habits more attractive, which makes it easier for the new behavior to become permanent.

2. Improvements in your life can help improve your friends’ lives
If you want to help make your friends’ lives happier, more successful, healthier, or more fulfilling, one of the best possible things you can do is acquire a good habit yourself. The change in you has a good chance of being noticed and admired by your friends, and it’s possible some of them will make improvements in their own lives inspired by your example. Additionally, making a positive change in part for the benefit of friends offers you an additional, very meaningful kind of inspiration to succeed.

3. Pick your friends carefully
If you spend time with people who are stuck and unhappy with their lives or who have bad habits you don’t want to pick up, your own quality of life is more likely to worsen unless you have so much support from other parts of your life that you’re a much stronger influence on your friends than they are on you.

Simply being aware of the impact friends can have on our habits and wellbeing can help bring out problems that were hidden and offer new possibilities for making things better.

Photo provided by freeparking

No Comments

How to Break a Bad Habit

Habits

Bunnies that are bad to the bone

In a recent article, I wrote about whether good habits make bad habits go away. The verdict was that they can sometimes, but only if they directly conflict with a bad habit. If the bad habit can coexist with the good habit, the good habit alone won’t be enough to get rid of the bad one. For example, if a newer Taekwondo student learns to bring the knee far up before kicking (a good habit), that won’t prevent bending the head forward (a bad habit) with every kick.

How bad habits are defeated
Fortunately, knowing how good habits and bad habits interact tells us what we need to do to get rid of bad habits. Unfortunately, it takes some work. But this isn’t any worse than what we already knew: if changing habits were easy, you and I wouldn’t have any trouble with it, and this kind of article wouldn’t be necessary.

The essential problem with getting rid of a bad habit is that our brains don’t seem to have any mechanism for not doing things except to do something else. That kind of makes sense when we look at it carefully, for instance by comparison with the way our bodies work. We don’t have muscles in our body for “not lying down”–but we do have muscles that can pull us into a standing or sitting position. The only way we have to not lie down is to do something other than lying down.

To put it another way, focusing on “not” doing something won’t get us anywhere: we have to instead focus our efforts on doing something else that prevents the behavior we don’t want. If a person has a problem with shouting when they’re upset, the job isn’t to “not shout” but rather to find something else that will interfere with the shouting, like speaking very softly or counting to ten. As simple as these kinds of strategies are, they prevent us from doing the thing we don’t want to do, and as specific behaviors they can eventually turn into good or neutral habits that can quash the habits we want to get rid of.

Consistently doing something else
The problem, then, is in getting us to consistently do the good habits. Just doing them every once in a while isn’t going to change anything: as I talk about in How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit?, research suggests that we have to do something very consistently over many days in order to turn it into a habit. In order for replacement behaviors to work, they have to be available to us all the time, and we have to focus on them carefully. And habits being habits, our bad habits are often going to be easier to follow than the replacement behaviors we want to use: sometimes a person will find it hard to count to ten instead of shouting if he’s used to shouting.

There are two ways to help skew things in favor of the replacement behaviors. In an article about how habits and goals relate to each other, Wendy Wood and David T. Neal of Duke University talk about the ways automatic behaviors kick in. One is direct, when a person responds to the sight of a Dunkin Donuts store by going in and buying a cruller because they’re used to buying a cruller when they pass Dunkin Donuts. The other is based on expected rewards, when a person imagines how pleasant it would be to eat a cruller and goes to Dunkin Donuts to get one out of desire for that sensation.

Focusing on the near-term payoff
So we can use expected rewards to help fight bad habits. If someone gets a little thrill of accomplishment by purposely walking by a Dunkin Donuts instead of going in, then that focusing attention on that thrill can activate the “expected rewards” system and reinforce the new behavior we want. Finding the right reward is the hardest thing about this technique. The reward has to be real (a gold star in a notebook isn’t going to be motivating unless you really love gold stars), something that you can consistently get, and to not start other bad habits. For instance, a student who rewards herself with a chocolate bar every time she sits down to study may acquire a good study habit at the same time as a bad chocolate-snarfing habit.

This is why, as discussed in this post, women who concentrated on the immediate feelings of well-being they got from a workout were better at keeping at an exercise habit than women who concentrated on their long-term goals. Long-term goals are important in their place, but in themselves they provide very little motivation: they need to be aided by tools like visualization.

Skipping bad behavior through visualization
The second way to shore up anti-bad behavior is though picturing a different behavior, because it appears that we are much more likely to perform behaviors that we picture mentally; William James called this “ideomotor” behavior. For example, a short time ago I was unexpectedly hungry, and it wasn’t time to eat yet. Not wanting to lend any strength to a past habit of eating between meals, I instead pictured myself sitting down and writing this post, which I started doing, and which has kept my attention long enough to get past the problem.

Photo by turbojoe (away)

2 Comments

My Empty E-mail Inbox, 10 Weeks Later

Habits

Ten weeks ago I posted the article “How I’m Keeping My Inbox Empty,” in which I described a new strategy I was taking to keep on top of all of my e-mail and keep my inbox completely clear. Some of the key points of my approach, which owed much to Dave Allen and his book Getting Things Done, were

  • Make a set of special-purpose folders for e-mails that need follow-up, things to read, general information to keep, etc.
  • Make tasks out of any e-mails that cause you to need to do tasks and put those tasks in a task management system
  • If you can answer or deal with an e-mail within about two minutes, handle it immediately
  • Look at everything that comes in as it comes in. Don’t put off any e-mails to consider later. If it’s going to take a while to respond, put the e-mails in your Reply/Act folder.
  • Visit your Reply/Act folder often and deal with e-mails there, oldest first.

Of course there’s more to it (see the original post), but those are some highlights.

Ten weeks after I started, do I still have an empty inbox? Actually, yes! And this pertains to both a personal e-mail setup I have and a work-related one: the system has been working in both places equally well.

And have my inboxes been empty the whole time, or have I had to redo the cleanup? Amazingly, the system has worked consistently for me so far: I’ve never had to duplicate my initial effort (which wasn’t even so difficult: I outline how to pretty rapidly establish a clean inbox in the original post) and have had a clean inbox the whole time.

Have there been any unexpected snags? Yes, one: I sometimes get in the habit of watching my inbox like a hawk but neglecting my reply/act folder, which really needs to be addressed often. In online gamer slang (from my book Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures), I’m “camping the spawn point,” looking for monsters where they appear instead of going after the ones that are already in place. But once I realized I was doing this, I began working harder at going back to that reply/act folder, and I’ve seen better results since. What’s wonderful is that even with that problem, I was being much, much more responsive to e-mails than I had ever been before.

Have you tried out this method of keeping a clean inbox? If so, I’d love to hear how it went for you in comments.

Photo by mek22

No Comments

Compulsively Checking E-mail and Going to Bed Late: Where Unintentional Habits Come From

Habits

You may be in charge of how often you check your e-mail: it may be that you can stay away from it for days at a time, that you don’t check it on vacation, and that if you’re at a computer doing something else, you never look at it every five minutes just to see whether something new has shown up. Many of us, however, are in a different boat–if not with e-mail, then regularly going to bed later than intended (even if the last wakeful hour of the day was spent just marking time), or with watching the news every night, or with having a cup of tea every afternoon at four (I’m not looking at you, The United Kingdom; I’m just saying).

Whether we think of these kinds of behaviors as compulsions, bad habits, or routine, they have a few things in common: they seem to appear by themselves without our ever choosing them; they are often counter-productive (well, maybe not the tea); and they’re not easy to get rid of.

But these habits aren’t such a mystery, because we acquire habits in the same way whether they help us or hurt us, whether they’re desired or accidental: we repeat a behavior over and over for a reason until we naturally start doing it automatically even when we don’t have a reason.

Constantly checking e-mail is a good example: this kind of habit can easily develop when there’s important information coming through e-mail that you’re eager to see. I know that every time I’ve had a writing success (when I won the Writers of the Future contest, when my book Talk the Talk sold, etc.) or especially was hoping for a writing success (waiting for a response on a short story, waiting to hear back from a publisher about a novel) I’ve tended to check my e-mail over and over on the off chance that some time in the last five minutes, the hoped-for news had come: the book had sold, the contest was won, the agent is excited about working with me. And having a number of kinds of things like that over the years, I did this repeated checking long enough, often enough, and consistently enough that now for me, checking my e-mail is a little bit like eating: if I go too long without doing it, I start feeling antsy.

The exact same process applies to staying up late at night, or playing video games when you arrive home from work or school, or watching the news every evening regardless of whether it’s really making your life better to do so: any period where you have a powerful reason to do the thing over and over can birth a long-term habit that doesn’t need a reason. The same steps even apply to addiction in some ways, although there are also physiological factors when we’re talking about substance abuse.

Some of these (non-substance abuse) habits are neutral or helpful, others not so much. If you want to ditch a habit you never meant to pick up in the first place, the process is simple in a sense, though it takes attention, effort, and thought: you interrupt the repeated behavior long enough to weaken the habit. In order to do this, it’s helpful to find some non-habit-forming or constructive alternative, because it’s difficult not to do something you’re used to, but much easier to do something else–even if you’re not used to the something else. This is why people who are trying to quit cigarettes chew gum and why people who are trying to quit alcohol drink coffee at AA meetings.

As to whether constantly checking e-mail is one of the bad habits or one of the neutral ones–well, I would answer that, but I have to go check my e-mail.

Photo by CarbonNYC

No Comments

Shouldn’t We Just Do What Comes Naturally?

Habits

Last week I was helping teach a newer student at Taekwondo class, and was showing her a stance she hadn’t done before, in which the body faces in one direction and the feet point in two other directions. “If it feels weird,” I found myself saying, “then you’re doing it right.”

There’s a reason for this: the muscles that help a person stand like that aren’t ones that get much use, so it takes some time and some practice before the new position becomes comfortable. But this stance is very useful in Taekwondo, and what feels weird at first gradually becomes comfortable and habitual.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve often heard advice like “just listen to your body,” with the assumption that if we just do what comes “naturally,” we’ll get the best possible result. And there are advantages to that kind of approach sometimes. First mindfulness and self-knowledge are key components of self-motivation. And second, if nothing gets in the way, often our bodies send us useful signals.

But there’s also a serious problem with just doing what comes naturally: what feels “natural” to us is a combination of instinct plus habit, and habit can transform all kinds of behaviors. Our eating cycles, our romantic preferences, the way we do our work and interact with other people, and pretty much every other complex behavior we have is built on natural inclinations, but only under layers and layers of past experiences and accustomed behaviors.

This is due to our “neural plasticity,” which means that the brain is constantly rewiring itself so that repeated behaviors and experiences feel more and more natural and come more and more easily. This means that if I eat doughnuts every morning, eating doughnuts is likely to start feeling very comfortable, normal, and necessary for me–even if it’s completely out of synch with what my body actually needs. And if I get used to taking a run every day after work, then that will get increasingly easier and more comfortable. The same is true for returning phone calls, doing homework, getting into arguments, watching TV, meditating, or any other good, bad, or netural habit. How long will that take for a habit to form? According to this study, it varies a lot, but something that’s done daily will be likely to turn into a habit some time between 1 and 7 months after we start. (If it’s not done daily, it will take much, much longer.)

So if we want to change a behavior, to redefine what comes naturally, there are two key steps we can take.

1. Work out the broken ideas we might have that are getting in our way, a process cognitive psychologists call “cognitive restructuring,” and

2. Deliberately set up and practice behaviors that feel weird at first.

Photo by crowolf

No Comments

How to Form a Habit: It’s Like Training a Friendly Idiot

Habits

Ah, brains: so mysterious, complicated, and powerful, and yet so inclined to tell us to sit on the couch and eat doughnuts instead of doing the dishes or working out. What’s with these things, anyway?

There’s a group of neurons deep in the heart of the brain called the basal ganglia, and they’re involved in some important functions like movement and habit formation. How does the habit formation part work? Kind of a like a big, stupid, friendly guy, who’s only too willing to help but needs to be shown what to do over and over. And over. And over again. You get the idea.

So if I’m out here wanting to develop a habit of remembering someone’s name the first time it’s said by always repeating it and using a mnemonic, and if I try that once or twice, the basal ganglia–our big friend–are going to be staring at me dully, wondering exactly what I’m getting at. But if I stay aware with post-it notes or constant vigilance or a string tied around my finger, and if I keep at it, eventually he’ll get a glimmer of understanding in his eye (though it obviously the basal ganglia don’t really have eyes–that would be creepy) and try to follow along, hesitantly and with some confusion. And if I keep introducing myself to enough new people (perhaps volunteering at the membership table of a stamp collecting convention, if that’s what it takes), and remember to always say the name over silently and come up with a mnemonic, then he begins to get in the groove and really starts to learn to do what I’m doing.

But then let’s say I’m tired after the stamp collecting convention. I go to a diner for a nice tomato sandwich, and when the waitress introduces herself as Evangeline, I’m just too tired to memorize her name. Suddenly the big guy lurches to a stop. He thought I was doing the thing with the repeating and the mnemonics, and now I’m doing the thing with the tomato sandwich, which is a little too many for him. So he waits for a clue.

Then five minutes later someone comes up and says “Hey, you were at the stamp convention! Did you get a load of those Cinderellas? Man!” He introduces himself as Larry.

This is it. I’ve already blown it with Evangeline, and Larry here is my Waterloo: the only question is whether I’m the guy who won at Waterloo or the guy who lost (yeah, I know their names, but if we get bogged down in details this article is going to run 1,500 words before we’re done, and nobody wants that).

So maybe I look at Larry and silently repeat the name “Larry” to myself, then think, “You know, he’s the kind of guy who looks like he would have a lair.” (Lair-Larry: that’s my mnemonic. And don’t give me that–I never said it had to be a clever mnemonic.) In this case the big dumb guy (the basal ganglia, not Larry: Larry’s like, 5’6″, not to mention he got a 1710 on his SAT’s) smiles angelically and lumbers forward again. He understands: this is a habit he and I are trying to form, and the thing with what’s-her-name the waitress, Angelina or Emmaline or whatever, was just a glitch. As long as there are very, very few glitches and lots of Larry experiences, the basal ganglia guy will put more and more of his massive strength behind reinforcing my name-remembering habit. And if I keep that habit up every day or very nearly every day, in just 18-254 days, give or take, it should be completely locked in! Now was that so hard?

OK, it was hard–for maybe two or three months (68 days on average, according to one study). But for the rest of my life, or until I start getting old and confused and calling everyone “Josephine,” I’ll be a champion name-rememberer, and people will look at me with awe and say “Boy, I wish I could remember names like that. I guess some people can just naturally do it and some people can’t.”

And even while I’m smacking my forehead in dismay at such people, the big dumb guy is happily shoving their names into long-term memory for me, unconfused and at peace.

Photo by Olivander

No Comments

Nothing to Do With Weight Loss: 17 Ways Exercise Promotes Willpower and Motivation

Habits

Mother and son doing pilates

I’m continuing to enjoy reading Dr. Daniel Kirschenbaum’s The 9 Truths About Weight Loss, which contains a lot of very pointed and useful information about diet, exercise, and getting fit. Interestingly, it also points out some of the side benefits of these subjects, and in one place particularly, Kirschenbaum lists 50 meaningful benefits exercise provides, most of which have nothing to do with weight loss, and some of which have a lot to do with self-motivation.

I was already aware of most of these benefits, but it had never occurred to me to list out all the ones I knew, and the effect of Kirschenbaum doing so was impressive. Taking his list for inspiration, I’d like to point out 17 benefits of exercise on mood, motivation, and willpower, many of them paraphrased from Kirschenbaum’s list.

Regular exercise …

1. can provide an uninterrupted opportunity to think
2. relieves stress, while helping to prevent future stress
3. stimulates release of endorphins, brain chemicals that promote feelings of happiness and well-being (this is sometimes known as “runner’s high”)
4. improves social opportunities–and the people you meet when you exercise tend to be happier, better-balanced, more reliable, and more proactive people than the general population due to the effects of regular exercise in their lives
5. improves self-esteem, self-image, and confidence
6. promotes self-awareness if done without distractions
7. fights depression, both temporary and chronic
8. reduces anxiety
9. improves sleep, making you better-rested and more focused
10. contibutes to greater energy and alertness
11. increases endurance for non-exercise activities, both physical (for instance, housework) and mental
12. helps reduce pain and weakness that might otherwise get in the way of other activities
13. improves our ability to relax quickly
14. promotes clear thinking
15. improves willpower through practice
16. makes it possible to get a larger perspective on other parts of our lives
17. provides a model for self-improvement in other areas

Of course, exercise is also nearly indispensable if you’re seeking weight loss and has many non-weight-loss-related health benefits, such as lowering blood pressure and triglycerides, improving cardiovascular health, preventing problems with posture as we age, extending lifespan, lessening back pain, improving digestion, improving cholesterol levels, preventing osteoperosis, and many others.

As long as I’m plugging exercise, I’ll also mention that not only does strenuous exercise get progressively easier and more pleasurable as you go from trying it out to doing it regularly, but it also doesn’t even have to be strenuous to provide good effects. For example, both in terms of mood and weight loss (two of exercise’s greatest benefits) walking alone, done very regularly and preferably for at least 30 minutes at a time, can yield enormous returns.

The most impressive benefits of exercise start when you exercise at least 3 times a week for 30 minutes or longer each time, and they increase dramatically if you exercise every day or close to it (for aerobic exercise: strength exercise seems to work best if you give that a resting day between days you work out).

Photo by Sean Dreilinger

1 Comment
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »


%d bloggers like this: