Positive psychology

Healthy practice:

1.Exercise

Just exercising three times a week, for 30 minutes a day can give you as much happiness bang for your buck as taking an SSRI or taking something like Zoloft. Pretty cool. In addition, we know that exercise can boost not just our mental health well-being but also our brain function and our cognitive function with it.

Hillman et al. (2008). Be smart, exercise your heart: exercise effects on brain and cognition.This paper tells the positive effects of exercise on cognition and brain function

2.Sleep

You think there’s just bad things going on in your life, but really it’s just that you’re not sleeping enough. So, that’s the kind of happiness side.

You get a boost from training to test during your waking hours, but you get way more of a boost from training to test after you’ve sleep. Just the act of sleeping allows you to consolidate things and to actually do better.

In addition to happiness, after one night of bad sleep, here is what we know happens.

1. you’re hungrier and likely to eat more later
2. you’re more likely to have an accident on the job
3. you’re probably not looking your best or looking very approachable
4. your immune system is going down you’re likely to have a cold
5. you’re actually losing brain tissue
6. There’s research saying that after one night of sleep, more likely to get emotional and less focused and having memory problems.

After chronic sleep deprivation, which again is defined as five hours a night and it’s sleep deprivation. So, chronic times having less than five hours or less of sleep, you are increasing your risk of death, decreasing your sperm count, increasing your risk of heart disease, increasing your risk for diabetes, increasing your risk for some cancers, increasing your risk of obesity, and quadrupling your stroke risk.

Strategies for better habits:

1.Situational support :

Finding situations that support you, that situations are affecting us in lots of ways that we don’t expect. That merely affecting the situation can change the extent to which we engage in all kinds of habits

The proximity of your goal to you is going to affect the extent to which you engage in it. Also the visibility of your goal helps too. You can fix your bad environments. Get rid of the stuff that is tempting you.

In addition and I think even more important, you can do small things to promote these healthy environments merely by having this stuff visible, these kinds of notes and reminders, these simple things sound really dumb, but they capture our attention

The point is that having others around you who are doing this stuff does two things. One is it promotes the positive habits, but also increases kindness, social connection, all this other stuff that we think matters a lot

Wansink et al. (2016). Slim by design: kitchen counter correlates of obesity. This paper tells us how environmental factors (specifically the types of food visible on the kitchen counter) influences eating habits and health – the presence of fruit on the counter was associated with lower BMI.

2.Goal setting:

About goal specificity, it’s this idea that you have some quantitative precision about your goal. Like, yes, I’m going to meditate. But how? Where? Am I going to meditate here in my house? Am I going to meditate by myself? Am I going to meditate today at 8:00 PM? How many times a week am I going to meditate? For how long? The quantitative specificity with which you define your goal, it turns out really seems to matter

So, when you have this really specific goal, it forces you to figure out how you’re going to do it. And it’s actually figuring out how you’re going to do it that seems to lead to better performance. And so, the upshot is, for whatever goals you’re thinking about, make those goals incredibly specific. Like the who, what, where, when, all those different parts, write them down, see it quantitatively, and that will help you.

3.mental contrasting

Spend the same amount of time as you do thinking about your goal and how awesome it would be to meet it, thinking about some of the obstacles that might get in your way. And this is a phenomena that researchers have referred to as mental contrasting. It’s this idea that you’re visualizing your positive future outcomes, everything, how awesome it would be once you get your goal, but you follow that up by thinking about, what might be the things that get in your way.

By contrast, if you only think about the obstacles, you dwell on how hard it is then you’re never going to get around to doing anything.

However, if you actually take the time, to again, intentionally and effort-fully do both, first indulge in how great it would be and then think about what the obstacles are. It turns out that you now have visualized both things that you need to succeed Don’t just visualize the good part, take time to do both parts. But both of these aren’t enough unless you add in the third component too, which I’m going to call goal planning.

Basically, the idea is that it’s a strategy that you have in the form of an ” if-then plan” that can help you lead to a better goal attainment. But it works in some of the same ways as mental contrasting, where you just practice it outside the situation, it turns out that our automatic systems can pay attention to that stuff. Like our automatic systems listen if you put it in with that level of specificity. And it seems to actually increase habit change in performance.

So, if I want to remember my keys, I think of some specific action I’m going to do like, when I grab the doorknob to leave, think keys. When I grab the doorknob to leave, think keys and automatically as I grab the doorknob, all of a sudden that plan pops up, and it can actually help me.

A technique that researchers have come up with that they call WOOP, which is an acronym for Wish, Outcome, Obstacles, and Plan.

1. Duckworth et al. (2013). From fantasy to action: Mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) improves academic performance in children. This paper tells us mental contrasting and implementation plans (via the WOOP technique) can help you achieve goals as seen in improved academic performance
2. Stadler et al. (2009). Physical activity in women: Effects of a self-regulation intervention. This paper tells us self-regulation (via the WOOP technique) can help you stick to your exercise plan