High-fat foods and watching football go hand in hand. Chicken wings, nachos, hotdogs followed by TUMS are all part of the experience. The influence of football on food consumption extends beyond the final score of the game. A study shows that the outcome of the game has a significant effect on what fans eat afterward. After researchers evaluated the saturated fat intake in a number of households during NFL seasons, they found that people not only ate more saturated fat after a loss, but that the preference for fatty foods was stronger in cities with wide fan bases or when the game had been particularly dramatic or close. This phenomenon is not uniquely American. French soccer fans showed a similar response. After a defeat, they gravitated towards unhealthy snacks.
The good news is that self-affirmation is an effective remedy. When fans of the losing team gave themselves affirmative support, they still ate the same amount, but of healthier food. After a loss, the researchers suggest reminding oneself of the bigger picture and trying to put things in perspective.
The takeaway? When you’re feeling beaten, the best thing to do is comfort yourself – but with words, not nachos and hotdogs.
A group of four years olds was asked to do simple learning tasks involving building blocks and putting shapes or colors together. The children were divided into two groups. The first group received instructions immediately. The second group was first asked to think about something that makes them happy and then given the same instructions as the first group. (One can only imagine what a four year old thinks of when asked to think happy thoughts but this is beside the point.) The children who were primed to think positively outperformed the others, completing the tasks faster and with fewer errors.
The benefits of positive emotions abound in schools, in offices and in life—the research is there. In one study, positivity impacted academic performance. Students who were told to think about the happiest day of their lives right before taking a standardized math test outperformed their peers. An analogous studyin the workplace yielded similar results: People who expressed more positive emotions while negotiating business deals did so more efficiently and successfully than those who were negative or even neutral.
Bottom line: Even the smallest amounts of positivity boosts cognitive power and job performance. Capitalize on the seemingly tiny, momentary blips of positivity—the micro moments, as it were—that pepper our lives each day and deliberately build more of them into your life. Don’t wait for weekends or vacations to have fun or to laugh. These moments don’t have to be long or involved, either.
Not only will you be happier, you will be more productive and creative too.
People just love to talk. We communicate with each other all day long through text messages, emails, phone calls, and face-to-face interactions. Language is a powerful communication tool that enables us to connect, to share ideas and to deepen understanding. We are social creatures and by talking to one another, we feel more connected.
Interestingly, the types of conversations we choose are astonishingly consistent. There is a recurring theme in most of what we say. Studies show that hands down, our favorite topic of communication is, you guessed it, ourselves. As Scientific American points out:
Why, in a world full of ideas to discover, develop, and discuss, do people spend the majority of their time talking about themselves? Recent research suggests a simple explanation: because itfeels good.
Well, according to one study, talking about oneself activates the same areas of the brain that light up when eating good food, taking drugs and even having sex. Simply put, self-disclosure is gratifying. It gives us a neurological buzz.
Who talks more and why, is less clear. Stereotypes lead us to believe that women enjoy chatting more than men. According to science, it’s more nuanced than that. A testconducted to explore social interaction patterns found that women speak only slightly more than men in professional and social settings, and only when the number of people involved in the conversation is less than six. In large groups, men tend to dominate the conversation.
Bottom Line: Everyone’s favorite topic is the same. We all love talking about ourselves. Next time you find yourself deep in conversation, be sure to listen too. Odds are, if you let the other person talk a lot about themselves, they will think youare fascinating.
One of my favorite quotes was sung by Ella Fitzgerald:
It isn’t where you came from; it’s where you’re going that counts.
If Ella says it, it must be true. And it is. We have long assumed that the strongest candidates for anything — job or college placement — are those with résumés that are jam packed with their awards, experiences, and extraordinary accomplishments. That in order to stand out, we need to showcase our achievements.
Not so fast. A studyby researchers at Harvard and Stanford yielded some surprising results about how we assess other people’s talent. It turns out that potential is far more appealing than achievement.
The study explored the preference for potential over achievement across a wide variety of settings. A rookie basketball player who demonstrated great potential was preferred over an accomplished more seasoned player who had been in the NBA for five years. A painting by an artist who was described as having potential to win a major art prize was preferred over the work of an artist who had already won a major art prize. Advertisements for a comedian who “could become the next big thing” versus “has become the next big thing” generated far more interest as measured by click rate. Applicants to a Ph.D. program with letters of recommendation emphasizing potential over achievement were considered more appealing.
Of course, just having potential isn’t enough. The study’s authors recognized that, in order to be taken seriously, you have to be a contender in the first place. In other words, potential needs to be backed up by substance. As the researchers write:
Having a horrible performance history but good potential…is unlikely to outweigh having a good performance history.
They also theorize that when a person’s achievements are truly outstanding – think Michael Jordan or Roger Federer — a preference for potential over achievement is canceled out.
These findings have broad implications for how we market ourselves and, perhaps more importantly, for how we think about ourselves. Do we dwell on the past and on what we have done or do we focus on the future and imagine what is possible?
Invasion of the killer chairs! When sofas attack! No, these aren’t titles of bad horror movies or the latest video games. It’s a reflection of what our lifestyle — one where we sit too much — is doing to us.
According to research,Americans spend 13 hours on average a day sitting down, and James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic and author of Get Up!, researches what all this sitting is doing to us. He argues that chairs are lethal. They are literally killing us. The lack of movement slows down our metabolism and contributes to obesity, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, and stress.
The good news is that simple natural movement throughout the day — not an hour of vigorous activity at the gym — can have a dramatically positive effect on health.
In one experiment, Levine compared obese and lean people who lived in similar environments and who shared similar lifestyles, diets, and jobs. They were all given “magic underwear” — an undergarment with motion sensors to collect data about how much they moved throughout the day. Not surprisingly, the obese people sat 2.25 hours longer than their thinner counterparts.
To further explore the effect of natural movement — what Levine terms “nonexercise activities” — on weight gain, Levine and his team designed the Great Gorging Experiment. Lean participants were asked to consume 1,000 more calories than usual every day for eight weeks. In spite of the overeating — a total of 56,000 extra calories over the course of the study — some participants didn’t gain any extra body fat. How did they stay skinny? According to data generated from the magic underwear, they simply moved around a lot more. What is interesting is that none of them said they made a conscious effort to do so.
In contrast, those who gained body fat in the study did not increase their movement. Instead of moving more, they reclined. They remained stuck to their chairs.
As part of a chair-free lifestyle, Levine came up with the idea of a treadmill desk 10 years ago. Studies show that people who use them are less stressed, have lower blood pressure and cholesterol and are skinnier. I got one last year and have found it to be life changing. Not only do I feel less tense at the end of the day, but I am more focused and productive.
We live amid a sea of killer chairs: adjustable, swivel, recliner, wing, club, chaise longue, sofa, arm, four-legged, three legged, wood, leather, plastic, car, plane, train, dining and bar. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you do not have to use them.
In that spirit, if you are reading this article sitting down, please stand up.
