Saturday, December 29, 2012

NY Times- I Put In 5 Miles at the Office

This semester I discovered the treadmill desk and the standing desk, and have loved using both during the entirety of the semester! I will definitely continue to use both for the rest of my life. Now my job is to make sure that I let others know about the benefits of not sitting while working (or studying). I'll make sure to establish a trend when I start working as an attorney after I graduate! :)

Here's a NY Times article talking about some of the benefits of using the treadmill desk. Using a standing desk or treadmill desk is a great way to work on the E part of the Happinizing equation! Any other ideas out there about how to be healthier while we work? I've also included a link to a video about treadmill desks. Enjoy and happinize on!

I Put In 5 Miles at the Office


Chris Machian for The New York Times
Walking 9 to 5 Zandra Hooks, right, and Kirk Hurley can answer phones and do computer work (not to mention burn calories) on their Walkstations at Mutual of Omaha.


Published: September 16, 2008
Correction Appended

TERRI KRIVOSHA, a partner at a Minneapolis law firm, logs three miles each workday on a treadmill without leaving her desk. She finds it easier to exercise while she types than to attend aerobics classes at the crack of dawn.



Brad Rhoads, a computer programmer and missionary in Princeton, Ill., faces a computer monitor on a file cabinet and gets in about five miles a day on a treadmill while working in his home office.

“After a while, your legs do get kind of tired,” said Mr. Rhoads, 40, who started exercising in March, when doctors advised him to lose weight after open-heart surgery.

Ms. Krivosha and Mr. Rhoads are part of a small but growing group of desk jockeys who were inspired by Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic. In 2005, Dr. Levine led a study showing that lean people burn about 350 more calories a day than those who are overweight, by doing ordinary things like fidgeting, pacing or walking to the copier.

To incorporate extra movement into the routines of sedentary workers (himself included), Dr. Levine constructed a treadmill desk by sliding a bedside hospital tray over a $400 treadmill.

Without breaking a sweat, the so-called work-walker can burn an estimated 100 to 130 calories an hour at speeds slower than two miles an hour, Mayo research shows.

Enthusiasts began following Dr. Levine’s example, constructing treadmill desks that range from sleekly robotic set-ups to rickety mash-ups that could be Wall-E’s long-lost kin. But the recent introduction of an all-in-one treadmill desk from Details may inch work-walking into the mainstream, as dozens of businesses invest in the hardware to let their employees walk (and, ideally, lose a little weight) at work.

Since last November, about 335 Walkstations, have been sold nationwide to companies including Humana, Mutual of Omaha, GlaxoSmithKline and Best Buy.

The Walkstation, which Dr. Levine helped develop, costs about $4,000 and comes in 36 laminate finishes with an ergonomically curved desktop. Its quiet motor is designed for slow speeds, said David Kagan, director of marketing communications at Details, a division of Steelcase.

STILL, to most, work-walking is “a freaky thing to do,” said Joe Stirt, 60, an anesthesiologist in Charlottesville, Va., who works and blogs in his off hours while walking up to six hours a day in his home office.

Mr. Stirt’s site, www.bookofjoe.com/2007/10/treadmill-works.html, is one of some dozen work-walking blogs, including www.treadmill-desk.com and treadmill-workstation.com.

“I know lots of people who are using them,” Dr. Stirt said of the treadmill desks. “But there are probably a hundred times more who we don’t read about on the Internet.”

There is even a burgeoning social network (officewalkers.ning.com), with around 30 members, that Mr. Rhoads started in March.

To the uninitiated, work-walking sounds like a recipe for distraction. But devotees say the treadmill desks increase not only their activity but also their concentration.

“I thought it was ridiculous until I tried it,” said Ms. Krivosha, 49, a partner in the law firm of Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand. Ms. Krivosha said it is tempting to become distracted during conference calls, but when she is exercising, she listens more intently. “Walking just takes care of the A.D.D. part,” she said.

Still, work-walking can require crafty maneuvering. When colleagues drop in on Bruce Langer, another work-walker, he pivots, then keeps striding backward while facing them.

“It’s more polite and, from a workout standpoint, it works different muscles,” said Mr. Langer, a vice president of Tealwood Asset Management in Minneapolis.

In 2005, Salo, a professional placement firm in Minneapolis, contacted Dr. Levine after fashioning its first treadmill unit. (Employees called the cobbled-together unit “the Frankendesk.”) By 2007, Salo had become a test site for early Walkstation models and now has 16.

At Mutual of Omaha’s 150-person call center in Omaha, four Walkstations have been in use since July as part of a small company study to figure out whether work-walking could maintain productivity while reducing employees’ cholesterol, weight and blood-sugar levels. Sixteen subjects of different ages, weights and fitness levels work-walk two hours a day, said Peggy Rivedal, the manager of employee health services. A similarly diverse control group works the old-fashioned way.

After leaving the military two years ago, Kirk Hurley, 40, a customer service representative at Mutual of Omaha, gained 75 pounds. In two months of work-walking two hours a day, he has lost 16 pounds.

“You don’t really feel the physical strain on your body because your mind’s occupied with your work,” he said.

Treadmill desks will not likely replace the sit-down kind any time soon. In corporate settings, they are usually in open areas where employees can just jump on. At a few firms, including Salo, they have replaced conference tables.

SOME business colleagues arrive at meetings with walking shoes in hand, said Amy Langer, a Salo founder (and Mr. Langer’s wife).

But not every employee has the enthusiasm to keep work-walking day after day. Take the trial Walkstation at Humana, a health insurer in Louisville, Ky.

After a year on site, the treadmill is in use about 60 percent of the workday, mostly for conference calls, said Grant Harrison, the vice president of consumer innovation. Many workers, he said, may “try it out, but they don’t make it a part of their daily life.”

Nor does everyone have the coordination to walk and work, said Andrew Wood, the director of ergonomics and corporate services for Muve, a weight-management consultancy affiliated with the Mayo Clinic.

“If you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, this may not be the workstation for you,” Mr. Wood said. But it should be a piece of cake for most people, he added.

James O. Hill, an obesity researcher and the director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Human Nutrition in Denver, shares this opinion: “There are not very many people who can’t walk,” he said. “You should have a doctor’s note to not walk.”

Will work-walking free you from the gym forever? Not if you’re seeking serious weight loss or peak cardio-respiratory fitness. “Walking on the treadmill could be enough to prevent weight gain, but it’s not going to melt the pounds off,” Dr. Hill said.

Still, something is better than nothing, say workwalkers like Mr. Rhoads. “At least a little bit of exercise will just be part of my day and part of my working,” he said. “The one thing I always do is work.”

Correction: September 25, 2008

An article last Thursday about desks that include treadmills stated that Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic, invented the first known treadmill desk. After the article was published, Seth Roberts, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out that he had created such a desk in 1996, eight years before Dr. Levine.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fmR6mB772zM 

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Why Gratitude Isn’t Just for Thanksgiving

http://healthland.time.com/2012/11/22/why-gratitude-isnt-just-for-thanksgiving/?iid=hl-main-lead


Being thankful is strongly linked with both mental and physical health— and can help to relieve stress, depression and addictions, among other conditions.
But what is gratitude? Psychologists view it as being able to maintain a world view that appreciates the positive.  That may sound like optimism, but unlike simply expecting the good, “appreciation” requires recognizing that happy outcomes are not just the result of your own hard work or moral uprightness, but depend on the efforts of others and, for the more spiritually-minded, on divine providence as well.
MORE: We Gather Together
This makes it a fundamentally social emotion:  you are grateful either to other people or to some sort of higher power with whom you can communicate. And if you do not behave graciously, ingratitude can cause relational problems, which could deny you the type of social support that is needed to protect against stress and depression.
Numerous studies now link counting one’s blessings to health.  A recent analysis published in Personality and Individual Differences included nearly 1,000 Swiss adults, ranging from teenagers to people in their 80s.  It found that physical health was strongly linked with gratitude, basically because it improved psychological health.  Better psychological health meant that people were more likely to engage in health-promoting activities and to seek medical help when it was needed.  Not surprisingly, this kept people in better mental and physical condition than if they engaged in self-destructive behaviors and avoided necessary medical care.
Among those who are more spiritual, religious thankfulness, or gratitude toward God, can predict susceptibility to mental illness. In a 2003 study involving 2600 adults, those who were most spiritually thankful had a lower risk of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, bulimia and addictions including alcohol, nicotine and illegal drugs.
Of course, it’s possible that mentally healthier people feel that they have more to be grateful for, which may explain some of their extra thankfulness.  However, because interventions aimed at improving gratitude seem to help with many of health conditions, it’s clear that whatever the reason, being thankful seems to have a strong relationship with health.  Studies show, for example, that interventions to increase gratitude improve impaired body image by 76% and can help treat generalized anxiety disorder in similarly dramatic fashion.
So how does gratitude improve health?  On one level, it helps people to sleep better.  Since disturbed sleep is linked to almost all mental illnesses, factors that improve sleep tend to alleviate some of these disorders.  A 2009 study of 401 people— 40% of whom had clinical sleep disorders— found that the most grateful people had better sleep quality, normalized sleep duration (not too long or too short), were able to fall asleep faster at night and also had less daytime tiredness compared to those who weren’t as thankful.
The key to reaping gratitude’s benefits seemed to involve what people thought about as they tried to fall asleep:  while grateful folks accentuated the positive, the others were consumed by worries and fears.  So mentally counting blessings before drifting off can help fight anxiety and depression, not just by replacing depressive and anxious thoughts but by making refreshing sleep easier to attain.
The most common ways to improve gratitude— making “gratitude lists” or keeping a daily diary focused on the things you are grateful for — build on this positive-focused thinking and are often a critical part of 12-step programs for addictions.
And they are effective, as a study tracking feelings of thanks and school satisfaction among a group of sixth and seventh graders showed. In the study, 221 children were assigned to write either a daily list of five things they were most grateful for, or of the hassles they experienced, or no list at all. The gratitude group reported greater satisfaction with school three weeks later compared to the other kids, especially those who focused on hassles.  That’s a potentially significant benefit since contentment at school is linked to academic performance and dissatisfaction is correlated with antisocial behavior like drinking and drug use. The authors write, “[T]hese findings suggest that gratitude has both immediate and long-term effects on positive psychological functioning.”
And those effects may be self-sustaining to a certain extent as well. One study found that compared to those who didn’t experience extensive thankfulness, grateful people saw the help they received from others as being more costly to the giver and more valuable to themselves. In addition, they also interpreted deeper expressions of kindness and caring from these acts.  These perceptions are likely to make people behave more gratefully towards others — since if you perceive the help you receive as being of little worth and primarily the result of self interest, you are less likely to be appreciative.
That may explain why gratefulness is a desirable trait in friends and colleagues, and why attempts to become more grateful can be an important part of improving many relationships.
So while it’s easy to focus on grievances during the hectic holiday season, try introducing a little gratefulness instead. Sure, there may be a bit of selfishness in that, since you may be motivated primarily to improve your own health, but it turns out that gratitude can change your perspective — in a contagious way that may ultimately help more than just you alone


Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/11/22/why-gratitude-isnt-just-for-thanksgiving/#ixzz2DIS1pqnd
Being thankful is strongly linked with both mental and physical health— and can help to relieve stress, depression and addictions, among other conditions.
But what is gratitude? Psychologists view it as being able to maintain a world view that appreciates the positive.  That may sound like optimism, but unlike simply expecting the good, “appreciation” requires recognizing that happy outcomes are not just the result of your own hard work or moral uprightness, but depend on the efforts of others and, for the more spiritually-minded, on divine providence as well.
MORE: We Gather Together
This makes it a fundamentally social emotion:  you are grateful either to other people or to some sort of higher power with whom you can communicate. And if you do not behave graciously, ingratitude can cause relational problems, which could deny you the type of social support that is needed to protect against stress and depression.
Numerous studies now link counting one’s blessings to health.  A recent analysis published in Personality and Individual Differences included nearly 1,000 Swiss adults, ranging from teenagers to people in their 80s.  It found that physical health was strongly linked with gratitude, basically because it improved psychological health.  Better psychological health meant that people were more likely to engage in health-promoting activities and to seek medical help when it was needed.  Not surprisingly, this kept people in better mental and physical condition than if they engaged in self-destructive behaviors and avoided necessary medical care.
Among those who are more spiritual, religious thankfulness, or gratitude toward God, can predict susceptibility to mental illness. In a 2003 study involving 2600 adults, those who were most spiritually thankful had a lower risk of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, bulimia and addictions including alcohol, nicotine and illegal drugs.
Of course, it’s possible that mentally healthier people feel that they have more to be grateful for, which may explain some of their extra thankfulness.  However, because interventions aimed at improving gratitude seem to help with many of health conditions, it’s clear that whatever the reason, being thankful seems to have a strong relationship with health.  Studies show, for example, that interventions to increase gratitude improve impaired body image by 76% and can help treat generalized anxiety disorder in similarly dramatic fashion.
So how does gratitude improve health?  On one level, it helps people to sleep better.  Since disturbed sleep is linked to almost all mental illnesses, factors that improve sleep tend to alleviate some of these disorders.  A 2009 study of 401 people— 40% of whom had clinical sleep disorders— found that the most grateful people had better sleep quality, normalized sleep duration (not too long or too short), were able to fall asleep faster at night and also had less daytime tiredness compared to those who weren’t as thankful.
The key to reaping gratitude’s benefits seemed to involve what people thought about as they tried to fall asleep:  while grateful folks accentuated the positive, the others were consumed by worries and fears.  So mentally counting blessings before drifting off can help fight anxiety and depression, not just by replacing depressive and anxious thoughts but by making refreshing sleep easier to attain.
The most common ways to improve gratitude— making “gratitude lists” or keeping a daily diary focused on the things you are grateful for — build on this positive-focused thinking and are often a critical part of 12-step programs for addictions.
And they are effective, as a study tracking feelings of thanks and school satisfaction among a group of sixth and seventh graders showed. In the study, 221 children were assigned to write either a daily list of five things they were most grateful for, or of the hassles they experienced, or no list at all. The gratitude group reported greater satisfaction with school three weeks later compared to the other kids, especially those who focused on hassles.  That’s a potentially significant benefit since contentment at school is linked to academic performance and dissatisfaction is correlated with antisocial behavior like drinking and drug use. The authors write, “[T]hese findings suggest that gratitude has both immediate and long-term effects on positive psychological functioning.”
And those effects may be self-sustaining to a certain extent as well. One study found that compared to those who didn’t experience extensive thankfulness, grateful people saw the help they received from others as being more costly to the giver and more valuable to themselves. In addition, they also interpreted deeper expressions of kindness and caring from these acts.  These perceptions are likely to make people behave more gratefully towards others — since if you perceive the help you receive as being of little worth and primarily the result of self interest, you are less likely to be appreciative.
That may explain why gratefulness is a desirable trait in friends and colleagues, and why attempts to become more grateful can be an important part of improving many relationships.
So while it’s easy to focus on grievances during the hectic holiday season, try introducing a little gratefulness instead. Sure, there may be a bit of selfishness in that, since you may be motivated primarily to improve your own health, but it turns out that gratitude can change your perspective — in a contagious way that may ultimately help more than just you alone


Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/11/22/why-gratitude-isnt-just-for-thanksgiving/#ixzz2DIS1pqnd

Friday, November 9, 2012

The Neuroscience of Looking on the Bright Side

Source: http://www.livescience.com/17848-neuroscience-optimism-human-brain.html 
 

The Neuroscience of Looking on the Bright Side

Date: 10 January 2012 Time: 06:26 PM ET
Cooperation-sa
happy kids smiling
Scientists are figuring out the neural processes involved in our rose-colored views of the future in the face of reality.
CREDIT: Dmitriy Shironosov | shutterstock
Ask a bride before walking down the aisle "How likely are you to get divorced?" and most will respond "Not a chance!" Tell her that the average divorce rate is close to 50 percent, and ask again. Would she change her mind? Unlikely. Even law students who have learned everything about the legal aspects of divorce, including its likelihood, state that their own chances of getting divorced are basically nil. How can we explain this?
Psychologists have documented human optimism for decades. They have learned that people generally overestimate their likelihood of experiencing positive events, such as winning the lottery, and underestimate their likelihood of experiencing negative events, such as being involved in an accident or suffering from cancer. Informing people about their statistical likelihood of experiencing negative events, such as divorce, is surprisingly ineffective at altering their optimistic predictions, and highlighting previously unknown risk factors for diseases fails to engender realistic perceptions of medical vulnerability. How can people maintain their rose-colored views of the future in the face of reality? Which neural processes are involved in people's optimistic predictions?
To answer these questions we have investigated optimism by using a recent, burgeoning approach in neuroscience: Describing neural activity related to complex behavior with the simple concept of "prediction errors." Prediction errors are the brain’s way of keeping track of how well it is doing at predicting what is going to happen in the future.

The concept of prediction errors was initially put forward in research on artificial intelligence. By now, scientists have used the basic concept of prediction errors in several domains and have come up with various ways of describing prediction errors in mathematical equations. Let me give you the basics without any mathematics: Imagine your granny tells you that she will give you some money next time she visits. You estimate how much money she will give you, maybe 10, maybe 100 dollars depending on how rich (and generous) your granny is. When she gives you the money you will not only be happy about the money but you will also see how much your prediction differed from what you actually got; in other words, you calculate a prediction error. Knowing this prediction error will help you to estimate how much money you will get the next time your granny comes along. It’s an essential part of learning, and the brain is doing it all the time.
How have neuroscientists employed the idea of prediction errors to study brain activity? In dozens of studies, researchers have looked for and identified brain regions that are related to the calculation of prediction errors. They do this in various ways, but the typical experiment consists of having participants gamble for money on computerized versions of slot machines. At the same time, participants’ brains are monitored in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners.
Interestingly, similar patterns of brain activity seem to be at play when participants gamble for money and when they engage in complex social interactions. For example, in our everyday life, we often have to track how good or bad the advice of another person is. Timothy Behrens and colleagues from Oxford University used prediction errors to model how humans incorporate advice from social partners into their decisions. Participants repeatedly had to choose which one of two options would yield a higher reward. Before they made their decision, they saw which option another person would advise them to choose. So participants had to form prediction errors for two types of information: non-social (how rewarding are the two options) and social (how good is the other person’s advice). The two kinds of prediction errors were processed in a similar fashion, suggesting conceptual links between processing social and non-social information.
Prediction errors also appear to be involved in another common human social behavior, when we find out whether another person likes us or not. In a recent study by Rebecca Jones and colleagues from Cornell University, participants learned how often unknown peers wanted to interact with them by seeing how often these peers sent them "Facebook-like" notes. Prediction errors captured the difference between participants' expectation of receiving a note and actually getting one. Similar to the Behrens study above, prediction error signals were related to brain activity commonly involved in learning about how likely non-social outcomes such as money are to be experienced.
How can prediction errors help us to understand optimism? Tali Sharot, Ray Dolan and I conducted a study at University College London to investigate how people maintain their optimistic predictions. Participants estimated their likelihood of experiencing 80 negative events including various diseases and criminal acts. They then saw the statistical likelihoods of these events happening to an average person of their age. We then measured how much participants updated their predictions by having them re-estimate their personal likelihoods of experiencing these 80 adverse life events. When given good news -- i.e., a bad outcome is not as likely as you thought -- people responded strongly. But given bad news, they tended to change their prediction only a little bit.  Importantly, distinct brain regions seemed to be related to prediction errors for good and bad news about the future. Interestingly, the more optimistic a participant was the less efficiently one of these regions coded for undesirable information. Thus, the bias in how errors are processed in the brain can account for the tendency to maintain rose-colored views.
Still, a word of caution to avoid being too optimistic is warranted. Neuroscience won’t tell us anytime soon everything that's going on in the mind of a bride walking down the aisle.
Christoph W. Korn is a third year PhD student at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. He studies how the human brain integrates information that is relevant in social settings.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
This article was first published on Scientific American. © 2011 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Puppy Love: Pet Owners Are Happier, Healthier (livescience)

http://www.livescience.com/14983-cat-dog-mental-health.html
 

Puppy Love: Pet Owners Are Happier, Healthier

Date: 11 July 2011 Time: 01:40 PM ET
dog, pet, puppy

CREDIT: Caroline Kjall/stock.xchng
Pets are good sources of social and emotional support for everyone, not just people facing health challenges, new research suggests.
"We observed evidence that pet owners fared better, both in terms of well-being outcomes and individual differences, than nonowners on several dimensions,” study researcher Allen McConnell, of Miami University in Ohio, said in a statement. “Specifically, pet owners had greater self-esteem, were more physically fit, tended to be less lonely, were more conscientious, were more extroverted, tended to be less fearful and tended to be less preoccupied than nonowners.” [America's Favorite Pets]
Pet ownership has been on the rise the last few decades. A study in 2006 by the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association determined that about two-thirds of American households (71.1 million) have at least one pet. In comparison, 56 percent of households had a pet in 1988, the first year the survey was conducted.

McConnell's group conducted several studies of pet owners.
First they surveyed 217 people, determining differences between pet owners and nonowners in terms of well-being, personality type and attachment style. They found that pet owners were happier, healthier and better adjusted than were nonowners.
The researchers then studied 56 dog owners, finding that pet owners who thought their dogs increased their feelings of belonging, self-esteem and meaningful existence had greater well-being than those who didn't perceive that their pet fulfilled their social needs.
They then asked 96 pet owners who were undergraduates to remember and write about a time they were excluded. They were then asked to either write about their favorite pet, their favorite friend or to draw a map of their college campus. Both writing about a pet or a friend reduced the feelings of rejection brought forth by thinking about being excluded. Surprisingly, both pets and friends staved off the feelings of rejection equally.
All in all, the researchers found that even healthy people benefit from pets. Pet owners are just as close to key people in their lives as to their animals, which serve as important sources of social and emotional support.
“The present work presents considerable evidence that pets benefit the lives of their owners, both psychologically and physically, by serving as an important source of social support,” the researchers wrote in the paper, published online by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Whereas past work has focused primarily on pet owners facing significant health challenges … the present study establishes that there are many positive consequences for everyday people.”
You can follow LiveScience staff writer Jennifer Welsh on Twitter @microbelover. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

For the Pet Lovers Out There

Instant pick me up:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/dog_paradox

The Happinizing © Factors

Today I start my happinizing © journal! I am convinced (as per my research) that happiness is a skill- and thus needs conscious, purposeful, and concerted effort. I have looked at the studies, countless articles, and am still working out the details of my happinizing © equation- but here are some of the factors that I have worked out so far. November being the month of gratitude, this would be a great project for you to start for yourself as well! The great thing is that this is so easy! You will literally be reshaping your brain, to make a you an overall happier person, and you will also literally be adding years to your life and be an overall happier + healthier person!

So, here's *my equation:

H (D/W) = E^2, C, M + 3Gs ©

Here's what each of the factors mean-

H (D/W) = happiness/happinizing steps you must purposefully take on a daily or weekly basis.

E^2 = the two Es, Exercise (3 times a week min, 30mins of cardio each time) and Eat well (healthy balanced diet with lots of omega 3s). Also, there are countless studies, all which talk about how bad sitting is for you- thus, I recommend that we start using standing desks more, or at the very least, take  a walking break every hour after you've been sitting behind your desk. Really, this will add years to your life.

CAK = Conscious Acts of Kindness. Go out, volunteer, write one nice email to a friend or coworker a day, do something nice for someone else for a change! It will release some dopamine into your brain and make you (and them) feel happier!

M = Meditate! I was shocked at all the studies that are out there that speak wonders about the power of meditation. Among the types of meditating you can do, I would recommend working on empathy and kindness meditation. This literally activates different parts of your brain, and makes you better at empathizing and being a compassionate human being. Also, as we read above in CAK, helping others releases dopamine, thus making you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

+ = Be positive!! Again, this sort of goes along with the 3Gs, but here write down three positive things that happened during your day. It will make much better at focusing on the rosier parts of life, regardless of how bad life may be at the moment.

3Gs = Always, before going to sleep, think of 3 things that happened that specific day that you are thankful for. Jot them down in your happinizing/gratitude journal, and really think about why you are grateful for them. Try to focus on intrinsic, and not extrinsic happiness factors, as intrinsic ones give you more bang for your buck.
*****
Now, there are also H factors that are more of reminders to keep in mind as we go through life. There's 3 factors to remember here: SPY

1)  S = foster/maintain your Social networks. Do NOT neglect your loved ones, whether this means friends, family, significant others, etc. You need to have a social network for when the going gets rough, and also people who will be there to celebrate life's big and small victories with you!

2) P = PLAY! Remember that we live in a tiny little planet that is part of this huge universe. We have about 70-100 years to live in it, don't be one of those people that when their time was up, and they looked back, they realized they had spent their whole lives working, and never focusing on the things that really made them happy. So yes, make a concerted effort to make play time part of your daily or weekly routine!

3) Y = be you!! Don't spend your life focusing on what others want you to do. This is your privileged time to be on earth, so use it as YOU want. Say no to peer/social pressure, and do the things that you want to do.

Happinize on my friends, and thrive!

*and yes, this is my intellectual property since I have been working on bringing all these factors together to make happinizing as easy as possible- so no, you can't go out and publish a book on it...already on it ;)

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

NY Times- The Island Where People Forget to Die

Great article that evidences the importance of the many factors that add to our happiness, and that make us live longer, healthier, and happier lives.

Source: NY Times 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people-forget-to-die.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

The Island Where People Forget to Die

Andrea Frazzetta/LUZphoto for The New York Times
Stamatis Moraitis tending his vineyard and olive grove on Ikaria. More Photos »
By DAN BUETTNER
Published: October 24, 2012 257 Comments

In 1943, a Greek war veteran named Stamatis Moraitis came to the United States for treatment of a combat-mangled arm. He’d survived a gunshot wound, escaped to Turkey and eventually talked his way onto the Queen Elizabeth, then serving as a troopship, to cross the Atlantic. Moraitis settled in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an enclave of countrymen from his native island, Ikaria. He quickly landed a job doing manual labor. Later, he moved to Boynton Beach, Fla. Along the way, Moraitis married a Greek-American woman, had three children and bought a three-bedroom house and a 1951 Chevrolet.

One day in 1976, Moraitis felt short of breath. Climbing stairs was a chore; he had to quit working midday. After X-rays, his doctor concluded that Moraitis had lung cancer. As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. They gave him nine months to live. He was in his mid-60s.

Moraitis considered staying in America and seeking aggressive cancer treatment at a local hospital. That way, he could also be close to his adult children. But he decided instead to return to Ikaria, where he could be buried with his ancestors in a cemetery shaded by oak trees that overlooked the Aegean Sea. He figured a funeral in the United States would cost thousands, a traditional Ikarian one only $200, leaving more of his retirement savings for his wife, Elpiniki. Moraitis and Elpiniki moved in with his elderly parents, into a tiny, whitewashed house on two acres of stepped vineyards near Evdilos, on the north side of Ikaria. At first, he spent his days in bed, as his mother and wife tended to him. He reconnected with his faith. On Sunday mornings, he hobbled up the hill to a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel where his grandfather once served as a priest. When his childhood friends discovered that he had moved back, they started showing up every afternoon. They’d talk for hours, an activity that invariably involved a bottle or two of locally produced wine. I might as well die happy, he thought.

In the ensuing months, something strange happened. He says he started to feel stronger. One day, feeling ambitious, he planted some vegetables in the garden. He didn’t expect to live to harvest them, but he enjoyed being in the sunshine, breathing the ocean air. Elpiniki could enjoy the fresh vegetables after he was gone.

Six months came and went. Moraitis didn’t die. Instead, he reaped his garden and, feeling emboldened, cleaned up the family vineyard as well. Easing himself into the island routine, he woke up when he felt like it, worked in the vineyards until midafternoon, made himself lunch and then took a long nap. In the evenings, he often walked to the local tavern, where he played dominoes past midnight. The years passed. His health continued to improve. He added a couple of rooms to his parents’ home so his children could visit. He built up the vineyard until it produced 400 gallons of wine a year. Today, three and a half decades later, he’s 97 years old — according to an official document he disputes; he says he’s 102 — and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move home to Ikaria.

I met Moraitis on Ikaria this past July during one of my visits to explore the extraordinary longevity of the island’s residents. For a decade, with support from the National Geographic Society, I’ve been organizing a study of the places where people live longest. The project grew out of studies by my partners, Dr. Gianni Pes of the University of Sassari in Italy and Dr. Michel Poulain, a Belgian demographer. In 2000, they identified a region of Sardinia’s Nuoro province as the place with the highest concentration of male centenarians in the world. As they zeroed in on a cluster of villages high in Nuoro’s mountains, they drew a boundary in blue ink on a map and began referring to the area inside as the “blue zone.” Starting in 2002, we identified three other populations around the world where people live measurably longer lives than everyone else. The world’s longest-lived women are found on the island of Okinawa. On Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, we discovered a population of 100,000 mestizos with a lower-than-normal rate of middle-age mortality. And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventh-day Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade.

In 2003, I started a consulting firm to see if it was possible to take what we were learning in the field and apply it to American communities. We also continued to do research and look for other pockets of longevity, and in 2008, following a lead from a Greek researcher, we began investigating Ikaria. Poulain’s plan there was to track down survivors born between 1900 and 1920 and determine when and where individuals died. The approach was complicated by the fact that people often moved around. That meant that not only were birth and death records required, but also information on immigration and emigration.

The data collection had to be rigorous. Earlier claims about long-lived people in places like Ecuador’s Vilcabamba Valley, Pakistan’s Hunza Valley or the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia had all been debunked after researchers discovered that many residents didn’t actually know their ages. For villagers born without birth certificates, it was easy to lose track. One year they were 80; a few months later they were 82. Pretty soon they claimed to be 100. And when a town discovers that a reputation for centenarians draws tourists, who’s going to question it? Even in Ikaria, the truth has been sometimes difficult to nail down. Stories like the one about Moraitis’s miraculous recovery become instant folklore, told and retold and changed and misattributed. (Stories about Moraitis have appeared on Greek TV.) In fact, when I was doing research there in 2009, I met a different man who told me virtually the exact same story about himself.

The study would try to cut through the stories and establish the facts about Ikaria’s longevity. Before including subjects, Poulain cross-referenced birth records against baptism or military documentation. After gathering all the data, he and his colleagues at the University of Athens concluded that people on Ikaria were, in fact, reaching the age of 90 at two and a half times the rate Americans do. (Ikarian men in particular are nearly four times as likely as their American counterparts to reach 90, often in better health.) But more than that, they were also living about 8 to 10 years longer before succumbing to cancers and cardiovascular disease, and they suffered less depression and about a quarter the rate of dementia. Almost half of Americans 85 and older show signs of Alzheimer’s. (The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that dementia cost Americans some $200 billion in 2012.) On Ikaria, however, people have been managing to stay sharp to the end.

Ikaria, an island of 99 square miles and home to almost 10,000 Greek nationals, lies about 30 miles off the western coast of Turkey. Its jagged ridge of scrub-covered mountains rises steeply out of the Aegean Sea. Before the Christian era, the island was home to thick oak forests and productive vineyards. Its reputation as a health destination dates back 25 centuries, when Greeks traveled to the island to soak in the hot springs near Therma. In the 17th century, Joseph Georgirenes, the bishop of Ikaria, described its residents as proud people who slept on the ground. “The most commendable thing on this island,” he wrote, “is their air and water, both so healthful that people are very long-lived, it being an ordinary thing to see persons in it of 100 years of age.”

Seeking to learn more about the island’s reputation for long-lived residents, I called on Dr. Ilias Leriadis, one of Ikaria’s few physicians, in 2009. On an outdoor patio at his weekend house, he set a table with Kalamata olives, hummus, heavy Ikarian bread and wine. “People stay up late here,” Leriadis said. “We wake up late and always take naps. I don’t even open my office until 11 a.m. because no one comes before then.” He took a sip of his wine. “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here? No clock is working correctly. When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.”

Pointing across the Aegean toward the neighboring island of Samos, he said: “Just 15 kilometers over there is a completely different world. There they are much more developed. There are high-rises and resorts and homes worth a million euros. In Samos, they care about money. Here, we don’t. For the many religious and cultural holidays, people pool their money and buy food and wine. If there is money left over, they give it to the poor. It’s not a ‘me’ place. It’s an ‘us’ place.”

Ikaria’s unusual past may explain its communal inclinations. The strong winds that buffet the island — mentioned in the “Iliad” — and the lack of natural harbors kept it outside the main shipping lanes for most of its history. This forced Ikaria to be self-sufficient. Then in the late 1940s, after the Greek Civil War, the government exiled thousands of Communists and radicals to the island. Nearly 40 percent of adults, many of them disillusioned with the high unemployment rate and the dwindling trickle of resources from Athens, still vote for the local Communist Party. About 75 percent of the population on Ikaria is under 65. The youngest adults, many of whom come home after college, often live in their parents’ home. They typically have to cobble together a living through small jobs and family support.

Leriadis also talked about local “mountain tea,” made from dried herbs endemic to the island, which is enjoyed as an end-of-the-day cocktail. He mentioned wild marjoram, sage (flaskomilia), a type of mint tea (fliskouni), rosemary and a drink made from boiling dandelion leaves and adding a little lemon. “People here think they’re drinking a comforting beverage, but they all double as medicine,” Leriadis said. Honey, too, is treated as a panacea. “They have types of honey here you won’t see anyplace else in the world,” he said. “They use it for everything from treating wounds to curing hangovers, or for treating influenza. Old people here will start their day with a spoonful of honey. They take it like medicine.”

Over the span of the next three days, I met some of Leriadis’s patients. In the area known as Raches, I met 20 people over 90 and one who claimed to be 104. I spoke to a 95-year-old man who still played the violin and a 98-year-old woman who ran a small hotel and played poker for money on the weekend.

On a trip the year before, I visited a slate-roofed house built into the slope at the top of a hill. I had come here after hearing of a couple who had been married for more than 75 years. Thanasis and Eirini Karimalis both came to the door, clapped their hands at the thrill of having a visitor and waved me in. They each stood maybe five feet tall. He wore a shapeless cotton shirt and a battered baseball cap, and she wore a housedress with her hair in a bun. Inside, there was a table, a medieval-looking fireplace heating a blackened pot, a nook of a closet that held one woolen suit coat, and fading black-and-white photographs of forebears on a soot-stained wall. The place was warm and cozy. “Sit down,” Eirini commanded. She hadn’t even asked my name or business but was already setting out teacups and a plate of cookies. Meanwhile, Thanasis scooted back and forth across the house with nervous energy, tidying up.

The couple were born in a nearby village, they told me. They married in their early 20s and raised five children on Thanasis’s pay as a lumberjack. Like that of almost all of Ikaria’s traditional folk, their daily routine unfolded much the way Leriadis had described it: Wake naturally, work in the garden, have a late lunch, take a nap. At sunset, they either visited neighbors or neighbors visited them. Their diet was also typical: a breakfast of goat’s milk, wine, sage tea or coffee, honey and bread. Lunch was almost always beans (lentils, garbanzos), potatoes, greens (fennel, dandelion or a spinachlike green called horta) and whatever seasonal vegetables their garden produced; dinner was bread and goat’s milk. At Christmas and Easter, they would slaughter the family pig and enjoy small portions of larded pork for the next several months.

During a tour of their property, Thanasis and Eirini introduced their pigs to me by name. Just after sunset, after we returned to their home to have some tea, another old couple walked in, carrying a glass amphora of homemade wine. The four nonagenarians cheek-kissed one another heartily and settled in around the table. They gossiped, drank wine and occasionally erupted into laughter.

Dr. Ioanna Chinou, a professor at the University of Athens School of Pharmacy, is one of Europe’s top experts on the bioactive properties of herbs and natural products. When I consulted her about Ikarians’ longevity, she told me that many of the teas they consume are traditional Greek remedies. Wild mint fights gingivitis and gastrointestinal disorders; rosemary is used as a remedy for gout; artemisia is thought to improve blood circulation. She invited me to give her samples and later tested seven of the most commonly used herbs on Ikaria. As rich sources of polyphenols, they showed strong antioxidant properties, she reported. Most of these herbs also contained mild diuretics. Doctors often use diuretics to treat hypertension — perhaps by drinking tea nightly, Ikarians have gently lowered their blood pressure throughout their lives.

Meanwhile, my colleagues Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain set out to track down the island’s 164 residents who were over 90 as of 1999, starting in the municipality of Raches. They found that 75 nonagenarians were still alive. Then, along with additional researchers, they fanned out across the island and asked 35 elderly subjects a battery of lifestyle questions to assess physical and cognitive functioning: How much do you sleep? Did you ever smoke? They asked them to get up and down from a chair five times and recorded how long it took them to walk 13 feet. To test mental agility, the researchers had subjects recall a series of items and reproduce geometric shapes.

Pes and Poulain were joined in the field by Dr. Antonia Trichopoulou of the University of Athens, an expert on the Mediterranean diet. She helped administer surveys, often sitting in village kitchens to ask subjects to reconstruct their childhood eating habits. She noted that the Ikarians’ diet, like that of others around the Mediterranean, was rich in olive oil and vegetables, low in dairy (except goat’s milk) and meat products, and also included moderate amounts of alcohol. It emphasized homegrown potatoes, beans (garbanzo, black-eyed peas and lentils), wild greens and locally produced goat milk and honey.

As I knew from my studies in other places with high numbers of very old people, every one of the Ikarians’ dietary tendencies had been linked to increased life spans: low intake of saturated fats from meat and dairy was associated with lower risk of heart disease; olive oil — especially unheated — reduced bad cholesterol and raised good cholesterol. Goat’s milk contained serotonin-boosting tryptophan and was easily digestible for older people. Some wild greens had 10 times as many antioxidants as red wine. Wine — in moderation — had been shown to be good for you if consumed as part of a Mediterranean diet, because it prompts the body to absorb more flavonoids, a type of antioxidant. And coffee, once said to stunt growth, was now associated with lower rates of diabetes, heart disease and, for some, Parkinson’s. Local sourdough bread might actually reduce a meal’s glycemic load. You could even argue that potatoes contributed heart-healthy potassium, vitamin B6 and fiber to the Ikarian diet. Another health factor at work might be the unprocessed nature of the food they consume: as Trichopoulou observed, because islanders eat greens from their gardens and fields, they consume fewer pesticides and more nutrients. She estimated that the Ikarian diet, compared with the standard American diet, might yield up to four additional years of life expectancy.

Of course, it may not be only what they’re eating; it may also be what they’re not eating. “Are they doing something positive, or is it the absence of something negative?” Gary Taubes asked when I described to him the Ikarians’ longevity and their diet. Taubes is a founder of the nonprofit Nutrition Science Initiative and the author of “Why We Get Fat” (and has written several articles for this magazine). “One explanation why they live so long is they eat a plant-based diet. Or it could be the absence of sugar and white flour. From what I know of the Greek diet, they eat very little refined sugar, and their breads have been traditionally made with stone-ground wheat.”

Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the Ikaria Study, which includes a survey of the diet of 673 Ikarians. She found that her subjects consumed about six times as many beans a day as Americans, ate fish twice a week and meat five times a month, drank on average two to three cups of coffee a day and took in about a quarter as much refined sugar — the elderly did not like soda. She also discovered they were consuming high levels of olive oil along with two to four glasses of wine a day.

Chrysohoou also suspected that Ikarians’ sleep and sex habits might have something to do with their long life. She cited a 2008 paper by the University of Athens Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health that studied more than 23,000 Greek adults. The researchers followed subjects for an average of six years, measuring their diets, physical activity and how much they napped. They found that occasional napping was associated with a 12 percent reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease, but that regular napping — at least three days weekly — was associated with a 37 percent reduction. She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly, and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with “good duration” and “achievement.”

During our time on Ikaria, my colleagues and I stayed at Thea Parikos’s guesthouse, the social hub of western Ikaria. Local women gathered in the dining room at midmorning to gossip over tea. Late at night, after the dinner rush, tables were pushed aside and the dining room became a dance floor, with people locking arms and kick-dancing to Greek music.

Parikos cooked the way her ancestors had for centuries, giving us a chance to consume the diet we were studying. For breakfast, she served local yogurt and honey from the 90-year-old beekeeper next door. For dinner, she walked out into the fields and returned with handfuls of weedlike greens, combined them with pumpkin and baked them into savory pies. My favorite was a dish made with black-eyed peas, tomatoes, fennel tops and garlic and finished with olive oil that we dubbed Ikarian stew.

Despite her consummately Ikarian air, Parikos was actually born in Detroit to an American father and an Ikarian mother. She had attended high school, worked as a real estate agent and married in the United States. After she and her husband had their first child, she felt a “genetic craving” for Ikaria. “I was not unhappy in America,” she said. “We had good friends, we went out to dinner on the weekends, I drove a Chevrolet. But I was always in a hurry.”

When she and her family moved to Ikaria and opened the guesthouse, everything changed. She stopped shopping for most groceries, instead planting a huge garden that provided most of their fruits and vegetables. She lost weight without trying to. I asked her if she thought her simple diet was going to make her family live longer. “Yes,” she said. “But we don’t think about it that way. It’s bigger than that.”

Although unemployment is high — perhaps as high as 40 percent — most everyone has access to a family garden and livestock, Parikos told me. People who work might have several jobs. Someone involved in tourism, for example, might also be a painter or an electrician or have a store. “People are fine here because we are very self-sufficient,” she said. “We may not have money for luxuries, but we will have food on the table and still have fun with family and friends. We may not be in a hurry to get work done during the day, so we work into the night. At the end of the day, we don’t go home to sit on the couch.”

Parikos was nursing a mug of coffee. Sunlight sifted in through the window shades; the waves of the nearby Aegean could be barely heard over the din of breakfast. “Do you know there’s no word in Greek for privacy?” she declared. “When everyone knows everyone else’s business, you get a feeling of connection and security. The lack of privacy is actually good, because it puts a check on people who don’t want to be caught or who do something to embarrass their family. If your kids misbehave, your neighbor has no problem disciplining them. There is less crime, not because of good policing, but because of the risk of shaming the family. You asked me about food, and yes, we do eat better here than in America. But it’s more about how we eat. Even if it’s your lunch break from work, you relax and enjoy your meal. You enjoy the company of whoever you are with. Food here is always enjoyed in combination with conversation.”

In the United States, when it comes to improving health, people tend to focus on exercise and what we put into our mouths — organic foods, omega-3’s, micronutrients. We spend nearly $30 billion a year on vitamins and supplements alone. Yet in Ikaria and the other places like it, diet only partly explained higher life expectancy. Exercise — at least the way we think of it, as willful, dutiful, physical activity — played a small role at best.

Social structure might turn out to be more important. In Sardinia, a cultural attitude that celebrated the elderly kept them engaged in the community and in extended-family homes until they were in their 100s. Studies have linked early retirement among some workers in industrialized economies to reduced life expectancy. In Okinawa, there’s none of this artificial punctuation of life. Instead, the notion of ikigai — “the reason for which you wake up in the morning” — suffuses people’s entire adult lives. It gets centenarians out of bed and out of the easy chair to teach karate, or to guide the village spiritually, or to pass down traditions to children. The Nicoyans in Costa Rica use the term plan de vida to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. As Dr. Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, once told me, being able to define your life meaning adds to your life expectancy.

The healthful plant-based diet that Seventh-day Adventists eat has been associated with an extra decade of life expectancy. It has also been linked to reduced rates of diabetes and heart disease. Adventists’ diet is inspired by the Bible — Genesis 1:29. (“And God said: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed . . . and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food.’ ”) But again, the key insight might be more about social structure than about the diet itself. While for most people, diets eventually fail, the Adventists eat the way they do for decades. How? Adventists hang out with other Adventists. When you go to an Adventist picnic, there’s no steak grilling on the barbecue; it’s a vegetarian potluck. No one is drinking alcohol or smoking. As Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard, found when examining data from a long-term study of the residents of Framingham, Mass., health habits can be as contagious as a cold virus. By his calculation, a Framingham individual’s chances of becoming obese shot up by 57 percent if a friend became obese. Among the Adventists we looked at, it was mostly positive social contagions that were in circulation.

Ask the very old on Ikaria how they managed to live past 90, and they’ll usually talk about the clean air and the wine. Or, as one 101-year-old woman put it to me with a shrug, “We just forget to die.” The reality is they have no idea how they got to be so old. And neither do we. To answer that question would require carefully tracking the lifestyles of a study group and a control group for an entire human lifetime (and then some). We do know from reliable data that people on Ikaria are outliving those on surrounding islands (a control group, of sorts). Samos, for instance, is just eight miles away. People there with the same genetic background eat yogurt, drink wine, breathe the same air, fish from the same sea as their neighbors on Ikaria. But people on Samos tend to live no longer than average Greeks. This is what makes the Ikarian formula so tantalizing.

If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast on Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.

Every one of these factors can be tied to longevity. That’s what the $70 billion diet industry and $20 billion health-club industry do in their efforts to persuade us that if we eat the right food or do the right workout, we’ll be healthier, lose weight and live longer. But these strategies rarely work. Not because they’re wrong-minded: it’s a good idea for people to do any of these healthful activities. The problem is, it’s difficult to change individual behaviors when community behaviors stay the same. In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.

As our access to calories has increased, we’ve decreased the amount of physical activity in our lives. In 1970, about 40 percent of all children in the U.S. walked to school; now fewer than 12 percent do. Our grandparents, without exercising, burned up about five times as many calories a day in physical activity as we do. At the same time, access to food has exploded.

Despite the island’s relative isolation, its tortuous roads and the fierce independence of its inhabitants, the American food culture, among other forces, is beginning to take root in Ikaria. Village markets are now selling potato chips and soda, which in my experience is replacing tea as the drink of choice among younger Ikarians. As the island’s ancient traditions give way before globalization, the gap between Ikarian life spans and those of the rest of the world seems to be gradually disappearing, as the next generations of old people become less likely to live quite so long.

The big aha for me, having studied populations of the long-lived for nearly a decade, is how the factors that encourage longevity reinforce one another over the long term. For people to adopt a healthful lifestyle, I have become convinced, they need to live in an ecosystem, so to speak, that makes it possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, purpose or religion out of the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses. The power of such an environment lies in the mutually reinforcing relationships among lots of small nudges and default choices. There’s no silver bullet to keep death and the diseases of old age at bay. If there’s anything close to a secret, it’s silver buckshot.

I called Moraitis a few weeks ago from my home in Minneapolis. Elpiniki died in the spring at age 85, and now he lives alone. He picked up the phone in the same whitewashed house that he’d moved into 35 years ago. It was late afternoon in Ikaria. He had worked in his vineyard that morning and just awakened from a nap. We chatted for a few minutes, but then he warned me that some of his neighbors were coming over for a drink in a few minutes and he’d have to go. I had one last question for him. How does he think he recovered from lung cancer?

“It just went away,” he said. “I actually went back to America about 25 years after moving here to see if the doctors could explain it to me.”

I had heard this part of the story before. It had become a piece of the folklore of Ikaria, proof of its exceptional way of life. Still, I asked him, “What happened?”

“My doctors were all dead.”


This article is adapted from new material being published in the second edition of “Blue Zones,” by Dan Buettner, out next month from National Geographic.

Editor: Dean Robinson

La ciencia de la felicidad

I think that it's vital that this happinizing information be shared with as many people as possible, thus I will be making this a multi-lingual as time allows!

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He estado investigando sobre la ciencia de la felicidad. Tras mis investigaciones, he llegado al punto donde estoy segura que la felicidad es una destreza que se tiene que practicar con la energía y con el esfuerzo que se le dedica a otras cosas como entrenar para un maratón o la practica de ir al gimnasio diariamente. Si uno se enfoca deliberadamente a la practica de ser feliz, uno ira incrementando su habilidad para ser feliz! Lo bueno de esto es de que es super fácil, y no cuesta nada! Estan listos para vivir vidas mas felices? En cuanto tenga mas tiempo agregare mas artículos y recursos para proveerles mas información sobre la ciencia de la felicidad.

Pasos intencionales para ser feliz (vienen del autor Shawn Achor):
-La gratitud debe ser un habito
-Mantén un diario de gratitud
-Haz ejercicio
-Medita
-Realiza actos intencionales de bondad 

Aqui esta en Ingles: 
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Shawn Achor's Advice about how to, in my words, Happinize Puposefully-

I recommend printing this and posting it somewhere where everyone in your household will see it on a daily basis. By doing these simple things you will be ensuring that your brain is in prime shape to happinize to the fullest!
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  • Make gratitude a life habit:  Each day jot down three specific things that you are grateful for and fully explain why each is important to you.
  • Keep a gratitude journal: Concentrate on meaningful experiences and write down as many positive details as you can remember.  Research has proven that keeping a journal for six weeks can create new positive neural tracts, decrease stress and even reduce the need for medication.
  • Exercise: It improves motivation, reduces stress and increases feelings of mastery and engagement. Exercise has been proven to increase one’s IQ for two hours after the activity ends.
  • Meditate:  In a hectic world of multitasking and information overload, meditation trains our brain to do one thing at a time.  Even a few simple moments of daily focus can have enormous benefits, such as taking your hands off the computer keyboard for two minutes each day and breathing deeply.
Perform conscious acts of kindness: Altruism has been proven to decrease stress and significantly enhance mental health. Achor makes it a practice to start his day by praising someone in a short email.  He says community service projects help families develop greater happiness and achieve more success.


Although (that I know of), Achor does not stress healthy eating, you should keep in mind that healthy eating, along with weekly exercise, is vital to helping your brain be in a prime condition to happinize.


Adding more life to your days

I have been reading a new book, "Moonwalking with Einstein," and a specific quote (actually, a few) I read really caught my attention. Here they are:

"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it... If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next- and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives." (p. 77)

"Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. 'If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human'." (p. 77)

After reading this I thought that along with happinizing, or maybe even to further happinzing, we need to add more life to our days. So take a different route on your daily run, finally go to that new restaurant you've been meaning to go to, there's a street party? well, go! It is these memorable experiences that add to our humanness and make our lives more memorable. In the "Happy" documentary one of the happiness researchers comments that novel experiences are extremely important in helping our brain produce the chemicals that are needed for that happy feeling, and additionally all of these things are vital in strengthening neural pathways as well as creating new ones (furthering learning and information retention), so go, thrive, try something new, and add life to your days!

*Happiness is a skill, happinize on!

Other Happinizing Blogs

Here are other Happinizing blogs that you may want to follow:

1) The Happiness Coach
 http://thehappinesscoach.biz/happiness-habits-a-step-by-step-guide-or-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-happiness-habits-but-were-afraid-to-ask



*Happiness is a skill, happinize on.

Precise Happinizing Steps

Shawn Achor's Advice about how to, in my words, Happinize Puposefully-

I recommend printing this and posting it somewhere where everyone in your household will see it on a daily basis. By doing these simple things you will be ensuring that your brain is in prime shape to happinize to the fullest!
-->
  • Make gratitude a life habit:  Each day jot down three specific things that you are grateful for and fully explain why each is important to you.
  • Keep a gratitude journal: Concentrate on meaningful experiences and write down as many positive details as you can remember.  Research has proven that keeping a journal for six weeks can create new positive neural tracts, decrease stress and even reduce the need for medication.
  • Exercise: It improves motivation, reduces stress and increases feelings of mastery and engagement. Exercise has been proven to increase one’s IQ for two hours after the activity ends.
  • Meditate:  In a hectic world of multitasking and information overload, meditation trains our brain to do one thing at a time.  Even a few simple moments of daily focus can have enormous benefits, such as taking your hands off the computer keyboard for two minutes each day and breathing deeply.
  • Perform conscious acts of kindness: Altruism has been proven to decrease stress and significantly enhance mental health. Achor makes it a practice to start his day by praising someone in a short email.  He says community service projects help families develop greater happiness and achieve more success.


    Although (that I know of), Achor does not stress healthy eating, you should keep in mind that healthy eating, along with weekly exercise, is vital to helping your brain be in a prime condition to happinize. 

I wish you all healthy living!