Category: Motivation

Fruits and vegetables boost happiness even quicker than health.

Eating 8 portions of fruit and vegetables a day provides the maximum boost to people’s happiness, a study finds.

The positive effect comes faster than the boost to health.

Up to 8 portions, the more portions people ate, the happier they were.

The effect on happiness of eating those 8 portions compared with none was dramatic.

In terms of life satisfaction, it was equivalent to the difference between being employed and unemployed.

The graph below shows the increase in life satisfaction with portions of fruit and vegetables consumed each day.

Graph courtesy of Mujcic & Oswald (2016)

It is the first time a large study has found that fruit and vegetables contribute to happiness on top of their well-known protective effect against cancer and heart disease.

Professor Andrew Oswald, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Eating fruit and vegetables apparently boosts our happiness far more quickly than it improves human health.

People’s motivation to eat healthy food is weakened by the fact that physical-health benefits, such as protecting against cancer, accrue decades later.

However, well-being improvements from increased consumption of fruit and vegetables are closer to immediate.”

The conclusions come from following over 12,000 people.

Participants kept food diaries and their psychological well-being was measured.

Within two years, those eating more fruits and vegetables felt better, the results showed.

Dr Redzo Mujcic, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Perhaps our results will be more effective than traditional messages in convincing people to have a healthy diet.

There is a psychological payoff now from fruit and vegetables — not just a lower health risk decades later.”

One possible mechanism by which fruit and vegetables affect happiness is through antioxidants.

There is a suggested connection between antioxidants and optimism.

And, if you need more encouragement:

• Eating More Vegetables Linked To 40% Better Memory

The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health (Mujcic & Oswald, 2016).

“Spark” is an ebook by Dr Jeremy Dean first released last year. It is a step-by-step guide to using psychological techniques to achieve the goals you want.

Attendance at fitness classes was 90% higher in the group that used this type of motivation.

Competition is one of the best motivators, a new study concludes.

It works much better than friendly support, which could actually backfire and reduce motivation, the researchers found.

The research involved college students being encouraged to attend classes at the University fitness centre.

The programme was managed through an internet-based social network.

The researchers tested the effects of four different types of social network interactions, some involving competition, others not.

The results showed that when competition was involved, attendance rates at fitness classes were 90% higher.

Dr Damon Centola, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Most people think that when it comes to social media more is better.

This study shows that isn’t true: When social media is used the wrong way, adding social support to an online health program can backfire and make people less likely to choose healthy behaviors.

However, when done right, we found that social media can increase people’s fitness dramatically.”

Whether it was individual or in groups — competition emerged as critical to motivation.

Dr Jingwen Zhang, the study’s first author, said:

“Framing the social interaction as a competition can create positive social norms for exercising.

Social support can make people more dependent on receiving messages, which can change the focus of the program.”

Dr Centola speculated on why social support may not have workd:

“Supportive groups can backfire because they draw attention to members who are less active, which can create a downward spiral of participation.

Competitive groups frame relationships in terms of goal-setting by the most active members.

These relationships help to motivate exercise because they give people higher expectations for their own levels of performance.”

In comparison, competition kept people pushing for more:

“In a competitive setting, each person’s activity raises the bar for everyone else.

Social support is the opposite: a ratcheting-down can happen.

If people stop exercising, it gives permission for others to stop, too, and the whole thing can unravel fairly quickly.”

The study was published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports (Zhang et al., 2016).

The two motivational keys to becoming a champion.

In my motivation ebook, I describe how boosting motivation for any goal involves identifying the right type of internal motivations.

Secondly, maintaining progress is crucially about dealing with the inevitable obstacles along the way.

New research finds both are key to becoming a great athletic champion.

The study finds that the obstacles a person faces matter less than how they deal with them.

Professor Dave Collins, lead author of the study, said:

“We’ve found that there are universal psychological characteristics amongst those who are aspiring to get to the top.

We have a good idea of what makes people excellent and how we can help them reach peak performance.”

The researchers interviewed athletes from a variety of sports included football, skiing, rowing and combat sports.

For each athlete the researchers looked at how successful they had been.

It turned out that the athletes who reached the elite level had a special attitude.

They were never satisfied with their performance: always looking for improvements and setting tougher goals.

The best athletes also talked about their total commitment and an internal drive that their lesser peers lacked.

When faced with injuries or failures, the ‘almost’ great athletes were surprised and lost enthusiasm.

The elite athletes, though, were determined to return stronger than ever.

As the authors write:

“Super champions were characterized by an almost fanatical reaction to challenge, both proactively and in reaction to mishaps (i.e., trauma) which typically occurred due to injury or sport related setbacks such as non-selection/being dropped.”

The surprising finding was that the almost great athletes suffered no more setbacks, on average, than the elite athletes.

In other words: the difference wasn’t down to bad luck, but a special attitude.

The authors conclude:

“In summary, we feel that the differences between different levels of adult achievement relate more to what performers bring to the challenges than what they experience.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Collins et al., 2016).

→ Get my ebook: Spark: 17 Steps That Will Boost Your Motivation For Anything.

Image credit: marcovdz

Study tested how people feel 90 minutes after watching a tearjerking film.

People who watched a sad film were eventually in a better mood after watching it than they were before, a recent study found.

However, it took about 90 minutes, on average, to feel better after crying.

The research could help explain the function of crying.

Some argue that crying provides emotional relief.

And yet, when it is measured in the lab, crying makes people feel much worse.

The study showed 60 people two films known to be tearjerkers.

Their mood was measured right after watching the films, then after 20 minutes and 90 minutes.

Around half of the participants cried during the film: naturally they felt worse immediately afterwards.

The results showed, though, that after 20 minutes the criers had recovered their initial dip in mood.

It is probably this dip and then recovery that makes people feel that crying has improved their mood.

However, after another 60 minutes the criers felt even happier than they did before watching the films.

None of the mood shifts were related to how much people cried.

Asmir Gračanin, the study’s lead author, said:

“After the initial deterioration of mood following crying, it takes some time for the mood not only to recover but also to be lifted above the levels at which it had been before the emotional event.”

Talking of crying, here is another strange finding about happiness and crying:

https://www.spring.org.uk/2014/11/the-reason-overwhelming-happiness-makes-people-cry.php

The study was published in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Gračanin et al., 2016).

Watching film image from Shutterstock

What older people can teach youngsters (and all of us) about how to learn.

Older people are better at correcting their mistakes on a general knowledge quiz, a new study finds.

It’s not just that seniors know more, it’s that they are better at correcting themselves when they initially get it wrong.

Indeed older people were better, on average, at learning the true answers regardless of how confident they were initially.

Perhaps with age we learn humility when it comes to memory.

Two of the study’s authors, Janet Metcalfe and David Friedman of Columbia University, said:

“The take home message is that there are some things that older adults can learn extremely well, even better than young adults.

Correcting their factual errors — all of their errors — is one of them.

There is such a negative stereotype about older adults’ cognitive abilities but our findings indicate that reality may not be as bleak as the stereotype implies.”

The researchers were inspired by a quirk in how we correct mistakes in our learning.

It turns out that when we’re really confident about an answer which we discover is wrong, we are more likely to correct it.

Called the ‘hypercorrection effect’, it probably stems from our motivation to be consistent.

In the study, around 500 older and younger people were given a series of general knowledge questions.

After answering, people said how confident they were about the answer.

What emerged was that older people were better at correcting the errors they’d made on low-confidence questions.

Younger people, though, were more likely to learn only from the wrong answers they were almost sure were correct.

Older people learned just as well from these as they did from the answers they were not confident about.

Brain scans during the tests revealed that it was down to the way older people paid attention.

Metcalfe and Friedman said:

“They care very much about the truth, they don’t want to make mistakes, and they recruit their attention to get it right.

To be sure, older adults should be heartened by our results–the older adults did splendidly in our study.

But we all grow old, so younger adults should be encouraged, too.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Metcalfe et al., 2015).

Man listening image from Shutterstock