Tweak your habits and adjust your mindset with some counter-intuitive methods

Part of beating your depression is changing the way you approach things and adjusting your lifestyle.  But it’s not easy and where do you start?  We’ve found some often forgotten but effective tips to help you tweak those habits and adjust your mindset; some may be obvious, some may be a bit more unusual, but we hope they help!

1. Eat Breakfast – we all know that breakfast is ‘most important meal of the day’, but many of us don’t act on this.  According to New York Magazine, “between 1965 and 1991, the number of adults who regularly skip breakfast increased from 14 to 25%.”  Numerous studies have also linked eating breakfast, particularly foods with a low glycaemic index, with promoting your general well-being, increasing your productivity rate, and lowering your body mass index.  Truthfully?  There isn’t really a better one-stop option so if you want to look, feel and work better, starting eating breakfast!

1. Sit Less! – we spend a lot of our time during the day sitting down, particularly office workers.  On average, we sit for around 9.3 hours a day, which is more hours than we sleep!  Not doing anything leads to higher cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes and other unhealthy side effects.  Engaging in regular aerobic exercise is enough to counteract this sitting but according to ‘inactivity research’, the best way to combat the negativeness of sitting and avoid weight gain is to move more often and break up that sitting cycle.  Walk to the water cooler, walk down the road to get a sandwich at lunchtime, take the stairs, walk over to a colleagues’ desk, stand up and bend over to tie your shoelaces… up the activity and increase your life expectancy.

1. Exercise in the Middle of the Day – as with eating breakfast, exercise is one of those activities that improves just about everything, including productivity and concentration.  In a UK study that followed 200 workers, it demonstrated that exercising on a workday significantly improved their mood, calmness, productivity and problem-solving capabilities.  The key findings, according to the Daily Mail, were:

a)      74% reported improvements in time management on exercise days compared to non-exercise days.

b)      79% said mental and interpersonal performance was better on days they exercised.

c)      74% said they managed their workload better.

1. Get an Office Pet – having pets at work improves productivity and camaraderie is a theory long-promoted by scientists, but it seems that they have been backed-up by recent studies, particularly when it comes to dogs.  Crain’s recent study from Central Michigan University summarised as follows:

“Researchers found that having dogs present increases collaboration.  In one experiment, they asked 12 groups of 4 people to create brief advertisements for an imaginary product. Some of the teams had dogs with them; the others did not.  Afterward, participants were asked to comment on how they felt about their teammates.  Those in the groups with dogs rated their colleagues higher on matters such as trust and team cohesion.”

1. Shorten your Commute – we make mistakes when we think about what will make us happy, and one of the most common oversights is when we think about the impact of our daily commute.  The Atlantic’s Cities blog recently wrote:

“In previous studies of happiness, commuting has been found to be the least pleasant part of our day.  Yet some of us make things even worse by trading a longer commute for a bigger house; several years ago, two Swiss economists found that if you commute 45 minutes to work, you have to make nearly 20% more money to make the trip worth it from a standpoint of well-being.  Part of the problem with long commutes is what’s called the ‘weighting mistake’ – over-valuing the extra bedroom you’ll never use, while de-valuing the extra 20 minutes to and from work.”

1. Use ALL of those Vacation Days – in an article for Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz, energy expert, noted that “more than half of all Americans now fail to take all of their vacation days and 30% of Americans use less than half their allotted vacation time.”  But we don’t gain productivity by doing so.  A comprehensive study by Ernst & Young showed that taking longer vacations improved their performance, and their well-being.

1. Distance Yourself from the Problem – research suggests that how ‘close’ we feel to a problem impacts our mental representation of it.  We contemplate situations in the here and how one way (concretely and creatively), and other situations projected into the future in another way (abstractly and more creatively).  We can increase our creativity by taking some simple steps, such as moving ourselves to a faraway place in our minds, thinking about the distant future, communicating with people dissimilar to us, and considering unlikely alternatives to reality.

1.  Explore your Dark Side – in a blog post at WIRED.com, journalist Jonah Lehrer considered 2 recent studies that implied – rightly or wrongly – that both anger and sadness were key drivers to creative thinking.  Anger seemed to fuel ‘unstructured thinking’ and idea generation, whilst sadness ‘increases our persistence and drives us to work harder’.