You already know, of course, that getting into a regular exercise routine is probably the best thing you can do for yourself — whether you want to be happier, healthier, skinnier, or smarter. Even though you already know this, I’m going to remind you. Why? Because I think we sometimes forget that the hassles of exercise don’t usually outweigh the benefits. Reams of research show that:

1) Exercise boosts your energy by delivering oxygen and nutrients to your brain and muscles. It helps your cardiovascular and muscular system work more efficiently, which gives you more strength and endurance (and therefore energy). Exercise also triggers the production of insulin receptors, which means that your body is able to better utilize glucose, or blood sugar — the raw energy that your body runs on.

2) Exercise reduces stress and anxiety. While aerobic exercise has been shown to alleviate anxiety disorders, even people who don’t struggle with a disorder report feeling less anxious after exercise.
3) Physical movement makes us happier, in part by fostering the neurochemicals in your body and brain that leave you happier and more relaxed. Doctors in the UK often prescribe exercise as a first-line treatment for depression, it’s so effective!

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“At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effects of chronic stress; it can also reverse them. Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to its preshriveled state. The mechanisms by which exercise changes how we think and feel are so much more effective than donuts, medicines, and wine. When you say you feel less stressed out after you go for a swim, or even a fast walk, you are.”

― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

 

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4) Physical movement improves sleep — and better sleep also tends to makes us happier, healthier, and more productive during the day.

5) Exercise makes us healthier physically and helps us control our weight, so much that it increases longevity — the amount of time that we live. Physically active people have: 

• Reduced risk of heart attack
• Lower blood cholesterol
• Lower risk of Type 2 Diabetes
• Lower risk of cancer
• Lower blood pressure
• Stronger bones, muscles, joints — and therefore lower risk of osteoporosis and risk of injury from falls.

6) It’ll improve your ability to focus, resist temptations, and make good decisions. According to John Ratey, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, participants in an Australian study who exercised:

Reported that an entire range of behavior related to self-regulation took a turn for the better. Not only did they steadily increase their visits to the gym, they reported that they smoked less, drank less caffeine and alcohol, ate more healthy food and less junk food, curbed impulse spending and overspending, and lost their tempers less often. They procrastinate less and kept more appointments. And, they didn’t leave the dishes in the sink — at least not as often.

7) Physical activity conditions your brain for improved memory and learning. Exercise increases brain chemicals called “growth factors,” which help the brain both grow new neurons and establish new connections between existing neurons. This helps us learn, adapt to change, and move what we learn into long-term memory.

I hope, looking at this long list of benefits — which is not even exhaustive, by the way — that you are feeling more motivated to make a plan to get in a daily exercise habit! If you know you want to get in an exercise habit but aren’t sure where to begin, please let me help! Enroll in my 21 Day Exercise Mini-Course — it’s only $9.99, and you’ll get free live coaching from me as a part of it.

 

Gratitude studies report long laundry lists of the benefits of gratitude. For example, people who jotted down something they were grateful for online everyday for just two weeks showed higher stress resilience and greater satisfaction with life. In addition, they reported fewer headaches and a reduction in stomach pain, coughs and sore throats!

People practicing gratitude even report sleeping better and getting more exercise. “The list of potential benefits is almost endless,” wrote Liz Gullford at the University of Birmingham. Gratitude is associated with “fewer intellectual biases, more effective learning strategies, more helpfulness towards others, raised self-confidence, better work attitude, strengthened resiliency, less physical pain, improved health, and longevity.”

What if you lean more towards the grouchy or cynical rather that the grateful? I have some good news for you. Gratitude is a SKILL, like learning to speak a new language or swing a bat. It can be taught, and it needs to be practiced consciously and deliberately. Yet, unlike learning a new language, practicing gratitude can be blissfully simple: just count the things in your life that you feel thankful for. Here are three of my favorite gratitude practices:

1.) At special dinners, we appreciate each other by writing on our dinner table place cards. The kids make giant construction paper place cards for each guest, and as people arrive and mingle, we each take some time to sit down at the table and write on the inside of each place card something that we love or appreciate about them. On birthdays, we usually skip the place cards but while we eat, we go around the table and say what we love or appreciate about the person who is having the birthday.

2.) Several times a week, I take a photograph of something I find beautiful or inspiring, or something for which I feel grateful. I was inspired to do this by Hailey Bartholomew’s film. Often, I just take the photo with my phone and it lives in the gratitude app that I use.

3.) Everyday, I ask my family about three good things. They might share good things that happened to them that day, or good things they did themselves, or even something good that hasn’t happened yet that they are anticipating.

If you are anything like me, you are not inclined to join a gym, or start training for a new race, or begin an exciting new exercise plan right now, during the holidays, when you have no time. (Even if, like me, you feel like you could use a little more exercise right about now.)

Here’s why the holidays are actually the best time to start a new routine

If we want our habits to stick, we need to start really, really small. It is hard for us humans to make a major behavior change (like swapping that holiday cocktail for a jog).

Here’s the thing: It’s much better to succeed at something rather unambitious (and then build on that success) than to fail at a more impressive goal. Almost all of us can pull off a brilliant couple of days, or even weeks, of ambitious exercise. But unless we have a really big catalyst for our change, like a very scary health diagnosis or other crisis-level event that provides us with immutable (and long-term) motivation, we’ll usually crash and burn soon after takeoff. We’ll have a couple of good weeks, but then we’ll have a bad day and skip our planned exercise. The next day we’ll decide that the whole routine is too hard and we’ll skip it again, resolving to make revisions tomorrow. The day after that we’ll hardly think of it at all. We’ll be back at square one.

The alternative to being super-ambitious when we create new habits is to build slowly. And because most of us have very little free time over the holidays, we feel better about doing something small — we can more easily see that something is better than nothing. So we are more willing to be shockingly unambitious in our exercise goals than we are are willing to be come January. And that is the very thing that will help us succeed!

When I first started going for regular walks in the late afternoon, my goal was just to put the leash on the dog and walk to the end of the block. Why? I ALWAYS have time for that, because it takes less than five minutes. (Yes, I really did this a lot at first, and I still occasionally do. Usually I walk longer, but not always.)

You, too, can do something ridiculously unambitious like this, and when you do, you’ll be carving a neural pathway in your brain that will eventually become an unshakable habit.

Join the Discussion: What’s stopping you from starting a new exercise routine? Will you make time this holiday season? Share your thoughts below.

Do you need support starting (or sticking to) an exercise habit? If so, you aren’t alone, and I really hope you’ll consider joining me in my brand new online class designed to get you into an exercise habit for the rest of your life. Here’s what’s best about it: It’s SUPER FUN, and you can do it even if you don’t have enough time to go to the gym. My new Establish an Exercise Habit Mini-Course is only $4.99 through Monday, November 29 at midnight (use the coupon code CCBlackFriday). Over the course of 21 days, it’ll deliver all the science you need to establish and keep an exercise habit. The mini-course includes access to a private Facebook Group for moral support and online coaching from me, Dr. Christine Carter. Learn more or enroll now here.

Ahh, Thanksgiving. For many of us regular gratitude-practicers, this extra grateful time of year can seem like a bit like more of the same. Sometimes our gratitude practices can become a bit routine, not quite as juicy as it was when we first started. And research suggests that when a practice starts to become too rote, its benefits start to wear off.

If you need a gratitude challenge this holiday season, here are three ways to take your appreciation to a totally new level.

1. Contemplate your own death.
There’s nothing like facing death to make us appreciate our lives–and sure enough, research finds that when people visualize their own death in detail, their gratitude increases. You can follow the instructions for this Tibetan death meditation, or simply set aside some time to really reflect on the following questions (which come from Enric Sala via Greg McKeown’s blog). Take each question one at a time, and try journaling an answer to each question before moving on to the next one.

What would I do if I only had a week left to live?

What would I do if I only had a month left to live?

What would I do if I only had a year left to live?

What would I do if I only had five years left to live?

What would I do if I only had a life left to live?

2. Throw a gratitude party.
One day, in the midst of planning her own 25th birthday, my good friends’ daughter Kate realized that her birthday party might not live up to her expectations. She wanted her party to be special, and she wanted to feel celebrated. She wanted the right people to come to the party, and the right food to be served. She wanted good music, and dancing, and for her friends to spontaneously make heartfelt toasts … to her, about her. And then it hit her: If she kept thinking about herself so darn much, she was bound to feel disappointed. (She might even cry at her own party, as the cliched song goes.) So she radically changed course. Here is the gist of the email I got from her:

Hello my parents’ dearest friends! First of all, THANK YOU for befriending my parents! You have given them love, acceptance, and friendship. You’ve inspired them to grow, and shared your beautiful light with them in a way that has changed their lives (and thus, mine) for the better. Thank you for that, from the very center of my heart.  

I’m writing you because I’m on a mission! As you probably don’t know, my 25th birthday is coming up, and rather than going the traditional route and having a blowout party for myself, I’m going to throw a SURPRISE party for my parents.  It’ll be a kind of “Thank You for My Birth(day)” party. I cannot wait!

My vision is to surround them with gratitude and love. I’m grateful to them for putting up with me for a quarter century, and so I want to show them in a dramatic way. What does that look like?

Here’s what I imagine: their favorite people showing up with huge smiles. Dancing. Laughter. Sharing of stories. Drinking. Some food (but I’m on a tight budget, so I may have to get creative here). A video of those who couldn’t make it. I’m open to your suggestions!

The party was better than anyone ever dreamed — for Kate and her parents, but also for all the guests. Kate gave us all the incredibly powerful gift of extreme gratitude.

3. Don’t just think about what you are grateful for, really feel it.
Another extreme form of gratitude is neuropsychologist Rick Hanson’s “taking in the good” practice. Here’s how to do it:

First, actively think of a positive experience for which you feel grateful. For example, the leaves in my neighborhood look so pretty at this time of year, and I’m grateful to have enjoyed a hike this afternoon among all the fall color.

Next, draw out — really savor — that positive experiences. According to Rick, the key is not just to hold something positive in our awareness for as long as possible, but also to remember the positive emotions that go along with it. The idea, he says, is to “turn positive facts into positive experiences.” For example, instead of just thinking “I’m grateful for the fall color,” I also reflected on how blissful I felt while outside walking. Thinking like this evokes what was rewarding about a positive event and helps use our brain chemistry to strengthen connections associated with the memory.

Finally, let it all sink in. Take this image — “sinking in” — as if it were literal. Rick invites us to later recall the positive experience — for me, the hike and seeing all the fall color — and feel that experience “entering deeply into your mind and body, like the sun’s warmth into a T-shirt, water into a sponge, or a jewel placed in a treasure chest in your heart.”

Don’t just think about what you are grateful for, really feel it. #Gratitude Share on XDon’t just think about what you are grateful for, really feel it.” username=”raisinghappines”]

Will you help me brainstorm other ways to practice extreme gratitude during this holiday season? Please take a moment to post your idea in the comments below. This is fun: I’ll send you a thank you gift! If you leave your email address in the comments, I’ll email you a new beautifully designed poster of my happiness manifesto that you can download and print.

References:
Frias, Araceli, Philip C. Watkins, Amy C. Webber, and Jeffrey J. Froh. 2011. “Death and Gratitude: Death Reflection Enhances Gratitude.” The Journal of Positive Psychology 6 (2) (March): 154–162.

Hanson, Rick. 2009. Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. New Harbinger Publications.

Photo courtesy of Nate Grigg via Flickr.