Inspirational and good news.
Here’s a fun video to start your week with, this old fellow plays all day for his health and to inspire his next invention. He wants all people from kids to seniors to play all day, everyday to help their mental and physical health. At the very least, his enthusiasm is infectious.
Thanks to Christine!
Seniors who lead active lives like playing cards and generally hanging out with friends feel healthier and are healthier than there less social peers. Friends make things fun and keep you fit!
Dr. Nicole Anderson is a clinical neuropsychologist at Baycrest Health Sciences in Toronto, where she’s leading a research project called BRAVO. It looks at the effects of volunteering among adults aged 55 and older from physical, cognitive and social functioning perspectives.
“Engaging in more social activities was related to better self-reported health and less loneliness and more life satisfaction,” Anderson said of the Statistics Canada research. “But that relationship really depended on whether they felt that those social relations were of high quality. That substantiates the claim that quality is more important than quantity.”
It’s thought that social connectedness helps the immune system to work better, lower stress hormone levels and offers psychological benefits, Anderson said.
In this TED talk Amy Cuddy explains that if you change how you stand, sit, or generally hold yourself you can change how you feel. As an added bonus, by posing yourself in certain ways you can make other people think of you differently.
Teresa Amabile is a professor at Harvard Business School who has researched diary keeping and has made a very nifty realization: even keeping a few thoughts a day can amount to huge differences in happiness. I use I Done This to track my days, perhaps you’d like to too after watching this video:
As an average cyclist I often find it confusing when drivers get their hate on for sustainable transit. Anyone who knows anything about the environment or living in an urban centre would acknowledge that bicycle infrastructure is important and creates a more vibrant city than car-dominated streets.
Yet, car drivers still demand more space and want to take away space from cyclists, what’s up with that? According to a columnist at Slate it has to do with the fact that car drivers can’t conceptualize riding a bicycle as a form of everyday transportation.
Moreover, bicycling as a primary means of transportation—I’m not talking about occasional weekend riders here—is a foreign concept to many drivers, making them more sensitive to perceived differences between themselves and cyclists. People do this all the time, making false connections between distinguishing characteristics like geography, race, and religion and people’s qualities as human beings. Sometimes it is benign (“Mormons are really polite”), sometimes less so (“Republicans hate poor people”). But in this case, it’s a one-way street: Though most Americans don’t ride bikes, bikers are less likely to stereotype drivers because most of us also drive. The “otherness†of cyclists makes them stand out, and that helps drivers cement their negative conclusions. This is also why sentiments like “taxi drivers are awful†and “Jersey drivers are terrible†are common, but you don’t often hear someone say “all drivers suck.†People don’t like lumping themselves into whatever group they are making negative conclusions about, so we subconsciously seek out a distinguishing characteristic first.
Now that we know what one of the problems is in North America it would be great to see more public awareness programs like car drivers for Jarvis.