Here’s one simple thing you can to do increase your brainpower…

Stand up.

Yes, it is that easy. Get out of your chair and on to your feet.

A new study from Texas A&M University found that students with standing desks were more attentive and showed 12 percent greater on-task engagement than students who had seated desks. This 12 percent equates to an extra seven minutes per hour of engaged instruction time.

These results lead researches to believe we think better on our feet.

Mark Benden, Ph.D., CPE, associate professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health, said that previous research has shown that physical activity, even at low levels, may have beneficial effects on cognitive ability.

“Standing workstations reduce disruptive behavior problems and increase students’ attention or academic behavioral engagement by providing students with a different method for completing academic tasks (like standing) that breaks up the monotony of seated work,” Benden said.

Is your work starting to feel monotonous? Maybe it is time to push the chair aside and let your feet do the thinking.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

The post One Simple Way To Increase Our Brainpower appeared first on Attention Land.

10 seconds? A minute?

The length of time you can endure the freezing cold tells a little about your pain tolerance. The longer you are able to withstand a frozen hand, the higher your tolerance.

What if I told you that you could improve this tolerance and all you had to do was laugh?

In his book, Ha! The Science of When We Laugh And Why, author Scott Weems tells the story of scientist who performed a cold pressor test. They asked participants to hold one hand in water chilled to 35 degrees Fahrenheit. They recorded their scores and then asked the participants to do the test again, only this time they performed the test while watching a recording of humorous stand-up comedy.

While watching the comedy, the patients were able to increase the amount of time they kept their hand in the ice water from 36-100 seconds. Weems calls this the Bill Cosby Effect (which unfortunately has a different connotation these days).

But laughing isn’t exactly the same as taking aspirin. Rather, it is more like a jog on a treadmill. Our minds need emotional engagement just like our bodies need exercise.

“The reason comedies and tragedies lead to greater pain tolerance is that our minds are exercised by each,” Weems says. “When we laugh, just as when we cry, our bodies experience emotional arousal. This effect is both engaging and distracting, strengthening our bodies—and our minds—for what is to come, much like a boxer lifts weights before a bout.”

Weems goes into great detail to show the benefits of laughing, but he also acknowledges that is it not a wonder drug. Humor may increase our pain tolerance but man cannot live on humor alone.

“Laughter is the best medicine, so long as it’s mixed with exercise, a healthy diet, and an occasional dose of penicillin,” says Weems.

Humor is a lot like changing a baby’s diaper—it doesn’t necessarily solve all our problems, but it sure does make things more pleasant for a while.”

So next time you are want to alleviate some hurt (physically or emotionally), you might just want to turn on Chris Rock’s Bring the Pain.

The post How Laughter Can Make You Feel Invincible appeared first on Attention Land.

I recently learned that this characteristic of being “all there” has a name: Mindfulness

Mindfulness has been defined as “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.”

While that sounds nearly impossible (I mean, who can really be aware of every single thought, feeling or sensation that occurs all day long?) it actually isn’t as difficult as it may seem. To be mindful, we simply have to tune into what is going on around us in the present moment rather than questioning the past or picturing the future.

And one particular study shows that our ability to do this can directly affect our happiness.

Matthew Killingsworth, one of the foremost researchers on mindfulness, ran an experiment that collected over 650,000 reports on happiness from over 15,000 people. He did so by creating an app that gathered real-time reports of thoughts, feelings and actions of a broad range of people as they went about their daily activities.

Killingsworth’s data found that people’s minds wander a lot. Forty-seven percent of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they are currently doing.

I was skeptical when I first read that. 47% seems like too much. But the more I thought about it, the more it actually makes sense. Consider your day…As you are driving to work you are probably thinking about the busy day you have on your plate. When you are working, you are likely thinking about the happy hour you can’t wait to get to. People are even constantly checking their phone while they are going to the bathroom.

We are a society of wandering minds, and Killingsworth says that isn’t a good thing.

His study found that people are significantly less happy when their minds are wandering than when they’re not. He also found that how often a person’s mind wanders and what they think about is “far more predictive of happiness than how much money they make.”

People are less happy even when they are mind-wandering away from something that isn’t enjoyable to think about something they find more amusing.

To explain this, Killingsworth uses the example of commuting to work: “For example, people don’t really like commuting to work very much; it’s one of their least enjoyable activities. Yet people are substantially happier when they’re focused only on their commute than when their mind is wandering off to something else. This pattern holds for every single activity we measured, including the least enjoyable. It’s amazing.”

In conclusion, the study found that mind-wandering appears to be a cause, and not a consequence, of unhappiness.

Killingsworth says, “The lesson here isn’t that we should stop mind-wandering entirely—after all, our capacity to revisit the past and imagine the future is immensely useful, and some degree of mind-wandering is probably unavoidable. But these results do suggest that mind-wandering less often could substantially improve the quality of our lives. If we learn to fully engage in the present, we may be able to cope more effectively with the bad moments and draw even more enjoyment from the good ones.”

As Jim Elliot said, “Wherever you are, be all there.”

Photo credit: Pixabay

The post We Spend 47% Of Our Day Doing This & It Is Making Us Unhappy appeared first on Attention Land.

According to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, we experience approximately 20,000 individual moments in a given day.

Each moment only lasts a few seconds, but a couple of those seconds can make someone’s day.

Months ago, I had a friend tell me that a post I wrote had inspired them. She told me that it was exactly what she needed to hear and it made her day.

She was not aware, but at that time, I was questioning if anyone out there was reading my stuff. I wondered if anyone cared. He compliment was a simple moment that only lasted a few seconds. But that brief moment was exactly what I needed to hear. It made my day.

We experience approximately 20,000 individual moments in a given day. But the result of a few of those moments last much longer.

When you are struggling with your goals or your dreams and you feel like giving up, remember…Not everything you do will make an impact on someone else. But a few select moments can make more of an impact than you may ever know. You never know when you will make someone’s day.

To quote The Lego Movie, “I know that sounds like a cat poster, but it’s true.”

Photo credit: Wikipedia

The post You Never Know When You’ll Make Someone’s Day appeared first on Attention Land.

Despite all that, he still was able to find meaning in life.

Frankl titled his book, Man’s Search For Meaning, because he recognized that we are all looking for meaning in our own lives. Each of us want to have something that gives us value or makes us feel important.

It is one thing to ask the question: Where can we find meaning?

Meaning can be found in our work, our family or, like Frankl, in efforts to help others find their meaning.

It is another thing to ask: Where can I find my unique meaning?

I don’t know about you, but finding my unique meaning always seems like a very difficult task. I keep waiting to find a cheat sheet or cliff notes version of my life that reveals my specific purpose.

I am still waiting…

If you are like me, maybe we are just looking at it the wrong way.

I recently read this quote by former Security of Education, John Gardner.

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like an answer to a riddle or a prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life.”

Every time I think about my search for meaning, feel I am playing the role of a detective. I picture myself as a super sleuth as I try to put together clues from my life to solve an important puzzle.

The only problem is that I am not Sherlock Holmes. I have no secret agent training and the only thing that makes me qualified to be a detective is that I own a magnifying glass. Other than that, I lack all appropriate detective equipment and preparation.

So in my most important case ever, the case of the missing purpose, I am lost.

That is discouraging.

As Gardner says, instead of looking at life like a detective, maybe I should be looking at meaning through the lens of a builder.

Instead of searching for missing pieces, I should be looking at blueprints. Rather than collecting clues, I should be assembling material. The building blocks of my unique meaning can be made up of the experiences I’ve had, the skills I possess and many of the other aspects of my life that make me, me.

While it is true that I am no engineer, and the only tool I really know how to use is a level, I feel that it is much easier to become Bob Vila than it is to become Sherlock Holmes.

Next time you are like me and feel you are hopeless in your quest for meaning, try and change your proverbial profession from detective to builder. I like our chances of building meaning much better than doing an investigation for meaning.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

The post Could This One Change Help You Find Meaning in Life? appeared first on Attention Land.