Taking Action - Exercise (Babyak et al., 2000)

Here's a great talk by psychologist Shawn Achor on why exercise is good for your success and happiness.



Everyone knows exercise is supposed to make you happier but we tell you the wrong reason for it. Usually we say  if you run enough maybe endorphins might get released and you might get addicted to those. Endorphines, these neurochemicals, they give you short term happiness but we are talking about today is long term quantifiable happiness and what we found is exercise does this but for a completely different reason. Exercise does this because it changes your tetris effect. What it does is people who exercise  also started eating healther on average. Why because their brain says I've been successful in one domain I bet I can be succcesful in  another domain.  which is why we found when senior level executives exercise in the morning they are better at dealing with their inbox at 2 oclock in the middle of the day. Two separate functions at two separate parts of the  day  and yet linked to the same activity. That activity is that you are getting your brain to believe your behaviour matters. If you exercise and go to work and you look around at other people you think I exercised and look at all these people that didn't , Even though that's the fist time you've exercised in a decade. you feel a moment of success and that moment of success translates into the very next action you take and just like we see in sports we see they get into the momentum of success that happens because they have an initial victory which leads to a cascading effect and those individuals start building an entire constellation of positive habits around them based on that first belief that my behaviour matters.