Smile
therapy
and the
dangers of television
by
Marcus Loane
16th
Feb 2010
Experiments
have shown that subjects rated jokes as being funnier if they were forced to
smile. The act of smiling fools the brain into feeling happier. Knowing this it
makes sense to deliberately smile more, even if you are on your own. It will
give you a little happiness boost. If it is inappropriate to be seen smiling
then you can do an invisible smile. Imagine yourself smiling and feel just a
hint of a smile tugging up the corners of your mouth and crinkling the sides of
your eyes ever so slightly. You can imagine the smile radiating throughout your
whole body and feel the happiness that accompanies it.
You can use
the same principle of the body leading the brain by adopting a confident
posture if you want to feel more confident. Stand up straight with shoulders
back and chin up and look people in the eye.
If you want
to feel relaxed then adopt a relaxed posture with shoulders down, relax all
your muscles, avoid fidgeting and notice the gentle rise and fall of your
breathing.
Music therapy
You can also
deliberately influence your moods by choosing different types of music. If you
need to feel energetic to get some physical task done then using fast paced
energetic music may help. If you need to relax then classical, melancholic jazz
or slow ballads may work for you.
Nature therapy and the dangers of
television
You can
deliberately manipulate your psychological states by changing or choosing the
environments you spend your time in. If you spend your time in cluttered, noisy
(think televison) untidy environments it will be more
difficult to achieve a state of inner calm. Tidy people find mess more
unnerving than untidy people so there is some individual variation here.
Some interesting
studies have shown that more exposure to the greenery in nature has beneficial
effects on young people's performance at school and in other areas. Teenagers were placed in similar buildings but with different
amounts of greenery around them and their behaviour was monitored. It is
quite surprising that having a few trees outside a tower block has measureable
effects on the inhabitants’ mental states and behaviour.
We are often
over-stimulated in modern environments with fast moving images on television
screens and constant noise and interruptions from electronic devices. There
have been alarming studies showing the detrimental effect of exposure to
television to babies and young children. Watching television slowed down their
development of language. In some homes the television may be on constantly and
this background noise may make it very difficult for a toddler's developing
brain to distinguish or even pay attention to the important sounds such as mum
and dad talking. There have also been studies showing a link between television
viewing hours and depression, obesity, heart disease and ADHD (attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder), and this was after taking out other factors
such as social class. Another study showed increased aggression and slowed
acquisition of reading skills in school children (the link to a summary of this
is here).
A study
was conducted comparing older people with or without dementia and their
lifestyles in middle age. It was found that those who spent more time viewing
television in middle age were more likely to develop dementia. In fact this was
the only single activity that showed a link to developing dementia.
Researchers
have also found that the more time spent watching television the more likely
you are to die younger.
‘The study
followed 8,800 adults with no history of heart disease for more than six years.
Compared to those who watched less than two hours of TV per day, people who
watched four hours or more were 80 percent more likely to die from heart
disease and 46 percent more likely to die from any cause. All told, 284 people
died during the study.
The pattern held even after the researchers took
into account the education level and overall health of the participants --
their age, whether they smoked, and their cholesterol and blood pressure, for
example.
Television isn't lethal in and of itself; the real
problem appears to be that sitting is the "default position" for TV
viewing, says lead study author David Dunstan, Ph.D., the head of the physical
activity lab at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, a national research
center in Victoria, Australia.
"Prolonged watching of television equals a lot
of sitting, which invariably means there's an absence of muscle movement,"
Dunstan says. If your muscles stay inactive for too long, it can disrupt your
metabolism, he explains.
Television isn't necessarily replacing our
exercise time, he explains, but it is replacing everyday,
"non-sweaty" movements as basic as standing and walking from room to
room. The positive health effects of these seemingly negligible activities are
underestimated, he says.’
Another study
linking television viewing of over two hours a day with increased risk of heart
attacks is reported here.
A walk in the park
Getting a
dose of nature is very good for us. We are part of it and our ancestors grew up
in it. We should not be surprised that it has a satisfying, grounding effect on
us.
--
Marcus Loane
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