Monday, November 16, 2015

Now that it's the end of the year, have you taken time off from your job yet? Doing so is good for your health, good for your workplace (not taking your allotted time off is like you're paying your employer for you to work) and according to this Fox News article, good for the economy. No sense in being a job martyr.

Budget Travel

Why you should take all the time off you deserve

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Vacation Commitment Summit (Diamond Resorts International.)


Are you a job martyr?

Not the perky one who volunteers to do all the vacation chores -- the cooking, the cleaning up while everyone else goes to the beach. I'm talking about the one who doesn't make it to the beach at all, the one who either considers themselves too valuable to take time off or too scared they'll return to find their boss realized they were expendable after all. And then there's the group simply overwhelmed by the thought of all the work that would pile up in their absence.


Whatever the reasons, Americans failed to use 429 million days of paid time off last year, the U.S. Travel Association reports. Those who get vacation time are taking less, while a quarter of Americans don't get any paid vacation at all in part because they have cobbled together several part-time jobs, explains Dr. Kenneth Matos of the Families and Work Institute, which researches work and family life issues.

Last year, a new study commissioned by MasterCard found that only half of Americans have been on, or are planning, a vacation. You've probably seen those pull-at-the-heartstrings MasterCard commercials with kids pleading with their parents to take just "One More Day" off. The campaign obviously has struck a nerve, generating over 100 million clicks, mentions, shares, likes and video completions from those of us who have heard those sentiments too many times from our own kids.

Katie Denis, a Washington, D.C., mom of a young daughter, freely admits she was a work martyr -- until she changed jobs. Now she is helping direct Project: Time Off, the new U.S. Travel Association initiative with the lofty goal of shifting our culture so that using personal time is no longer considered frivolous. "There is always going to be a reason to put vacation off, but you need to prioritize that time, not only because your family needs you to, but also because it will make you a better employee," she said. "Our research proves that HR managers agree that employees who take more vacation time are more productive, creative, and better performers."

Ready to get onboard?

The U.S. Travel Association, by the way, realized only 19 percent of its own staff was taking all of their vacation. After they offered $500 bonuses to those who did, the vast majority did "and we had the most successful year," said the association's Executive Vice President Gary Oster, speaking recently at a Vacation Commitment Summit in New York City presented by another initiative, TakeBackYourTime.org and Diamond Resorts whose CEO, David Palmer, has become a champion of this growing movement.

"In the hospitality business, we have the privilege of impacting someone's life every day, with memorable experiences and moments," he explained. "I had missed that we weren't creating that same opportunity for our team members ... it is too costly not to do this."

Palmer said his Las Vegas-based company with more than 7,000 employees now is developing programs to encourage managers to not only lead by example to take their vacations, but to encourage their team members to take theirs as well. They are even giving away all-expense paid trips every month to employees who explain why they couldn't get away otherwise every month.

At the summit, speaker after speaker detailed research findings that show people return from vacations rejuvenated, less stressed and more productive -- no real surprise. "People can't innovate if they don't have time to stop and think. Vacation gives them that opportunity," said Dr. Matos, adding that employers can benefit as much from their employees' time off as the employees themselves.

For one thing, they take less sick days. "A vacation isn't a luxury. It's a medical necessity," said Dr. Leigh Vinocur, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, who said she sees patients daily whose conditions are caused or exacerbated by stress. "The number one thing a vacation can do is release stress," she said. They also can improve your sex life, she added, and your kids' school performance.

If you are afraid to take your vacation, here's another factoid to consider: Those who don't use all their vacation aren't any more likely to get a raise or a promotion. "Martyrdom," said Katie Denis, "is bad for business," as well as for your family life. Still, she said, in many corporate cultures, "people get weird when you want to talk about whether to take vacation."

If you still feel too guilty to get away, consider that, according to the U.S. Travel Association, those unused days cost the U.S. economy $160 billion in spending that could support 1.2 million jobs.

If your boss grumbles about the "extra work" your absence will cause, remind her how many innovative ideas you'll come back with. Denis noted that some of the greatest recent success stories have been products of vacation thinking, including Dropbox and Instagram.

Point to what MasterCard is doing. After all, said Executive Vice President Susan Kunreuther, they couldn't launch an advertising campaign to encourage Americans to take vacations while their own people weren't taking the time they were owed -- often leaving more than four days on the table.

Now MasterCard employees get reminder emails of what vacation time they have left (sent to bosses, as well) and there are incentive contests with vacation experiences as prizes. Managers, Kunreuther said, are being encouraged "to leave folks alone" during vacation and weekends.

The strategy is working. During the four months following the campaign (September to December 2014) employees, in total, took almost 1,500 more days than they had the previous year but Kunreuther added, "We have a long way to go."

So where are you going on vacation?

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Metabolic Syndrome (High blood sugar/Diabetes with high blood pressure and large girth) is an epidemic in the U.S. A new study indicates brief exercise can help lower BP. Over time, exercise and diet will help lower weight/girth and reduce sugar levels. In fact, exercise and diet is an effective prohibitor of metabolic syndrome and its components and it costs little more than some of your time.

Brief bursts of activity lower blood pressure in type 2 diabetics


Published:



 
New research shows that just short bursts of simple, gentle exercise can significantly lower blood pressure in patients with type 2 diabetes.
 
[Diabetes in the dictionary]
Short flurries of exercise help lower blood pressure in type 2 diabetes patients.
 

Patients with type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure have a significantly increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. As such, research into methods that minimize these risks are vital.

An estimated 29.1 million people in the US have diabetes, of which 90-95% are type 2.
From 2009-2012, 71% of diabetic adults (aged 18 or older), had a blood pressure of at least 140/90 mm Hg or used prescription medications to lower high blood pressure.

Individuals with a systolic blood pressure of 140 or more are considered to have high blood pressure.
In 2010, hospitalization rates for stroke were 1.5 times higher among adults with diabetes aged 20 years or older, compared with the general population. Research into effective methods of controlling blood pressure are increasingly valuable as the obesity trend continues.

These new findings were presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2015. The team of investigators, from Melbourne, Australia, found that just a few minutes of light movement every 30 minutes could lower blood pressure.

Blood pressure reductions with very light walking


The trial was conducted on 24 obese or overweight people (average age 62) with type 2 diabetes as they sat for an 8-hour period.

Every 30 minutes, the participants either walked on a treadmill for 3 minutes at an average pace of 2 mph or carried out 3 minutes of light resistance exercises.

The resistance exercises consisted of half-squats, calf raises, knee raises or gluteal muscle squeezes. The study was carried out across 3 separate days, 8 hours per day, and the participants' blood pressure and norepinephrine levels were checked at regular intervals.

The participants who embarked on the light walking were found to have an average 10-point decrease in their systolic pressure and those engaging in resistance exercise showed a 12-point decrease.
 
Co-author Bronwyn Kingwell, PhD, says:
"It appears you don't have to do very much. We saw some marked blood pressure reductions over trial days when people did the equivalent of walking to the water cooler or some simple body-weight movements on the spot."
Long periods of inactivity have already been shown to have negative impacts on health and metabolism including obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.
This is the first study on short, intermittent bursts of light activity on type 2 diabetes patients in a controlled lab setting.

Kingwell notes that exercise benefits people with type 2 diabetes because as the muscles work, they take up more blood sugar. Because the patients either cannot make enough insulin or are unable to use it efficiently, this reuptake by the muscles is helpful toward maintaining a healthy internal balance.

The role of norepinephrine


The mechanisms through which blood pressure dropped during the trial are unclear. However, the team's norepinephrine measurements might give an insight. They observed an associated drop in norepinephrine as blood pressure lowered.

Norepinephrine is a hormone and neurotransmitter, and a potential candidate for causing the blood pressure drop.

Generally, norepinephrine is released in times of stress or danger. It elicits arousal and alertness, increases vigilance and improves memory recall. During sleep, norepinephrine is at its lowest concentrations in the brain.

Importantly, in regards to this study, norepinephrine also increases blood pressure and heart rate. This measured drop may well have influenced the simultaneous decrease in blood pressure. However, further investigation will be needed before we can confidently attribute these positive changes to this particular chemical.

Kingwell adds:
"Light activity breaks are not meant to replace regular, purposeful exercise. But they may be a practical solution to cut down sitting time, especially if you're at your desk all day."
So, in this case, less might not be more, but it certainly seems to be worthwhile. Medical News Today recently reported on how depression and diabetes are linked to a sedentary pregnancy.

Monday, November 9, 2015

The idea of happiness at work - equating to job satisfaction - is an oft sought component of a corporate culture. You either have it and fit in, or you may find yourself sitting alone in the cafeteria. But in an article published in the Harvard Business Review, its authors site research indicating that happiness at work may not be all that it is purported to be and may, in fact, be counter-productive. Makes you wonder if wanting to be left alone to do your job is such a bad thing.



The Research We’ve Ignored About Happiness at Work

 
by Andre Spicer & Carl Cedarstrom

July 21, 2015
 
JUL15_21_happiness_work_B


Recently, we found ourselves in motivational seminars at our respective places of employment. Both events preached the gospel of happiness. In one, a speaker explained that happiness could make you healthier, kinder, more productive, and even more likely to get promoted.

The other seminar involved mandatory dancing of the wilder kind. It was supposed to fill our bodies with joy. It also prompted one of us to sneak out and take refuge in the nearest bathroom.

Ever since a group of scientists switched the lights on and off at the Hawthorne factory in the mid-1920s, scholars and executives alike have been obsessed with increasing their employees’ productivity. In particular, happiness as a way to boost productivity seems to have gained increased traction in corporate circles as of late. Firms spend money on happiness coaches, team-building exercises, gameplays, funsultants, and Chief Happiness Officers (yes, you’ll find one of those at Google). These activities and titles may appear jovial, or even bizarre, but companies are taking them extremely seriously. Should they?

When you look closely at the research — which we did after the dancing incident — it’s actually not clear that encouraging happiness at work is always a good idea. Sure, there is evidence to suggest that happy employees are less likely to leave, more likely to satisfy customers, are safer, and more likely to engage in citizenship behavior. However, we also discovered alternate findings, which indicates that some of the taken-for-granted wisdoms about what happiness can achieve in the workplace are mere myths.

To start, we don’t really know what happiness is, or how to measure it.

Measuring happiness is about as easy as taking the temperature of the soul or determining the exact color of love. As Darrin M. McMahon shows in his illuminating study Happiness: A History, ever since the 6th Century B.C., when Croseus is said to have quipped “No one who lives is happy,” we have seen this slippery concept being a proxy for all sorts of other concepts, from pleasure and joy to plenitude and contentment. Being happy in the moment, Samuel Johnson said, could be achieved only when drunk. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, happiness was to lie in a boat, drifting aimlessly, feeling like a God (not exactly the picture of productivity). There are other definitions of happiness, too, but they are neither less nor more plausible but those of Rousseau or Johnson.

And just because we have more advanced technology today doesn’t mean we’re any closer to pinning down a definition, as Will Davies reminds us in his new book The Happiness Industry. He concludes that even as we have developed more advanced techniques for measuring emotions and predicting behaviors, we have also adopted increasingly simplified notions of what it means to be human, let alone what it means to pursue happiness. A brain scan that lights up may seem like it’s telling us something concrete about an elusive emotion, for example, when it actually isn’t.

Happiness doesn’t necessarily lead to increased productivity. 

 A stream of research shows some contradictory results about the relationship between happiness — which is often defined as “job satisfaction” — and productivity. One study on British supermarkets even suggests there might be a negative correlation between job satisfaction and corporate productivity: The more miserable the employees were, the better the profits. Sure, other studies have pointed in the opposite direction, saying that there is a link between feeling content with work and being productive. But even these studies, when considered as a whole, demonstrates a relatively weak correlation.

Happiness can be exhausting.

The pursuit of happiness may not be wholly effective, but it doesn’t really hurt, right? Wrong. Ever since the 18th century, people have been pointing out that the demand to be happy brings with it a heavy burden, a responsibility that can never be perfectly fulfilled. Focusing on happiness can actually make us feel less happy.

A psychological experiment recently demonstrated this. The researchers asked their subjects to watch a film that would usually make them happy — a figure skater winning a medal. But before watching the film, half of the group was asked to read out a statement about the importance of happiness in life. The other half did not. The researchers were surprised to find that those who had read the statement about the importance of happiness actually were less happy after watching the film. Essentially, when happiness becomes a duty, it can make people feel worse if they fail to accomplish it.

This is particularly problematic at the present era, where happiness is preached as a moral obligation. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner put it: “Unhappiness is not only unhappiness; it is, worse yet, a failure to be happy.”

It won’t necessarily get you through the work day. 

 If you have worked in a front-line customer service job, like a call center or fast food restaurant, you know that being upbeat is not an option. It’s compulsory. And as tiring as this may be, it makes some sense when you’re in front of customers.

But today, many non-customer facing employees are also asked to be upbeat. This could have some unforeseen consequences. One study found that people who were in a good mood were worse at picking out acts of deception than those who were in a bad mood. Another piece of research found that people who were angry during a negotiation achieve better outcomes than people who are happy. This suggests that being happy all the time may not be good for all aspects of our work, or jobs that rely heavily on certain abilities. In fact, for some things, happiness can actually make us perform worse.

Happiness could damage your relationship with your boss. 

 If we believe that work is where we will find happiness, we might, in some cases, start to mistake our boss for a surrogate spouse or parent. In her study of a media company, Susanne Ekmann found that those who expected work to make them happy would often become emotionally needy. They wanted their managers to provide them with a steady stream of recognition and emotional reassurance. And when not receiving the expected emotional response (which was often), these employees felt neglected and started overreacting. Even minor setbacks were interpreted as clear evidence of rejection by their bosses. So in many ways, expecting a boss to bring happiness makes us emotionally vulnerable.

It could also hurt your relationship with friends and family.

In her book Cold Intimacies Eva Illouz noticed a strange side effect of people trying to live more emotionally at work: They started to treat their private lives like work tasks. The people she spoke with saw their personal lives as things needed to be carefully administered using a range of tools and techniques they had learned from corporate life. As a result, their home lives became increasingly cold and calculating. It was no wonder, then, that many of the people she spoke with preferred to spend time at work rather than at home.

It could make losing your job that much more devastating. 

 If we expect the workplace to provide happiness and meaning in our life, we become dangerously dependent on it. When studying professionals, Richard Sennett noticed that people who saw their employer as an important source of personal meaning were those who became most devastated if they were fired. When these people lost their jobs, they were not just loosing an income – they were loosing the promise of happiness. This suggests that, when we see our work as a great source of happiness, we make ourselves emotionally vulnerable during periods of change. In an era of constant corporate restructuring, this can be dangerous.

Happiness could make you selfish.

Being happy makes you a better person, right? Not so, according to an interesting piece of research. Participants were given lottery tickets, and then given a choice about how many tickets they wanted to give to others and how many they wished to keep for themselves. Those who were in a good mood ended up keeping more tickets for themselves. This suggests that, at least in some settings, being happy does not necessarily mean we will be generous. In fact, the opposite could be true.

It could also make you lonely.

In one experiment, psychologists asked a number of people to keep a detailed diary for two weeks. What they found at the end of the study was that those who greatly valued happiness also felt lonelier. It seems that focusing too much on the pursuit of happiness can make us feel more disconnected from other people.

So why, contrary to all of this evidence, do we continue to hold on to the belief that happiness can improve a workplace?

The answer, according to one study, comes down to aesthetics and ideology. Happiness is a convenient idea that looks good on paper (the aesthetic part). But it’s also an idea that helps us shy away from more serious issues at work, such as conflicts and workplace politics (the ideological part).

When we assume that happy workers are better workers, we can sweep more uncomfortable questions under the carpet, especially since happiness is often seen as a choice. It becomes a convenient way of dealing with negative attitudes, party poopers, miserable bastards, and other unwanted characters in corporate life. Invoking happiness, in all its ambiguity, is an excellent way of getting away with controversial decisions, such as letting people go. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her book Bright-Sided, positive messages about happiness have proved particularly popular in times of crisis and mass layoffs.

Given all these potential problems, we think there is a strong case for rethinking our expectation that work should always make us happy. It can be exhausting, make us overreact, drain our personal life of meaning, increase our vulnerability, make us more gullible, selfish and lonely. Most striking is that consciously pursuing happiness can actually drain the sense of joy we usually get from the really good things we experience.

In reality, work — like all other aspects of life — is likely to make us feel a wide range of emotions. If your job feels depressing and meaningless, it might be because it is depressing and meaningless. Pretending otherwise can just make it worse.

Happiness, of course, is a great thing to experience, but nothing that can be willed into existence. And maybe the less we seek to actively pursue happiness through our jobs, the more likely we will be to actually experience a sense of joy in them — a joy which is spontaneous and pleasurable, and not constructed and oppressive. But most importantly, we will be better equipped to cope with work in a sober manner. To see it for what it is. And not as we — whether executives, employees, or dancing motivational seminar leaders — pretend that it is.


André Spicer is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Cass Business School in London and the co-author of The Wellness Syndrome.

Carl Cederström is an Associate Professor of Organization Theory at Stockholm University and the co-author of The Wellness Syndrome.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

With so much news focused lately on age-related dementia and Alzheimer's Disease, people's awareness of the conditions is certainly becoming heightened. At the same time, such awareness also forces people to ask what they might do to prevent the conditions occurring to themselves. Now a new study indicates that there is something that will help prevent age-related brain changes - aerobic exercise.



Long-term aerobic exercise prevents age-related brain change

 

Date:October 29, 2015

Source:
PLOS
Summary:
A study of the brains of mice shows that structural deterioration associated with old age can be prevented by long-term aerobic exercise starting in mid-life, according to new research. Structural changes that make the blood-brain barrier leaky and result in inflammation of brain tissues in old mice can be mitigated by allowing the animals to run regularly, providing a potential explanation for the beneficial effects of exercise on dementia in humans.


A study of the brains of mice shows that structural deterioration associated with old age can be prevented by long-term aerobic exercise starting in mid-life, according to the authors of a research article publishing in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on October 29th. Gareth Howell, Ileana Soto and their colleagues at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine (USA) found that structural changes that make the blood-brain barrier leaky and result in inflammation of brain tissues in old mice can be mitigated by allowing the animals to run regularly, so providing a potential explanation for the beneficial effects of exercise on dementia in humans.

Old age is the major risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, like many other diseases. Age-related cognitive deficits are due partly to changes in neuronal function, but also correlate with deficiencies in the blood supply to the brain and with low-level inflammation. In this study, the authors set out to investigate the changes in the brains of normal young and aged laboratory mice by comparing by their gene expression profiles using a technique called RNA sequencing, and by comparing their structures at high-resolution by using fluorescence microscopy and electron microscopy.

The gene expression analysis indicated age-related changes in the expression of genes relevant to vascular function (including focal adhesion, vascular smooth muscle and ECM-receptor interactions), and inflammation (especially related to the complement system, which clears foreign particles) in the brain cortex. These changes were accompanied by a decline in the function of astrocytes (key support cells in brain) and loss of pericytes (the contractile cells that surround small capillaries and venules and maintain the blood-brain barrier) and of major components of the basement membrane, which forms an integral part of the blood-brain barrier, as well as an increase in the density and functional activation of the immune cells known as microglia/monocytes, which scavenge the brain for infectious agents and damaged cells.

Dr. Soto, lead author on the study, says: "Collectively, our data suggests that normal aging causes significant dysfunction to the cortical neurovascular unit, including basement membrane reduction and pericyte loss. These changes correlate strongly with an increase in microglia/monocytes in the aged cortex,"

Physical activity is already known to ameliorate the cognitive decline and sensorimotor deficits seen in old age in humans as well as in mice. To investigate the impact of long-term physical exercise on the brain changes seen in the aging mice, the researchers provided the animals with a running wheel from 12 months old (equivalent to middle aged in humans) and assessed their brains at 18 months (equivalent to ~60yrs old in humans, when the risk of Alzheimer's disease is greatly increased).

Young and old mice alike ran about two miles per night, and this physical activity improved the ability and motivation of the old mice to engage in the typical spontaneous behaviors that seem to be affected by aging. This exercise significantly reduced age-related pericyte loss in the brain cortex and improved other indicators of dysfunction of the vascular system and blood-brain barrier. Exercise also decreased the numbers of microglia/monocytes expressing a crucial initiating component of the complement pathway that others have shown previously to play are role in age-related cognitive decline.

Interestingly, these beneficial effects of exercise were not seen in mice deficient in a gene called Apoe, variants of which are a major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. The authors also report that Apoe expression in the brain cortex declines in aged mice and this decline can also be prevented by exercise.

Numerous studies have correlated the development of Alzheimer's disease with vascular dysfunction during aging. This study suggests that this dysfunction might be driven by astrocyte dysfunction and/or pericyte loss leading to a breakdown of the blood-brain barrier. But further work will be required to establish the mechanism(s): what is the role of the complement-producing microglia/macrophages, how does Apoe decline contribute to age-related neurovascular decline, does the leaky blood-brain barrier allow the passage of damaging factors from the circulation into the brain?

Previous studies showing that exercise is beneficial for the human brain suggest the effects on mice are relevant for human health. The authors conclude that, "Our data, supported by data from human studies, point towards focusing efforts on understanding the impact of aging and lifestyle choices on neurovascular unit decline and neuroinflammation, particularly astrocyte and pericyte dysfunction.

Dr. Howell believes as a society we need to work hard to ensure we maintain an active lifestyle wherever possible. "In this day and age, with so many distractions and conveniences, it is easy to fall into a lifestyle that does not include enough exercise. With an aging population, I hope our study helps in encouraging a healthy lifestyle that includes exercise."

He goes on to say that: "For those that are unfortunately unable to exercise, our study provides insight into a possible mechanism by which exercise may benefit the aging brain and may one day lead to improved treatments for age-related cognitive decline, Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders."


Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by PLOS. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
  1. Ileana Soto, Leah C. Graham, Hannah J. Richter, Stephen N. Simeone, Jake E. Radell, Weronika Grabowska, W. Keith Funkhouser, Megan C. Howell, Gareth R. Howell. APOE Stabilization by Exercise Prevents Aging Neurovascular Dysfunction and Complement Induction. PLOS Biology, 2015; 13 (10): e1002279 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002279