Now that Summer is over, did you take time to take a vacation or are you one of those people who keep saying you'll get around to it but never do? There are a number of reasons why you should make sure you schedule time off, not the least of which is your well-being, but here's ten top reasons why you should take that vacation.

   

Top 10 Reasons To Take A Vacation

Does anyone go on non-working vacations anymore? Vacations, should be the time we forget about the real world and instead we simply make what small time we do take for ourselves, an extension of our work schedule. What are the repercussions? There are many. Below are the Top 10 Reasons you must employ at least 2 weeks of vacation time into your work year.

1. Vacations can reduce stress: Did you know that the two biggest causes of stress are “money” and “work”? No big surprise right? Although the word “stress” seems pretty harmless, it’s an open door to extremely harmful diseases. Namely, heart attack and high blood pressure. Think it can’t happen to you? Statistics offer up a different opinion.

2. Vacations clear the fog: If you’re a workaholic like so many of us, chances are you get those days where you just can’t think as clear as you normally do. Believe me, this doesn’t get better unless you make changes. These unproductive days will come to you more often. Because so many of us seem to live for work instead of the other way around, we aren’t getting the rest and more importantly, the sleep, we truly need to be productive. Do you sleep 8-hours every night? Is it real sleep or do you have to use prescription medication to turn off your brain? It’s an absolute fact that we must have 8 hours of sleep a night and anything less has major health implications. In addition to brain fog, diabetes and heart disease have been attributed to lack of sleep. Not to mention aging prematurely.

3. Because you need more money: Say what? When we vacation, our brains relax and we are open to opportunity and creative ideas. We get less headaches and fewer neck and shoulder pains. When we feel good, we see the world differently. In the real world, our routines are to be around the same people in the same places with the same issues on a daily basis. We don’t allow our minds to skinny-dip like we used to. We don’t dream. If our mind is not free to wander, we can’t see true opportunity because we are far too busy working. Vacationing in a different atmosphere helps us dream.

4. Personal Relationships First: Our career will have it’s ups and downs and jobs may come and go but our personal relationships are here to stay, or not. Take a vacation and shut out the real world and spend that time enjoying being with people you love most. We tend to take our relationships with family and friends for granted and sadly enough, these are the people that make our lives whole. Our employer does not.

5. Vacationing Is An Anti-Aging Catalyst: Did you know that people who live in countries where employees are required to take vacations live longer? It’s true! In fact, if this next statistic doesn’t scare you to a Travel Coordinator, what will? In 1980 there were only 10 countries that lived longer than people in the USA. Now, there are people living in 41 countries that live longer than us. Cayman Islands, here I come.

6. To Be An Asset: It is said that job stresses and burn out cost our country over $300 billion each year. The words “I’m just burned out” stop being comical when they cost other people money.

7. You Like Your Job: With job burnout comes incompetence and mistakes that can damage your employment. Have you seen unemployment statistics lately, if you have a job, count your blessings. When you are an employee, the hours you’ve “signed up for” are not your own anymore. These hours are handed to your employer with a mutual agreement that you will be productive for the hours you are paid. Not in that agreement are: spaciness, sick time, brain fog or depression.

8. Health Insurance: If you own a business, chances are very good that you don’t have adequate (or any) health insurance. If you become ill, who is going to pay for that expense? How will you bring in money for your family. No government bailout for you… besides we’re already paying for things we have no control over.

9. Memories Last A Lifetime: We need more of them. Memories create happiness and happiness is healthy. How often do you let your mind run amok and reflect with fond memories on … work? When was the last time you sat on the porch and smiled to yourself as you thought of the traffic jam you were in this morning? Memories are what put a smile on our faces and make us feel human. Take a vacation, create memories.

10. Because We Matter: Fast forward your life for a moment, in the very end, do you think your final wish would be that you could spend more time working, or more time with the people that matter most? In the end, what do you think your friends and family’s final though would be?

After watching a YouTube video about Millennials being defined as self-absorbed narcissists, I thought about all of our obsession regarding the pursuit of happiness. Where once it was derived from a sense of self-fulfillment, it now seems to be a by-product of industry's use of it to create a false corporate culture. Perhaps it is also why we long for something else that comes from within.

The business of happiness

 

BY PHILIP MATTHEWS

 

Monkey Business Images

Dancing like everyone's watching - the way to happiness?

What if capitalism died from lack of interest? Or to use the correct language, from low levels of employee engagement. What if everyone phoned in sick or just stopped bothering at all?

It sounds fanciful but British sociologist and author William Davies floats the idea in his fascinating and timely new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. It may not be a revolution or a big financial crisis or something equally epochal that knocks capitalism off its perch but general, yawning indifference.

It is a dramatic way to talk about boredom and the lack of engagement in workplaces, but there is plenty of data to back it up. Davies cites Gallup research figures that show only 13 per cent of the global workforce is properly engaged, 63 per cent are not engaged and 24 per cent of workers are "actively disengaged". This active disengagement may cost the US economy up to US$500 billion a year, a number that seems astonishing to Davies.

What is your motivation? It even seems that what it means to be sick has changed, turning into general ennui. A Canadian study in 2014 found that 29 per cent of workplace absence is due to workers feeling tired or stressed about their jobs. In 2012, stress took over as the leading cause of absence from work in the UK.

As Davies writes, managers were once required to negotiate with unions. Now they must "confront a much trickier challenge, of dealing with employees who are regularly absent, unmotivated or suffering from persistent, low-level mental health problems".

Suspicion grows in response. A survey of 1000 British bosses found that a third check social media to see if employees are really sick or just faking.

Overall, there is a view that modern life is making many of us mentally unwell. For example, the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology estimated in 2011 that 38 per cent of Europeans are suffering from a mental health problem, including depression, anxiety and insomnia.


You could quote statistics all day but the trends seem clear. And these workplace trends are likely to be mirrored in the New Zealand economy, although the sums will be less spectacular. A Wellness in the Workplace survey estimated that absenteeism cost New Zealand business $1.6b in 2013.

So it's no surprise that managers look for ways to make employees happy and keep them that way. Corporate cheering-up can risk becoming absurd. While in the US on book promotion, Davies heard from an audience member about the casino where he works. Employees are expected to join managers in dancing to the Pharrell Williams song "Happy" at regularly scheduled times.

Clap along if you feel like you would rather have a pay rise.

"There is a problem with the culture of work in developed, western neoliberal economies where we all want work that is utterly fulfilling," Davies explains by phone from the UK, where he is a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, the University of London.

"Students come out of university wanting to be novelists or artists. We have had this expectation since the 1960s that we want to be fulfilled but a lot of work doesn't really offer that."

In a way, Davies' book is a well-researched rejoinder to the mountain of self-help feel-good bestsellers and pop-psychology management bibles. All that thinking and growing rich, all those habits of successful people, always accentuating the positive and trying to persuade you that any individual can achieve anything. It is about the realities of economic dissatisfaction and personal unhappiness that are obscured by the newspeak of human resources departments and the wide distribution of antidepressants.

"All of us have psychological questions about who we are as people and how we should live our lives," Davies says. "All human beings suffer anxiety as to whether they are doing the right thing or the wrong thing, and feel questions of uncertainty as to whether they should do things differently. But those questions are being exploited by people who have other agendas. And those agendas in the business world include trying to get people to work harder for their managers, or to purchase things through strategies of advertising and market research."

Davies asks, what does a happiness or well-being industry exist for, and who benefits from it? At times, it can resemble science-fiction or a culture of benign-seeming surveillance.

There is the wearable technology that could let managers see how stressed employees are, or how active, which has sinister potential. Could managers identify the less active or sociable sector of their workforce and find ways to remove them? They could come to similar conclusions by analysing keywords in emails and social media messages, and picking up patterns in metadata.
"While I give it a slightly sinister spin, there are people out there who think this is the future of business," Davies says.

Measuring and then modifying the public mood could turn out to be relatively easy. There is the example of a literature festival in the UK that filmed the smiles of attendees, which were analysed by software and rated. It was described by as "the future of evaluation".

There was the infamous Facebook experiment, in which the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users were manipulated for a week to test theories about "emotional contagion". Some users saw more good news than usual and some saw more bad news, and Facebook found that the input had a small effect on the output. In other words, those whose feeds had been negative posted more negative comments themselves.

They have ways of making you happy. In the UK, "the science of emotion has been put to work as part of an austerity agenda that withdraws benefits from vulnerable populations", Davies says.
It almost sounds like a perversion of motivational thinking.

"If you are going to claim a jobseeker's allowance or disability benefit, you have to engage in forms of therapy which tell you you have to be independent, believe in yourself and stop being dependent on other people. People who are already very vulnerable and need care and support are being given therapies that tell them they have to go out there and be enterprising and entrepreneurial when they may actually be ill or depressed."


Think about the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century. Would you include the invention of antidepressants in that list? You probably should.

Roughly one in 10 New Zealanders are on antidepressants, which is comparable to figures in other developed economies and suggests that sadness and melancholy have become medicalised.

Or as Davies argues, "a culture which values only optimism will produce pathologies of pessimism".
When antidepressants were discovered in the late 1950s, they were a solution in search of a problem. No one even knew what to call them.

"They just made people feel generally brighter about themselves and their future, that they had more energy and so on," Davies says. "At the same time you had the emergence of particular types of psychiatric symptoms of people feeling generally flat, negative about their self and their life."

In very broad terms, two similar trends happened in parallel over the following decades. Mental health became about the individual, rather than about the individual's relationship with society. Forget the social context, depression was now understood as a problem with brain chemistry, to the point where the vast majority of depressed people are now diagnosed by general practitioners rather than psychiatrists or psychologists.

The other trend is the growth of what is called neoliberal politics from the 1980s on. In the UK, this was Thatcherism. In New Zealand, Rogernomics. The free market and privatisation trumped the real or fictional threat of "socialism". Individual success and enterprise were privileged.

These trends came together "to produce a common political and economic culture," Davies argues. But neoliberalism also produced large numbers of unemployed. Contrary to the neoliberal theory, these unemployed masses did not suddenly rise up as motivated entrepreneurs. Instead, as researchers such as Andrew Oswald at Warwick University in the UK discovered, unemployment caused much greater levels of social unhappiness than economists expected.

It was not just about the loss of money. It was about the loss of purpose and self-esteem.

"Orthodox economics thinks that happiness and money correlate pretty closely to each other," Davies says. "What happiness economics shows from the 1990s onwards is that actually this is not the case. An economy that generates high levels of unemployment will wreak far greater social injury than was previously thought."

But rather than using a finding about "preventable suffering in society" to propose a different economic model that would produce less unemployment, such as a four-day working week, the policy said that you had to tackle the depression of the unemployed to get them back to work.

There is a problem with that "causal connection", Davies says. Put simply, if society is making people depressed, maybe society is at fault. But that kind of thinking went out in the 1970s.

"As a political and economic problem, unhappiness has become viewed as a symptom to be cured rather than a proportionate reflection of circumstances."

As a reviewer of The Happiness Industry wrote in the Independent newspaper, "being depressed by the human condition will no longer be socially acceptable, or even an option. The state or big business will soon see to it."

More and more aspects of human emotion have become medicalised. In the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, even grief lasting longer than two weeks has become a disorder, as a new drug can target "major depressive symptoms occurring shortly after the loss of a loved one".

What is lost is the question of what constitutes a disproportionate response to events.

To some, the brave new world of pharmaceutical well-being and happiness measurement may not sound so terrible. It is akin to the surveillance debate that briefly followed the Edward Snowden revelations, when the public response was shown to be closer to apathy than outrage.

That's because "we have an outdated critique of surveillance," Davies says. We think of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four or the German film The Lives of Others, with someone listening in on the other side of the wall. Surveillance now is about using technology to spot patterns in enormous amounts of data.

Nor does "consumer surveillance" involve a trade-off between privacy and security. They simply want to give us more and more of what we want and we don't mind helping out. Online retailers and social media companies gather more personal information about us than we would ever dream of giving away to market researchers.

"Amazon is constantly conducting surveillance on what we do there because they want to make better recommendations. People don't have much of a critique of surveillance if it's delivering them pleasure or well-being."

Indeed, one of the problems Davies had when writing the book was working out just how to pitch it. Should he be alarmist? He has discovered since that one of the unexpected audiences for the book are US survivalists who want to go off the grid and think it's all about how governments and corporations are keeping tabs on us.

"And they are keeping tabs on us," Davies points out. "I'm not saying they're keeping tabs on us in a purely conspiratorial way to mind-wash or control us but they are keeping tabs on us. Sometimes it benefits us and sometimes it benefits them and that's the society we're moving towards."

Large or small, our communities are where we spend much of our time and how smart those communities are have much to do with our quality of life. The evolution and growth of our communities is dependent on the innovation of our community leaders. Their and your creativity must overcome stagnant concepts in order to remain healthy...and grow smart.

From - The Smartcommunities.org 

The Smart Community: innovation and creativity are hallmarks

 
The Smart Community Concept
 
A smart community is a community that has made a conscious effort to use information technology to transform life and work within its region in significant and fundamental rather than incremental ways. The goal of such an effort is more than the mere deployment of technology. Rather it is about preparing one's community to meet the challenges of a global, knowledge economy.

Founded in 1997, the Smart Community program was created by John M Eger Van Deerlin Endowed Chair of Communications and Public Policy and Executive Director of the International Center for Communications at San Diego State University.

Creativity & Innovation

As we anticipate a whole new economy based upon creativity and innovation, the dawn of the "Creative Age," as the Nomura Research Institute put it, we are more acutely aware of the importance of reinventing our business strategies, our corporations, our communities, our schools, our housing and land use policies and more.

While creative industries, according to the Americans for the Arts, are defined as "arts-related," creativity and innovation are vital to the success of all businesses. To ensure our success and survival in this new economy, we must sharpen our focus on training, nurturing and retaining the next generation of leaders for the Age of Creativity and Innovation.

Ten Steps to a Creative and Innovative Community

1. The " Creative and Innovative Community" must be well understood.
   Becoming a creative and innovative community is about understanding the basic shift in the structure of the economy and society; and organizing to reinvent your community to meet these challenges.

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2. Ownership of the Creative and Innovative Community Concept must be broadly communicated.
   Because of the devolution of power, or the reverse flow of sovereignty, all individuals and individual communities -- down to and including the smallest neighborhoods, now have the ability to take ownership of this new future. Policies and programs, therefore, whether developed at the local, state or federal level, must be communicated broadly and well understood by all stakeholders in order for them to be successful.

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3. A New Decision-making Mechanism must be created.
   Because power has devolved, every individual must be persuaded, indeed enticed, to change the way life and work take place within his or her community. Toward that end, a new decision-making mechanism – or "collaboratory" -- involving all of the stakeholders, must be established. These stakeholders include businesses large and small, academe at every level from K-12 through the university, non-profit organizations throughout the community and government itself.

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4. The Needs of the Community must be assessed and the community defined.
   Geographical boundaries -- cities, towns, villages, and states, indeed even nation-states -- are being redefined by the convergence of technology and economics (the technology of telecommunications and computers, and the economics of a global economy). A first step to launching such an initiative, therefore, is determining the size and geographic limits of the community; and determining the community's needs and interests.

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5. A Vision and Mission Statement must be developed.
   Only after understanding the interests and concerns of a community can a vision and mission statement be developed. Often, this can be done in one day through a facilitation of key stakeholders and/or a survey of key stakeholders; and then codification into a one-page vision and mission statement prepared for widespread acceptance, leading to action.

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6. Specific Goals and Priorities must be established.
   After a community develops its vision and mission statement, the next step in the process is to articulate specific goals and priorities. These are best developed and refined by a number of working committees, which the collaboratory should establish. While each community may differ, most communities usually organize around functional areas such as health care, education, transportation, law enforcement, government services, economic development, and so forth. It is important to spend some time in defining the committee structure before establishing the committees themselves.

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7. A Strategic Plan for the Creative and Innovative Community Concept needs to be drafted.
   At this stage in the process, after a vision and mission statement is created, committees formed, and priorities established, a plan must be put in place to implement the development of an agenda for changing the laws, rules, regulations, and attitudes that must be changed in order to facilitate the development of both the new infrastructure and services that are deemed to be needed to nurture, retain and attract the creative and innovative workforce of the global knowledge age.

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8. Responsibilities must be clearly defined and Timelines established.
   At this juncture, it is also important to determine how this plan will be financed. Private/public partnerships and outsourcing may be the best methods for accelerating implementation of the plan. This is the opportunity to bring together private and public interests, to seek collaboration among and between industry, government at several levels, and the community at large.

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9. Community Linkages must be made.
   The vision of the future must be coordinated with all other elements of the community that affect, and are in turn affected by this fundamental plan. There is, for example, a new "architecture" to be developed that will involve zoning, land use and development; and art and culture initiatives to provide a magnet for downtown redevelopment.

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10. Metrics must be established and progress constantly monitored.
    After the headlines and the ribbon cutting, the real work must take place. Indeed, the business of creating a creative and innovative community is truly a multi-year and ongoing process. Mechanisms must be established to keep the energy and focus and commitment alive.

Defining the Civil Society

Civic pride, freedom of speech and action, a sense of place, sustainable environment are all part of making a community smart and creative. Too often being "civil" is misconstrued as simply being nice, getting along, or conflict avoidance. In fact, a civil society is one with a shared sense of mission and common goals - a "commonwealth." Being or becoming a civil society goes to the heart of the 21st century "city of the future." 

As we continue to age, the advice to exercise never seems to go away...it's good for your heart, for your weight, helps ward off diabetes, etc. Most would agree we should exercise. But not everyone does. Ten years after first being published, a Harvard Health Publication's commentary still rings true.

The Family Health Guide
 

Why we should exercise — and why we don’t

You already know that exercise is good for you. What you may not know is just how good — or exactly what qualifies as exercise.

A deluge of studies have documented the health benefits of exercise. What’s impressive about the research, aside from the sheer volume, is the number of conditions exercise seems to prevent, ameliorate, or delay.

We’re used to hearing about exercise fending off heart attacks. If you’re physically active, your heart gets trained to beat slower and stronger, so it needs less oxygen to function well; your arteries get springier, so they push your blood along better; and your levels of “good” HDL cholesterol go up.
It’s also not much of a surprise that physical activity helps prevent diabetes. Muscles that are used to working stay more receptive to insulin, the hormone that ushers blood sugar into cells, so in fit individuals blood sugar levels aren’t as likely to creep up.

But exercise as a soldier in the war against cancer? It seems to be, and on several fronts: breast, colon, endometrial, perhaps ovarian. Some research suggests that it takes quite a lot of exercise to make a difference: four to seven hours of moderate to vigorous activity a week. Three studies have found that if you’ve had colon cancer or breast cancer, physical activity reduces the chances of it coming back.

To top things off, moving the body seems to help the brain. Several studies have found that exercise can reduce the symptoms of depression, and it changes the brain in ways similar to antidepressant medications. In old age, physical activity may delay the slide of cognitive decline into dementia, and even once that process has started, exercise can improve certain aspects of thinking.

Most evidence suggests that the choice of the kind of activity is far less important than whether to be active at all. About half of adult Americans don’t meet one of the most oft-cited guidelines, which calls for 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity (a fast walking pace) most days of the week — and you can accumulate that total in bouts of 10 to 15 minutes.

Clearly some of us are less athletic than others — and some unathletic individuals were simply born that way. Twin studies suggest that about half of the difference in physical activity among people is probably inherited. And researchers are making headway in identifying particular genes that may influence how we respond to physical exertion.

But genetic explanations for behaviors like exercising only go so far. Many other influences come into play: family, neighborhood, cultural attitudes, historical circumstances. Research has shown, not surprisingly, that active children are more likely to have parents who encouraged them to be that way.

The trip of a thousand miles begins…

The federal government is scheduled to release new physical activity guidelines sometime in October 2008. The scientific committee that advised the guideline writers concluded that current research supports the standard advice to get 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise most days of the week. So in that spirit, we’ve made several suggestions for ways to become a little bit more physically active.

1. Take the far away spot. Walking from the farthest corner of the parking lot will burn a few calories. If it’s a parking garage, head for the roof and use the stairs.
2. Walk to the next stop. If you take a bus or train, don’t wait at the nearest stop. Walk to the next one. Or, at the end of your journey, get off a stop early and finish up on foot.
3. Adopt someone as your walking, jogging, or biking buddy. Adding a social element to exercise helps many people stick with it.
4. Be part of the fun. Adults shouldn’t miss a chance to jump into the fray if kids are playing. Climbing on the jungle gym (be careful!) and swinging on a swing will strengthen muscles and bones and set a good example.
5. Put on your dancing shoes. Exercise doesn’t have to be done in a straight line. Dancing can get your heart going and helps with balance. Dance classes tend to have lower dropout rates than gyms. Or just turn up the volume at home and boogie.
6. Clean house. Even if you have a cleaning service, you can take responsibility for vacuuming a couple of rooms yourself. Fifteen minutes burns around 80 calories. Wash some windows and do some dusting and you’ve got a pretty decent workout — and a cleaner house.
7. Grow a garden. No matter how green the thumb, the digging, the planting, the weeding, and the picking will ramp up your activity level and exercise sundry muscles.
8. Use a push mower. Even if you have a large lawn, pick a small part of it to mow in the old-fashioned way. You get a nice workout, you’re not burning any gas, and it’s usually quieter. The same reasoning favors the rake over the leaf blower.
9. Think small. Small bouts of activity are better than knocking yourself out with a workout that will be hard to replicate.
10. Be a stair master. Take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator whenever you can. It’s good for your legs and knees, and your cardiovascular health will benefit from the little bit of huffing and puffing. Don’t overdo. One flight at a time.

Most people who run often say that doing so makes them feel good. In a new study it turns out that its more than just an endorphin "high," but rather a sense of happiness due to a hormones influence on motivation. Leptin, the hormone that's released to make you feel "full" after eating will also, when its level is low, make you get up and run.

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Your source for the latest research news

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Why does running make us happy?

Date:

September 1, 2015

Source:

University of Montreal

Summary:

The joy of running. That sense of well-being, freedom and extra energy that runners often experience is not just a matter of endorphins. A new study shows that the "runner's high" phenomenon is also caused by dopamine, an important neurotransmitter for motivation.

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A new study shows that the "runner's high" phenomenon is also caused by dopamine, an important neurotransmitter for motivation.  Credit: © Martinan / Fotolia

 

 

The joy of running. That sense of well-being, freedom and extra energy that runners often experience is not just a matter of endorphins. A study at the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM) shows that the "runner's high" phenomenon is also caused by dopamine, an important neurotransmitter for motivation.

"We discovered that the rewarding effects of endurance activity are modulated by leptin, a key hormone in metabolism. Leptin inhibits physical activity through dopamine neurons in the brain," said Stephanie Fulton, a researcher at the CRCHUM and lead author of an article published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

Secreted by adipose tissue, leptin helps control the feeling of satiety. This hormone also influences physical activity. "The more fat there is, the more leptin there is and and the less we feel like eating. Our findings now show that this hormone also plays a vital role in motivation to run, which may be related to searching for food," explained Stephanie Fulton, who is also a professor at Université de Montréal's Department of Nutrition.

Hormone signals that modulate feeding and exercise are in fact believed to be closely linked. Endurance running capacity in mammals, particularly humans, is thought to have evolved to maximize the chances of finding food. This study suggests that leptin plays a critical role both in regulating energy balance and encouraging behaviours that are "rewarding" for the person's metabolism, i.e., engaging in physical activity to find food.

The researchers studied voluntary wheel running in mice in cages. These mice can run up to seven kilometres a day. In a laboratory, the physical activity of normal mice was compared with that of mice who underwent a genetic modification to suppress a molecule activated by leptin, STAT3 (signal transducer and activator of transcription-3). The STAT3 molecule is found in the neurons that synthesize dopamine in the midbrain. This "mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway" is a like a motivational highway in the brain.

"Mice that do not have the STAT3 molecule in the dopaminergic neurons run substantially more. Conversely, normal mice are less active because leptin then activates STAT3 in the dopamine neurons, signalling that energy reserves in the body are sufficient and that there is no need to get active and go looking for food," explained Maria Fernanda Fernandes, first author of the study.

And is leptin as important for motivation to be active in humans? Yes. "Previous studies have clearly shown a correlation between leptin and marathon run times. The lower leptin levels are, the better the performance. Our study on mice suggests that this molecule is also involved in the rewarding effects experienced when we do physical exercise. We speculate that for humans, low leptin levels increase motivation to exercise and make it easier to get a runner's high," summed up Stephanie Fulton.

Mice, humans and mammals in general are thought to have evolved to increase the return on effective food acquisition behaviours. Ultimately, hormones are sending the brain a clear message: when food is scarce, it's fun to run to chase some down.

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

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Journal Reference:

1. Fulton et al. Leptin suppresses the rewarding effects of running via STAT3 signaling in dopamine neurons. Cell Metabolism, September 2015 DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2015.08.003

Many managers, particularly new ones, struggle with ways to effectively motivate team members to work for them. They see themselves as a "boss" and not as a leader. Most people, however, respond best to appreciation rather than being made to feel dispensable. Great leaders understand that the way to best motivate their teams is to say "thank you."

From - TLNT/Talent Management and HR

Lead by Greatness: How Leaders of Character Motivate People

By David Lapin


Appreciation is not just a social law. It is a universal, natural law.

In religion and spirituality, it is well recognized that showing appreciation attracts the universe’s abundance and God’s blessing. Sincerely appreciative people radiate their thankfulness to strangers as they walk down the street. They radiate it to family, colleagues, and customers. And as people radiate appreciation, others, thirsty for appreciation, are drawn to them and want to help and support them in every way they can.

We are wired to help people; we just fear being taken advantage of. So, when we see people who truly value our generosity and know how to show it, we give of ourselves abundantly.
The opposite is true as well. When people feel undervalued, their channels of generosity shut down.

People want to make a difference

I am sure you have heard managers say that no one is indispensable. They do this to make people feel insecure and motivate them to improve.

If, like Frederick Winslow Taylor or Douglas McGregor’s X-Theory managers, we see people as mechanical beings motivated only by self-interest and their instinctual drive for survival and security, then saying that no one is indispensable might work to motivate them, or rather to scare them into performance. But this mantra does nothing to inspire the soul. On the contrary, it undermines people’s sense of uniqueness and their capacity to make a difference.

At their soul level, people want and need to feel that they are trusted, valued, and able to make a difference.

People are wired to try not to disappoint those that trust, respect, and value them. Making people feel valued and indispensable doesn’t diminish their effectiveness, it increases it exponentially. When people feel trusted and valued, they bring their souls, their passions, and their creative, heroic drive to work, making a far bigger difference than anything we might have expected of them. Telling people that they are indispensable doesn’t mean that you or your team could not survive without them; it simply means it would be different without them.

All people, provided they bring their souls to work and not just their bodies, add an ingredient to the team’s energy and dynamic that no one else can. If we want people to bring their souls to work, then we as leaders need to be ready to nourish those souls.

People feel spiritually nourished when their life has meaning, and when they feel honored by others. Telling people they are dispensable does not give them meaning, nor does it honor them. It diminishes their sense of worth and triggers their defensive instincts. They shut down, and we get less from them. Knowing how to say “thank you” sincerely attracts generosity in abundance in ways that nothing else can.

How to say “Thank You”

The art of an effective thank-you, like any good communication, is not so much in the words as in the feeling you evoke in the other person.

The Hebrew word for “thank you” (todah) appears often in the Bible and comes from the same root as the word for confession. In every thank-you there is an implied confession: “I do not feel deserving of what you have given me or done for me.” Clearly, if you believe you are entitled to what the other person did for you or gave you, you would have no need to say thank you, other than as a superficial courtesy.

A meaningful thank-you is only appropriate if you believe the person did something for you over and above what you deserved. If this is the case, the feeling you want to evoke in the other person is one of your own humility, of appreciation for that person and his or her gesture, and of the certainty that he or she will not be taken for granted.

It is difficult to say thank you, because it exposes a level of vulnerability that we are trained to hide from others. It shows that we need others, that they did something valuable for us, and that we feel in some way indebted to them. This is why only secure people with a high sense of self-esteem and little ego truly convey a sense of gratitude to others in a way that makes them feel honored.

What leaders of character do

Leaders of character set the tone in their organizations by going out of their way to genuinely thank everyone who does anything for them, from the doorman to the CEO, and by insisting that the people in their team do the same. These gestures of character are a leader’s key to their success.

Try taking the risk of doing generous things for people around you; things that are valuable to them but perhaps don’t require a lot from you. And watch the response. You will be pleasantly surprised to see new levels of engagement and commitment from others as your own human greatness is reflected in them, and your team begins to pulsate with soul.

Excerpted with permission of the publisher Avoda Books from LEAD BY GREATNESS: How Character Can Power Your Success by David Lapin. Copyright © 2012 by David Lapin.

Now that Summer is over, did you take your vacation? If not, you could be jeopardizing your health while also providing a disadvantage to your company. Studies show that all work and no play is neither good for you, or for the business that emplys you. Here's nine reasons to take that vacation.

9 Reasons To Take A Vacation ASAP, According To Science

The Huffington Post  |  By Renee Jacques

It's a fact now that most American workers aren't taking any vacations. Last week we reported that about 40 percent of Americans don't plan on using all of their paid time off this year. And you're probably one of them. You hoard up your precious vacation days and keep saying you'll use them, but something gets in the way. Maybe it's your workload, or, maybe, like others, you're totally scared that you're going to lose your job. The most common reason why people weren't taking vacation was because they possess what researchers call a "martyr" complex, in which they believe that no one else can do their job as well as they can. Yet more than 20 percent of people who don't take vacations say they skip out because they are afraid they feel they are easily replaceable.

0Photo credit: Caiaimage/Paul Bradbury via Getty Images


Whichever is the case, we're here to tell you to please, please take a vacation. We know you're afraid. But after you read these reasons why taking a vacation will do amazing things for your wellbeing and your mind, you may reconsider. And more importantly: Taking a vacation could make you even better at your job. Yes, it's true. Read on, and start booking your next flight or planning a staycation.

1. Your body is literally telling you to take a break. But you keep ignoring it. 



Giving employees significant time to take a break will help them be renewed and come back to work even stronger, says Tony Schwartz, the chief executive officer of The Energy Project, in an op-ed in The New York Times. His company offers employees four weeks of vacation starting in their first year. He does this because he believes that "the importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology." He credits a study done by researchers at Florida State University in which they looked at the performance of elite athletes, musicians and chess players, and found that the best performers practiced in intervals of 90 minutes. They often took breaks between sessions and hardly ever worked more than four and half hours a day. That's how you properly recover.

2. Because when your brain is completely relaxed, it’s still working on improving the skills you have learned.



This all goes back to the science of sleep. Many studies have shown that when the brain is relaxed, it focuses itself on boring but essential tasks, like etching in and memorizing the new skills you may have learned at the office during the week before. So, if you're struggling to keep up with the new software your company just introduced, right now might be the best time to take a vacation. Let your brain take some time to process the new information, and you might return in tip-top shape!

3. It's been proven that allowing your brain to day-dream allows you to better solve problems and be more creative. 



Your brain operates on two levels: One side is task-focused and the other side is focused on letting your mind wander and daydream. As you can imagine, a hard worker like you is pretty much always in the task-focused mode, overworking your brian to stay engaged on something you must finish for work, all the while taking in an overload of information (a 2011 study claims everyday we process 174 newspapers' worth of info!).

As we mentioned above, taking a break is good for your brain. Because you have got to let your brain daydream. Daniel J. Levitin, the director of the Laboratory for Music, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University and the author of "The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload," told the New York Times that giving our brains time to wind down and think about nothing at all can provide "our moments of greatest creativity and insight."

4. Fact: The more (shorter) vacations you take, the happier you'll be.
 


As far as vacations go, the more the merrier. A study done at Erasmus University in Rotterdam found that among about 1,500 Dutch adults in which 974 of them took a vacation, those who took time off were happier than those who did not, mostly because they were excited in anticipation for their vacation. They also showed signs of slightly increased happiness for two weeks after they returned from vacation. So, the trick for success, says the study's leader, Jeroen Nawijn, seems to be taking two or more short breaks spread out in the year rather than one massive vacation. Spread out that happiness!

5. In fact, you should try to take a vacation day every single week (if you can). 



Some researchers have argued that instead of offering employees a couple of long vacations every year, they should start providing employees with the option of taking a vacation every single week. A Harvard Business School study tracked employees for four years at a consulting group. Every year, the bosses insisted the employees take consistent time off. Those who took the time off committed to taking a break from work one day of the workweek, usually consisting of one full day off or a one night of uninterrupted personal time. After only five months, those who took the regular breaks from work reported being happier with their jobs and much prouder of the work they did at their job.

6. Your performance review this year could be higher if you just go take your vacation. 


All that happiness could pay off for you in major ways. An internal study done by the Ernst & Young accounting firm found that for each additional 10 hours that an employee took for vacation, his or her performance review was 8 percent higher the next year. Who knew that some rest and relaxation could get your your next raise?

7. Bosses who take vacations return to work as more focused business leaders.



A survey by job recruiters at Korn/Ferry International discovered that 84 percent of over 250 executives have canceled a vacation due to pressures at work. That's shocking. If you're the head honcho, don't think it's impossible for you take a vacation. We know it's hard to break yourself away from your work, but you make the rules, after all, and it's proven that you'll be better and enforcing those rules if you give yourself a little break.

Jennifer Deal, a researcher at the Center for Creative Leadership who has examined the way executives deal with taking vacations, told The Wall Street Journal that when bosses take time off they come back more creative and able to think about the long run future of the company better. If they don't take a break, she says it's extremely difficult for them to "see outside of the immediate whirlwind."

8. Immersing yourself in new cultures and cuisines will give you a whole new array of ideas you can bring back to work.
 


Think of your vacation as a very relaxing and stress-free way to get some more work done. A study published in the US National Library of Medicine concludes that multicultural experiences help foster creativity and help generate ideas. However, this shouldn't be working abroad. The study emphasizes that the experience will only promote creativity when the situation doesn't call for "firm answers or existential concerns."

9. You might even get paid for taking time off.



If you're still afraid, consider this: Some companies are paying their employees to get out of the office or they are removing restrictions to how much vacation time they can take off. The Wall Street Journal reports that FullContact, an advertising firm in Boston, began enticing its employees with a $7,500 incentive a year to help fund a nonworking vacation. Also, there's no limit on how long their vacation can be. And HubSpot, a marketing software company in Cambridge, Mass., has ordered a two week paid vacation minimum for its employees. Now that's a great work-life balance.