Joe Robinson

Three-Quarters of Your Doctor Bills Are Because of This

2013-05-22T08:09:13-04:00

It would be great if stress were an exotic flu or an illness that needs a cure. It's our bad luck, though, that stress is far from exotic, and we know exactly how to fix it. This has allowed stress to have the perceived virulency of a hangnail. So under the radar it's off the radar, stress has exploded to an invisible, $1 trillion health epidemic, according to Peter Schnall's Unhealthy Work. That's more expensive than the cost of cancer, smoking, diabetes, and heart disease combined.

It's an astounding enough fact to be in Ripley's, yet one we've never heard of. And there is more hidden from view. Stress is a factor in five out of the six leading causes of death -- heart disease, cancer, stroke, lower respiratory disease, and accidents. An estimated 75 percent to 90 percent of all doctor visits are for stress-related issues.

There seems to be a trend here. Illness and stress. Spending wild amounts of money and stress. The culprit behind so many of our health problems is staring us in the face. Want to cut chronic diseases and health bills? Start with stress, the crisis at the heart of the health care crisis. Want to cut the deficit? Encourage policies that prevent and manage stress, and lop off a few hundred billion bucks.

Of course, stress is more than numbers. It's a daily crucible for millions of us. I meet a lot of people caught in its vice-grip as a work-life balance and stress management educator. Away from earshot of work colleagues, people pull me aside to confide the toll stress is taking. I met a 29-year-old government worker who had an assortment of illnesses you'd expect to see in someone in their 70s. A man in his 40s at an aerospace company told me about the heart attack he'd had two months earlier. He managed to get another position at the firm to get the stress down, but the new position was even more stressful. On the legal frontlines, an attorney told me, "Everyone I know is on Paxil!"

If there were an America's Most Wanted for health problems, stress would be at the top of the list. The U.N. calls stress the 21st century health epidemic. So why does it continue to remain out of sight and out of mind for policy makers and health insurance when it's ravaging so many lives and bankrupting the nation? One, stress is thought to be normal and no big deal. Two, stress is considered a personal, and what's worse, mental problem with no effect on anyone else. Three, there has been no social or political movement to challenge stress as there has been to fight smoking or cancer.

The good news is that we can do something about the latter and in the process fix the other two. I've launched a campaign to fill the grassroots void called Smash Stress. We have a very specific health care policy petition I hope you'll check out and sign here that calls for stress screening and management for all. It only requires an executive action, and it could transform health in America. I hope you will join The Huffington Post, which is supporting the effort, as well as the Center for Social Epidemiology, a group of the top stress researchers led by Peter Schnall, to get stress out of the back alleys of personal agony and into the forefront of public health policy. We have the opportunity to do something historic right now.

The problem is that we've been treating the symptoms of stress -- heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes -- instead of the cause, stress itself, and shutting that down. Our petition calls for reversing that approach, adding stress screening to the preventive services of the Affordable Care Act. There are currently 16 preventive services covered by the law (22 preventive services for women), from colorectal screening to depression screening. We are asking President Obama and Health and Human Resources Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to add stress screening, the most important preventive measure of all, to the law, as well as accessible and affordable stress management. This is a doable executive action that fits perfectly with the Administration's National Prevention Strategy, which states that, "preventing disease and injuries is key to improving America's health."

Can signing a petition do anything? Ask Dena Patrick, of the social volunteering site wishadoo.com. She submitted a petition at change.org calling for health benefits for part-time FEMA workers, who didn't get any. They get health benefits now, because the administration changed the policy after her petition attracted 112,000 signatures. We can do it too and save millions of lives and billions of dollars.

Collective action helped change social behavior around smoking. Sarah Speck, a cardiologist at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, calls stress "the new tobacco." Like nicotine and tobacco, it constricts blood vessels. Also like smoking, stress is another default habit that requires social intervention to change the attitudes that create it, both for stress perpetrators and reactors. With knowledge and social sanctions, it becomes less acceptable, more costly, more stupid to engage in stress.

We know how to manage stress. We just need to get the information out to everyone.

Smash Stress is lobbying the surgeon general and the CDC to sponsor vigorous, ongoing stress awareness and prevention programs.

We've been sold the idea that stress is some kind of personal flaw whose demons we alone must bear. Though it's not infectious, stress is highly contagious. It's easily spread between workmates, spouses and significant others through "pass-along strain." It drives the hair-trigger emotions and false crisis mentality that spill out into the accident and crime reports of our communities and make our world more angry, panicked, sleep-deprived, and dangerous than it needs to be.

Maybe we can say someday, beginning with action on stress screening and management today, that we made our world a less angry, healthier, safer place to live.

Joe Robinson is a work-life balance and stress management educator, speaker, and author of Work to Live, Don't Miss Your Life, and the Email Overload Survival Kit. You can find his work at www.worktolive.info and the Smash Stress Campaign at www.worktolive.info/stress-campaign.

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Fear Is Momentary, Regrets Are Forever

2012-01-24T08:38:37-05:00

If fear was gold, we'd all be millionaires. Unfortunately, the payoff is mostly less than zero for this ancient and epidemic human emotion these days. The insecurity-mongers and safety police are working overtime to squelch the full expression of your life and whatever you would like to accomplish in the new year.

You'd never know it in a world of alarmists and nay-sayers that we weren't built to cling to the Barcalounger. The biochemistry is designed for the exact opposite, to go where we haven't gone before. Risk is the central piece of forward progress, and the life satisfaction that springs from it. Without it, we can't satisfy the mandate of our brain neurons for novelty and challenge, the keys to long-term life fulfillment, say brain researchers. Without risk, we can't gratify core psychological needs that require that we step off the moving sidewalk and chart a self-determined path.

Fear has had the upper hand, thanks to an itchy security trigger from our days back on the savanna and our habit of not disputing the emotional backwash in our brains. If it's in my head, it's gotta be true. The research shows we can outfox fear's vise-grip on risk by modifying our behavior and thoughts and changing the terms of risk evaluation.

What risks has fear overruled for you? Maybe a career change you didn't make, a trip someone convinced you wasn't safe, an activity you didn't want to look like a fool doing. Looking back, you'd make a different choice, because, with time, you see that the "fears" were false, momentary blips of projected anxiety that stepped on the neck of your life.

Fear is momentary; regrets are forever. The reality is that fears that paralyze us today will be long forgotten tomorrow, and we'll be left with the after-effects of opting for safety -- life unexperienced, progress unmade, a truckful of regret. It's the opportunities we don't act on that cause the most regret, say researchers, known as "the inaction effect."[1] Instead of looking back years later at what we wished we would have done, why not look back now in the moment of risk, and use regret to transcend autopilot fears?

Regret is a built-in insurance policy to make sure we don't leave too much life on the table. It forces us to see the big picture fear obscures in the anxiety of the moment. Think how mad you're going to be later if you don't act, and let regret fortify your courage.

We pay for the safety default with boredom and stir-craziness, items born of something built into the DNA -- habituation. We're made to get tired of reruns. This anti-rut device is designed to make us change things up. Core psychological needs, such as autonomy and competence, can only be satisfied when you demonstrate your capacity to take on new things.

We can improve risk-taking ability by changing attitude, increasing competence and through a process of reframing fears called fear extinction. Researchers have found that people in a positive frame of mind tend to see risk as an opportunity, not a threat.[2] Reducing stress, since it keeps your brain constricted to negativity, can help as well as intrinsic goals. Acting for the sake of the experience itself removes the expectations that give us pause.

Risk is about managing uncertainty. The more homework you do, the more that uncertainty is managed, and the more you feel competent to handle the risk. Competence makes you see potential benefits, instead of threats,[3] say researchers. Fears can also be weakened by exposure to threatening stimuli. You can change fearful images by altering your memory of them. Each time you recall a memory and add or subtract from it, you are defanging the initial fear.

More of us could take the risks we need by changing the equation from potential loss to gain. Try viewing the unknown, not as a threat, but as exploring, exactly what your brain neurons want you to do. Researchers call the release of the brain's party chemical, dopamine, at the mere expectation of something novel the "exploration bonus." You can get your bonus cranking through incremental risk, one step at a time.

Mountaineer Ed Viesturs, the first American to climb the world's 14 tallest peaks, made a practice of not looking at the summit when he climbed a daunting peak. Too intimidating. "You see this rock in front of you and say, I'm going to go to that rock and then I'm going to stop," he told me. His goal for the day is the base camp, not the summit.

In the course of researching Don't Miss Your Life, my book on the power of engaged experience. I met a host of folks who have applied the spirit of exploration to risks in their personal lives that have transformed their lives. Psychotherapist Sheila Gross turned the jitters of performing with a group of strangers into the most important feature of her week -- singing in a community choir. Accountant Marty Herman transcended his social fears by becoming an ace salsa dancer in his 50s.

Breast cancer survivor Cindy Roberts overcame her battle with the ultimate fear through the power of dragon boat paddling. She knows the truth behind risk: There's no such thing as security anyway. "There is no later. Live it now," she says.

Mountaineers call the initial climb of a peak a "first ascent." There's an extra incentive of bagging a "first," a distinction we can use to turn the discomfort of doing something new to its flip-side: excitement.

What can you do for the first time this week? Next week? Each week of 2012? It could be anything from trying an exotic fruit for the first time to signing up for a dance class. Consider your "firsts" progress, and the route to a life of no regrets.

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Joe Robinson is author of the book, Don't Miss Your Life, on the science, spirit and skills of activating the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress-management speaker, trainer and coach at Work to Live.

References:

[1] Marcel Zeelenburg, Eric von Dijk, Kees van den Bos, Rik Peters. "The Inaction Effect on the Psychology of Regret," 2002.

[2] Vikas Mittal, William Ross. "The Impact of Positive and Negative Affect and Issue Framing on Issue Interpretation and Risk-Taking," 1998.

[3] Norris Krueger, Peter Dickson. "How Believing in Ourselves Increases Risk-Taking: Perceived Self-Efficacy and Opportunity Recognition," 1994.

American Identity Crisis: Are You Your Job?

2011-12-08T08:30:41-05:00

It's automatic for strangers at any American social setting -- right after "nice to meet you" and within the first two minutes of conversation or your citizenship is revoked. "What do you do?" It's a line that would be considered rude in many lands, but not here, where inquiring minds have to know: What's your status and how much money are you making?

The answer could be "I like to bike" or some other expression of your real identity, but the instinctive response is to go with the very real-appearing but pseudo-identity, the job ID. In a rootless culture with no obvious class markers, the job defines the person and the pecking order. You are what you do. It's a case of mistaken identity that is hazardous to your health, life, and even the work you do. In a 24/7 world where we're always in work mode, there's little escape from the identity that's not you. We get home from work, and we're either thinking about work or talking about it, not a habit in other cultures.

Default to where the perceived value is, output without end, and you wind up doing too much of it. Even if you love your job, do too much of it and you'll hate it. Having all your self-concept tied up in the job can be particularly dangerous in the layoff era. Who are you without a job? It's a good idea to find out, because it's your real identity that gets you through hard times. You've got a foundation of worth to fall back on -- skills, social ties, and interests and enthusiasms that buffer the stress.

Tens of millions of identities have been stolen by an interloper, the performance identity, leaving the commandeered easy prey for false beliefs that rub out the real you -- that all value lies in performance, that you can't step back from production and tasks for a second, or you're a slacker; that busyness is next to godliness; that self-worth comes from the productivity yardstick, net worth; or that taking time for your life is an interruption of production.

Chasing performance and its metrics -- money, status, toys -- to pump up worth pumps up something else: futility. Performance can't produce worth, since it's an external yardstick, about what others think. You don't really buy it. You get a quick bump, it vanishes, and then you have to produce more to get more worth. It's a treadmill that can never give you what you really need, the internal validation that comes from satisfying the real audience, your authentic core -- and the critical needs at the center of it, autonomy, competence, and connection with others that researchers say we have to gratify, or we're not happy.

When your identity is dependent solely on the job, you're conditioned to feel as good or as bad as your latest performance, your worth hanging in the balance with every task or jitter-inducing free moment. Having to remanufacture your worth every day is exhausting, and it crowds out the parts of life needed to bolster your real identity.

Contrary to the instructions of the performance ID, your job is just your social face, what psychologists call a "persona." The term comes from the masks actors wore in ancient plays to indicate their various roles. The persona is a mask you need to function in society, but it's not the real you. When you think it is, you lose track of the authentic person behind the mask and that character's needs, interests and values. You make yourself vulnerable to "contingent self-esteem," worth based on a narrow domain subject to the fickle approval of others. It's a very flimsy affair.

You're looking for love in all the wrong places when the persona is running the show. The thrill of a job promotion is gone in two weeks. Then you have to find another notch to pump yourself up with.

Persona lives are a bit like one of those colorized black-and-white films. They feel "off," fake. The form is there but not the content. People hijacked by the performance ID tell me that something is missing in their lives, and it is -- the expression of their real identity. What's that? That can take some digging to uncover from under the pile of duty, obligation, and email. I met a guy in Los Angeles who is an identity detective. He helps professionals whose identities have been appropriated by their professions, particularly doctors and lawyers, rediscover who they are by going through old love letters, high school yearbooks and other clues that predate the persona ID.

It's nice to get things done, and I like being productive as much as the next person, but when all the value comes from this narrow slice of a human existence, the tendency is to default to more of it and to the stress, burnout, and overload that comes with it. As work hours go up and leisure time down, health problems and negative emotions increase and life satisfaction plummets, reports Tim Kasser, who heads the psychology department at Knox College in Illinois [1]. Working more than 51 hours a week can triple the risk of hypertension[2]. As for the work itself, productivity tanks with excess overtime[3].

The most insidious thing about the performance ID isn't just that it makes you work more than you have to; it's that it winds up running your time off-the-clock, too. It books up your off-hours with tasks, time urgency and busyness, obliterating the whole point of the work -- life, and the experiences that satisfy your core needs.

The unchallenged performance ID leads to a host of issues, from chronic fatigue to insomnia, cardiovascular issues, relationships nonexistent or on the rocks, and a gnawing void where life used to be, all of which i see in my training and coaching work. And, yes, the guilt, in the form of productivity paranoia. For as much as we get done, there's the guilt about what's not getting done. Take a night off or a weekend for kicking back, and you hear the nag in your head. Shouldn't you be getting something done?

The one-tracked mode of performance can leave you at a loss for what to do in a free moment. You forget interests, how to have fun. The mind maps for those disappear. It's like trying to hit a baseball after not swinging a bat for 10 years. It's gone. Stanford Medical School's Mark Cullen did some research on retired executives who had been super-successful in their working careers. They made gobs of money and had loads of status. However, when they walked out the office door to retirement, within days they felt worthless. "The minute they stop, 20 or 25 years of accomplishments leak out," he told me. "They feel they are nothing." After a lifetime of working for a time when they could live, they didn't know how. "They had no leisure skills," said Cullen.

That last comment led me on a search to the source of those leisure skills and this crucial piece of identity we're oblivious to, which I detail in my book, Don't Miss Your Life. It turns out that we exit the persona and find our true ID in the world of play. Studies have shown that we are more authentic when we're at leisure than when we're on the job. We're doing what we want, when we want, and we're motivated, not by the usual external payoffs that make us batty, but by internal goals -- fun, learning, challenge, joy, the experience itself, things that satisfy the cravings of the core self, such as autonomy and competence.

That true you is where you never expect it to be, right next door in the lowly realm of R&R, a place the performance identity would have you believe is worthless. It turns out that your time off-the-clock is the road to who you really are. The best predictor of personal satisfaction is satisfaction in your non-professional life. If you don't have a non-professional life, chances are you might not be too happy.

Reclaiming your real ID means separating what you do for a living, the output mentality, from the "input" of the living you're making yourself. A place to start: a new line for your next conversation with a stranger, one that can set the stage for real persons to emerge from behind the masks. What do you like to do?

[1] Tim Kasser, Kennon Sheldon. "Time Affluence as a Path Toward Personal Happiness and Ethical Business Practice" (2009).

[2] Haiou Yang, Peter Schnall, Maritza Jauregui, Ta-Chen Su, Dean Baker. "Work Hours and Self-Reported Hypertension among Working People in California" (2002).

[3] Edward Shepard, Thomas Clifton. "Are Longer Hours Reducing Productivity in Manufacturing?" (2000)

Joe Robinson is author of Don't Miss Your Life, on the science, spirit and skills of activating the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress-management speaker, trainer and coach at Work to Live.

Do We Need an App for Fear?

2011-10-12T09:12:00-04:00

Of all the Steve Jobs products that have become essentials of daily life -- iMac to iPod to iPhone -- the one that may be most needed is echoing virally around the Web in the form of his Stanford commencement speech: iCan. His advice to "stay hungry, stay foolish," and remember that, as mortal beings, we have "nothing to lose" has struck a nerve at a time when millions are up to their eyeballs in a babble of nonstop fear about what we can't do. He's reminded us that we can counter the fright fest with something we forgot -- courage, and our own wits.

The gloom-and-doom meisters have had their way for years now, freezing out belief and possibility with a steady dirge of dire forecasts. Jobs' message is a much-needed wake-up call. Yes, we have challenges, but we have it within ourselves to act despite our fears and rise above the naysayers and change phobics. Uncontested fear begets more fear. Like Franklin Roosevelt's exhortation that, "we have nothing to fear but fear itself," Jobs' speech tells us we can avoid the fear factor when we dig deep and rally self-belief over our insecurities.

Courage and self-belief are qualities we all have, but they often need outside stimulus to be activated. They can lie dormant for years like African killifish, whose eggs are buried in the ground and come to life only with the right amount of rain. Inspiration can rouse self-determination skills that trigger the risk-taking without which we can't move forward -- or be truly gratified.

Researchers tell us we can't satisfy our core needs to feel autonomous or competent, for example, unless we go beyond the familiar and do things that make us stretch. Our core psychological needs, says the University of Rochester's Edward Deci, author of Why We Do What We Do, are all about self-determination. The fulfilling life we want doesn't come from taking the safe road, but from what is challenging, reports Emory University brain scientist Gregory Berns (1).

As usual, Jobs' timing was impeccable. It's time to declare open season on fear and discover the courage to step into our futures without knowing the exact path they will take. It's time to break out the antidote to fear: risk. It's time to tune out the crystal-balling pundits and politicians and the incessant guessing about the calamity that's going to happen next. We're not psychics; we're adventurers. That's how we're made, from novelty-seeking brain neurons to big toes designed for marathon journeys.

Jobs' reference to the fact we can only connect the dots in retrospect hit the bullseye. Fear demands you know the whole journey before you've even embarked. If we have to know the end before we've even begun, we'll never risk or start anything. Joseph Campbell said the process of trial and error that is the human path is "like a tree growing. It doesn't know where it's growing next. A branch may grow this way and that way. If you let it be and don't have pressures from outside, when you look back, you will see that this will have been an organic development."

It's a choice between staying foolish -- not worrying what others think, taking the risks conventional wisdom says are dumb -- or staying in our bunkers. Foolish people are open to ideas wherever they come from. They're not afraid of making a mistake, since that's the nature of the learning process and all forward movement. They know that it's foolish not to make use of everything at our disposal to get the most out of our time on this planet. Foolishness short-circuits the left-brain rationality that says you can't do this and, instead, you say, iCan. Foolishness is freedom from fear. Fools are fueled by the most powerful motivator in life satisfaction -- intrinsic choice: doing what you like just to do it, not for a payoff. That's why fools have more fun.

To be more foolish and less defensive, we have to turn down the flood of fear and turn up inner strengths, such as locus of control, the belief that what you do and what happens to you depends on your choices. Overriding fear doesn't mean ignoring or avoiding it. That only eggs it on, since fear is a byproduct of unconfronted anxiety. The way out is managing it, reframing it, refusing to let what doesn't exist -- future projections, which is what most fear is -- to run your present.

Fear is a saboteur of bodies, minds, and workplaces, generating a host of stress-related conditions -- heart disease, back problems, stroke, burnout, irritable bowel, depression, diabetes, insomnia, paranoia, phobias, ulcers, damaged long-term memories, fractured attention spans and many more. Over 70 percent of doctor visits are stress-related. Companies squander $344 billion a year on stress-related issues, according to a study at Middle Tennessee State University. Fearful employees are two to three times more likely than non-fearful to have stress issues such as back pain or be taking tranquilizers (2).

Decisions made out of fear are never in your best interest. That's because no one thinks clearly when they're frightened. Fear activates the hub of your ancient emotional brain, the amygdala, which shuts off the rational thinking of the higher brain and defaults to a state of panic and catastrophic thoughts. Unless it's life-or-death, it's a false alarm.

When the amygdala is in charge, sanity isn't. You lose your ability to concentrate, to weigh pro and con, to see the big picture, to be creative, to see that the thoughts in your brain are distortions of a cornered caveman/woman. The stress spiral fixates on irrational thoughts until they appear real. Thinking is so impaired, it's hard to find a way out. In fact, resulting sadness has been shown to reduce the actual volume of your thoughts, according to Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence.

Humans have an overactive fear reflex, dating back to the days when it helped the species survive sketchy hunter-gatherer days. But the amygdala wasn't designed for 21st century stressors, such as too much email, traffic, or wall-to-wall prognosticators of imminent apocalypse. None of those things is a life-or-death threat, but they can trigger fears and the stress response just the same, if they make you feel you can't cope (a subconscious message misinterpreted by the amygdala as Grim-Reaper time).

Researchers are getting closer to understanding the mechanism that runs the fear show, the amygdala, an organ which isn't all bad, since it also alerts you to real dangers. Scientists at the University of Iowa studied a woman with a rare disorder that destroyed her amygdala (3). They found that, without an amygdala, she couldn't experience fear. None of the usual suspects -- snakes, fright flicks or bugs -- scare her. She also can't recognize fear in facial expressions. The rest of her emotions, from joy to sadness, function normally. She just has no fear. What would you, could you, do without fear?

Since amygdala removal isn't a practical option, learning how to live with risks and take them is a less invasive option. There's a risk in just about everything we do once we step outside the house each day -- or don't. The bathroom is a very dangerous place, from tubs to hair dryers and the person staring back in the mirror at you at 5:30 a.m. The only way to avoid risk is to be dead. The only way to move forward is to advance into the unfamiliar, where we find what we didn't know was out there that is essential for our path.

One of the most effective places to build risk-taking skills is something we would never expect: play, something I found in the course of my new book, Don't Miss Your Life, on the power of engaged experience. You can take risks without judgment or "failure" when you play. You're just playing, but in the process of being foolish -- which is what play is; there's no purpose whatsoever, no external payoff needed -- you get used to doing things you didn't think you could, and that carries over to the rest of your life.

That happened to Sara Lingafelter, an attorney I met who took up rock climbing at a local gym but had to overcome acrophobia when she started up cliff faces. She knew the fear was irrational, but it would force her back down from climbs in her early days on the rocks. By continuing to develop her skill level and persisting through the fear, she was able to beat not only acrophobia but take big risks in her professional life. She turned her back on a safe legal career for a path that led to a successful climbing blog (rockclimbergirl.com) and her dream job, social media maven for an outdoor company.

The right motivation crushes fear. When you are motivated by an internal goal, such as mastery, fun, excellence, helping others, listening to your gut, you're more likely to think "iCan" and take a leap -- plus stick with it, researchers say. The more caught up in external expectations and the value of future time you are, the less likely you are to risk. Potential loss in the future drowns out a vital present.

We know where that future is headed, so there's no time to waste in the foolish pursuit of an "insanely" fulfilling life, as Jobs might have put it.

Joe Robinson is author of "Don't Miss Your Life," on the science, spirit and skills of activating the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress-management speaker, trainer and coach at Work to Live.

1. Gregory Berns. "Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment." Henry Holt, 2005.

2. Gianfranco Domenighetti. "Health Effects of Fear of Unemployment among Employees in the General Population." 1998

3. Justin Feinstein, Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio Daniel Tranel. "The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear." 2011

Why Comfort Is Actually Bad For You

2011-09-14T08:22:00-04:00

Sometimes our closest friends can turn out to be not so friendly after all. That appears to be the case with an amigo few of us would ever question is a true bud and something we can hardly live without: comfort. The excessive pursuit of this commodity has been at the center of more than a few credit ratings going over the cliff in recent years, has fueled a host of unsustainable products and behavior, convinced many of us that luxury surroundings or designer labels will make everything better and kept a number of us from stepping outside entertainment centers to do the uncomfortable things that make us healthy and satisfied.

Exercise hurts. Comfort foods feel good. Learning a new skill takes effort. Crashing on the Barcalounger doesn't. A budget vacation requires us to figure things out for ourselves, which fuels competence, a core need. The luxury vacation takes care of everything, except our brains and wallets, but at least we've lived like kings for a few days.

As marketers have known since the days of toga sales, humans love their creature comforts. Tempur-pedic beds and cinema-sized TVs are nice, but researchers tell us we're a lot happier when we can tear ourselves away from what makes us feel cozy. It turns out that what our brains and bodies really want isn't comfort. It's engagement. Comfort is your enemy.

It's not that we need to be Spartans and forage for dinner. It's just that we're designed to be more than bystanders to our lives and venture beyond the familiar, so much so that the body's party drug, dopamine, is triggered by the mere anticipation of something novel. It's evolution's way of prodding novelty-seeking behavior. We're also equipped with another internal incentive to break out of the comfort default: habituation. We get tired of the same old, same old. A key element of sustainable happiness is varying how we do what we do to prevent the boredom of habituation.

The problem is that we also have an overactive safety reflex and prefer the pleasure at hand, because we aren't very good at delayed gratification. That comes from a time when we didn't know where the next meal was coming from. Marketers have made the comfort reflex even more of an autopilot, extolling its ease and status and making it synonymous with the good life.

The science shows, though, that it's just the opposite of the velvet cocoon that gratifies us. Our core psychological needs are satisfied not by how comfy we feel but by breaking out of the force field of routine. The two key factors in long-term life satisfaction are novelty and challenge, says brain scientist Gregory Berns of Emory University School of Medicine. The plush life doesn't make us happy because, like all external metrics, it doesn't do anything for you internally, where the real arbiters of gratification live.

The more we chase external comfort, the more uncomfortable we are on the inside. Inactivity, passive lifestyles and spectating follow the pursuit of comfort and take their toll. An extra hour of TV watching can increase the risk of death by 11 percent, a study led by Australian researcher David Dunston found (1). Watching TV more than four hours a day is associated with an 80 percent increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Alpa Patel, of the American Cancer Society, who studied 120,000 people and their sitting habits, says that people who sit too much cut two years off their life (2).

"Inactivity" studies show that excess sitting can be lethal. In the seated position, electrical activity in the body plunges, along with good cholesterol levels and calorie-burning, which drops to one-third less than when you're walking. Insulin effectiveness plummets, and the risk of diabetes climbs. As many as 50 million Americans are leading sedentary lives, according to University of South Carolina exercise science professor Steven Blair, who has called the inactivity problem the biggest public health risk of the 21st century. Through his work with the Aerobics Center Longitude Study, he discovered that poor fitness accounted for 16 percent of deaths and that women who were fit were 55 percent less likely to die of breast cancer than inactive women (3).

The comfort zone is just as nasty for your brain. Feed it the same data over and over because it's safe and routine, and your brain neurons literally stop noticing it. They're programmed to pay attention to what's new. This is how we wind up with years that are a complete blank in retrospect. We haven't done anything different, so we don't remember them. If you want a memorable life, the research is very clear: You have to live a life worth remembering.

Without mental stimulation dendrites, connections between brain neurons that keep information flowing, shrink or disappear altogether. Active learning and physical exercise increase dendrite networks and also increase the brain's regenerating capacity, known as plasticity.

"Neglect of intense learning leads plasticity systems to waste away," says Norman Doidge in "The Brain That Changes Itself." Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of plasticity research, adds that going beyond the familiar is essential to brain health: "It's the willingness to leave the comfort zone that is the key to keeping the brain new."

We cling to comfort zones because they offer perceived safety and keep the threat of change from our doorsteps. And they're easy. They require no effort. We're led to believe that non-exertion is the way to happiness, but our brains hate being on idle, looking into the window of life. We wind up with a hollowed-out life of spectating and learned helplessness, without the initiating skills essential to self-worth and a well-lived life. It's self-determined actions and experiences that provide the gratification we need. Your core psychological needs -- autonomy, competence and relatedness, the social connection -- can only be satisfied through participation, not cushy observation.

I met a host of folks across the country en route to "Don't Miss Your Life," my book on the power of engaged experience, who managed to break out of the comfort cage. They did it by pushing their respective envelopes in an area we would never expect is key to life fulfillment: skill-building off the professional track, by developing passions.

Southern California accountant Marty Herman broke through major comfort zones with salsa dancing. He can now perform without nerves in front of a crowd, and salsa connected him to a host of new friends. By following her passion for rock climbing despite a fear of heights, lawyer Sara Lingafelter discovered strengths she didn't know she had. She wound up breaking out of the legal world that was safe but unsatisfying and landing her dream job, as a social media specialist for a major outdoor products company. Her work and life are now aligned, thanks to her willingness to push through several comfort zones.

Remarkable things happen when we step outside the "comfort" of our self-limitations. It turns out that building competence at activities outside the job realm is one of the most effective ways to do that. We satisfy our core needs better through engaged recreational experiences than anywhere else. The activities are autonomous, you build skills that make you feel competent and you connect with others, satisfying all your core needs. It's no wonder humans are at their happiest when they're involved in engaging leisure activities, as a study led by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Alan Kahneman found (4).

The comfort crutch locks out engaged participation, the active ingredient in gratification, and locks in the biggest impediment to an extraordinary life: fear. We're here to venture, challenge ourselves and grow. It's built into the biochemistry. Comfort is allergic to the forward progress your brain neurons crave. The goal isn't to avoid lifting a finger on this planet, but to dig in with both hands to the wisdom of uncomfortable places.

Joe Robinson is author of the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the science, spirit and skills of activating the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress-management speaker, trainer and coach at Work to Live.

1. David Dunston. Television Viewing Time and Mortality: The Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (AusDiab), D.W. Dunstan, E.L.M. Barr, G.N. Healy, J. Salmon, J.E. Shaw, B. Balkau, D.J. Magliano, A.J. Cameron, P.Z. Zimmet, and N. Owen, Circulation, 2010.

2. Alpa Patel. Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults, America Journal of Epidemiology, 2010. Alpa Patel, Leslie Bernstein, Anusila Deka, Heather Spencer Feigelson, Peter T. Campbell, Susan M. Gapstur, Graham A. Colditz, and Michael J. Thun

3. Steven Blair, Aerobics Center Longitude Study.

4. Alan Krueger. National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life. Alan Krueger, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur Stone. Working Papers, Princeton Univ., 2008.

How to Get More Vacation Time

2011-08-09T08:41:00-04:00

The 2-week vacation used to be as normal a summer rite as barbecues and flip-flops. My dad would pile us into the station wagon, and we'd head out on windblown road trips (minus air conditioning) across the western U.S. Today, only 14 percent of Americans take two weeks or more at one time, one Harris survey found.

The average vacation is now a long weekend. Pretty soon you'll be able to take your vacation on your lunch break. Micro-cations don't cut it for your life or health. Vacations can cure burnout, the last stage of chronic stress, but research shows it takes two weeks for that recovery process to occur (1). To get the recuperative benefits of a vacation, you need time and, believe it or not, there are ways you can get it with the right mindset and strategies.

Let's start with the time off you may already have in your vacation policy. Many people are reluctant to use it (an Expedia survey shows only 38% of Americans use all their vacation time) for fear they might be considered someone who likes vacations, and, therefore, must not like to work. Or they fear everything would fall apart in their absence. Or they fear layoffs. The dirty little secret is that people who don't take vacations get laid off like everyone else. I spoke to a woman at a hi-tech firm in California who had four weeks coming to her because of her long tenure there, but never took more than a couple long weekends a year. She got laid off after 25 years, and now she's asking, "Where did my life go?"

Your vacation is your best chance each year to live your life as freely and fully as possible. When you skip a vacation, you skip out on life. That time is never coming back again. Handing back vacation time is handing back the best times of your life. If your company has a vacation policy, you're entitled to it by law.

Another woman I spoke to, an account executive in Lansing, Michigan, never took more than two weeks of the three weeks she was entitled to. She was convinced that, without her finger in the dike, everything would implode. Then one year she broke down and took her full three weeks. She returned refreshed and amazed to find the earth still spun on it axis. Nothing happened while she was gone. "It was all in my head. I survived it, I loved it," she said. Now she thinks about all the living time she gave back for so many years.

Vacations get us in touch with one of the most potent forces of well-being: experiences. As I discovered in the research for my new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," engaged recreational experiences are the missing link to life satisfaction. These activities we mistake as deviations from production satisfy our core psychological needs like nothing else. They are a resource to reduce stress and build positive mood every week of the year.

It's easier to take vacations and get more time on them when you take a proactive approach to them. It's no secret. What makes long holidays in Europe possible, besides national minimum paid-leave laws of four or five weeks, is that they are planned absences. Planning makes absences in the workplace not only feasible, but normal, as they once were here (the vacation itself is a concept invented by companies to revitalize workers). Even though firms in the U. S. may have vacation policies, they don't do any planning to account for vacation absences.

Across the Atlantic, practical strategies and more efficient management make vacations work for companies and employees. Businesses plan for the time off, and employees cross-train to pick up the slack when folks are on holiday. At the beginning of the year, everyone sits down and hashes out when they will take their holidays. Schedules are set and built into operations. As a result, the trips don't interrupt productivity, as one U.S. manager of an engineering firm in Rotterdam, Holland explained to me. Though his Dutch employees had six weeks off, "There was no reduction whatsoever in productivity," Water Perkins told me.

In Denmark, management plans vacations into the workflow of the company and makes sure they have the ability to cover people while they're gone. Holidays are factored into budgeting, production, every facet of the operation. Here in the U.S., companies don't plan for the vacations that are in their policies, and neither do most of their employees. Last-minute vacations cause headaches for employees and employers. The key is planning. Get your plans rolling four months ahead of time. You'll get the best deals, and you'll lock the company and yourself into a schedule that is much more likely to make your trip happen.

Thinking ahead of time facilitates the use of cross-training, the practice of sharing your job duties with other people. A German friend of mine, Jurgen Lattenkamp, who is an MRI tech, divides his job among three other people at his small company when he takes his three-week trip each year. "I give my job to different people," says Lattenkamp. "Twenty percent there, 30 percent there, 50 percent there." An American who worked in Europe, Elliot Robertson, told me he supervised a department of five. "We would all cross train. Every department did its own cross training."

That could happen within your department as well. Cross training is not some European anomaly. The U. S. Army uses it, and so do a few enlightened companies here, such as the H Group, a financial services firm in Oregon where everyone pitches in for someone else when they're on vacation. Even the boss, Ron Kelemen. Nothing builds teamwork like knowing that people you work with are helping you get a life. Cross training, along with a program that focuses on the importance of time off and refueling, has been so successful that Kelemen has doubled his profits.

The only folks who get more vacation time are the ones who ask for it. Here are a few strategies that can help you do that:

1. Start a cross-training program within your department. Don't wait for cross training to come down from on high. Start a test program and demonstrate its success -- increased productivity, job satisfaction, engagement. This is how Best Buy's corporate culture was changed to the Results Only Work Environment, where folks can work from anywhere at any time; it started in one department and filtered up. Cross training could not only make it easier for you to take the time you have, but to ask for more. You and your colleagues are covered when you're out.

2. Negotiate for more vacation when you start a job. It is possible, if your talents are in demand, and you know the company wants you, to negotiate for more than the stated vacation policy. One HR person I spoke to says she's seen one and even two additional weeks of vacation time given to people her company really wants.

3. Present evidence for more vacation time. Studies show an annual vacation can cut the risk of heart attack by 32 percent in men (2) and data from the famed Framingham Heart Study shows that women who don't take vacations are eight times more likely to suffer from heart disease. Vacations increase performance when you get back to work, in one study by as much as 25 percent (3).

4. Offer an incentive. Several people have told me that they made their bosses a pitch that their productivity would increase with an extra week off. After they took the extra week, their productivity soared. Demonstrate the power of refueling, and it's a win-win for all.

5. Take unpaid time off. Try asking for a week off without pay. Companies are only too happy to save money. I was able to do this at several companies I worked at.

6. Buy more time. Some companies let you buy and sell vacation time. You buy and sell at 100 percent of the value of your regular wages for the time period traded. The time you buy is deducted from your wages over a specified period. You can buy an extra week or even two weeks this way. Of course, this adds to your vacation costs, but at least you get the time.

And time is the real money. Our supply of it, (e.g., lifespan) is extremely limited. The more you can put to the service of living now the fewer regrets you'll have later. As an old saying goes, if you haven't had a day off, you haven't had a day on.

1. Hobfoll, Shirom; Stress and Burnout in the Workplace: Conservation of Resources, Handbook of Organizational Behavior, 1993.

2. Gump, Matthews: Are Vacations Good for Your Health?, Psychosomatic Medicine Sept.-Oct. 2001.

3. Rosekind, Alertness Solutions, 2006.

Joe Robinson is author of the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the science, spirit and skills of activating the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress-management speaker, trainer, and coach at Work to Live.

The 6 Skills You Can't Live Without

2011-07-27T08:19:00-04:00

Despite all the classes we take, degrees we get, documentaries we watch, most of us never get the word about a remedy as key to health and happiness as watching cholesterol or eating the right food. It's the invisible cure for a host of our problems, from stress to obesity to loneliness.

Stanford Medical School's Mark Cullen found out what happens to people who ignore this over-the-counter tonic. He found in his research that successful men were reduced to feeling "they were nothing," once they walked out the door to retirement. They had no worth beyond job performance, and they were missing a resource they couldn't live without. "They had no leisure skills," said Cullen. They didn't know how to live. Single-minded focus on production left them unequipped to enjoy the life they theoretically worked for. Many died early deaths.

Leisure skills? What's that? Microwave popcorn popping? Isometric finger exercises for the remote? That's probably what many of these execs would have thought and had a good guffaw over in the myopia of their working days. That attitude doomed them to a life without living.

When you don't have leisure skills, what do you do? Flip on the TV. The average state of someone watching TV is a mild depression, reports Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, author of "Finding Flow" and the pioneering authority on optimal experience. A sedentary lifestyle is a major risk factor for heart disease and other serious health problems. A recent study in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise reported that men who spend 23 or more hours a week sitting, watching TV or glued to car seats, had a 64 percent greater chance of fatal heart disease than those who only logged 11 hours or less per week on their butts. That could well be a bigger problem, since some 78 percent of Americans over age 30 don't get any exercise, according to Census Bureau statistics and Seppo Iso-Ahola of the University of Maryland.

The root of the problem? Missing leisure skills, something we don't know we need. The assumption is that leisure is a vegetative condition, and therefore there are no requirements aside from batteries for the remote. But it's actually the exact opposite. As Aristotle saw it, the non-work arena is a realm of engagement, of self-fulfillment and learning. Today, off-hours have been relegated to spectator sport.

In one of the not-so-great ironies of the modern world, we're trained to make a living, but not how to do the living we're making. That's left to others -- the stars with the production values, the tabloid train-wreck of the moment. We wind up without the skills to do what is essential for physical and mental health -- participate in our lives through engaged experience.

The link between leisure and health is plenty clear to researchers. A study by Tim Kasser, who heads the psychology department at Knox College in Illinois, found that as work time increases and leisure time decreases, health problems and negative emotions increase. Leisure experiences have been found to reduce stress by buffering setbacks and building coping mechanisms. They also build self-esteem and confidence and improve mood through increased self-control and social support.¹ Aerobic exercise and vacations have both been shown to reduce depression. The more active leisure life you have, the higher your life satisfaction, says Iso Ahola.

I saw this vitalizing force first-hand in the course of my new book, "Don't Miss Your Life", on the power of engaged experience. I met people whose health and worth had been transformed by active living. Philadelphia breast cancer survivor Kathy King barely had the strength to put a paddle in the water when she went to her first dragon boat paddling practice. Now she's in the front of the boat, leading the charge during races and has rebuilt her life. Her teammate Karen Lynch told me that "life before paddling was just breast cancer and being alone." She says the camaraderie and challenge of paddling "complete my life."

Former Marine Oz Sanchez found his life finished at the age of 25 when a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. After 18 months in a body cast and a long period of despair, he discovered a hand-cycle one day. It brought him to wheelchair racing and back to life. He won a hand-cycling gold medal at the 2008 Paralympics. Many others I met had no physical barriers, but passionate play overcame their mental blocks. Aikido banished insecurity for Montreal resident Erica Gipson; kayaking turned Chris Joose from an insular person to a leader and initiator; rock climbing helped Sara Lingafelter overcome her fears and find strengths and talents she never knew she had.

Passions and the active leisure skills that create them work wonders for your health and outlook because they satisfy core psychological needs for autonomy, competence and connection with others. This makeover show happens where it matters: inside. Yet this power of this health resource doesn't filter down to us because of the ingrained notion that recreation and leisure are little removed from outright vagrancy, since they don't produce anything (unless you want to call living a productive endeavor).

We concentrate all our skill-building and education on the work side, where we believe all the value is. Work skills -- getting results, micromanaging, staying in the comfort zone -- get you nowhere when it comes to activating your life, which is about input, not output, experience over results, letting go and getting out of the straitjacket of habit.

It takes another skill-set to create a fulfilling life outside the professional world. Here are some of the key leisure skills that get your life going:

Intrinsic motivation. Pursuing and enjoying experiences off the clock takes a different motivation than the work reflex of external results: intrinsic motivation. You do it for the inherent interest, fun, learning or challenge. Research shows we enjoy what we do and remember much more of it (critical to memory, which is what tells you that you like your life or not) when the goal is intrinsic. Expect no payoff, and you get a big one, internal gratification.

Initiating. Instead of being told what to do or watching others doing the living, we have to break out of spectator mode and self-determine our lives to feel gratified. We need to research and plan activities and vacations, seek out and try new things, invite others to get out and participate -- and if they don't reciprocate, go alone.

Risk-taking. The real risk is not risking. Security is a red flag for the brain, which is built to seek out novelty and challenge. Make the risk intrinsic (the result doesn't matter), and you're able to venture much more because, instead of having anything on the line, you're just exploring.

Pursuit of competence. Since competence is one of your core needs, it's a handy thing to build and sublime to feel. The idea here is that you want to get better at something -- not to show off, not for anyone else but for your own gratification. Pursuing competence leads you to build your skills at an activity to the point where it can become a passion. It's a fabulous self- and life-sustaining skill.

Attention-directing and absorption. The work mind wants to get everything over with ASAP. The key to optimal experiences is being 100 percent engaged in what you're doing now. That means losing the electronic devices and distractions and putting all your concentration on the activity at hand. The more absorbed you are, the more your thoughts and deeds are the same, and the happier you are. It's called harmony.

Going for the experience. Observation and hanging back don't satisfy the engagement mandate of your brain neurons. To activate a fulfilling life, we have to participate in the 40 percent of our potential happiness (the rest is inherited or due to circumstance) we can actually do something about -- intentional activities. That's the realm of experience. Experiences make us happier than material things because they can't be compared with anyone else's experience. They don't lose value through social comparison. They are personal events that engage our self-determination needs.

These skills take us inside the participant dynamic essential to a healthy and extraordinary life. They show us that the good life comes from a place quite a bit different than the recliner, and that the script of nonstop production is about as accurate a route to satisfaction and aliveness as a divining rod.

1. Chalip, L., Thomas, D. R. & Voyle, J. (1992). Sport, recreation and wellbeing. In D. Thomas & A. Veno (Eds.), Psychology and social change: Creating an international agenda. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press.

Joe Robinson is author of the new book, Don't Miss Your Life, on the science, spirit and skills of activating the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress-management speaker, trainer, and coach at Work to Live.

The Taboo Toxin Of Overwork

2011-07-12T08:10:00-04:00

More than one employee around the table had the same confession to make. Yes, they were taking their BlackBerrys to bed. Talk about an unrequited love. I wasn't surprised by this news at a work-life balance workshop I led. But it wasn't just connection addiction that was causing them to shack up with their devices. It also had to do with something that has gone largely unreported through the Great Recession. The people who are employed -- 90.8 percent, according to the latest stats -- are often doing the jobs of several people as a result of years of cutbacks.

These people are increasingly imploding from overload and the stress and burnout that comes with it, yet they're made to feel they can't complain. After all, they have a job. The question is at what price? For both individual and company. I meet people who have had heart attacks at age 29, folks in the prime of life who are on more meds than the folks on some geriatric wards. All pointlessly, and completely counter to the research on what makes us productive in the knowledge economy: a refreshed and energized brain.

Any engineer can tell you: We have structural limits. Even the strongest materials pull apart when subjected to the right amount of force and load. American workers are being pulled apart, because we're not making adjustments to the increased load and pace coming down on us. Chronic long hours can trigger a cascade of health problems. A study at the University of California, Irvine found that a steady diet of workweeks of more than 51 hours can triple the risk of hypertension. British researchers in a 2010 study documented that people who work more than 11 or 12 hours a day have a 60 percent increased chance of coronary incidents, from heart attacks to angina. Stress is the culprit, triggering the release of hormones that help contribute to plaque build-up inside arteries. Long days were also linked to sleep problems and depression.

The Japanese have known for a long time where excessive workweeks can lead, to what they call "karoshi," death by overwork. Researchers there have found a link between long hours, high blood pressure, heart disease and an unhealthy lifestyle -- no exercise, sleeplessness, poor eating habits, fewer medical visits and increased anxiety and strain.

We're working ourselves to death. Many of us have become so fused with our work we have become our jobs. One woman told me she has zero identity outside her work. We create the self through labor in this land, unlike in other countries, where your family or regional background give you a sense of who you are. We're a young land, we move around a lot and wind up defining ourselves by our jobs. Performance becomes the sole source of identity and value. Step away from it, and you have no value. You hear the nag in your head bellowing, "Get busy" -- even if you're at home on a Sunday morning.

Like all external yardsticks, performance is a flimsy source of worth, so you have to keep doing more of it to keep it propped up. A government employee I worked with told me she hadn't had 10 minutes to herself in five months. Digging deeper, I found that almost all of it was self-inflicted. She had a talk with her supervisor, who asked her why in the world she was working all these weekends.

Fear of layoffs drives "defensive overworking," as some go to extreme hours to avoid pink slips. But those who work on weekends and skip vacations get laid off like everyone else. A tech worker who limited her vacation to a long weekend, instead of the four weeks she had coming to her because she'd worked at the firm two decades, got laid off like everyone else. "Now I'm wondering where my life went," she told me.

That's usually the first thing to go with overwork -- exercise, hobbies, social outlets -- all the things that reduce stress and provide proof there is another realm of value and meaning, and that ensure you make time for it. In the course of researching my new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," I paddled, danced and hiked with people whose greatest achievement wasn't in marathon workweeks and the external approval and health problems that come with them. They found lasting gratification in the act of living through passions and hobbies.

It turns out that where we think all the gratification comes from -- performance, status, stuff -- is way off-base. The research shows the best predictor of personal satisfaction is satisfaction in your non-professional life. The more active leisure life you have, the higher your life satisfaction. The badminton, aikido, kayaking and dancing enthusiasts I met know what the researchers have confirmed: that recreational activities build mastery and risk-taking and connect us with our true aspirations and selves like nothing else. That creates lasting gratification, since these pursuits pump us up with internal satisfaction, not the mercurial approval of others.

This anti-burnout tonic is available to all of us when we rediscover the most basic self and life-management tool: boundaries. In an unbounded workplace in which there is no shortage of people happy to guilt you into burning the midnight oil, you have to be able to know when to say when.

Ex-GE boss Jack Welch, famed for his workaholic ways, was said to have made his managers demand well more than their workers could actually do on the premise of pushing until there was pushback. That pushback is not coming enough today, even though studies show speaking up in the workplace doesn't have the negative repercussions we think. One Harvard report showed that people are speaking up, and they tend to be extraverts. The report called "No," the "voice-oriented improvement system." It's how we get more effective. In my experience with workers across the country, the people who speak up get the best schedules and save their health from irreversible damage.

At a time of record job insecurity, speaking up seems dicey. But people are doing it every day and living to tell about it. At workshops, I'll ask who's good at setting boundaries. A couple hands go up, maybe 5 percent out of any group. So what happens when they set a boundary? Well, they say, there's some static. Okay, natural. And after that? Nothing. And now a boundary is set. There is a method to it, and with the right language and approach, it's a win-win. The job gets done more effectively.

One Harvard study found that boundaries are a success tool. "The key trait of successful businesspeople who have true satisfaction in their lives is the deliberate imposition of limits," said Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson. People who are good at setting limits are able to find the "just enough" point, the authors say, when they had done just enough for a given project or for the day.

Boundaries are a productivity tool. They prevent the colossal drop-off in performance that comes from excess hours (25 percent and more), fatigue and stress that comes out of your hide the next day and the next. MRI scans of fatigued brains look exactly like ones that are sound asleep. Boundaries also produce a little thing called life, a realm in which beds are BlackBerry-free zones.

Joe Robinson is author of the new book "Don't Miss Your Life" on the science, spirit and skills of activating the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress-management speaker, trainer, and coach at Work to Live.

The Costanza Correction: Why Happiness Is Doing the Opposite

2011-06-21T00:34:00-04:00

It's not easy to arrive in Los Angeles when you're on a flight to New York. Yet most of us are programmed in just this nonsensical way, to seek out happiness and life satisfaction by going in the exact opposite direction from what can produce it. No wonder we get headaches. The science shows that what produces satisfaction requires a 180-degree course correction from where we're convinced it comes from. The answer lies buried in the footage of an old "Seinfeld" episode. Call it the Costanza Correction.

As you may recall, George decides to do something radical to change his loser status. From now on, he will do exactly the reverse of his normal inclination. "If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right," Jerry tells him. George goes opposite, and suddenly things start happening. He winds up working for the Yankees and gets a girlfriend, unthinkable for normal George.

The Costanza Correction prevents headlong rushing in the wrong direction from what can deliver regular doses of happiness and optimal experience. Let's deploy it now to turn the table on three classic wrong-way myths about gratification.

Firstly, self-worth and happiness are supposed to come from external approval, in the form of yardsticks such as status, money, beauty and popularity, when the research shows that it's generated by the exact reverse -- intrinsic goals that produce growth and gratification felt by you, nobody else. Secondly, your personal value is supposed to come from nonstop production. Any halt in busyness is a mortal sin. But iquality recreation is actually the engine of productivity and life satisfaction, the polar opposite of all the training you get. And lastly, few of us would suspect that what our brains and psyches want is engagement with the unknown, the reverse of the impulse to cling to safety at all costs.

Follow the research, and it's easy to make the Costanza Corrections needed. Beginning with the external approval myth, the evidence tells us that what produces self-value, joy and even a meaningful life is in another direction entirely. Going for the fame, dough or image to win the approval of others is a bust at delivering gratification. The more importance placed on wealth aspirations, the poorer the well-being (Kasser et al.). When self-esteem is based on external measures -- appearance, performance, approval -- there is more stress, anger and substance abuse (Crocker). External approval concerns lead to an increase in social comparison, and more insecurity as a result. When people "organize their lives around wealth and possessions, they are essentially wasting their time as far as well-being is concerned," notes Tim Kasser, who heads the psychology department at Knox College in Illinois.

External metrics fail to satisfy you because they're about satisfying others. You get a brief bump from praise, a promotion or a new car, but you don't feel it inside, and so the thrill is gone in a blink. This leads to the need to get more approval, and so we double down on the wrong direction, going for more money, performance or things we believe will make us popular, and wind up on what the psychologists call a hedonic treadmill, where we can never catch up to the externally-fueled wants we think will fill the void inside.

Take the opposite course with the Costanza Correction, and you're on track for what actually delivers the goods: intrinsic pursuits, things you do for the inherent interest, challenge or fun, for no reward and no one else but yourself. Intrinsic choices make us happy, because they connect us to what matters to us, synching with our values, and allowing us to satisfy core psychological needs that make us feel autonomous, competent and connected to others. This is the route to true self-worth, long-term gratification and something essential to the human spirit: meaning, which compelling research shows comes from self-determined effort, not external rewards.

I met a crew of fired-up folks doing just that on the road to my new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the power of engaged experience. By making the Costanza Correction, they found the real reward, the internal payoff, on the opposite path. Richard Weinberg, for example, was a very successful Chicago businessman and entertainment investor, but something was missing: life. He found that elusive item when he took up dancing at the age of 49. "I didn't know I wasn't really living before," he told me. Now a professional dancer able to hoof it in 14 different dance styles, Weinberg says dancing has "given me a ... purpose."

That's not an item that's supposed to come from something as lowly and non-purposeful as play. Yet our second Costanza Correction shows that, when we participate in engaged R&R, it leads not to terminal slackerhood but instead to mastery, growth and the recharging that fuels well-being and productivity. The science is way ahead of our stereotypes on this. Active recreational pursuits increase life satisfaction more than work (London, Crandall, et al.); improve positive mood (McCann, Holmes); and help develop risk-taking skills that satisfy our need for challenge and competence. Erica Gipson, an aikido practitioner I met in the Montreal studio of instructor Karl Grignon, says the Japanese martial art transformed her life, swapping out stress and defensiveness for confidence and focus.

Finally, when you go Costanza, you can reverse field on one of the most insistent obstructions to the life you want: the safety default. Humans were designed with an itchy security trigger because the species had to be hyperalert to threats to survival back in the day on African savannas. But a bunker mentality leads to stagnation and boredom, the opposite of what your brain wants: novelty and challenge. Brain neurons crave novelty so much that just the anticipation of experiencing something new sets off the release of dopamine, the body's party drug. It's called the "exploration bonus." We're born to discover. When that drive gets shut down by fear and comfort zones, so does forward progress and fulfillment of your core needs. You might be safe, but you're sorry.

A tide of research, detailed expertly by Gregory Berns in "Satisfaction," shows that what we really need for fulfillment is a steady dose of engagement, not vegetating in our bunkers. The basis for satisfaction is seeking out things that require us to go beyond the familiar, that allow us to discover and challenge ourselves. Satisfaction doesn't come from autopilot; it comes from taking on things that make us stretch -- like doing the opposite of what we're supposed to, thanks to that singular sage, Costanza.

Joe Robinson is author of the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the science, spirit and missing skills of a happy life outside the office. He is a work-life balance and stress-management speaker, trainer, coach and author at Work to Live.

Overworked and Underplayed: The Incredible Shrinking Vacation

2011-05-31T08:26:00-04:00

As you trudge back to work after a brief glimpse of freedom beyond the office, your thoughts may turn to what it would feel like to have a few more days off from the grind. The end of May used to mark the unofficial start of vacation season, a time when people took road trips, went camping, roamed amusement parks, traveled and explored their world. Today, vacations are little more than a memory for many of us, a theoretical concept that exists only on paper.

Some 25 percent of Americans and 31 percent of low-wage earners get no vacation at all anymore, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. This is because, unlike in 138 other countries around the world, you're not entitled to a vacation longer than the current news cycle. You happen to live in a country that, along with the esteemed likes of Myanmar, the Guyanas and North Korea, has no minimum paid leave law to make vacations statutorily legit. Two years ago, that all could have changed.

I stood outside U.S. congressional offices in May of 2009, as Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida introduced the first minimum paid leave law, the Paid Vacation Act of 2009. Grayson mentioned in his remarks that having vacations guaranteed by law was a matter of justice, with some Americans able to get vacation time from employers and an increasing number of them able to get nothing at all. It was also a family values issue, vacations being the best time all year for quality family time. I could hardly believe it was happening. I had started a campaign to press for a minimum paid leave law back in 2000, and, with the help of John de Graaf and Take Back Your Time, our proposed amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act to give Americans the same right folks in 138 other countries have was on its way.

It had been a long, strange trip to legalized vacations in the U.S. As the concept of vacations dawned after the turn of the century, begun by companies as a respite to restore and recharge workers, ex-president William Howard Taft suggested in 1910 that the American worker needed two to three months of vacation a year "in order to continue his work next year with the energy and effectiveness which it ought to have." Taft's pitch was ultimately picked up by the Swedes and Germans, who average about seven weeks of holiday time a year.

Back in the 1930s, the Committee on Vacations with Pay was tasked by the Labor Department to look into the problem of the lack of a vacation law in the U.S. when 30 other nations had one. How could that be? The group recommended to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins that a law be enacted, but nothing happened. This was the fork in the road where the Europeans went one way on holiday time and we went quite another. Labor unions in Europe continued to push for time off, and as a result Europeans gained additional vacation time in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Today, most of Europe has four and five weeks off by law (plus a week to two weeks more by agreement with their employers), as do Australians and Brazilians, among many others. Fast forward to the era of downsizing and tech tools demanding constant contact, and vacations today are going the way of the dodo.

It makes as little sense for business as it does for their employees. Performance increases after a vacation, with reaction times going up 40 percent. Vacations cure burnout, the last stage of chronic stress and something very difficult to shake. Burned-out employees are a major liability to effective performance. They may be at the office physically, but output is next to nothing when cognitive, physical and emotional resources have been depleted. Vacations regather crashed resources and restore productive capacity. But it takes two weeks for the recuperative process to occur. Only 14 percent of Americans take more than one week of vacation at a time these days, according to a Harris poll.

When I was a kid, it was norm for my family to take off every summer for a two-week road trip of overheated radiators and giant balls of twine. My dad never missed a vacation. That's not true anymore. Expedia's just-released annual survey shows that only 38 percent of Americans use all their vacation days. Job insecurity is a big part of it, the belief that if you take that holiday, your layoff number might come up. It's called defensive overworking, and it's futile. I've talked to people who have worked at companies for 25 years and hardly ever used their vacation time, and they got pink-slipped, too. There would be a lot less unused vacation days if it were legally protected.

The arguments on the other side mostly boil down to a belief that the world will come to an end for U.S. productivity if we somehow enjoyed legal title to a vacation. It's just the opposite. Performance increases with recharging and refueling, all the studies show. "We'll wind up like unproductive Europe" is another favorite line. Another myth, too. Several European countries with four- and five-week vacation laws are more productive than we are per hour -- Belgium, Norway, even France.

How many hundreds of U.S. companies are operating in Europe right now with all their employees taking four- to six-week vacations by law? I don't see a mass exodus of unprofitable U.S. firms in Europe due to their employees' vacations. Walter Perkins, a finance VP for a top American engineering firm who ran an office in Rotterdam, told me that four-week-plus holidays affected output not one iota at his office.

People who work for a living get all this -- and people from both parties, too. I've been on a number of conservative talk radio shows in which the host expects callers to ream me, but the majority supported having vacations protected by law. The hosts are always stunned.

American management is way behind the science on where productivity and innovation come from, using obsolete, factory metrics and motivational tools (as Daniel Pink details wonderfully in "Drive"), something I see in my work as a stress management trainer for these organizations. It's not the amount of hours on the job, but the quality of those hours that results in productive endeavor in the knowledge economy, where it's not about how much of a pounding you can take but how fresh your brain is. Time off to recharge and renew is the engine of productivity and innovation. Enlightened companies understand this, firms such as SAS Institute in Cary, N.C., which offers three weeks off to all employees during the first year on the job and has seen its sales increase by double digits for years to $2 billion a year.

One of the reasons you don't have a vacation or one that feels legit enough to take without gobs of guilt is that the culture programs us to believe that only output has value. Step away from performance, and there is no value. The problem is that the realm of nonproductivity is where your life lives -- family, friends, hobbies, passions, travel, exploring. I detail in the new book "Don't Miss Your Life" how we have it all wrong about the non-task side of life. The science shows that real value, in the form of authentic self-worth, not based on the external approval of output and status, as well as life satisfaction, comes in engaging recreational activities off the clock, which allow you to gratify core psychological needs.

A study led by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Nobel-prize-winning psychology professor and researcher Daniel Kahneman found that of all the things on the planet, humans are at their happiest when they're involved in engaging leisure experiences. Leaf Van Boven, of the University of Colorado, has found that vacations make us happier than material things, because they can't be compared to anyone else's experiences. They create lasting memories that fire off multiple parts of the brain and, as a result, stick with us. It's our memories that tell us we like our lives.

Engaged recreation is one of the world's best stress buffers, no doubt why an annual vacation cuts the risk of heart attack in men by 30 percent and by 50 percent in women who take more than one vacation a year. Think about the impact of those reduced heart events on health care costs. Research by Tim Kasser has documented that, as work time increases and leisure time decreases, negative emotions and health problems increase and life satisfaction plummets.

In our guts we know all this -- and that there's something that doesn't add up about being the "no vacation nation," as the CEPR study put it. How is it that the rest of the world can pull off vacations for its citizens and the can-do nation can't? They have more courageous lawmakers, for one.

The Paid Vacation Act of 2009 didn't find the support it needed and never made it onto the floor of Congress. Lawmakers say now is not the right time. It will kill jobs, when it actually enhances them. Staff turnover at Jancoa, a Cincinnati firm, dropped from 360 percent to 60 percent and productivity soared with the addition of a week of vacation. Ron Keleman of the H Group in Salem, Ore. has doubled his profits since he increased vacation time at his office. Not to mention, increased time off would be a boon for tourism, prime the economic pump and create jobs. A former World Bank official told me about a meeting with state tourism officials in Tennessee, who were spending the bulk of their ad dollars trying to lure European tourists, since Americans had no time to visit.

The question that needs to be asked is when the right time to live is. We're already 80 years behind schedule on minimum paid leave. Do you have another 80 years to wait for what the citizens of almost every other nation on the planet have? If not, let's find new Congressional sponsors who can pick up the ball that took eight decades to bounce into the halls of Congress and move the Paid Vacation Act forward. And get us out of the company of such quality of life stalwarts as Myanmar and North Korea.

Joe Robinson is author of the new book "Don't Miss Your Life," on the science, spirit and missing skills of living the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress management speaker, trainer, coach and author at "Work to Live."

Job Stress? How to Keep Catastrophic Thoughts from Killing You

2011-05-17T08:41:00-04:00

T-Bone Walker called it "Stormy Monday" in his electric blues masterpiece. ER physicians and hospital personnel know it as "Black Monday," the day of the week when more heart attack victims check in than any other day of the week. The prospect of another week of job pressures triggers a myocardial infarction and a trip to the emergency room. Monday is not the favorite day of the week for most of us. It means open season on our pulse rates for the next five days, courtesy of a silent killer we aid and abet: job stress.

Slide open the top desk drawer of a typical workstation today, and chances are good that you will stumble onto a mini-pharmacy. Tums, Tagamet, Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol. This is the rumbling underbelly of an epidemic of chronic stress. Inside the purses and briefcases, there are pharmaceutical reinforcements--Paxil to Xanax. A lawyer in Washington D.C. told me everyone she knows is on Paxil.

When I do work-life balance workshops for companies or government organizations, I invariably meet folks who take me aside to tick off a litany of meds and conditions--all due to chronic work stress. A manager at an aviation company told me about the heart attack he'd had five months earlier. A woman at a drug company listed seven meds she was on, for everything from depression to insomnia and gut issues. I met a woman in her twenties at one government agency who had the ailments of a 70-year-old.

It's a national health tragedy that is all but invisible, hidden behind the game face of workers who have been trained to take it in silence, part of the mettle-testing battleground of the bravado workplace. When we take the stress, though, we get taken--by any number of health problems, by the nonproductivity that comes from stress-addled brains, and by the staggering costs of a problem that we enable.

More than three-quarters of the 956 million visits to physicians every year are estimated to be the result of stress-related problems. Want to dramatically cut health care costs? Start here. Three-quarters of visits to doctor's offices at, conservatively, $100 a pop = $71 billion.

Job-related stress also costs American business $344 billion a year in everything from medical bills to recruiting and training, according to research at Middle Tennessee State. Chronic stress kills more people every year than traffic accidents, nicotine, or alcohol from the host of conditions it stokes, from heart disease to strokes, yet we hear next to nothing about it -- no anti-stress ad campaigns like the anti-smoking spots. In Britain, they take work stress seriously enough that the law requires that companies there undergo regular stress audits. Can you imagine that happening here?

A massive stress education program could go a long way toward addressing the problem, because the vast majority of us know next to nothing about stress--and how we hold the key to creating it or dumping it. Yes, there are plenty of stressors coming at us in a warp factor 9 workplace, but it's not the deadline, what a customer says, or the conflict with a colleague that's causing your stress. The reality is you are. It's the story you tell yourself about the negative event or the stressor that's causing the stress. We all have the ability to change the stories that create our stress, if we know how the dynamic works.

The problem is a design flaw in our brains that leaves us prone to false emergencies. We were designed for life-and-death struggles on African savannas, not overflowing in-boxes or sales quotas. That's especially true for the part of your brain that sets off the stress response, the amygdala, a hub of the emotional brain, the ancient limbic system, which ran operations before we evolved the higher brain organs that can make decisions based on reason and analysis, not raw emotion.

In times of perceived danger the amygdala hijacks the 21st century brain and takes the helm again. This ancient alarm system is as good at measuring threats in the workplace as a yardstick is at calculating the distance to the sun. A hundred and fifty emails a day is a hassle, but it's not life-or-death. But if an overloaded inbox makes you feel you can't cope, off goes the signal that sets off the stress response, which floods your body with hormones that suppress your immune system to help you fight or run ... away from your computer?

Researchers have discovered that there are a couple of keys to controlling the stress response (which can be shut off in three minutes, as soon as the brain can see the danger is over): increasing "latitude," such as the amount of control you have in your work -- possible through changes in how you do your tasks -- and the story you tell yourself about the problem. The first story you get when the stress response goes off is supplied by your caveman brain, the amygdala. Since it thinks those 150 emails will overload your coping ability, it interprets the matter as life-and-death, unleashing the stress response and the panicked thoughts that come with it. The initial thoughts of a panicked brain are exaggerated, catastrophic. We get swept away by a surge of emotion from these distortions, buy the false beliefs, and go down the irrational track, causing any number of consequences, all based on a fantasy.

Stress constricts your brain to the perceived crisis and inhibits all the things that can reduce the stress, such as relaxation, recreation and play. Active recreational experiences are one of the best stress buffers available, something I detail in my new book on the power of engaged experiences, "Don't Miss Your Life." But stress shuts off diversions from stewing and ruminating, leaving us to obsess about the perceived emergency. The more we stay caught up in a cycle of stress and rumination, the more we miss our lives.

We're never taught to contest the illusions of stress, so the hysterical stories stick. If we don't dispute these stories with the 21st century brain, the stress response spirals in intensity, locking in a false crisis mentality. Since the process suppresses the immune system, you become vulnerable to any number of health problems -- adrenal dysfunction, back pain, chronic fatigue syndrome, hypertension. The biochemical changes increase the bad cholesterol and decrease the good kind. The stress response steals from various body systems to pump more blood to your arms and legs to fight and run. It was intended to last for the minutes or perhaps hours it took to get out of harm's way, not to pump 24/7, day after day, month after month, as it does with modern chronic stress.

You can exit the trap of work stress by increasing your control over the work environment as best you can and changing the false story of the caveman brain to one based on the facts of the situation as soon as you feel the wave of emotions and irrational thoughts go off. There are a number of effective techniques that can help reframe the story, as well as relaxation tools that can reduce the anxiety so you can build in your rebuttal to the irrational thoughts.

Some processes, which involve deep breathing and reframing, are good for situational stress. They let you step back when the going gets tense and create counter-stories that can stop the stress spiral in its early stages, before the catastrophic thoughts get entrenched. The stress spiral is weakest at the very beginning of the cycle, so that's when you want to contest it. It takes time and effort to change reflex behaviors, but you can learn to reframe emotional panic with realistic appraisal of stressful situations.

Stress is by no means easy to deal with, since we react to stressors before we think. It's an automatic response, which is why we are so under its thumb. But we can build in the thinking and catch ourselves before we rush headlong down the irrational track and wind up with a dump truck of angst -- for nothing.

Real courage lies not in absorbing punishment but in managing reflex emotions and work tasks that set them off. As Lao Tzu put it, "He who is brave in daring will be killed. He who is brave in not daring will survive." Opting out of the stress reflex is the real home of the brave.

Joe Robinson is author of the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the science, spirit, and missing skills of living the fullest life. He is a work-life balance and stress management speaker, trainer, coach and author at Work to Live.

The Secret To A Life Of No Regrets: Live Before You Die

2011-05-03T11:53:00-04:00

Consider a place where people feel guilty if they enjoyed themselves -- because they aren't getting anything done. Where people see free time as inferior to the un-free time of work and performance. How's that for chutzpah? It sounds absurd yet all too familiar, because that place is all around us, the result of one of the most effective social engineering experiments of all time. The programming has convinced most of us that the very experience of life is taboo.

The master of sci-fi commentary, Rod Serling, would have had a field day with this hoax. I can see his monologue now: "You unlock a door and enter a world in which no one can rest. Where people exist to produce and nothing more. Where enjoyment triggers guilt. You have entered a dimension where only the future matters, and the present is but a way station to a living nightmare in the Twilight Zone."

The taboo against living the life you're here for is held in place by a host of false beliefs straight out of the Twilight Zone -- that worth is dependent on filling every moment with busyness; that the good life is out there in the future somewhere (when you have the right money, house, spouse, success, etc.), instead of where it is, Now, in engaged experiences that satisfy your core needs; that others hold the key to your happiness and satisfaction when you are the audience who determines it all through self-determined actions that make you feel gratified; that you must work till you drop to stay on the success track, also known as the "ideal worker" social norm.

It's such a convincing con that it takes a near-death experience to wake us up to our real lives and the fact that we're actually here to live before we die. There's no doubt about that fact on Philadelphia's Hope Afloat dragon boat team, where the focus is getting the most out of every minute of life. I hung out and paddled with the team of breast cancer survivors on the road to my new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the missing link of happiness: engaged experiences. They all told me their lives are far richer and more satisfying post-cancer than before. They are no longer oblivious to the present tense and are energized by their passion for paddling and the camaraderie that comes with it.

"It was an awakening to take my time more seriously," one of the paddlers, Kathy King, told me. "Before I'd be tired, and I would stare down at my feet. Now I look up at the sky, the buildings. I don't want to miss anything."

The blinders stay on for most of us, thanks to twisted social norms that keep us projecting our lives into the future and equating personal value with what we produce. As Alan Watts once put it, "Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax." He noted that the education you get prepares you for the future, "instead of showing you how to be alive now." Kathy King and her colleagues are showing us how to live now. Because tomorrow's too late.

The false belief that all value comes from output -- "I produce therefore I am" -- is a lousy measuring stick for self-worth but very effective at squelching your life. Every time you step back from productive endeavor, you have no value. The problem is that the realm of nonproductivity happens to be where your life lives -- fun, recreation, play, love, art, social activities, passions. The programming says that's all a sideshow to the real measure of a worthwhile existence: external approval.

Over the last two decades researchers have detailed just how unproductive external approval is. It creates really flimsy self-worth. One researcher I spoke to, Mark Cullen of Stanford's Medical School, told me about enormously successful executives who go into retirement and feel worthless two days later, because they aren't producing anything and have no leisure skills.

External approval concerns lead to more social comparisons, a fantastic way to make yourself miserable by having your status contingent on what others have or do. Focus on extrinsic goals crowds out intrinsic experiences, a study by Bruno Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee points out. There's no room for anything but external results, or what Edward Deci of the University of Rochester calls "instrumental thinking." Everything has to lead to some external gain. Anything that doesn't -- living, for instance -- gets eliminated from the agenda. And you wind up with a nag you could do without, regrets. Researchers have found that what we really regret are the things we don't do. It's called the "inaction effect." The taboo against living your life creates plenty of those.

When we crowd out our lives by chasing the yardsticks of outside approval -- money, popularity, beauty, status -- we miss out on the things that provide the only approval that counts, the gratification of our core needs: autonomy, competence, and social connection.
Worth is a byproduct of internal validation, something you get from the part of life that's supposed to be worthless: your passions, i.e., play.

Amy Doran, a woman I met flying kites in Oregon, was a single mother in a new town with no friends and insecure about where she was going. Then she discovered stunt kite flying. Now she's a confident festival performer with a host of friends. Her son, Connor, who has epilepsy, said he felt worthless before he took up kite-flying. He wound up on "America's Got Talent" and has become an inspiration to people across the country. Tony Scott, who was laid off from a financial job in New York, got his worth back, not from a new job, but from making pottery. He learned that there was a person with skills beyond the professional mask.

The skills these people acquired and those of many others I met, from rock climbers to kayakers and badminton players, point a way out of the twilight zone to lasting self-worth and satisfaction that no job can deliver, because it's based on the internal gratifications of autonomy and mastery, not what others think.

The inconvenient truth is that time is the real money. It's a resource with a very finite supply. As Paul Bowles once wrote, "Because we don't know when we will die we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well ... How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems so limitless."

How do we get this through our heads before we die that the part of life that's supposed to be worthless is actually what we've been looking for all along? That the elixirs of fun, challenge and social connection right next to us in the world of play and adventure are main courses of life, not fringe desserts? Listening to messengers like Kathy King is one way.

We could also use a regular awareness campaign to counter the propaganda of life-denial. We have National Week for the Gifted, National Small Business Week, National Arson Awareness, National Tsunami Week. I'd like to propose National Get Out and Live Week for the week of July 18. During this week, everyone would have permission to do the things they don't want to regret not doing later. They can get out and participate in what the science says makes us happier than anything else: engaging recreational experiences. Go out dancing, hike a favorite trail, hang glide, travel with family or friends. Do what you like and things you've never done before. We'll give each other ideas and collect videos that capture people in the act of living without regrets. And we'll get life off the taboo list.

All this really hit home for me in March, when my father died after a long illness. He had no regrets about missing anything at the end, because he didn't. He was never defined by his job, but, instead, by all of his interests and curiosities. He loved cycling and did 100-mile century races in his 60s. He was an amateur carpenter who helped build dozens of homes for Habitat for Humanity, a ham radio buff, a nature lover and camper, a rose gardener extraordinaire, a piano student, a traveler, an astronomy fan, a classical and jazz music lover, a great barbecuer, a ballroom dancer and a short-story writer.

In his last months, as he reviewed his life, he would often say, "Those were good days," looking back and savoring. Those good days are now. Don't get hoaxed out of them.

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Joe Robinson is author of the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the science, spirit and skills of living the fullest life. He is founder of Work to Live and is a work-life balance and stress management speaker and trainer.

The Stress-Killer Taboo for Grown-Ups

2011-03-22T08:49:00-04:00

Adults have a few problems, as I'm sure you've noticed. Some three out of four doctor visits are stress-related. A doctor in Wisconsin told me that 90 percent of her patients have depleted adrenal glands, the result of the stress response pouring out adrenaline around the clock. American businesses squander $344 billion a year on stress-related costs, according to data from Middle Tennessee State University. Yet grown-ups insist on unilateral disarmament when it comes to one of the best stress buffers there is: play.

We would rather ruminate on troubles -- which fuels them -- than use a resource that's right at our fingertips and cheaper than the last trip to the pharmacy. Turning your back on play makes about as much sense as swearing off laughing and has about the same effect: locking in the overseriousness that reinforces that you are too busy, besieged or important to let your hair down.

I don't see the upside of being miserable when the science shows that strategic doses of fun can shred the awfulizing and irrational thoughts that are at the root of most stress. Stress hijacks the higher brain, handing the controls over to a primitive part of your gray matter that distorts stressors and setbacks into life-and-death affairs. Play has a remarkable ability to interrupt the anxiety cycle and restore sanity. It builds coping resources by increasing positive mood and breaking up the mental set that locks in obsessive associations. Play reboots your brain, as it recharges positive mood and vitality.

Brain surgeons have to carve into craniums to bring back healthy functioning. Play can do that without a scalpel. A host of studies we never hear about underscore why it's a good idea for grown-ups to lose the masochism and cut loose with regular bouts of task-less enjoyment. Engaged leisure experiences build coping mechanisms, increasing resilience by building confidence and connection with others. They increase life satisfaction more than work by satisfying core psychological needs, such as autonomy. And they help develop risk-taking skills that allow you to break free of habits that fuel stress.

There's no success like recess -- that once (and still) critical part of your day. A landmark study by Alan Krueger and Nobel-Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman analyzed how 4,000 Americans spent their time and found that people are at their happiest when they are involved in engaging leisure activities. Happiness, it turns out, depends more on how you play than on your business card or the car you drive.

That's not the message we get every day. We're led to believe we'll be terminal slackers and wimps if we dare to step away from the grindstone. But the produce-till-you-drop social norm is not only a fiction; it's also completely counterproductive to work effectiveness, particularly in the knowledge economy, in which the source of productivity is a refreshed and energized brain. Studies show that performance goes up after breaks and vacations. The best predictor of personal satisfaction is satisfaction in your nonprofessional life. So if you don't have a non-professional life, chances are you may not be too satisfied.

I met a host of satisfied folks on the road to the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," which details a piece of the happiness equation all but ignored: engaged play. Each of these life enthusiasts has taken a proactive approach to play, seeing it not as an infraction for adults, but as something that can make life most worthwhile. Karen Lynch, a breast cancer survivor, found stress relief and a lot more when she took up the sport of dragon boat paddling. It became her passion. "Now that paddling is in my life, and all these women, it completes my life. It makes me a better person," she told me. Play has taken her from a loop of fear and stress at home to a wider world of challenge, fun, and camaraderie. She's no longer alone, but thriving with a large support system of fellow cancer survivor paddlers.

For Nao Kumigai, badminton is sport, art, refuge, teacher and friend. "When I'm depressed, or don't have confidence, or fail at something, I know I can get over it with badminton," says the Los Angeles restaurant and hotel product salesman. "In business you have to have confidence, or you can't sell. Badminton gives me that." When he's on the road for business and has a spare hour, he's on a local court, blasting shuttlecocks.

Physical exercise and the act of learning or practicing a skill cause massive changes in the brain that result in improved health, memory and problem-solving. Engaged play interrupts the flow of stress and builds up emotional resources to help you cope, such as a sense of mastery and social support.

You would think that if there were a source of happiness as reliable as engaged play that riot police would be posted outside martial arts studios or pottery classes to hold back the hordes. But mythology, stress and, no doubt, a plot by antacid makers prevent an outbreak of sanity. You can override these forces of life denial by opting out of stress and rumination with the transformative power of play. You don't have to take the pounding of work and stress without letup to be a valid performer. You are entitled under current law to actually live your life, no matter what the social pressures say. And when you do so by playing more often, you're happier, healthier and more connected to the authentic life beyond the obligational yoke.

I recently saw a man in his forties walking down the sidewalk on my street -- head down, lost in thought, doing the adult shuffle. Suddenly, he broke into a series of hops, straddles and jumps. Local kids had chalked in a hopscotch pattern on the cement, and he leaped right in. After his last hop, he straightened himself out and continued walking, never once looking back to see if anyone saw him. He had a bounce in his step.

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Joe Robinson is author of the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the missing link to happiness, life fully lived. He is founder of Work to Live, and is a work-life balance and stress management trainer and coach.

Out of Control: Why Adults Need to Lose It More Often

2011-02-22T08:29:00-05:00

It's in the adult handbook. You have to be in control, or look like you are, every waking moment, or pay the price in vulnerability or foolishness, risky and unseemly for grown-ups. As a result, many of us become experts at holding at bay the very things that unleash a life worth living -- the opposite of lockdown mode: surrendering to spontaneity, not knowing, and, yes, foolishness.

While there are plenty of things we need to be in command of -- income, roof over the head, well-being -- defaulting to the control bunker in your nonobligational life seals out the experience of living. What we can't see from inside the adult force field is that fools have more fun. It's why kids have more fun. They're not afraid to be foolish, trying new things relentlessly, also known as learning.

Control seems like the way to go, but the forces of safety shut down precisely what our brain neurons crave for fulfillment -- novelty and challenge -- and one of the best producers of those items, play. When we let the grown-up straitjacket run the show, it rules out all manner of activities that are spur-of-the-moment, out of character, new, light, uncynical, or that threaten to reveal the non-know-it-all that we all are.

Control is overrated, if your idea is to actually truly live your life. Whether it's learning how to dance or having the richest travel experience, life's enjoyments are fueled by letting go of the safety equipment, something I detail through a host of people doing just that in the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life", on the missing link to an extraordinary life -- participant experiences. Otherwise, the klutzy learning phase of dance drives you to quit, or you stay cooped up at a resort that keeps the real world of discovery out. You have to actually do the traveling yourself to get something out of it.

I met an American couple in Belize who made exactly this point on a flight from Placentia, a small coastal hamlet. They asked how I liked the place. I had stayed in the town in a local apartment and met some great friends, including a German couple I'm still in touch with. We trekked/slid in a rainforest in the rain, took a skiff out to snorkel, and spent hours musing on the mysteries of life over the local brew. The couple hated their trip. They stayed at the big resort outside town, had met no one, had no experiences other than being served food and drinks. "We were captives," the guy said. Safe from life.

Travel is one of the best ways to see that the world gets along perfectly well without you in control -- both at home and on the road. The job doesn't fall apart when you're gone, and you, hopefully, scramble out of the bunker. It's a relief to not know where you are, perfectly acceptable when out of our element on the road. We try things we never would at home, adapt to the unfamiliar and unpredictable, and in the process feel empowered from new experiences we handled.

It's just what your brain has been hoping you'd do. Our core needs of autonomy and competence demand that we scrap the armor and allow ourselves to forge unprotected into realms that allow us to learn, grow, and connect closely with others. You can't do any of that without some vulnerability, without springing yourself from the code of conduct you get locked into by what friends might think, or the preconceived notions that tell you that you can't take up a musical instrument or travel solo before you've even tried it. It's the job of the control police to make sure you never have a chance to be vulnerable, thereby locking you out of the precondition to learning, fun and friendship.

Acting foolish flies in the face of everything you were raised to be -- serious, purposeful, bored -- and that makes it a very unexpected skill of "life intelligence," an acumen that is the polar opposite of the control skills we use for the job. Foolishness automatically removes the security blanket holding back the authentic expression of your life through play. It's a kind of active not-knowing, a basic step on the way to fun, learning and a less ego-driven life. It frees you from the ability of stone cold strangers or friends to determine your life for you by looks or comments that keep you frozen in familiarity.

Not caring whether you look foolish opens up the living potential exponentially. Instead of having the majority of the exhilarating experiences on the planet ruled out because they're out of your comfort zone, suddenly, everything this side of a trip to Mars is in. That's a good thing, since experiences are where life satisfaction and you live. Researchers say we're at our happiest when we're immersed in engaging recreational experiences, i.e., play.

Loss of control is one of the hallmarks of optimal experiences, or flow. It's surrender to the moment that makes the magic happen, as your skills meet a challenge and focus your mind so intently there's no room for any of the self-talk and self-consciousness that keeps the living out of your life. You go with what's thrown at you and don't try to fight it. By not trying to control the course of events or outcome, you give yourself a chance to satisfy competence -- at dance, kayaking or aikido. As soon as the ego and its control squad -- Am I doing it well enough? How do I look? -- appear, you are no longer in the experience.

Trying to control whatever people think about what you are doing is futile but very effective at creating missing lives. As Pema Chodren has observed, fixating on our image "is like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with a black hood over your head. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs."

Life intelligence practitioners leave the judging to superior courts. Being out of control in the service of learning, fun and growth, oddly enough, places you in control of your life, because you are self-determining its content. Keep the beginner's mind on, and there is no shame in being out of your element. You can see that your element is, in fact, just a box, one that doesn't move forward. Foolishness busts you out of lockdown.

Joe Robinson is author of the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life", on the science, skills and spirit of full-tilt living. He is founder of Work to Live, and is a work-life balance and stress management trainer and coach.

The Hidden Hub of Happiness

2011-02-15T11:03:00-05:00

Unlike aardvarks or ferrets, behavioral cues don't come with our biology. The Arctic tern knows exactly when to head south. We, however, are flying blind most of the time, since the instinct we follow is of the herd kind. Without built-in guidelines, researchers say we try to conform to what we think the majority is doing. While it may work at the ballot box, majority rule is a loser when it comes to determining your happiness, which depends on what you're doing -- nobody else.

Much as we're badgered to be like others, buy like others or succeed like others to be happy, the nature of satisfaction is that it only comes from actions you take that make you feel gratified. Happiness and its long-form version, fulfillment, are a byproduct of what researchers call "intentional activity" -- proactive choices we make to interact with our world in ways that satisfy core needs for self-determination, competence and connection with others.

"Intentional activity has the best potential to elevate people into the upper end of their happiness range," researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon and David Schkade report in an article on the crucial role that activities play in building and sustaining positive mood.

In real estate, it's all about location, location, location. When it comes to happiness, it's initiation, initiation, initiation. You have to initiate to participate in the intentional activities and experiences that increase your happiness. Happy is as happy does. Initiators have a much better chance of realizing the self-determination needs that make them happy than people who hang back, vegetate or wait for their ship to come in. We tend to think of initiative as something that only applies to careers, but it's one of the essential ingredients in life activation -- one of a group of "life intelligence" skills I detail in the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the power of participant experiences to create an extraordinary life.

We don't hear much about initiating as a key piece of happiness in our private lives because it's something that's so at odds with the mythology of external success that's supposed to deliver happiness. It's assumed that happiness will emerge from work and financial success. We don't think there's anything we need to do to make it happen, so we wait... and wait. It's part of a mentality that always pushes living into the future.

Another reason initiating doesn't get a lot of attention is that it isn't easy. It goes against the grain of our notions about play and fun. But the research shows that satisfaction, and happiness, take work. You can't feel satisfied by doing something that's easy, like opening the refrigerator. Satisfaction is the reward for doing something novel or hard.

It takes initiative to get out the door and into the center of the life experiences that increase positive mood. It also takes will power to resist the inertial pull of sedentary entertainment and go for experiential options, which provide the internal payoff. Experiences make you happier than material things, touching core places within, so having more of them dramatically increases your potential to upgrade happiness -- and perhaps your fans. Leaf Van Boven at the University of Colorado has found that people like experiential folks better than materialistic ones. They're considered more authentic and interesting.

We've been led to believe that our weeknights and weekends don't mean much. We can veg through them or book them up with errands. The reality is that it's the frequency and quality of experiences in your off-hours that determine the state of your positive universe and, thus, your happiness. Research shows that happiness is the cumulative result of many small positive experiences and activities that allow us to express our aspirations and leave the memories that tell us we like our lives. The more positive and novel the recent experiences you can recall, the higher you rate your happiness.

Making these experiences happen takes initiative. You have to research activities and vacations, call friends, organize get-togethers, follow curiosities, and take risks. One of the best ways to insure a steady supply of positive events is with a hobby or a passion. Brad Wetmore, a digital security engineer in the San Francisco Bay area, says he always has something to look forward to since he discovered orienteering -- a sport that combines trail-running and treasure hunting that he indulges almost every weekend. "A week before a meet I'll be thinking, I can't wait until next Friday," says Wetmore. "That gives me something to work for."

Having reasons to work helps insure that we do more than work. Living-to-work is the unconscious default that seals life out for many of us. When we can shift to the notion that we are working-to-live, we have to think about what we're living for -- like, say, having some actual life in our lives. That's where the intentional activities come in, along with the self-determination to ferret them out and self-activate.

When you initiate, you are following your internal mandate to self-determine the content of your life. It's a powerful urge that, if ignored, leaves you feeling dependent and bored. You can boost your initiating skills by turning up the receptivity to the opportunities around you that come in the form of curiosities and affinities. Listen to the signals and make a beeline for them. See initiating as exploring, without a defined result at the end or need for judgment. You're just exploring, and what you uncover in the process is the fullest life possible.

Where do those signals come from? Philadelphia breast cancer survivor Kathy King heard about dragon boat paddling from a friend at a poetry class. Even though she was so weak from cancer treatment she could barely put a paddle in the water, she decided to check out the Hope Afloat dragon boat team. By following up that lead and trying it out, King wound up discovering a passion that pumps up her life and support network. Sonja Rodriguez, a Homeland Security executive, became intrigued by hockey after seeing a tournament that featured women's teams. Raised in Puerto Rico, she had never ice-skated in her life. But, going with her curiosity, she not only learned how to skate, but today plays on a team that competed in a national competition this year.

The energizing agent of initiative is a bias for action. Instead of caving to transient moods, you opt for action, for working to live, even if you've had a bad day or you're too tired or too busy. No, you're not falling for that. Planning a specific time for a participant activity -- getting it on the calendar -- helps insure your living time doesn't get waylaid by the anxiety of the moment.

The activities that offer the best chance to increase happiness are ones that fit your affinities and values and that are engaging, not spectating, in nature. Research shows that the odds of improving happiness are greater the more inherently pleasing the experience is, the better the fit with your personality, and the more the opportunity for personal growth. Those features are trying to tell us something: If you want to ensure a life that's fully lived, you can't leave the living up to anyone else.

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Joe Robinson is author of the new book, "Don't Miss Your Life," on the science, skills and spirit of full-tilt living. He is founder of Work to Live, and is a work-life balance and stress management trainer and coach.