How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Aerobic Exercise (Just a Little)
Finally, a reminder of a simple way to quickly boost your smarts: jumping
around. A wealth of research shows that exercise improves our focus and our
memory, quickens our response speed, and improves our ability to learn and
plan.
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 That makes us better at handling complex tasks. One set of experiments
demonstrated this using something called the Stroop test, where subjects have to
look at a word like “red” printed in blue ink, and answer correctly when asked
what color the ink is—which is not as easy as it sounds. And studies have shown
that just one bout of exercise makes people score higher on the test. The only
thing that exercise doesn’t seem to do is actually answer all our emails for us—
although a workout does make it more likely that we’ll whiz through our inbox
more efficiently when we get back to it.
So exercise sharpens the saw. But how much do you have to sharpen it? Do
you have to run? Get breathless and sweaty? The great news is that there is lots
of evidence that you can get most of the intellectual benefits of exercise with just
twenty to thirty minutes of moderate aerobic activity—and researchers from the
Arnold School of Public Health found that this can be done in two or three bites,
for example with a fast walk to and from a meeting. They conclude: “Some
activity is better than none, and more is better than some. Even light-intensity
activity appears to provide benefit and is preferable to sitting still.”
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So you
don’t need to do anything too fancy to reap some quick cognitive benefits when
you’re in the middle of a challenging task.
For Peggy, her go-to mental boost involves jumping on her bicycle. “After
one especially bad meeting I went for a two-and-a-half-hour bike ride around
Los Angeles. That enabled me to say, ‘Okay!’ and get back into it. But usually I
don’t have to go for all that long. A few minutes can help me come back to the
task with more focus.”

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