A Body in Motion

Virtually everyone has heard by now that a walking activity promotes physical and emotional well-being.  In medical parlance, walking is preventive physical and emotional medicine in its three major incarnations.  Walking is primary physical prevention because it enables some of us to avoid the onset of a disease, such as obesity; it is secondary prevention if it short-circuits a disease in its early stage, as can be true for hypertension; and it is tertiary prevention when it enables someone with a full blown disease, such as insulin dependent diabetes, to reduce their medication dosage. Walking is primary emotional illness prevention when an individual learns to walk to avoid becoming angry; secondary prevention if he/she takes a long walk as anger just starts to accelerate; and tertiary, in the event that it helps a person rapidly “cool off” after having experienced an angry outburst.

Although walking’s physical and emotional health benefits are widely known and promoted, some people might not like to walk and do so grudgingly at best.  Let’s consider one physical example and one emotional example demonstrating that even reluctant ones should walk the walk.

There certainly are people for whom walking is uncomfortable, causing their feet or legs to ache.  No one would fault a person diagnosed with peripheral vascular disease (PAD), a disorder that produces muscle cramps during walking, for being reluctant to walk.  However, Dr. Mary M. McDermott and her colleagues (2013) have produced research suggesting that walking might be precisely what they should do.

Their PAD patients participated in a six month program in which they walked as a group 1 day per week for 45 minutes and 5 days for 50 minutes each day at home.  Those who experienced severe pain while walking were advised to rest, and then to continue walking after the pain subsided. Patients who completed the program functioned significantly better than their control counterparts in distance walked, walking time, and general physical activity level.

What about people disinclined to walk for exercise, but not subject to ambulation-associated pain?   Would one expect them to derive any positive emotional benefit from walking?  Given my purpose in writing this post, you will not be surprised to learn that the following research-based answer, courtesy of Jeffery Miller and Zlatan Krizan (2016), is in the affirmative.

Without providing any hint as to why, Miller and Krizan had half their university student subjects sit and the other half walk as part of a situation that was presented as a test of how unfamiliar and familiar environments affect people emotionally.  All sat while watching a 10 minute video of unfamiliar Chinese landscapes.  Then the sit-group watched a video of familiar campus sites while the walk-group walked to visit the same video sites that their comrades merely sat and watched.  Results suggested, first, that non-exercise-enacted walking increased positive feelings despite the incidental nature of the walking, and second, that walking had the potential to overcome negative emotions, such as feelings of dread or boredom.

Miller and Krizan offer two major implications worth mentioning.  They suggest that walking can promote positive emotions, such as joviality and vigor.  They also support the notion that even people reluctant to be physical active derive inadvertent emotional and physical benefits from motoric engagement. 

In sum, the human body was made to move.  We feel better physically and mentally when we are in motion.  Walking—perhaps the simplest, most perfect deliberate and incidental exercise—provides primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention benefits.  Whether you want to reduce your illness risk, reduce incipient illness, or ameliorate full-blown illness, walking can confer major benefits even for persons who suffer manageable exercise-related discomfort or who are disinterested in exercise.

References:

McDermott, M. et al. (2013).  Home-Based Walking Exercise Intervention in Peripheral Artery Disease: A Randomized Clinical Trial.  JAMA, 310, 1,57-65.  Retrieved from doi:10.1001/jama.2013.7231.

Miller, Jeffrey Conrath; Krizan, Zlatan (2016).  Walking Facilitates Positive Affect (Even When Expecting the Opposite).  Emotion, April 21.  No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040270.

I Guess I'm Just Depressed: The Context of Emotion

Etymologists describe the word “emotion” as a middle 1500s French creation meaning “a public disturbance” with the French word itself being derived from the Latin, meaning “to move away.”  In contemporary culture, we often speak of being “moved” by emotions.  But is it the emotion that is moving us, or is the emotion being moved by something else?

First things first.  If your healthful lifestyle adjustment concerns cognitive-emotional change with the emphasis on emotion, you first must decide what truly is at issue.  People naturally simplify their emotional experience, focusing on one element of the total gestalt or whole.  We regularly believe, for instance, that we are “depressed” and blame that depressed feeling for the internal state that we feel at the moment.  However, emotions rarely are pure; they almost always are a mixture—a composite of feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and physiology.  What you perceive as depression, for instance, might really be an amalgam of disappointment (emotion), irritation (cognition), and fatigue (physiological state).  Moreover, it is possible that the cognitive and/or physiological elements are primary and the emotion is secondary.  Accordingly, something that changes the thoughts or physiology could be a cure for what you self-describe as your depression.

So maybe you are not being moved by your emotions after all.  Think about the context in which the depression occurs.  Your environments, including the natural, fabricated, and/or interpersonal environments primarily could be responsible for the depressed-like thoughts, behaviors, and physiology with which you struggle.  Sometimes the source is obvious.  If you are snowed-in and have lost power, your feelings surely are related to the natural and fabricated environments.  Or if you just had a rip-roaring argument with your associate, the negative feelings most likely are a consequence of that interpersonal confrontation.

On the other hand, sometimes the source of what you regard as depressed mood is not so apparent.  You could be undermined by covert influences.  In fact, anything that primes you negatively, either overtly or covertly, can be the reason for your feeling depressed. 

Psychologists often study priming which means exposing persons to information of a particular type in order to observe the information’s effects.  For instance, Katherine B. Carnelley, Lorna J. Otway, and Angela C. Rowe (2015) presented some research subjects with primes, including priming texts, that depicted anxious and avoidant interpersonal relationships, and other primes that represented secure interpersonal relationships.  Not surprisingly, those in the former condition evidenced increased depressed mood and those in the latter, less.  The point, of course, is not that the negative information incited more depression, but that the information was presented covertly and had no direct personal relevance—that the subjects were unaware of and their lives were not threatened by the primed information.

The implication is clear: Your emotions may be moved by information of which you totally are unaware.  Anything from extended conversation with depressed friends to preoccupation with depressing local or national news could be implicated in your dysphoria.  Look to your lifestyle and lifespace to understand why you feel the way you do.  Make lifestyle adjustments to relieve what seems to be, but is not, a purely intra-psychically determined depressed or otherwise unpleasant mood.

Reference:  Carnelley, K., Otway, L., & Rowe, A. (2015).  The Effects of Attachment Priming on Depressed and Anxious Mood.  Clinical Psychological Science, October 5.  doi: 10.1177/2167702615594998.

When You Feel Like Giving Up

Everyone has their moments when the effort required for success seems overwhelming.  Making a healthful lifestyle change is no different.  Your perseverance will be tested from time to time, so your response to the challenges will determine success or failure.  As always, you are most likely to succeed if you know yourself and your personal defenses.

We all have characteristic responses to the threat of failure—some conscious, some unconscious, some adaptive and some maladaptive.   George E. Vaillant (2000) described the processes well and his work is the basis for this blog post.  He suggested that when we are threatened, we usually respond in one of three ways.  We find someone to help us, execute some deliberate coping strategy, or employ a non-conscious mechanism by default.  Let’s use as an example a cognitive-emotional healthful lifestyle change wherein we want to progress from a personal sense of intellectual stagnation to a sense of intellectual stimulation.    

Responses in the first category require us to find someone capable and willing to help.  The helper might be a partner who inspires us to learn a new skill or to explore a new subject.  Second category responses might include our deciding to find a setting, rather than a person per se, whose expressed purpose is to teach the new desired skill.

Whereas responses in the first two categories are consciously employed, ones in the third, default, category  just seem to happen.  These unconsciously determined responses more often than not are maladaptive, and result in our failing to achieve the desired goal.  For instance, even if you strongly would prefer to learn a specific new skill or subject for yourself, you could overcome intellectual boredom adaptively by unwittingly deciding to teach someone else a less desirable skill or subject that you already have mastered thoroughly.  Alternatively, you could handle your intellectual boredom maladaptively by randomly and mindlessly surfing the internet instead of pursuing a disciplined approach to mastering something specific.

When you have a goal in mind then, whether cognitive-emotional or otherwise, be aware of your characteristic tendency when overwhelmed by the effort.  Try your best to use the more reliable, deliberate, and adaptive strategies that enlist the support of capable others or that enable you independently to execute a deliberate coping strategy that is rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived.     

Reference:  Vaillant, George E.  Adaptive mental mechanisms: Their role in a positive psychology. American Psychologist, Vol 55(1), Jan 2000, 89-98.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.89

What Do You Meme By That?

Forget about objective reality for the moment.  Psychologically speaking, we most often are affected by subjective reality far more than by what is objectively true.  It is a case of style over substance that results from the ways that we ascribe meaning to our experience.

Where does the meaning come from anyway?

In my previous book, Conversation: Striving, Surviving, and Thriving (McCusker, 2004), I discussed memes, a concept coined by Oxford University ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1976).   In brief, a meme is the fundamental unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene, the fundamental unit of biological transmission.  Memes can take many forms; for instance, they can be verbal, as in the Happy Birthday song, enactive, as in the handshake or “high five,” or purely ideational, as in the commonly held belief that Lincoln was the USA’s greatest president.  To qualify as a meme, the item must be faithfully reproduced, widespread, and long-lasting.  Thus, a fad—such as the Macarena—would not be considered a meme.

So, in theory, memes are the proffered cultural meanings that we tend to “inherit” merely by living in our native society.  I say “tend" to inherit because the meme offered is not necessarily the one accepted by you—the individual.  Harkening back to Lincoln, not everyone accepts that he was America’s greatest president, and in a more contemporary vein, some do not accept that Barack Obama is America’s first black president, since, in truth, he is our first biracial president. 

Just because the culture offers a meme, then, does not mean that you accept the meme as valid, or that you think and act upon it in the exact way that many others do.  What you accept and incorporate actually is filtered through your ego strength—through you history, temperament, personality, and environments.  After you do, the filtered meme becomes an indiveme.

So where is the health-oriented connection?  The point is that every day you are besieged with media-generated advice about how to live your life.  Some of the meme-like advice is correct and some, incorrect.  You need to be able to think about your ego strength as it encourages you to embrace some information and to reject other information.  By doing so you accurately determine what is worth pursuing for you specifically and how to pursue it.  That way you will not prematurely dismiss good ideas or uncritically accept bad ones.

Think indiveme, not meme.

Dawkins, R. (1976).  The Selfish Gene.  Oxford University Press.

McCusker, P. (2004).  Conversation: Striving, Surviving, and Thriving.  Iuniverse.