Being busy
can affect your lifestyle choices. Busyness coupled with time constraints can
lead to stress, depression, and anxiety. Therefore, if you have a lot to do but
don't have a lot of time, it can lead to impulsive decisions that may be
unhealthy.
Being busy can affect your lifestyle choices. |
How
Does Being Busy Affect Your Lifestyle Choices?
Busy Lifestyles
Our modern, continuous connected work
seems to be frantic, drought, and always catch up. We often juggle
responsibilities at work and at home, trying to find time to take care of
ourselves and maybe even have fun once in a while.
If we are always running and keeping
ourselves busy, there may be some unanticipated and unexpected benefits.
A few days ago, new research was conducted at Global Business School (INSEAD), there
are its campuses in France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. The
members of the group studied a series designed to keep the participants in a
busy mindset. And the results of this study will now be published in the
Journal of Consumer Research.
Research shows that busy
people often make more healthy choices. When this is a barren type of
participation, it can be disastrous for our health and well-being, but the
right type of engagement and busyness can create new connections and paths in
our brain, which can give us better brain power with the aging process.
There were also the busiest people who scored the highest in cognitive tests,
showed better processing speed, episodic long-term memory working memory, logic
or reasoning and crystallized knowledge. In addition, performance differences
between those participants who were busy versus those who had a simpler
lifestyle as older people.
Therefore, older adults have spent years cursing their early lifestyle, now
they can thank those mental tax works for improving cognitive function,
including memory, logic and mental speed.
The results are good news
for ages like us because improving cognitive performance can prevent
neurological disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
Since
advanced medicine and technology enable people to live longer, keep the brain
above the speed and healthy as a body is a daunting task.
Busyness and the brain
The level of
engagement or busyness of the participants was based on self-reported
questionnaires, who asked how many times they had too much work in the day,
used to go to bed after their normal sleeping hours, or forget food to eat due
to their schedule.
After some prior
research in the laboratory, the motivation for this work was that the older
adults who are engaged in challenging new education for long periods show the
benefits of memory. So they wanted to see that some kind of engagement proxy
was there.
You have to keep the house in constant stretches that you use less often.
Working, like learning how to speak a new language and playing a new musical
instrument, forces your brain to work in a way that is not used and often you
feel mentally and physically tired. This type of exercise is good for the
brain.
How does a busy mindset affect your lifestyle choices? |
Busyness and the body
While a busy
lifestyle showed favorable results in the health of the brain, the study did
not see the engagement and relationships between stress and cognition and its
effects on the body.
It is
possible that engagement or busyness can contribute to higher levels of stress,
but it is also possible that people who report high levels of engagement will
not report extreme levels of stress.
When a busy
lifestyle is out of control, it is also called separating you from others and
negatively affecting your sleep.
If you have
enough high levels of stress hormones, then research has also found that it can
be passed to your grandchildren.
Since highly
busy life is often associated with stress, the result of not having sufficient
downtime can possibly leave the hormonal chemical cortisol, which temporarily
closes our digestive system and the immune system. This can prevent us from
performing at our maximum capacity, keeping our body in constant
"fight-or-flight" mode.
What should
we know now in which range of engagement tensions and when people report that
their busy schedule is stress, it means that they are feeling really tension or
are worried about a busy life.
Busyness and self-esteem
We make many
decisions that include selection between our immediate and future welfare.
When we
consider ourselves to be busy, it promotes our self-esteem, and it tips the
balance in favor of a more valuable choice.
Lower
self-esteem can cause anxiety and stress, can negatively impact on
relationships, school or job performance, and can increase the chances of
misuse of drugs or alcohol.
It is no
surprise then that having high self-esteem can help us to become healthier
lifestyle choices.
As long as the barriers of time are not created, active and busy can help us to maintain quality self-esteem, and in detail, a more healthy lifestyle.
How does a busy mindset affect your lifestyle choices? |
Can busy mindsets have positive results?
To make the
study participants feel busy, the scientists told them about calm, subtle
messages which suggested that they were really busy people.
Some
participants were asked to write to them who were keeping them busy recently.
There was
also a control group that was not aware of the busy lifestyle-induced
activities.
Once all the
participants were in a suitable busy mindset, the researchers asked them to
make a series of decision-making. These choices will tell study writers about
their self-control and how it will relate to the state of their mind - in other
words, how busy they feel.
These decisions were on subjects such as food, work and retirement savings of
participants. They were not life-and-death decisions, but many people make
choices on a daily basis, which can definitely affect their health.
Those who
felt that they were busy making better, healthier choices than their
counterparts, who had no mention or reminder before the trial.
The authors pointed out that engagement with obstacles of time can cause stress
and anxiety. Therefore, if you do not have enough to do a lot, but this can
result in impulsive decisions that can be unhealthier, such as eating quick but
less nutritious food and less physical activity.
However,
this study also showed that feeling busy is not always a positive thing. In
many cases, busy mindset may have a negative effect.