Become Your Own Health Advocate – My Appearance on the Charlotte Today Show
Become Your Own Health Advocate
On my recent appearance on The Charlotte Today Show, I spoke about the importance of being a health advocate. One of the most important things you can do is pick the right primary care physician who will guide your care. You know you can interview physicians. The next thing to know is cost of care. What does your insurance cover? Did you know you can negotiate and shop for price? Find out this and more in our segment.
Thinking About Work Life Balance Actually Causes Health Problems
Repeatedly thinking about work life balance linked to health problems
Thinking over and over again about conflicts between your job and personal life is likely to damage both your mental and physical health, research from Oregon State University suggests.
The study included more than 200 people, with results showing that “repetitive thought” was a pathway between work-family conflict and negative outcomes in six different health categories.
Repetitive thought refers to thinking repeatedly and attentively about the parts of your job and your personal life that clash with each other: for example, that late-afternoon meeting that prevents you from attending your son’s baseball game.
Our Friday Song of the Week – Pink Cadillac
Our Friday Song of the Week – Pink Cadillac
Laughter + Exercise Improves Mental Health and Aerobic Endurance for Older People
Incorporating laughter into a physical activity program could improve older adults’ mental health, aerobic endurance and confidence in their ability to exercise.
In this Georgia State University study, older adults residing in four assisted-living facilities participated in a moderate-intensity group exercise program called LaughActive that incorporates playful simulated laughter into a strength, balance and flexibility workout. In simulated laughter exercises, participants initially choose to laugh and go through the motions of laughing. The exercises facilitate eye contact and playful behaviors with other participants, which generally transition the laughter from simulated to genuine. It is kind of like Laughter Yoga.
For six weeks, study participants attended two 45-minute physical activity sessions per week that included eight to 10 laughter exercises lasting 30 to 60 seconds each.
When surveyed about their satisfaction with the program, 96.2 percent found laughter to be an enjoyable addition to a traditional exercise program, 88.9 percent said laughter helped make exercise more accessible and 88.9 percent reported the program enhanced their motivation to participate in other exercise classes or activities.
Despite the health benefits of physical activity and the risks of physical inactivity, many adults (1 in 4) don’t engage in sufficient physical activity to achieve health benefits.
The pleasant associations with laughter may add enjoyment to an exercise program and keep older adults motivated to work out.
“The combination of laughter and exercise may influence older adults to begin exercising and to stick with the program,” said Celeste Greene, lead author of the study and a master’s degree graduate from Georgia State’s Gerontology Institute. “We want to help older adults have a positive experience with exercise, so we developed a physical activity program that specifically targets exercise enjoyment through laughter. Laughter is an enjoyable activity and it carries with it so many health benefits, so we incorporated intentional laughter into this program to put the fun in fitness for older adults.”
This research is one of few studies to evaluate the potential of simulated laughter in improving health outcomes among older adults, and it’s the first evaluation of a dedicated physical activity program that incorporated simulated laughter, said Dr. Jennifer Craft Morgan, second author of the study and Greene’s thesis adviser.
Co-authors of the study include Dr. Chivon Mingo of the Gerontology Institute at Georgia State and Dr. LaVona Traywick of the Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Arkansas.
Read the study at http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/08/03/geront.gnw105.full?sid=3b88def6-8841-49f3-a4e2-faec3c48392e.
To learn more about the LaughActive program, visit www.laughactive.com.
Thinking About Work-Life Balance Actually Causes Health Problems
Repeatedly thinking about work-life balance linked to health problems
Thinking over and over again about conflicts between your job and personal life is likely to damage both your mental and physical health, research from Oregon State University suggests.
The study included more than 200 people, with results showing that “repetitive thought” was a pathway between work-family conflict and negative outcomes in six different health categories.
Repetitive thought refers to thinking repeatedly and attentively about the parts of your job and your personal life that clash with each other: for example, that late-afternoon meeting that prevents you from attending your son’s baseball game.
Kelly D. Davis of OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences was the lead author on the project funded by Pennsylvania State University’s Social Science Research Institute and Penn State’s Center for Healthy Aging.
Davis, an assistant professor in the CPHHS School of Social and Behavioral Health Sciences, says repetitive thought over work-family conflict keeps the stressor active and thus gets in the way of recovery.
The study involved 203 adults ages 24 to 76. Each was in a romantic relationship, and roughly two-thirds had at least one child at home.
Results showed a link between repetitive thought and negative outcomes in the health categories of life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, fatigue, perceived health, and health conditions.
Positive affect is the extent to which a person subjectively experiences positive moods, and negative affect is the extent to which someone experiences negative moods. In this study, health conditions referred to a list of 22 conditions or problems, such as stroke or diabetes. Participants were scored based on how many times they answered yes.
In the category of perceived health, participants were asked to rate their health on a five-point scale.
Repetitive thought is related to two other types of cognition that also can have adverse effects on health: rumination and worry. Rumination is persistent, redundant thinking that usually looks backward and is associated with depression; worry is also persistent, redundant thinking but tends to look forward and is typically more associated with anxious apprehension.
One technique that can help is mindfulness: intentionally paying attention to the present-moment experience.
“You stay in the moment and acknowledge what you are feeling, recognize that those are real feelings, and process them, putting things in perspective,” Davis said. “In the hypothetical baseball game example, the person could acknowledge the disappointment and frustration he was feeling as legitimate, honest feelings, and then also think in terms of ‘these meeting conflicts don’t happen that often, there are lots of games left for me to watch my child play, etc.’”
Davis also points out that the burden for coping with work-family conflict shouldn’t fall solely on the employee.
“There needs to be strategies at the organizational level as well as the individual level,” she said. “For example, a business could implement mindfulness training or other strategies in the workplace that make it a more supportive culture, one that recognizes employees have a life outside of work and that sometimes there’s conflict.
“Planning ahead and having a backup plan, having a network to support one another, those things make you better able to reduce work-family conflict,” Davis said. “But it shouldn’t just rest on the shoulders of the individual. We need changes in the ways in which organizations treat their employees. We can’t deny the fact that work and family influence one another, so by improving the lives of employees, you get that return on investment with positive work and family lives spilling over onto one another.”
Policy changes are particularly important to lower-income workers, Davis says.
“Not all of us are so fortunate to have backup plans for our family responsibilities to stop us from repetitively thinking about work-family conflict,” she said. “It’s the organizational support and culture that matter most. Knowing there’s a policy you can use without backlash maybe is almost as beneficial as actually using the policy. It’s also important for managers and executives to be modeling that too, going to family events and scheduling time to fit all of their roles.”
