Is the gym contributing to the unhappiness epidemic? RX - Yoga
21/11/08 09:50
Happiness is relative - it is the natural state that
occurs when unhappiness is absent. Therefore the best
way to become happy is not to seek to acquire
happiness but to develop the skills to remove the
causes of unhappiness.
I was reading a news story in the New York Times yesterday about the latest research findings on happiness. It was titled "What happy people don't do". In a nutshell the discovery was that happy people spend a lot of time socialising, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.
That’s what unhappy people do. And data show that people who spend the most time watching television are least happy in the long run.
This got me thinking about Television and the gym - could there be unintended consequences of the usual gym workout routine? Could the gym be making people unhappy?
If you go to the modern gym the chances are you will see television screens everywhere. And if you go into the actual gym area you will see most people staring at these television screens while they are working out. Recent research found that 70% of gym members watch TV when they go to the gym and they watch 40 minutes on average per visit.
Why are people watching TV while they are exercising? Because what they are doing is boring. Watching TV keeps them distracted and detached from what is going on.
Another way to read this is that many people are actually paying money to train themselves to disconnect their minds and their bodies. They are training themselves in mindlessness and distraction. And now the latest research shows that by watching more television they are probably training themselves to be more unhappy too.
Yoga is the antithesis of the gym/TV gig. Yoga is a training in mindfulness - it is mental, physical and emotional training rolled into one and interconnected. You learn be present, to live in the present moment and to connect with the flow of life. You learn to become yourself and express yourself. You learn to connect vs. disconnect. You learn to focus and pay attention vs. training for distraction.
Yoga can be a practice that transforms your life. The purely physical aspects of yoga, like the physical aspects of working out at the gym, will slide away if you stop practising. And many forms of yoga don't really get much past this anyway - especially when they are taught in the gym environment and by people with a minimal training qualification. On the other hand, promise from yoga schools that weekend, one day, one week or one month courses will transform your consciousness are straight out right lies and fly in the face of yoga
The real long term benefits from yoga come from learning a new way to relate to yourself and to life. We are trying to teach you a generic approach and skill that you can apply to the whole of your life. That is what we encourage you to practice. The real practice of yoga has nothing to do with "perfecting" certain physical positions in terms of how they look from an external perspective - that approach teaches "conformit"y and the idea that self value comes from being perfect in the eyes of standards set by an external authority. In Yoga we are teaching you to connect to, and express yourself from, an "internal reference point" - to be internally directed rather than externally directed.
Our desire is for you to learn to connect to, and align yourself with, the actual flow of life and the reality of what is happening.
Yoga is ultimately about relationships and as the happiness study showed it was relational activities that contributed to happiness. As one of my teachers, TKV Desikachar once said to me, from the perspective of yoga it is more important for your students to fix their relationships with their mothers than do any yoga posture or breathing exercise.
And a few final thoughts about happiness. Happiness is a relative concept. The state of happiness exists relative to the state of unhappiness. If unhappiness were to disappear then happiness would also disappear. If you doubt it reflect on your own experience. When you are happy do you consciously register the fact? How much of your time do you spend thinking about how happy you are? I imagine very little to none. When we are happy we aren't usually aware of it. But unhappiness is the opposite - when we are unhappy we are aware of it and think about it - but we don't generally think "how do I become happy" - we think "how do I get rid of this unhappiness" .
If we were constantly happy we would become used to it just like we become used to anything that doesn't change - it would be the normal state and life would be become flat. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't aspire to be happy.
Maybe we would be happier if we focused on first avoiding doing the things that made us unhappy rather than trying to work out what makes us happy. But then where would the whole happiness industry be? I have in front of me right now a brochure for the fourth annual conference on "Happiness and it's Causes - Tools and Techniques for a happier life". Somehow I don't think that "Unhappiness and it's causes - tools and techniques for removing unhappiness" would sell as well. Happiness is now a consumer item - something to buy, something that is acquired, rather than the natural state that exists when unhappiness has been removed. Feel free to go along and get scalped.
I was reading a news story in the New York Times yesterday about the latest research findings on happiness. It was titled "What happy people don't do". In a nutshell the discovery was that happy people spend a lot of time socialising, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.
That’s what unhappy people do. And data show that people who spend the most time watching television are least happy in the long run.
This got me thinking about Television and the gym - could there be unintended consequences of the usual gym workout routine? Could the gym be making people unhappy?
If you go to the modern gym the chances are you will see television screens everywhere. And if you go into the actual gym area you will see most people staring at these television screens while they are working out. Recent research found that 70% of gym members watch TV when they go to the gym and they watch 40 minutes on average per visit.
Why are people watching TV while they are exercising? Because what they are doing is boring. Watching TV keeps them distracted and detached from what is going on.
Another way to read this is that many people are actually paying money to train themselves to disconnect their minds and their bodies. They are training themselves in mindlessness and distraction. And now the latest research shows that by watching more television they are probably training themselves to be more unhappy too.
Yoga is the antithesis of the gym/TV gig. Yoga is a training in mindfulness - it is mental, physical and emotional training rolled into one and interconnected. You learn be present, to live in the present moment and to connect with the flow of life. You learn to become yourself and express yourself. You learn to connect vs. disconnect. You learn to focus and pay attention vs. training for distraction.
Yoga can be a practice that transforms your life. The purely physical aspects of yoga, like the physical aspects of working out at the gym, will slide away if you stop practising. And many forms of yoga don't really get much past this anyway - especially when they are taught in the gym environment and by people with a minimal training qualification. On the other hand, promise from yoga schools that weekend, one day, one week or one month courses will transform your consciousness are straight out right lies and fly in the face of yoga
The real long term benefits from yoga come from learning a new way to relate to yourself and to life. We are trying to teach you a generic approach and skill that you can apply to the whole of your life. That is what we encourage you to practice. The real practice of yoga has nothing to do with "perfecting" certain physical positions in terms of how they look from an external perspective - that approach teaches "conformit"y and the idea that self value comes from being perfect in the eyes of standards set by an external authority. In Yoga we are teaching you to connect to, and express yourself from, an "internal reference point" - to be internally directed rather than externally directed.
Our desire is for you to learn to connect to, and align yourself with, the actual flow of life and the reality of what is happening.
Yoga is ultimately about relationships and as the happiness study showed it was relational activities that contributed to happiness. As one of my teachers, TKV Desikachar once said to me, from the perspective of yoga it is more important for your students to fix their relationships with their mothers than do any yoga posture or breathing exercise.
And a few final thoughts about happiness. Happiness is a relative concept. The state of happiness exists relative to the state of unhappiness. If unhappiness were to disappear then happiness would also disappear. If you doubt it reflect on your own experience. When you are happy do you consciously register the fact? How much of your time do you spend thinking about how happy you are? I imagine very little to none. When we are happy we aren't usually aware of it. But unhappiness is the opposite - when we are unhappy we are aware of it and think about it - but we don't generally think "how do I become happy" - we think "how do I get rid of this unhappiness" .
If we were constantly happy we would become used to it just like we become used to anything that doesn't change - it would be the normal state and life would be become flat. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't aspire to be happy.
Maybe we would be happier if we focused on first avoiding doing the things that made us unhappy rather than trying to work out what makes us happy. But then where would the whole happiness industry be? I have in front of me right now a brochure for the fourth annual conference on "Happiness and it's Causes - Tools and Techniques for a happier life". Somehow I don't think that "Unhappiness and it's causes - tools and techniques for removing unhappiness" would sell as well. Happiness is now a consumer item - something to buy, something that is acquired, rather than the natural state that exists when unhappiness has been removed. Feel free to go along and get scalped.
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Rediscovering Ancient Wisdom to save the human Race
13/11/08 14:28
Your prenatal yoga classes are benefiting you baby's heart as well as you new research suggests
08/04/08 11:14
Here
is some good news if you practising prenatal yoga a
couple of times a week - new research presented at
the 121st annual meeting of the American
Physiological Society on Monday 7th April 2008
reports that "When the mom exercises during
pregnancy, the unborn baby gets the same type of
training effect that you would see in an adult - so
you see the lower heart rate and also improved heart
rate variability, which is evidence of improvements
in the nervous system of the heart."
Dr. Linda E. May, from Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences in Kansas City, and her colleagues tested the hypothesis that foetuses exposed to exercise in the womb have better autonomic function compared with that of foetuses not exposed to exercise.
How often and for how long and at what intensity do you need to exercise to see these benefits? Probably more than once a week.
In the pilot study the researchers compared a group of 5 women who performed moderate intensity aerobic exercise for at least 30 minutes, 3 times per week, with another group of 5 who had no regular exercise regime. They measured the foetal heart rate and heart rate variability between 28 to 36 weeks of pregnancy.
Foetuses exposed to maternal exercise had significantly lower heart rates than foetuses not exposed to exercise. At each stage of pregnancy, the differences between the average foetal heart rates of the two groups were statistically significant. Foetal heart rate variability was also significantly higher in the exercise group than in the non-exercise group.
"Maternal exercise may be the earliest intervention to improve the heart of children and possibly the best," said Dr May.
Dr. Linda E. May, from Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences in Kansas City, and her colleagues tested the hypothesis that foetuses exposed to exercise in the womb have better autonomic function compared with that of foetuses not exposed to exercise.
How often and for how long and at what intensity do you need to exercise to see these benefits? Probably more than once a week.
In the pilot study the researchers compared a group of 5 women who performed moderate intensity aerobic exercise for at least 30 minutes, 3 times per week, with another group of 5 who had no regular exercise regime. They measured the foetal heart rate and heart rate variability between 28 to 36 weeks of pregnancy.
Foetuses exposed to maternal exercise had significantly lower heart rates than foetuses not exposed to exercise. At each stage of pregnancy, the differences between the average foetal heart rates of the two groups were statistically significant. Foetal heart rate variability was also significantly higher in the exercise group than in the non-exercise group.
"Maternal exercise may be the earliest intervention to improve the heart of children and possibly the best," said Dr May.