We are sedentary for 21 hours a day, according to juststand.org. The Washington Post wrote that the average office worker sits for about 10 hours a day, a combination of work and at-home chair-surfing. It’s a no-brainer that all this sitting is bad for your health. Yet many of us are unknowingly putting ourselves at risk for major health problems.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act but a habit.”
This quote from Aristotle is one of my favorites. Habits form the foundations for how we live, work and play. Whether or not we’re intentional about them, our habits shape who we are becoming. Where are your habits leading you?
How do you respond when your spouse, friend or family asks, “How was your day?” If you are like most people, it is all too easy to unload the various frustrations, injustices and wrongs you encountered. We tend to do this rather than highlight the good experiences from our day. Some term this the negativity bias. Put simply, it is our natural tendency to focus on the bad instead of the good. We do this at work, at home, with our children and so on.
To be honest, the negativity bias isn’t all bad. This natural bias helps us detect and avoid danger. However, when we become overly focused on the bad (i.e. pessimism) at the exclusion of the good, it can lead to a host of concerns:
To begin our adventures in 2013, my wife, Laura, and I took a walk on the moon. Okay, well, not quite. Actually, we visited White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. Prior to our exploration of what seemed like another world, we surveyed the exhibits and learned about what makes White Sands so special. We learned that these beautiful gypsum dunes are constantly moving and changing. While some dunes move only a few feet per year, others are making strides of up to 30 feet per year. That just blew me away. The dunes that move the furthest are changing the most and do so as they gain and lose tiny particles of the gypsum every day. It happens little by little.
