How to Be Happy and Successful
Guidance for and from the mildly incompetent on how to be happy and successful.
How to Be Happy and Successful
Ep. 12: Exercise (Happiness)
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Learn how exercise makes you happy and what kind of exercise is the most useful.
Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the Mildly Incompetent. Hi, everyone. Welcome to our next episode on the Happiness site called Exercise, where we talk about the value of exercise for making you a happier person. Now let me start off by saying I'm sorry this episode is late. I thought I would be just a few days late, and now I'm a full week late. And it was my goal from the beginning of the podcast to always get my episodes out on time. I really enjoyed listening to podcasts myself, and I don't like it when I think one's coming, and then I have to wait and wait and wait. Not that I think anybody is on the edge of their seat for my podcast, but still, you should get your podcasts released when you say they're going to be released. So I blew it there, as we will in life. You might have heard me say that before. First, I moved, and then I was lucky enough to go on a short trip for five days, and those two things together put me behind, and I didn't plan ahead enough to get this episode out on time. So again, sorry about that. And when I knew I was going to be late, I thought, well, I'll just push to get this one out as quick as I can, and then I'll get the next episode back on track. But, you know, I want the next episode to be good. And I think if I push to get it done one week from now, it's not going to be as good as it could be. So it's going to get pushed back a week, also. So here we are with this episode a week late. The next episode will be in two weeks. So I am guessing I'm just going to be late forever. I kind of feel like before I get into the meat of the episode, I feel like I should explain why exercise, because it doesn't exactly, even to me, seem to fit with the previous topics. You know, if you run through the topics on the happiness side of the podcast, as I call it, and surely you've listened to all of these by now, we have gratitude, self-compassion, being in the moment, and treating people well. It doesn't really seem that exercise, fitness, getting out on an exercise bike or something, fits into that group, right? That those first four topics, they kind of you could call them spiritual if you wanted. You could say they're about your inner thoughts and feelings a lot of the time. Even, you know, for sure, the idea of gratitude and self-compassion and being in the moment, that's those really internal behaviors I'm encouraging you to work on. Treating people well is an external behavior. You're doing it as you interact with other people. You're doing it out in the world, so to speak, rather than in your head. But it requires so much of you changing your perspective in regards to other people in order to do it well, that it sort of fits in with the first three. You can absolutely see somebody who teaches meditation or Easter-inspired ideas, they would teach these first three ideas, and then for sure treating people well would fit into that their message. You know, ethical treatment of others is a core message of Buddhism, for example. But exercise doesn't seem to generally go on the list. You know, you don't hear people quoting the Buddha, or for that matter, quoting uh Muhammad or quoting any medieval scholars from uh the Jewish or Christian traditions or any other religious figure talking about uh the importance of doing uh strength training or keeping your heart rate up to 140 beats per minute for you know 25 minutes at a time, uh that doesn't come up much. And the fact that I'm doing it seems even kind of funny to me. To do a little bit of inside baseball here for no particular reason, give you a view of behind the scenes of how to be happy and successful. I think I've said before, when I first conceived of a website where I write some articles about you know how to be happy and successful, giving some advice, and then I think I'll do a podcast. I thought I'd be like three topics done, you know, right? Uh here's some three things going to lead you to success and being happy. Go get them. And it was really, as I started to write notes and ideas, well, here's this would be good for the site and the podcast. I realized there's just so many ways that we can improve our behaviors and improve the way we treat ourselves. There's so many healthy practices we can partake in to make our lives better, that I realized I couldn't do three and out. So then, you know, I just I had a whole bunch of ideas. It was frankly too much even for me to conceive like how am I gonna get, you know, 25 ideas per side, you know, for the 25 ideas for happiness and 25 ideas for success. How am I gonna even get through the project? So I I broke it into five and five. I'm gonna start off organizing my thoughts around my first five pieces of advice for happiness and my first five pieces of advice for success. And I'm just gonna think about those things for now. It's gonna be the whole focus of my work for the coming months. And then I realized I'll start off with a few introductory episodes and I'll go at that. And I just made it a smaller project so I can get my brain sort of wrapped around it. So then I had to decide, well, which ones should go in the first five for happiness and for success. So I I swapped out one problem of too much material to even envisage to the problem of what do I choose? And as I worked on the lists and added some things and crossed some things off, I realized exercise should be there. And the reason is, even though it doesn't seem to fit with the first four, you don't generally hear the hearing exercise categorized with things like self-compassion and gratitude. Okay, I believe in the first four ideas a lot. Yeah, the first four lessons or pieces of advice I gave on being happy, of course I believe in them. That's why I did podcasts about them. But here's the truth: there is no piece of advice for making you a happier person that is better supported by evidence than that you exercise regularly. Again, exercising regularly has been demonstrated again and again through multiple different kinds of studies to make people's lives better and to make them happier. Now that is probably partly the case because it's easier to study somebody getting on an exercise bike or going for a run or doing some form of exercise for you know half an hour a day, four days a week, for eight weeks, and then measuring things like self-reporting of happiness and you know stress levels in the blood. It's easier to do that than it is to say, well, how much gratitude is someone really practicing? And what kind of gratitude practices are very useful? So it's it's more straightforward to study exercise and then physiological and self-reporting uh measurements of happiness than it is to study the other things I've talked about. Nonetheless, whatever the reason, it's there that there's so much material that tells us if you exercise regularly, you are benefiting both your health and more pertinent to this podcast's purpose, your happiness. So that's why it's there. If it doesn't seem to fit into the other ones, now I've explained its presence. And in truth, exercise for many of us doesn't really seem to fit in with our lives. This is something I'm going to talk about a little later in the show, is that it kind of feels like something well, we know we should do exercise. We know it's good for us, but you know we're busy, or that's just not who we are. It doesn't match what Morpheus from The Matrix calls our residual self-image. But you know by now that I'm not too concerned about that. The idea of practicing self-compassion, for sure, does not match many people's self-image. And so even when we do a little bit of exercise, it's really a little bit of exercise, and it doesn't last very long. So, exercise, it fits into the purpose of this podcast, and that it really does make you happier if you do it regularly, and it can fit into your life too. You just have to make it so. In the same way, you should be writing your goal lists and writing gratitude lists and watching for your voices that tell you how awful you are, and telling them just take a step back, relax a little bit. You should be doing your regular exercise. But we'll talk more about that point in a little bit. First, let's talk about what exercise actually does for you, how it makes you happier. Now, I'm not going to try to do 40 minutes of, you know, here's all the data as to how we know this is so good for you. You know, here this study in 2012 showed this, and this study in 1998 showed this. First of all, I'm not an MD, I'm not a neuroscientist. You know, I'm not as qualified as many people who are online explaining these benefits. I'm not as qualified as they are to do the whole rundown, and you don't need it, right? I don't exercise, I'm sure, is not a foreign idea to you. So let me just run through some of the ideas that are worth having a basic understanding of. First off, we know that when you exercise, you get these chemical responses in your body. You get neurotransmitters released in your brain that are associated with you feeling good. You know, you having reduced pain levels, reduced anxiety levels. You get endorphins released that are connected with pleasure sensations. You know, I think it's an exaggeration in general to talk about a runner's high. I used to run pretty regularly and I liked it. I had to stop because I actually had arthritis in my hips, which was not caused by running, but if you had that, running exacerbates it. And so I enjoyed running. But, you know, while I have no experience doing things like heroin or cocaine, I strongly suspect the rush of good feeling you get with those drugs is much stronger than the good feeling I get when I go for a run. So, as you might know from previous episodes, I don't like to exaggerate the immediate benefits you're gonna get. You know, when you write gratitude lists, the world's not gonna open up into a beautiful flower for you. When you go for a run or a swim or ride an exercise bike, etc., etc., it's very unlikely that you're going to suddenly feel a tremendous rush of wonderful emotion. If you do, congratulations. You're probably exercising already because you get that amazing positive response. But the truth is there that you feel better when you exercise than you don't. Basically, any given day, if you know, whatever your state is, if you can take yourself and do 30 minutes of exercise, your mood, your happiness will improve. Your stress levels, your anxiety will diminish. And as we talked about way back in what is happiness, that's almost the key to you being happy is reducing negative feelings in your life. Physiologically, exercise has been demonstrated again and again to produce and distribute more of the chemicals that make you a happier, less stressed person. It also has been demonstrated repeatedly to improve your sleep, to generally make you sleep more and to sleep better, sleep more effectively, get more rest when you sleep. This is a tremendous benefit for your life. Prioritizing sleep, it's on my long list of topics. There are a lot of people, certainly sleep experts, who for sure would have put it in the top five. They would likely put it at number one, and there's arguments to do so. Sleep is so important in your life for your happiness, your mental health, your physical health. And regular exercise helps you sleep more and sleep better. On the less physiological and more emotional side, regular exercise will make you more proud of yourself. And that pride can come from different sources. What I'm talking about here is mostly you realizing that you're taking part in a good and healthy behavior. We feel better about ourselves when we do that. That's one of the reasons I gave for treating people well to make you feel better, is that you know it's the right thing to do to treat people well. It matches with your belief in how people should behave. And when you act in accordance with your beliefs, you feel better about yourself. Well, you know that it's better for you, it's better for you in the short term, and it's better for you in the long term to exercise regularly. People generally, or very often, feel bad about themselves when they don't exercise regularly. Well, okay. Start exercising regularly and you'll feel proud of yourself. Now, of course, there can also be the pride in how you look or what you can achieve. In other words, you might be able to brag to someone that you can, you know, bench 200 pounds or more, that you could do 50 push-ups, etc. Or even, you know, sort of brag in your own head that you could brag to other people if you were a bragging person. You are not, but you like it in your head that compared to others, you're physically fitter. Now, this is not exactly the kind of pride I'm trying to encourage. You know, I do not advise you to base your self-esteem on your looks. And that's the case whether people consider you a great-looking person or not at all. And I also think that it won't help you to base your happiness on an achievement of a physical fitness goal, especially when that goal is tied into feeling sort of superior to others. Now, having said that, we're all human beings. Those are very natural emotions to care about our appearance, to want our appearance to be judged well by others, or just in our own heads to fit in with what our society thinks is good looking, and to compare ourselves physically to others in what we can achieve. Not only are you not a bad person if those emotions don't play some part in your thoughts in the day. You're really a strange person. Sorry if this counts for you. You're a strange person if they never do. And or certainly if they never have. I don't care about how I look ever. Or no, no, no, no, I'm never gonna compare myself to other people. You know, as I start running regularly, I'm never gonna think about whether or not I am much better at running than I used to be, or or I can I can run a half marathon. And is that impressive to other people at all? You don't have to try to get rid of those feelings. I'm saying don't base your happiness on them or your self-esteem on them. But look, some of your good feelings might come from that. Take it. Take it. It should not be the reason you start exercising. I'm not telling you do this because you're gonna be better at the beach next summer. But in the same way, I think we should all give more money to charity, and whatever gets us to do that is fine. If it makes us feel better, that we can tell other people that we give 10% of our income to charities, and that's part of the driving motivation for us to do that and help the world, great, good. Let that aspect of pride drive you to giving a lot of money to the charity. Likewise, if some feeling of pride in how you look or what you can do gets you out exercising three or four days a week, terrific. Take it. So, some feeling of pride, that is a part of the benefit you're gonna get in your happiness when you exercise regularly. And that idea of pride in what you're doing, it kind of slides us over into another positive effect of exercise. It's both a positive effect and a positive reinforcer, and that is increased social connection that can come through exercise. Now, the pride aspect is this it's a little complicated, but I think we can handle it. So, as we talked about back in the episode, I was talking about habit formation, which again is in work your behaviors and more particularly stick with things beyond enthusiasm. Charles Dewey, the guy I mostly rely on for that information, he says there's almost nothing more powerful than a feeling of social connection to a behavior. There's almost no stronger reward that helps motivate us than some kind of social connection. And that can come even without being in contact with other people as we do the behavior, if we feel that the behavior gives us a sense of pride that we would feel in front of other people. In other words, if in our social world a certain behavior is considered praiseworthy, then we will feel pride in ourselves when we do it, even if nobody else sees it. So that doesn't mean exactly, it's not the same thing as you care about how you look in front of other people. I've already talked about that. But rather, again, you know that exercise is good for you, so you have pride in yourself for doing a healthy habit. But also you know that other people they respect, they admire people who exercise, and so we will feel good even if no one knows we're doing it. If we know we're doing it, we know that our culture has some kind of places, some kind of value on exercise. It gives us a different sense of pride that helps encourage us to do it and makes us happier and feel good. Now, of course, there's also the social connection we can build through the exercise. We can partake in exercise that engages with other people. This is obviously the case when it comes to doing sports, but also you can have a workout buddy that you work out with at the gym. You meet this person at the gym, you work out with them. You know that. If you have no one in your life you can work out with, you can go to the gym. Not only will you just see other people there, and if you're a regular, you'll get to know these people, you can join in classes. And those will be social engagements. Even if you never talk to those people outside of class, if the only time you see the people from your spin class or whatever else is at the gym, that is still a social engagement, and that by itself is positive for you. If you did exercise in some way that gave you some kind of social engagement, let's say two half hours a week, you know, that our time is just you by yourself, but two half hours a week, you are doing social engagement exercise. If for some reason you got no exercise benefits from that, for some reason, the exercise you did during those half hours didn't affect your body or your brain chemistry at all. That's impossible, but let's say that. Still, the social interaction would make you a happier person. So another way exercise can help us, help us be happier, is by increasing our social connections with other people, and that can be done in a variety of ways. And it doesn't require that you have someone in your life who definitely wants to work out with you, or that you put a lot of effort into finding people that you're going to join a team with. Though you can and you might enjoy it a lot more than you think. Now, of course, there's the main benefit that we all associate with exercise, and that's health benefits. And then it's short-term health benefits and long-term health benefits, and in the middle, you know. From the get-go, exercise will help you manage your sugar levels better if you're diabetic. It will help you sleep better. I've already said that. That is good for your health. As I've already said, it helps regulate and even out your moods, which is good for your mental health, but yes, also good for your physical health that you do so. There are studies that show a correlation between people exercising more or exercising regularly and paying more attention to what they eat. We tend to tend to do these good habits together, and eating better is good for our short-term and long-term health. And of course, the long-term health is the really big winner. You know, regular exercise, you might know, gives reductions in heart attacks and strokes and different kinds of cancer and the likelihood of getting Alzheimer's disease. It gives us multiple long-term health benefits. And I heard a woman talking on a TED talk who said the studies have shown that if you that even if you're overweight, and we generally think that the way you get benefits from exercise is that you it helps you lose weight and losing weight helps your health. Well, losing weight is correlated with lots of health benefits. But studies show that if you are overweight and you persist in being overweight, as is common for most of us, but you partake in two healthy habits and you you skip two bad habits. In other words, if you are overweight, but you don't smoke, you drink moderately or not at all, you eat fruits and vegetables, and you exercise regularly, your mortality rate, the rate at which you are likely to die in any given year, is the same as someone who does those good habits and is that a it was considered a healthy weight. I have no idea if all studies will support that finding. And there's more to health than just mortality rate, and more to having a good life and a healthy life than just your mortality rate. But the point is that exercise is not just about you being able to lose 10 pounds or 60 pounds, and then you're going to get benefits from it from the get-go, and persistently, whatever your weight, you will get benefits from it. And your health is such a big factor in you being happy. You know, there's a saying, all you have is your health. I'd think that's an exaggeration, but it's important. And there's a saying, which I talked about in the gratitude episode, that you don't appreciate things until they're gone. And I say in the gratitude episode, that's doesn't have to be true. You can appreciate things while they're with you. But believe me, that idea and that saying is probably most true of your health. If you are healthy, if you are not suffering from any kind of persistent problems of pain, disease, anything else, you will hardly appreciate that health. But if it goes away, boy, you really miss it. Health is important and exercise helps you have a healthier life and therefore have a happier life. And I'm moving a bit into eudaimonic happiness, right? If you have not been around with this podcast long enough to have listened to the What is Happiness episode, where I talk about hedonic happiness, which is happiness in the moment, how you feel on any given day, and eudaimonic happiness, happiness with your life overall. Well, I'm not going to explain it all again now. Go back and listen to what is happiness. But usually the episodes on what I call the happiness side of the podcast, this being one of those episodes, are about hedonic happiness, being happy in the moment today. But of course, there is, you know, there's blending and there's crossover. You being someone who exercises regularly will make you live both a longer and a more capable life, a life where you can do more things on your own and with the people you care about. It'll give you more autonomy as you live into your later years. And as I think I've already mentioned, exercise is associated with persistence of cognitive abilities. In other words, you're less likely to have cognitive decline through dementia if you are exercising regularly. It's much more useful in things like doing crossword puzzles, for example, or brain teasers, which I, as far as I know, have not demonstrated any efficacy in maintaining cognitive abilities. Basically, doing crossword puzzles, playing chess, whatever, they make you good at doing crossword puzzles and playing chess. And there's nothing wrong with that, but exercise helps you keep your brain healthier. And that's one of the ways that exercise is gonna give you more eudaimonic happiness, more happiness with your life and have you have a happier life. Obviously, that's terrific. And doing a practice that you know is gonna help your long-term happiness will make you happier now. It's again that sort of feeling of pride, that feeling that you are doing something that's good for you, you could pat yourself on the back for it. And you should pat yourself on the back for it. Rewarding yourself emotionally for doing the right thing is one of the best ways to keep you doing the right thing. As I talk about it, and work your behaviors and stick with things beyond enthusiasm. Now, let's say I've convinced you, or maybe you were already convinced before you start listening to this episode, uh, that exercise is not just a chore you should do to help your long-term health, but it's a way for you to improve your happiness. So if you start from zero or from hardly any exercise, and you become someone who exercises four times a week, week in, week out, or just about week in, week out, you'll be a happier person over the coming year. And really from now on, so long as you keep up that routine. Suppose you buy that. Well, know that the kind of exercise you do matters. And this, you know, what I'm gonna talk about here, it blends the ideas of making you happier and the ideas of health. You know, the recommendations on what exercise to do are the logic built around how to make you a healthier person. In other words, there are in health podcasts and health articles and health videos, not on a happiness podcast, etc., but you should understand these things that go together, the kind of exercise you do to make you healthier over the long term, the fact that you are healthier will make you happier, and sort of more vigorous exercise, which I'll talk about in a minute, is more effective at making positive changes in your neurochemistry, for example, that will make you happier. Now, I'm not gonna go into the exact kind of exercise routine that you should do starting now or starting next week, or you should build up to over the next six months, because it widely varies what you want to do. One of the most useful strategies for becoming someone who does long-term exercise is to find something that you enjoy doing. If you enjoy playing tennis, or you enjoy swimming, or you enjoy rock climbing, et cetera, et cetera, if you can find pleasure in any of those things, if you don't really like any of those things, but you enjoy the social aspect of going to the gym with your friends, even if you don't really enjoy the gym that much, but you like being there with your friends, whatever it is that you can find pleasure in, if you can find pleasure in some exercise, and it's almost a short thing that you can if you open your mind to it and you get used to it and you look around for different things that you might enjoy. Finding pleasure in exercise, of course, is a great way to keep you exercising, to make it more appealing to you, to drop the barriers as I talk about and work your behavior and stick with things beyond enthusiasm. You know, you don't want to depend upon willpower in your life to get long-term habits done. You don't want to think I'm gonna work for years on something and I'm never gonna like it. I'm always gonna use my willpower to overcome my resistance. Forget that. What you want to do is grease the wheels as much as possible. So finding exercise that you enjoy is much better than being told a certain exercise is ideal and making yourself do it even though you don't like to do it. It's just very unlikely you're gonna stick with that. Or do it as much as you should. You know, there are experts out there you can listen to that recommend exercise. You know, one of the best known people out there right now is Dr. Peter Atia, who does the podcast called The Drive. He has a book called Outlive the Science and Art of Longevity. So he's obviously a well-known source, and I think someone who gives good information. You know, he's someone who does understand and study the research that's out there. But you should not think that he corners the market. You know, there are a lot of people giving good information. You can find them online. Really, any reasonably good uh physical trainer at any worthwhile gym can really help guide you towards good exercise plans. And again, if you want to pay for a trainer, you can find good uh you know, instructions and ideas on YouTube videos, and you can find good workout regimens and suggested plans online. What's important to understand is that exercise has to be a regular part of your life, and I don't mean once a week regular, I mean like four times a week at least. And that might sound crazy to you. If you're starting off from zero, or one time a week I go for a long walk, or one time a week I go for a bike ride, and I can barely fit that in. I know it sounds like I might be asking a lot for you to change your life. I'm not asking you to change it tomorrow or next week, but I'm telling you, you need to get it to be part of your life where it is in your life four times a week, five times a week. So that's how often you should be doing it. And what you want is vigorous exercise. So you don't just want to go for walks. And I'm not against walks. First of all, I love walking, I enjoy walking. When I visit cities or I just go to cities that I know well, I like it. I love walking around, I love going on hikes in nature. So walking is great, and it is useful exercise in that you do burn calories and you strengthen your body and you help manage sugar levels in your bloodstream, and you do it without doing high impact work that might cause damage to your bodies and your risk of injury is very low. But what you want to do, what really you need to do, is do cardiovascular work that is more vigorous than that. As you might have heard, you need your heart rate to get higher than it gets when you're just doing very mild exercise like walking. You need your heart rate to get higher for periods of say half an hour or more. So that would mean things like jogging, maybe fast walking. It means fast walking, especially if you're fast walking, you know, up and down hills or something. Um, bike riding, swimming, and of course, sports, you know, playing tennis, playing ultimate frisbee, playing soccer, things that keep you moving. Things like softball. I'm not anti-softball, it's fun to play, but you spend a lot of time standing around. Doesn't really do the same thing for you. For the large majority of people who play softball, it's more of a social engagement and a fun one than a really great form of exercise. So you need something that pushes your cardiovascular system. Again, you want to get your heart rate up, you know, and the numbers vary depends on what your base heart rate is. So something like a hundred to a hundred and thirty would be typical for moderate exercise, and pushing it harder than that, say a hundred and you know, forty up to a hundred and seventy, would be for more vigorous exercise. But the kind of thing you can still sustain, we're talking about you sprinting, but you can push yourself and do that for minutes at a time. Now, if you're very far from anything like that, if you are frankly very out of shape, you never exercise, you should not turn off the episode and think, well, forget it. You know, every idea that I teach, it's designed for people who never practice it, who have never written a gratitude list, who have never written goal lists for themselves, who have never tried doing any kind of mindfulness practice. Okay, if you don't exercise at all, and so you're not ready to get out and do four or five days a week where you are doing some kind of exercise that raises your heart rate up and makes you sweat, of course, I get it. So you should start walking. I'm not anti-walking, as I said, and that's a fine first step. If you are brand new to playing the piano, of course, you're not gonna start off by playing challenging pieces, the kind of pieces that you dream about playing. You're gonna start off by playing scales and you're gonna suck at it, and maybe some very simple pieces, and you're gonna be lousy at them too. By practicing, you'll get better both at scales and the simple pieces, and you will move on to more advanced material and get better at that more advanced material. It's the same with exercise. Start walking two days a week, three days a week. After you've done that for a little while, make it four or five days a week and start some of that time doing a little jogging or doing a bike ride or doing squats in your house. Something that starts to raise your heart rate a little more often. So, exercise is one of the things people love to start and then give up on. And one of the reasons is because they don't want to give themselves enough time to get good at it. It's as I said in other episodes, it's so easy for us to criticize ourselves when we're trying to do something good. We are making efforts to improve our lives. We are not doing it quite as well as we hope, so we put ourselves down. That's crazy. The moment you start doing something that is good for you and likely good for other people around you who are in your life, everything that comes out of your head should be praise. That doesn't mean you can't say I could do that better, and here's how I can do it better. You can critique yourself and say, I gotta improve this and I gotta improve that. But I'm working on it, and that's good. It's good that I'm doing this work. Treat exercise like that. If you're starting from zero, get up, start walking. Now, you can't think I'm telling you, well, just start walking five minutes a day, and that's how you're gonna get somewhere. You've got to make more demands in yourself than that. You can find half an hour a day through effort, and you might think, I can't, I can't, I can't do that. Maybe you can't every single day. Maybe there's some days from the moment you get up to the moment you drop onto your bed, you don't have half an hour. I have days like that too, sometimes. But you can find half hours during your week. And if you can't, you gotta cut something else out. Now I'm gonna get back to that point in a minute, but just know you've got to push yourself to eventually get to vigorous exercise, and you don't want to start off by saying, well, I'll do three minutes a day. Make a bigger ask of yourself. Now, in addition to some kind of vigorous cardiovascular exercise, you want to do some kind of strength training. And again, there are people out there who are experts on that. I'm not an expert on strength training, so I'm not gonna try to give you the little bit of knowledge I have on it. But the point is, it's not just about cardio. You want to build in muscular strength as well. There's a bunch of reasons for that, but one of the people who explains it well is Dr. Atiyu, whom I just mentioned a few minutes ago, in that, you know, he's talking to people at my age, I'm 49 right now, people who can look forward and see their senior years not that far in the future. And he says, you know, you want to not only get there and extend your lifespan, you want to make those years as vigorous and strong as possible. You want to raise the quality of your life, as he says, the last decade of your life. You want that to have a high quality of life. And one of the ways to do that is to work on your physical strength. Things like your grip strength matters for you having a good quality of life. It reduces the chance of you later having a fall that leads to a hip fracture or some other kind of damage. And I'm a nurse who works on orthopedic floor, so I see these kind of events happen. But even outside of that kind of accident, you want to be doing some kind of strength training to improve your health. And again, you know, I moved on to long-term health and how you're going to improve your life. But again, I'm not just working on eudaimonic happiness here, though that is important. Exercise improves your happiness in your short term as well, and doing the right kind of exercise, the most useful exercise, I should say, that will improve your health and your happiness more than exercise that is not as ideal. All right. Well, now we get into what may be the crux of the episode, the the most important part of it, which is talking about how you must and can make exercise a regular part of your life. You just have to build it into your life. You know, I suspect that though it may have surprised you to have found that I chose exercise as a topic for making you happier, and maybe the idea that exercise makes you happier at all is surprising to you. Perhaps, like many people, you thought exercise is something that you you don't like doing. It's a chore that makes you unhappy, but it's good for you. Kind of like eating vegetables that you don't enjoy. But surely you have heard by now, many times I assume, that exercise is good for you and you should be doing it. And so if that's not you, you know, if you already someone exercises a ton, you could have skipped this whole episode. So if that's not you, then you've not been moved by other voices, other sources of information that tell you, you know, you really got to exercise. Okay, what's different about this one? I don't know. What I hope will be different about it is that for whatever reason, this is when you decide you sort of understand and you really commit to making exercise just a piece of your life that you are not gonna do without. You're gonna make it a regular part of your weekly schedule. Now, that is not the case for most people. For most people, exercise is something that sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't do it, but always it's kind of an extra thing. Again, it's not everybody, but for a lot of people, exercise it's a tag on to their life. And when they have time to do it, that's great. And sometimes they like it, sometimes it's you know, it's more of a chore than not. But really, for most people, most adults that I know, exercise it's not built into their life, it's just something you do if you can fit it into your life. And if somebody you know sets time for it in their week, it's the first thing they'll get bumped when other things come up. Now, from my perspective, that is kind of both natural and unnatural in terms of you know human history and evolution. When I say unnatural, I mean that from most of humans' history, people have gotten a lot more exercise than they do. You know, most human life was not as sedentary as our current life is. There were opportunities, in fact, there were requirements to do things that brought you some kind of physical exercise. Of course, that was mostly in the form of physical labor, which is not exactly the kind of exercise I'm talking about, partly because it could be long and hard, but didn't always get your heart rate up high, as I said a little while ago, you should be doing. But people had more of a chance to work their bodies previously. So it's strange the sedentary lives that we tend to live now, that are so easy to live now. The way that those sedentary lives, the the idea that exercise is an extra that we we don't normally turn to, the way that's actually kind of natural is because previous humans did not do exercise by choice when they didn't have to, or very or rarely did. You know, there are lots of people throughout human history, and I'm sure in prehistory, who did participate in sports and competitions. We know that's the case going back thousands of years. But for the most part, people did not think, huh, where am I going to build in some running and am I weak? To do so would have seemed insane. And so the fact that most of us they're not that eager to do something along those lines now, that's not strange, and it's not very different from our ancestors. We are like our ancestors, and we aren't motivated to hop up and start burning calories. But the truth is we need exercise more than our ancestors did because, again, they generally had lives that had more labor, more opportunities to burn calories, and they add fewer calories in their life. They didn't have as much food available to them, and the foods they have weren't as rich in calories as the food surrounding us. So we have to do this unnatural thing and find ways to burn calories and push ourselves in the useful forms of exercise, the strength training and the cardiovascular work that we know now can be so good for us to live long and healthy and happy lives. How do you do that? How do you make it so that exercise really is just an integral part of your life if it's not there already? Most of us have lives that probably seem pretty full already. And by full, I don't necessarily mean satisfying and fulfilling. Many people have lives that they don't feel are satisfying and fulfilling, and yet they feel full as in there doesn't seem to be a lot of spare minutes in the day. Most people have lives where usually some work involved, or maybe school instead that takes up your time. Some people have both. Often there are family responsibilities, and certainly there are things we regularly do with our time that seem to take up our time. And that could be anything from, you know, watching shows by ourselves or with friends or or you know loved ones, uh, playing games, doing tasks that we think are enjoyable in some ways or are important, or again, our responsibilities. If you don't already, how do you find, let's say, six hours a week to, and I mean essentially every week, to do this thing that's so good for you in so many ways, as I've already talked about. And six hours, that's realistic. You know, if if you were just doing, let's say, three hours of actual sweating. Because you know, there's a time to get yourself ready, and if you go to a gym or you go somewhere to play a sport, you gotta take the time to do that. And of course, there's you know, showering and changing afterwards, so maybe eight to ten hours is more realistic to do the kind of exercise that I think is worthwhile for you to do. How do you find that time? And how do you find sort of the motivation to carve out that time, which means giving up something or a number of things, you know, lessening our your ability to contribute somewhere else in your life or to enjoy something else in your life. It might sound impossible to you, it's not impossible, but the sad truth is I don't have a magic button that's gonna make you motivated to do it. If you're not already motivated, but whatever you've heard before about the benefits of exercise and what I've talked about here, that not only will it increase your health, which I'm sure you already knew, but really will make you happier now and happier for years to come. If that hasn't spurred your motivation, well again, I I don't have a magic bullet to do so. But here's one way to look at it that I think can be useful and I think it's frankly it's just valid. If you had some kind of condition, if you started feeling some kind of symptoms of whatever variety, some kind of physical symptoms that were affecting your quality of life and your ability to do things, and you went to a doctor, and maybe you would see a specialist, and they told you you have some condition that is going to make you less and less capable of performing physical functions well, make you have a lower quality of life, and probably end your life sooner than you would have expected it to end if you didn't have this condition. But there are these, you know, these drills you can do, these exercises you can do at home or at a gym or somewhere or at a physical therapist's office, and that will hold off, even reverse the condition. So you've got some neurological condition or disease, and it's gonna have a dramatic and negative effect on your body and your life, but luckily there are exercises you can do and skills you can develop that can halt the effects and even reverse the effects. Would you do them? I think you would. It would because it would seem that this unfortunate disease or condition that has struck you, it's so unusual, it makes sense that you would act upon it. And if you told other people, you know, I from now on I can't do that thing with you because I had this condition and I had to, I just have to do an hour day of exercises at home in order to make sure that I can, you know, keep walking for the rest of my life for the next 40 years. I will only be able to walk well and keep my balance and use my limbs and enjoy my life fully, if I do these, this hour of exercise every single day or five days a week, they would say, Oh, yeah, you should do that. That's very important. I'm so sorry you had that condition, but I'm glad that you were taking it seriously. In the same way that if you were diagnosed with diabetes, and so you started telling people in your life, you know, I can't eat those foods, certainly in the quantity that I used to eat those foods, and I've got to start taking these medications down. I've got to check my sugar regularly, maybe I have to take insulin at home, and that's important to me, so I'm gonna do it every day. People who care about you, they wouldn't say, oh, come on, you don't have to. They would say, yes, good, keep doing that. Likewise, if you were diagnosed with this mystery condition I'm talking about, then they would say, Yes, make the time and keep the motivation to do those drills and exercises. Now you might think, yeah, but I'm not able to tell myself I have some mystery thing and that's why I've got to do this. I'm not gonna buy that on an ongoing basis. I'm not gonna be able to keep that illusion in my head. Now, here's the thing some of you might have already realized this, it's not an illusion. You have that condition. You are an aging human being. And if you don't carve out time to exercise in useful ways, ways that work on your cardiovascular system and ways that work on your strength, you will have a diminished quality of life, a shorter and less enjoyable life than if you make time for this exercise. Get it into your heads that by being alive and by continuing to age, you have been diagnosed with some mystery disease. And it may be that you don't feel these symptoms yet. And so that's tough, right? If you are having symptoms of multiple sclerosis and you're having tingling or numbness or partial paralysis somewhere, it's gonna send you to the doctor fast. And then you're gonna say, what can I do to help stop the progression of this disease? And you're gonna do it, whether that be taking medication or doing some kind of physical exercises. If you're not enduring those symptoms, you haven't noticed anything like that. Okay, it's hard to get that kind of motivation. But realize neurological and physical decay is in fact there for all of us. Time passes and we will become weaker and less healthy as time goes by, unless we act in ways that prevent or even reverse the process. That really slows down the aging process or the effects of aging on our systems. And if you're out of shape now, you could do things that actually make you a healthier and stronger person. Instead of you declining as time goes by, you can get more fit as time goes by. You can, but you've got to build it into your life. And you've got to get out of your head some identity, some image of yourself that says, I'm not the kind of person who does that. That other people spend their lives exercising, not me. It that will be you if you just do it. You've got to think, oh, I'm gonna go from where I am now, and if I just get up to a day a week of playing golf, or you know, a day a week of playing golf, and I'll walk you know, half an hour a week, twice a week, and that'll be good. That's a fine first step. But you better be ready to move forward with that because really that's not enough. It's not enough to do what I'm talking about to make you a healthier and a happier person. This podcast is how to be happy and successful, just like practicing gratitude lists or practicing self-compassion or being mindful or treating people well, just like those practices done regularly throughout your week, even if you're not used to them when you start off, those will make you happier people for the rest of your life. So will you build exercise into your life? It'll make you much happier than staring at Netflix for three hours a day, seven days a week, or social media or other things. I'm not judging those things, I'm just telling you which one will make you a happy person. It's the exercise. And you know, you have my permission to watch things while you're exercising. If that's what you do, if you want to, you know, sit on a rowing machine or on a bike and watch a video while you're doing that, great. Or if you want to go exercise, and then when you're done, you get cleaned up and then you go watch movies or jump on your phone to social media. I got no problem with that. But if you're spending all of your time sitting on the chair or something and watching things, I'm not judging you, but I'm telling you, you are letting the condition of life that you are stuck with, that is the fact that you are an aging organism, work against your happiness instead of you working against that unfortunate condition. Okay, well, I think I've said enough. Frankly, as usual, I think I've said more than enough and taken up more than enough of your time. You know, the the main point here is that exercise is not something you do that makes you miserable, but you you should do it anyways because it's good for you. It's the opposite of that. You know, I heard a joke once where a guy said, you know, a guy told his friend, you know, you're gonna live longer if you drink less beer. And the friend says, nah, it'll just seem longer. A lot of people see exercise like that. They think it's just starting exercising is a way to make yourself unhappy. It's not the case at all. Then not only is there all this evidence that, you know, exercise makes you happy in all these different ways, but really, just about everybody who starts exercising, whether they start from nothing and get going on it, or they do very little and they increase the amount, they actually learn to enjoy it. If you start exercising and you find, I hate this thing I'm doing, find something else. There's so much variety of types of exercise you can do that you can find something that'll bring you pleasure. But you have to understand how important it is to make yourself do it, to put in the effort to find the thing you enjoy, then to get out there and do it. All right, let's, as usual, finish with our mantra. The mantra goes, you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. Well, you matter. I keep telling you through these episodes that just as a baseline, right now, without you having to achieve anything, you have value and you matter. Tell yourself that because it's true. Because you matter, the work matters. Not because David Murphy, me, I say these things. That's not what makes these things worthwhile. You making yourself a happier, more successful person matters because you matter. And then you can do this work. You could start exercising. It may be you can't run a half marathon next month, or maybe ever. You know, I had a hip replacement a few years ago, and I've got osteotheritis on the other hip as well. So running sort of out of the picture for me. If I do it, it's gonna be very bad for my hips. So I used to like running, no more running for me. Now I bike or I swim or I row or I do other things. There may be some things you can't do, or lots of things that you're not ready to do right now. Great. Go find what you can do, get started, build your abilities, learn to enjoy yourself. And like we talked about back in Stick with Things Beyond Enthusiasm, use all the cues you can to make it a regular part of your life. First, block out the time, say, this matters, so I'm gonna make the time on my weekly schedule, and then you set up those cues, make it at the same time, set some behavior beforehand that's a trigger. Ideally, set up some kind of social connection to help you get exercising, whether it's just you are talking to a certain friend on the phone on the way to the gym or you're meeting people there, whatever it is. But the more cues you use with the behavior, the more likely you are to do the behavior. And the rewards, well, the rewards are really built into exercise, but feel free to give yourself some other kind of rewards as well, just for doing a good job, doing a positive behavior and helping to make yourself a happier and healthier person. So that's a long way to say you can do this work. Nothing's weird about you that says you can't do it. Okay, that's it. Until next time. All right, this has been the How to Be Happy and Successful Podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. Website is www.happy-successful.com. So it's happyandsuccessful.com, there's types in between the words. You can read articles there. You can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put out new content, you will get an email saying, hey, there's new content. Go listen or go read. I also offered coaching. So if you'd like some help being happy or being successful, or both, you think my ideas are good, reach out to me through the website. If you like the episode, please go add a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, or you can just keep that to yourself. And if you really like the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter. That'd be awesome. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and uh send me an email. I will do my best to respond. So actually I barely have time to put this thing together, so I won't promise, but I will try. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.