Category: behavior

behavior · mental health · work

Successful People Relax and Take Time Off to Recharge!

Beth Kelley1 Comment

More and more Americans are working through their weekends. According to a 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, more than one-third of U.S. employees log time on the weekends, putting in an average of five and a half hours, and a whopping 81 percent of respondents in a recent GFI Software survey said they check their email on Saturdays and Sundays. But enjoying those precious two days off can actually make you more effective throughout the workweek.

"There are 60 hours between that 6 p.m. Friday beer and that 6 a.m. Monday alarm clock," Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, writes in a Fast Company blog. "That’s plenty of time for fun, relaxation and more importantly, recharging the batteries. In our competitive world, successful people know that great weekends are the secret to workday success. You want weekends that leave you refreshed, not exhausted or disappointed."

From literary icons of the past to present-day CEOs, these successful people make the most of their time off with weekend rituals and habits that don’t involve catching up on email.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/weekend-rituals-of-hig_n_3640661.html

Get the memo, America! Unplug! Relax! Recharge! Take a Sabbath, even if it’s Wednesday evening, whenever! So long as you make space for downtime and contemplation, time to reconnect with family.

behavior · community · health · mental health

Pickleball, Anyone? Senior Athletes Play New Games And Old : NPR

Beth Kelley
Hazel Trexler-Campbell throws spray-painted horseshoes during the Senior Games in Cleveland on July 23. (Benjamin Morris for NPR)

Health and fitness is often focused on the young, to the point that as athletes age they often get discouraged that they can’t compete in their old sports anymore. Well fear not, young-at-heart! There is… the Senior Games, with different age brackets.

A lot of what you’d see at the National Senior Games looks familiar if you’ve ever watched the Summer Olympics: there’s track and field, basketball and swimming. At the Summer Olympics, however, you will not hear voices in the crowd cheering “Go, Grandma!”Everyone at these Games is over 50 and they play some sports that will likely never appear at the Olympics.

more via Pickleball, Anyone? Senior Athletes Play New Games And Old : NPR.

I JUST discovered the Senior Games this morning, and I’m already excited to sign up when I’m old enough to qualify – that’s only 20 years away, so I better start practicing. 🙂

But for those who already qualify, this is a great sporting event that should be shared out with more seniors. People like my dad, a lifelong athlete who tries to keep up with the young folks perhaps a bit too much, would make a killing in some of these events.

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behavior · brain · disease · happiness · health · play

How to live to 100: advice for life and living longer

Beth Kelley

At first it seems like the typical “there’s no golden rule to getting old” article, right?

Some of the supercentenarian advice is sweet, some is a bit strange and a couple are everything we’ve always hoped for. Who knew bacon and whiskey were the fountain of youth?

more photos via How to live to 100: advice for life and living longer.

Some appear silly, and some fly in the face of recent studies (for example, married people tend to be healthier, and ergo live longer).

But if you try to generalize the advice, much of it boils down to one thing: have fun, be playful, don’t stress out too much about the details.

If you want to live to be 100, you have to give yourself space to play!

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behavior · creativity · culture · happiness · health · mental health · play

Adults are reclaiming playtime

Beth Kelley1 Comment
Dr. Norman Bethune (centre) watching a game of...
A lively game of checkers among friends (Photo credit: BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives)

From Dodgeball to pillow fights to roller derby, adults are reclaiming time to play in their lives:

It was all fun and games until someone smacked Don Norman in the head — hard — with a feather pillow. Walking into his first two-hour “Playing in the Deep” session, a weekly organized event in Portland, Maine that engages stressed-out grownups in childlike activities, Norman, a 48-year-old database administrator, didn’t know what to expect. Then he saw the pillows, a big pile of them, stacked high. Everyone around him grabbed one and was suddenly roughhousing like over-caffeinated kids at summer camp. Someone handed him his own pillow, but he simply held on to it, too inhibited to let his freak flag fly. He considered bolting.

“And then I got hit!” Norman recalls. “I figured, ‘If they’re going to hit me, I’ll hit them!’ By the end of the night, I was running around like a madman, and I forgot all about my self-consciousness. I forgot about everything. It was liberating.”

“I’ve seen a steady increase in invitations for adult play,” says game designer and self-proclaimed “fun theorist” Bernie De Koven, author of The Well-Played Game. “Now that we no longer have the same sense of community at work or in our neighborhoods as we did twenty or thirty years ago, these opportunities for play are filling the gap.”

The events may consist of kiddie games, but there’s often a serious psychological, even spiritual purpose behind them. “People need to feel they’re connected to other people,” says Cary Umhau, the cofounder of Spacious, who says she was inspired by the adage “Love Thy Neighbor.” “Most people are trying to numb themselves out from just the pain of life. If they don’t have addictions, they spend much of their life watching TV. They need places to come together, to step out of the box and out of their social silo.”

more via Stories: Playing For Keeps – Life Reimagined.

More and more adults are understanding the psychological benefits to playing and making time to let their hair down (or pull it up into a ponytail and go hog wild!), from less sick days to a larger community to helping solve a project problem at work. Even if it’s something as small as giving the barista a silly name the next time you order coffee (I am Batman!), it’s enough to get your brain cells firing and keep it healthy.

How do you squeeze in playtime for yourself? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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behavior · mental health · work

The Surefire Way To Be Happier At Work: Chat With Your Coworkers | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

Beth Kelley
Stock photo of ridiculously happy coworkers. Mine don’t usually wear ties to the office, but they do usually look this happy (ok, only sometimes).

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about making happy, playful spaces. But in the end the most important thing to making a space playful and happy is the people that fill that space.

According to a new study by Alex Bryson and George MacKerron, published through the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science, of all the things we choose to do at work (other than work!), it’s casually interacting with our colleagues that makes us happiest. From the study:
The largest positive net effect of combining work and another activity on happiness relates to ‘Talking, chatting, socialising’. . . . There are clearly positive psychological benefits of being able to socialise whilst working. It is the only activity that, in combination with working, results in happiness levels that are similar to those experienced when not working.

more via The Surefire Way To Be Happier At Work: Chat With Your Coworkers | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.

Now, according to this same study they found the strongest correlation between reducing stress and working was watching videos (film, TV), which indicates to me the study may not be the most robust, but to be fair other studies have found a strong correlation between watching cute things and destressing and an increase in the ability to concentrate, so if these study participants were watching cute puppies and kittens then that makes perfect sense.

I certainly know that having good coworkers makes a huge difference in how much I enjoy my work (and lucky for me I’ve got great coworkers!)

What do you think? Does your personal work happiness depend on your coworkers? Share your work stories in the comments below.

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anthropology · architecture · behavior · community · creativity · design · work

Workstations Designed For Collaboration, Modeled On Friendly Neighborhoods | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

Beth Kelley

This article brings up an interesting idea of a “forced” playful space. You can certainly encourage creativity and playfulness, but forcing the issue can backfire in a bad way.

“We have recently seen many offices that try to evoke a kind of forced playfulness,” says Sam Hecht, founder of London-based Industrial Facility. “Slides, chill-out zones, ping-pong, or a kind of home-like interior. We were very suspicious of this.”

For his own take on the flexible office system, Hecht and his partner, Kim Colin, adopted a more nuanced approach to getting employees to think fondly of their office–and not view them as places of mandatory drudgery. Locale, for Herman Miller, uses modular pieces that easily adjust in place and height to create what Hecht calls neighborhoods.

more via 1 | Workstations Designed For Collaboration, Modeled On Friendly Neighborhoods | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.

I definitely agree that everyone has to buy in or the “playful” environment doesn’t truly exist. A space designated for “play” just becomes a dead zone at work if nobody wants to hang out there, or knows they’ll be scolded by fellow workers for disrupting work, or viewed as “lazy.”

I’m curious to hear more of why the Locale design would make people feel more neighborly. Thoughts? Ideas? Leave them in the comments below.

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behavior · community · environment · work

Creative Leadership Grows in the Garden

Beth Kelley
English: Photo of Robert Hart's forest garden ...
English: Photo of Robert Hart’s forest garden by Graham Burnett (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Great insight from Tim Brown of IDEO on how playing in the dirt can forge great leadership skills:

Over the years, I’ve given a lot of thought to what gardening, design, and creative leadership have in common.

Gardening is generative, iterative, and user-centered
When designers in our Chicago studio first planted a roof garden, they noticed people were picking and eating the strawberries and tomatoes and leaving the eggplants and tomatillos to rot on the vine. They soon realized that planting a work garden for 60 busy people is very different from planting a home garden for a family of four. Project deadlines simply took priority over cooking, so any plants that took extra steps to prepare were ignored. The next year, the designers planted a “Grab and Go Garden” that contained only fruits and vegetables that could be eaten straight away. This time, more plants were eaten, less were wasted. A good garden, like good design, needs to meet the needs of its users.

Full article:
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130626172846-10842349-want-to-be-a-creative-leader-look-to-the-garden?trk=mp-details-rr-rmpost

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autism · behavior · brain · children · learning · mental health · Nature · play · school

Outdoor Play Helps Improve Autistic Symptoms

Beth Kelley

Reposting this from a fantastic blog Free Range Kids, run by Lenore Skenazy, a huge advocate for letting children be children and just playing, especially outdoors:

Readers — In our desperation to create “smarter” kids, we have practically pinned them to their desks. Now educators are realizing this may be just the opposite of what is best for kids — including those with special needs, as Andrea Gordon writes in Toronto’s TheStar.com (a paper run by my favorite editor-in-chief from back when he and I were at the NY Daily News, Michael Cooke). – L.

It was a crisp March day outside Blaydon Public School when teachers discovered that 4-year-old Alex Wong could spell his name.There were no pencils or paper in sight. Everyone was bundled in winter jackets. Alex, who has autism, was in the outdoor classroom where his special-needs class played and explored for at least an hour every day, alongside 25 kids from the mainstream kindergarten class.

Teacher Sue Cooper noticed Alex march over to a pile of wood, put three sticks in a small wheelbarrow and push it to a spot on the pavement. One by one, he placed the sticks on the ground, forming the letter A. He made three more trips and came back with sticks to make three more letters, which he placed in a row: L, E and X.

Cooper’s jaw dropped. The teachers ran for a camera.

Alex is non-verbal and for a long time, his only interactions had been to throw things or hit. But in the fresh air, day after day, something started to change. Over several months Alex had watched the other children making structures. And that March morning, he was ready to take his turn.

The teachers say his is one example of how daily outdoor time is changing the way their young students — including those autism and other special needs — learn and behave.

Full post.

Obviously more research needs to be done, but there has been strong correlations drawn between outdoor time and decreasing of ADD and dementia symptoms, so it makes sense that putting humans in our natural surroundings would also help other mental disabilities and ailments.

There are a growing number of outdoor preschools, and I’d argue that there should be more outdoor elementary and even middle schools.

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anthropology · behavior · creativity · culture · happiness · play · Social · technology · youtube

Lolcats and the Harlem Shake: Play on the Internet

Beth Kelley


An article from the head of Google’s Agency Strategic Planning team published in Fast Company talks about why we play on the Internet; it’s a really good dive into the need and importance for play in our lives and share that playful experience with others, and how as we move towards a more digital space we are taking that need to share play with us. It is marketing/branding focused, but the message is clear; we all need play and are making space for it, at least in our Internet lives:

We [netizens] uploaded over half a million variations of Harlem Shake to YouTube in the past few months. Google searches for Cat GIFs hit an all-time high last month. And we took 380 billion photos last year–that’s 10% of all the photos taken . . . ever. But let’s be honest–these memes are fun, but they don’t matter, right? They’re pretty much a waste of time.

As the head of Google’s Agency Strategic Planning team, it’s my job to work with brands and creative agencies to help develop their ideas in the digital space. So I had to ask: Why would we be doing so much of all this “visual play” if it really means so little to us?
To get to the bottom of these memes, we assembled a team of original thinkers–anthropologists, digital vanguards, and content creators–to dig a little deeper into this “visual web.” We also spoke to gen-Cers–the people who grew up on the web or behave as though they did–and who thrive on creation, curation, connection, and community.

The research showed us that far from distracting us from more serious things, these viral pictures, videos, and memes reconnect us to an essential part of ourselves.

It may seem that all we’re doing is just capturing every mundane moment. But look closely. These everyday moments are shot, displayed, and juxtaposed in a way that offers us a new perspective. And then all of a sudden these everyday moments, places, and things look . . . fascinating.

As kids, that happens all the time because everything is new. Everything is unlike. And we aren’t constrained by the rules about what “goes together.” Why else was putting the Barbie in the toy car wash more fun than putting the car in the car wash?

Read the whole article here: Memes With Meaning: Why We Create And Share Cat Videos And Why It Matters To People And Brands

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behavior · children · creativity · culture · happiness · health · play

Cool doctors doing what’s right… – The Meta Picture

Beth Kelley

Hospitals can be scary places, for grown ups and for kids. This is a great way to make hospitals a little less intimidating, and add some silliness to an otherwise boring, and possibly painful, medical procedure.

Originally from Cool doctors doing what’s right… – The Meta Picture.