The Centenarian

Go ahead: Indulge yourself. Top your cone with another scoop of ice cream. Then check out these suggestions for creating (even more) moments to savor.

I’m not a happiness guy–there’s nothing new that I can tell you about how to live a fulfilling life. Instead, I am interested in the more concrete topic of pleasure. What’s the difference? Happiness is a prolonged state of being that is influenced by a variety of factors, ranging from a person’s relationships to her religion to her genetic predispositions.

Pleasure, on the other hand, is a purely instinctive reaction with a brief life span: 30 seconds to an hour or two, tops. And while happiness can be elusive at times, sources of pleasure are fairly easy to come by. Read on for a host of unexpected ways to pack bliss into your life.

1. Play that song you love so much. Repeat. As any preschooler can tell you, repetition nurtures pleasure. When you experience something more than once, you notice more details about it each time, thereby increasing your enjoyment. That’s why you love revisiting that jazz standard, favorite roast chicken recipe, and beloved old Woody Allen movie.

Of course, you can overdo it. The effect of repetition on pleasure is an inverted U: You appreciate something more and more over time until, abruptly, it becomes repellent to you. Which is why no one you know can bear to listen to that “I get knocked down, but I get up again” song any more.

2. Seek out the sommelier. In all areas of our lives, our sensory reactions are affected by the depth of our knowledge. Take wine, for example. If you want to enjoy it more fully, you don’t have to shell out hundreds for a bottle of Château Lynch-Bages; you simply need to learn about the vino you are already drinking. Buy a wine encyclopedia, take a class–or head to a restaurant with a sommelier who likes to educate patrons during the meal. You won’t just think about wine differently; you will taste it differently.

3. Don’t buy boxed sets of DVDs. Economist Tyler Cowen says that much of the joy we get from our purchases lies in the experience of seeking them out, getting them home, and opening them up. If you receive 18 DVDs in one package, you’ll use up the buzz all at once. Buy them one at a time and space out the pleasure.

4. Keep your child’s baby shoes in your desk at work. You know how you keep a bag of almonds in your drawer in case you need an energy boost in the afternoon? Place something emotionally resonant there as well for the times your mood needs a quick lift. Stash a few objects that are connected with treasured experiences–say, that 1997 vacation to Barcelona–and occasionally take a moment to pick up one of these items and look at it closely. Elation is sure to follow.

5. Read (or watch or participate in) something that takes your breath away. A recent study found that people seek out newspaper articles that inspire awe–that hard-to-define feeling we get when we’re exposed to great beauty, power, or accomplishment. This pleasurable tickle is uniquely human and can be achieved in multiple ways: praying, watching nature programs, and reading stories of personal triumph, to name a few. Whatever gives you that lump-in-your-throat feeling, pursue it any way you can.

6. Look outside. Our species has spent almost all of its existence on the African savanna, surrounded by trees, water, and sky. The world in which most of us spend our time nowadays is unnatural and can corrode the spirit. Even a small dose of nature elevates our mood. But accept no substitutes! Psychologist Peter Kahn Jr. put 50-inch high-definition TVs into windowless offices of faculty and staff members at the University of Washington in Seattle, then streamed in a live view of a natural scene. It turned out that these HDTVs did nothing for the participants’ physiological stress response. What worked? A window with a view of real greenery. My guess is that even a view of a humdrum landscape, like the parking lot of an office building, is more emotionally satisfying than the most beautiful travel poster.

7. Pet a dog (any dog). You may have heard this before, but it bears repeating: Physical contact with animals works wonders. It increases the brain chemicals associated with pleasure and decreases those associated with stress. Even people without pets can get some of the effect by hanging out for a few minutes at a dog run.

8. Grin and bear it. Isn’t it annoying when you’re a little blue and your friends and family tell you to smile? Well, like it or not, smiling is a mood booster. Here’s why: People react better to you when you look happy, leading to a reinforcing cycle of good vibes. Plus, thanks to something called “facial feedback,” looking happy (oddly enough) fools your brain into thinking that you are happy.

9. Give. Humans are altruistic by nature: If we act generously, we feel joyful. Go ahead and try it. Go to the website of a favorite charity and make a donation. It doesn’t have to be a lot–just enough to get a small burst of pride in your chest.

10. Make the bath as hot as you can stand it. Psychologist Paul Rozin has argued that people get a kick from “benign masochism”–that is, controlled exposure to low-level discomfort (think spicy chili peppers and saunas). Maybe we love the endorphin rush. Or just the delightful contrast when we ultimately escape from the pain. Regardless, it pays to pamper yourself occasionally with a bit–but just a bit–of suffering.

Filed under: New on July 1st, 2010 | No Comments »

Biking for as little as five minutes a day can help women minimize weight gain as they enter middle age, especially if they’re overweight to begin with, a new study suggests.

The study followed more than 18,000 premenopausal women between the ages of 25 and 42 for 16 years. During that time, the women gained an average of about 20.5 pounds.

Women who started biking for just five minutes a day gained about 1.5 fewer pounds over the course of the study than similar women who didn’t take up biking, the researchers found. Women who increased their daily biking by 30 minutes during the study kept even more weight off, gaining about 3.5 fewer pounds than those whose biking habits stayed the same.

“Bicycling is an answer to weight control,” says the lead author of the study, Dr. Anne Lusk, Ph.D., a research fellow in nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston. “Walking is not necessarily an answer, unless the person is walking briskly.”

Indeed, Lusk and her colleagues found that women who increased the time they spent walking briskly by 30 minutes per day during the study gained about four pounds less than their peers who didn’t increase their walking. (A “brisk” pace is three miles per hour or more.) On the other hand, women who only walked slowly did not manage to prevent any weight gain.

Women who were overweight or obese at the start of the study experienced even better results than normal-weight women when they increased their daily physical activity. Overweight women who biked for 30 extra minutes per day over the course of the study gained about seven pounds less than those who didn’t, for instance.

The findings should encourage overweight women to not give up on exercise, says Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, D.O., director of Women and Heart Disease at Lenox Hill Hospital, in New York City. “People tend to say, ‘I’m too fat. I can’t do it. It’s too difficult.’ A study like this reminds them not to give up. Do something.”

The study appears this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Previous research has shown the weight benefits of daily walking, but few studies have focused specifically on biking and none have compared walking with biking.

“A lot of information on physical activity provided to women is very general, encouraging daily activity, but not specifically what kind,” says Keri Gans, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. “This study encourages an activity that is not expensive and that almost all women can easily engage in. And if a woman is presently a walker, it’s good to know that she must pick up her pace.”

Biking and walking are easier than many other forms of exercise to incorporate into everyday life, Lusk points out. “[They] can be a routine part of the day, so you can get your physical activity as a normal part of the day,” she says.

The study participants were all nurses and are part of a larger, national study on health and lifestyle that began in 1989. Women with physical problems that make regular exercise difficult were excluded from the current study, as were women who reported chronic health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer.

At the start of the study, half of the participants reported walking slowly, 39 percent said they walked briskly, and 48 percent said they biked (including working out on a stationary bike).

By 2005, the average physical activity had increased slightly but remained very low overall. Participants walked briskly for just one hour per week, on average, and biked for only about 18 minutes per week. Meanwhile they sat around the house for about 2.5 hours a day.

Current guidelines recommend that adults get at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise on most days of the week, a goal that many women in the study appear to be well below.

Individuals can’t bear all of the blame for that inactivity, Lusk and her colleagues suggest. Their physical surroundings may also be partly responsible.

Although some cities and towns have encouraged walking and biking (by adding sidewalks and bike lanes, for instance), the U.S. remains a “car-centric nation,” they write.

Nine percent of commuters in the U.S. walk to work and just 0.5 percent bike, according to data cited in the study. By contrast, in the Netherlands, where the roads are more bike-friendly, 22 percent of commuters walk to work and 27 percent bike.

“We need to provide the infrastructure or facilities so that more people could comfortably bicycle,” Lusk says. “In the U.S., the emphasis has been on the walking environment and not on the bicycling environment.”

Filed under: Body, Food on June 30th, 2010 | No Comments »

Exercise May Be an Effective and Nonpharmacologic Treatment Option for Alcohol Dependence

Alcohol abuse is highly disruptive of circadian rhythms, and circadian disruptions can also lead to alcohol abuse as well as relapse in abstinent alcoholics. Circadian timing in mammals is regulated by light as well as other influences such as food, social interactions, and exercise. A new study of the relationship between alcohol intake and wheel-running in hamsters has found that exercise may provide an effective alternative for reducing alcohol intake in humans.

Results will be published in the September 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

“Alcohol abuse, characterized by routine craving for and consumption of alcohol as well as an inability to function normally without it, disrupts both the timing and consolidation of daily circadian rhythms — when to sleep, eat, and mate — driven by the brain circadian clock,” explained J. David Glass, professor of biological sciences at Kent State University and corresponding author for the study. “With continual alcohol use, one may go to bed too early or late, not sleep across the night, and have an unusual eating regime, eating little throughout the day and/or overeating at night. This can lead to a vicious cycle of drinking because these individuals, in response, will consume more alcohol to fall asleep easier only to complain of more disrupted sleep across the night and additionally have a greater craving for alcohol.”

In other words, said Alan M. Rosenwasser, professor of psychology at the University of Maine, chronic alcohol abuse and circadian disruption become reciprocally destructive and result in negative effects on physical and emotional health. “It is therefore very interesting that access to running wheels or other forms of voluntary exercise in animal experiments has emerged as a powerful environmental factor influencing brain health, circadian rhythms, and emotional well-being,” he said.

Glass agreed, noting that exercise is important in the non-photic regulation of circadian timing. “Restricting animals from exercising,” he said, “such as blocking access to a running wheel as we did in this study, had a significant stimulatory effect on alcohol consumption.”

Glass and his colleagues tested for three things: the effects of wheel-running on chronic free-choice consumption of an alcohol (20% v/v) and water solution; the effects of alcohol consumption on wheel-running in alcohol-naïve hamsters; and the influence of constant light (LL) on both alcohol consumption and wheel-running behavior.

“In this study, we found that the more the hamsters ran, the less they consumed alcohol,” said Glass. “The ‘lazier’ hamsters that did not run as much had a greater craving for and consumption of alcohol, suggesting that exercise may be an effective, beneficial, and non-pharmacologic treatment option for alcoholism.”

“It seems that alcohol intake and voluntary exercise represent two forms of inherently rewarding behavior,” added Rosenwasser, “and the rewarding effects of these two behaviors may partially substitute for one another. This finding suggests that the two behaviors are regulated by overlapping systems in the brain.”

Glass agreed, noting that exercise appears able to alter the chemical environment of the brain in a manner similar to alcohol. “Dopamine is the primary chemical released within the brain in response to any type of reward, including exercise, drugs, food, and sex,” he said. “For humans, exercise may be an effective, beneficial, and naturally rewarding substitute for any type of addiction. It may also reduce the risk of addiction in individuals who have a family history of it, in addition to significantly reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and mood disorders. But like all rewards, exercise should be used in moderation, and not interfere with an individual’s normal daily functioning.”

A second key finding was that hamsters that displayed greater sensitivity to the disruptive effects of constant light on circadian rhythms also craved alcohol less. “Thus, there may be an underlying genetic predisposition for alcohol dependence and abuse that is expressed under challenging circadian conditions,” said Glass, “such as shift work, sleep problems or repeated jet-lag exposure.”

“Several research groups have recently become interested in relationships between circadian clocks, exercise, and alcohol and drug abuse,” said Rosenwasser. “In general, research in this area has shown that alcohol abuse can dramatically disrupt biological rhythms, that these disruptions can promote subsequent alcohol abuse, and that exercise is an important environmental factor influencing both circadian rhythms and alcohol drinking. These studies have opened several new directions for alcohol researchers, and raise the hope that circadian-based and/or exercise-based interventions may be developed for improved management of the serious and debilitating disorders associated with excessive drinking.”

“Many members of the general public, and indeed, many medical professionals, continue to view alcohol abuse and alcohol addiction as character flaws and as failures of ‘willpower,’” said Rosenwasser. “Findings such as these help put alcohol abuse disorders in a broader biological context, and show that both physiological and environmental factors contribute to excessive alcohol intake. Accordingly, these physiological and environmental factors will need to be addressed in order to effectively control alcohol abuse and other forms of excessive behavior.”?

Filed under: Body, Disease, Mind, News on June 24th, 2010 | No Comments »

Have you ever wondered why Coke comes with a smile? Because it gets you high. They removed the cocaine almost 100 years ago. Why? Maybe it was redundant.

1. In the first 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor, allowing you to keep it down.
2. 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (And there’s plenty of that at this particular moment.)
3. 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dilate; your blood pressure rises; as a response, your liver dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked, preventing drowsiness.
4. 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production, stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
5. 60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium, and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
6. 60 minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium, and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolytes, and water.
7. 60 minutes: As the rave inside you dies down, you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like hydrating your system, or building strong bones and teeth.

This will all be followed by a caffeine crash in the next few hours. (As little as two if you’re a smoker.) Want to know what happens after that? Check out what happens to your body after you drink a coke, every day for a long time.

Coke itself isn’t the enemy here. It’s the dynamic combo of massive sugar doses combined with caffeine and phosphoric acid, which are found in almost all sodas. Moderation, people!

Filed under: Body, Food on June 24th, 2010 | No Comments »

Census workers in Indonesia have come across a woman who claims to be 157 years old.

Don’t believe her? You could always ask her 108-year-old adopted daughter.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) reports the woman, identified only as Turinah, lives in a small village on the island of Sumatra. She doesn’t have identification papers because she burned them in 1965 so she wouldn’t be connected to communists, she told authorities.

“There’s no authentic data to prove her age but judging from her statements and the age of her adopted daughter, who’s now 108 years old, it’s difficult to doubt it,” statistics bureau official Jhonny Sardjono told global news agency AFP Monday.

AFP reported the woman still works around her home and has smoked clove cigarettes all her life.

“Despite her age she still has an incredible memory, clear sight and has no hearing problems. She speaks Dutch quite fluently,” Sardjono said.

If it’s true, it means the woman has outlived the only person verified to have lived more than 120 years. Jeanne Calment of France died in 1997 at the age of 122.

RNW says Turinah claimed to be born in 1853 and is able to describe the huge eruption of the Krakatao volcano between the islands of Java and Sumatra in Indonesia in June 1883, which she said she saw with her own eyes.

In the year of her birth, street signs were authorized in San Francisco intersections for the first time, the first electric telegraph was used, the U.S. began minting $3 gold pieces and Giuseppe Verdi’s Opera La Traviata premiered in Venice.?

Filed under: Centenarians on June 10th, 2010 | No Comments »