Challenge 11 - Nature Walk

The more nature, the better you feel. Florence Williams

Today’s challenge is to get outside and take some fresh air.

Increasing urbanisation has more people living in cities than in rural areas. However, our connection to nature is hardwired, and without regular exposure, it can impact our wellbeing, this disconnection, and its impact, has been named ‘nature deficit disorder’.

Research confirms the benefits of immersing yourself in nature but even a view of nature helps. Hospital patients with views over green roofs show improved recovery post-surgery1, prison inmates with views of trees (versus brick walls) experience lower physical and mental illness2 and ‘forest bathing’ has been shown to have a positive effect on the mental and cardiovascular health as well as the activation of immunity supporting cells.

The good news is that you don’t need to be in prison, hospital or deep in a forest to experience benefits, and it may help your productivity, especially if you need to disconnect or be creative. A simple walk from your home or work to a park with greenery can make an impact in as little as 15 minutes.

Where might you go outside to improve your wellbeing today? Share your ideas

Reference

1.     Green roofs and hospitals. Roger Ulrich. 1984

2.     Inmates with views of trees 24% less likely to have physical or mental illness. State prison of Southern Michigan

Further reading

• Read: The Nature Fix: Why nature makes us happier, healthier, and more creative. 2017. Florence Williams

• Listen: Outside Podcast: Florence Williams on the Nature fix

• Watch: Why bother leaving the house. Ben Saunders www.ted.com

** Disclaimer – Part of the Fresh Start Effect / Build Your Ideal Day Program by Duncan Young. All content and media on the Build Your Ideal Day Website is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice.

Challenge 12 - Focus & Attention

Sterile cockpits: when pilots are below 10,000 feet only conversations that directly relate to flying the aircraft are possible.

Today's challenge is to create time and space for focus and concentration on the things that matter most without disruption. Ideally, you will create your own cockpit without leaving the tarmac.

So what is the sterile cockpit rule? Several aviation accidents occurred when crew attention was diverted with items unrelated to flying. The aviation regulator instituted a rule that forbids any unnecessary actions or conversations in the aircraft cockpit during the most critical parts of the flights. This usually occurs under 10,000 feet of altitude for activities such as the taxi, take-off and approach and landing phases.

According to Cal Newport our ability to focus is declining, and although most of us are not flight crew, the world is increasing in complexity, and those who can develop the skill of focusing are more likely to succeed. The impact of distraction is evident across multiple industries, including the hospital, where nurses who can use 'do-not-disturb vests' to work distraction-free reduce errors in medication distribution dropped by 47%.

So how might we build your own deep work muscle and create environments for distraction-free work?

• Invest in your wellbeing – sleep, nutrition, physical activity, etc all help us focus.

• Create a focus cacoon – this could be as simple as a room free of distractions or as elaborate as your own 'writers cabin.'

• Create a regular time for focus – understand your chronotype and peak focus times.

• Electronically disconnect – silence all devices and set the alarm if needed to signal the end of the session.

So how might you turn off the autopilot and start flying your own plane in a focused manner? Tell us here

Reference

1.     Federal Aviation Authority rules - FAR 121.542 and 135.100

2.     Kaiser Permanente South San Francisco nurse

Further reading

Read:  The Benefits of a Productive Cocoon. Daniel Goldman www.huffpost.com

Listen: The Hidden Brain  Cal Newport

Watch: Deep Work Cal Newport

** Disclaimer – Fresh start effect & 30 Day challenge by Duncan Young. All content and media on the Build Your Ideal Day Website is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice.

Challenge 13 - Progress Principle

Small wins have transformational power.1

Today's challenge is to use small wins to supercharge your wellbeing.

The impact of the pandemic has many people uncertain about the future. Some days it feels like nothing can go right, that there is an obstacle at every turn, and it's simply just too hard to make progress. Any time spent listening to the news cycles reinforces that not everything is well, and it's easy to adopt a negative outlook.  

In times of extraordinary change, the temptation is to go large and make radical plans, but this is where the achievable plans are key. Professor Robert Sutton from Stanford Engineering School suggests, "Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. Our job is to focus on the small wins that enable people to make a little progress every day." 2

Research into the psychology of action and the pursuit of meaningful goals plays a vital role in our psychological wellbeing. Pursuing goals reveals an interesting cycle between progress on our goals and our reported happiness and subjective wellbeing.3 Making progress makes us happier and creates positive emotions. It encourages goal-directed behaviours and helps us complete the tasks, i.e. by making progress on a goal enhances further action and progress.

So how might this virtuous progress loop work?

• Identify a goal that you care about or is meaningful to you.

• Create a diary breaking the goal into small actionable steps. These may be so small that on their own seem inconsequential.

• Celebrate the completion of each micro activity which represents a small win and helps build progress.

• Identify areas to accelerate your goals (catalysts) and those that are barriers.

• Acknowledge failed activities. When things go bad, as they often do, failure leads to modest disappointments rather than catastrophic setbacks

• Observe how these small wins feed into the success of more significant events.

My insight about using the progress principle is evident in this challenge. Each year I try to develop a legacy piece of work to help people enhance their wellbeing. I believe that online challenges, such as The Fresh Start Effect, to be meaningful. Each challenge is designed to foster curiosity during a calendar month, so 20 days of content must be created. The beginning is always daunting and can be a little overwhelming, but breaking down each challenge day into manageable actions ie topic, background research, image selection, words, references, survey & upload all help track progress and celebrate progress. The image above shows the completion of the first 16 challenges. It is denoted by a large 'X', which is satisfying and provides momentum to finish the challenge set.

So how might you progress your wellbeing today with small wins? Tell us here

Reference

1.     How to make small wins work for you. 2018 Mehrnaz Bassiri.

2.     HBR - Hey Boss - Enough with the Big, Hairy Goals HBR. 2010. Robert I. Sutton

3.     Goal Progress and Happiness. How to decrease procrastination and increase happiness. 2008. Psychology today.

Further reading

Read:   To Solve Big Problems, Look for Small Wins. 2020. Harvard Business Review.

Watch: Teresa Amabile - The Progress Principle TEDxAtlanta

** Disclaimer – Fresh start effect & 30 Day challenge by Duncan Young. All content and media on the Build Your Ideal Day Website is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice.

Challenge 14 - Create a ‘To-Don’t’ List

Not every problem needs to be overcome, just the ones stopping you from where you want to be. 1

Today's challenge is to create a to-don't-list to help you be intentional with your time, complete the work that matters and avoid going down rabbit holes.

For many, the pandemic has changed our working lives and the familiar cadence of our daily work. So to address the routine disruption and best allocate our time, the simple answer it seemed was to write a to-do list. The list of all the actions that showed progress toward a known goal, a things to-do list if you would like, but if your list is anything like mine, we need a complementary list called the 'to-don't-list.'

When it comes to work, I often wonder where the time goes. Yet, we know from Parkinson's law that work expands to fill the time available for its completion, so to focus our finite energy on what matters and avoid the things that either sap our energy or distract us from achieving our goals.

In a recent article, the phenomenally productive organizational psychologist Wharton Professor Adam Grant shared his to-don't list:

1. Helping everyone who asks – with only limited time, he helps only those to who he can make a 'unique contribution'.

2. Mindlessly engaging with screens – he avoids getting on his phone or computer unless he has a specific plan for what he's going to do with them.

3. Putting work ahead of family time – he quarantines 3.00–7.00 PM on weekdays as a solid block of family time to spend with his three kids.

4. Playing online Scrabble – games play to his curious nature but he knows when strength becomes a weakness. The solution was to play Scrabble only at certain times and delete the Scrabble app from his phone.

So if you find you aren't completing your to-do list then the solution may not be to work more, but instead, consider what tasks you might stop doing. It sounds simple, but how? Firstly take a piece of paper, identify the goal you want to achieve. Secondly, write the actions required to achieve the goal on the left-hand side (the to-do list) and the right-hand side all the actions that might sap your energy or time (not-to-do list). At the end of the day, savour the success while you cross off all the actions you have achieved and acknowledge the ones you have been able to avoid.

What's on your to-don't list? Tell us here

Source: This tip is adapted from “Want to Be More Productive? Try Doing Less,” by Kate Northrup

Reference

1.     Ann Hill

Further reading

Read:  Is you to do list making you nuts? Ideas TED Adam Grant

Make a to-don’t list. hbr.org

** Disclaimer – Fresh start effect & 30 Day challenge by Duncan Young. All content and media on the Build Your Ideal Day Website is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice.

Challenge 15 - Optimism

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”1

Today's challenge is to become more optimistic.

Did you know that how we see the world and our level of optimism significantly impact our quality of life?

Optimism, by definition, is a positive expectation for the future, a glass half full if you like, and may impact both physical and mental health. It also provides stress-buffering that helps people remain happy in the wake of adverse events, and recent studies have found an inverse correlation between optimism and depressive symptoms, which is handy right now.2

Can we change our outlook? Even if you are not born an optimist, we can change our default setting. Of course, heretics, environment, and socio-economics status influence our optimism levels you are. Still, according to Martin Seligman, positive psychology's founding father, we can cultivate a positive perspective that believes that optimism is modifiable and can be learned with practice.

Like all things, how you view the world is unlikely to change overnight, but some of the below ideas might help create a mindset to make positive progress in your life: 

• Visualize the best possible self. What might your life look like everything went as well as expected?

• Look to the positive in things and keep the negative self-reflection in check.

• Review your social environment and surround yourself with more positive people.

• Stay informed but don't constantly watch the news cycle, reinforcing negative thoughts.

• Start a diary noting the positive occurrences.

• Acknowledge what you can and let go of what you can't control

• Put things in perspective - counteract your extremely negative predictions with highly positive ones.

• Acknowledge that negative things happen – life well lived will include some disappointments.

How might you build more optimism into your day? Tell us here

Reference

1.     Winston Churchill

2.     Optimism and Its Impact on Mental and Physical Well-Being. 2010. C.Conversano

Further reading

·         Read: Train your brain to be more optimistic www.nbcnews.com

·         Listen: Optimism and hope - All in the mind www.abc.net.au

·         Watch: How to calculate a positive perspective - Learned optimism Martin Seligman

** Disclaimer – Part of the Fresh Start Effect / Build Your Ideal Day Program by Duncan Young. All content and media on the Build Your Ideal Day Website is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice.