Right, so we're continuing our discussion of the kinds of behaviors that seem to make us happy. And I wanted to start with one that I think is a behavior that can completely improve our depression, it could prove our anxiety, but it's not often when we think of. And s, o imagine that we had a pill that you could take this pill and you get all the following benefits. You would get happier, for sure, but you'd also get better grades. You would also look better and improve how you look physically. There would be no side effects whatsoever. It would make you healthier and improve how your heart functions, how your immune system functions. It would be completely legal and it would be free. Right, if we had such a pill, my guess would be many people would sign up to get it and it turns out that we do have that pill, it's not called the pill, it's just called exercise. Exercise, moving our bodies just a little bit, is one of the things that we know can improve our happiness. And we often don't realize that it can have the effect that it can have. This doesn't necessarily mean running a marathon or becoming like an ultra marathon or like crazy cross fit exercise or anything. It really is just moving your body for 30 minutes a day. The evidence suggests it has huge benefits that we often don't think about. One is that there's lots and lots of evidence that exercise can improve our overall positive mood. And these are from studies that didn't just look at the effective exercise. It compared exercise to one of the best things that we have on the market for improving our mood, namely anti-depression medications. And so, there is one study kind of compared people who are suffering from a major depression and either assigned them for 16 weeks to do a little bit more exercise. So three times a week they had to move their body for 30 minutes or they get the kind of leading anti-depressant medication at the time. The study was published, which is Zoloft, right? And we're going to look at how many people, the percentage of people in this group that either recovered from their depression kind of recovered, which is going to be the black bar or kind of relapse. So, those are folks who didn't recover so much. This is what happens in the exercise condition. You're saying between 80 and 90% of people basically recover from their depression in 16 weeks just exercising. And the exercise condition is actually doing better than the leading anti-depression medication. And so, this is the case for depression. This is also the case, I can show you different data for anxiety. Basically, for many of the mental health conditions we know plague, teens in your age group, just getting a little bit more exercise can really help. But of course exercise has a ton of other benefits too. We know it helps our body, we know it makes us look better and so on. But there's also evidence that exercise can improve your brain function, like it literally can help you do better in terms of your academics as well. Hillman and colleagues looked at this directly, they looked at the correlation that students had between their physical fitness is actually an elementary school age kids. So the correlation between physical fitness and your academic achievement. And so, they looked at students standardized test scores and then they brought students in and looked at their average physical fitness scores. This is that kind of like presidential fitness test that all of you probably took as kids. So is there any correlation between your academics and your physical fitness level? Basically, how much you exercise or how good you would be exercising. And here are the correlations they find, if you look at students mathematical ability big, very strong correlation. If you look at students reading ability, big very strong correlation. So this seems the exercise might have benefits even beyond just making you feel better, it might be actually improving cognition, improving the way you think and how you do in school as well. We should be writing everybody a prescription not for anti-depression medications necessarily, but also maybe for exercise to free and helpful for you. And so, how can we get all these benefits from exercising? Luckily, we have psychprotips their back, yeah, it's like psychprotip number one is just an easy one, just move your body, again, not ultramarathon just 20 to 30 minutes a day. The evidence suggests can help. This could be doing the sports you normally do at high school or this could be kind of engaging and doing some weight lifting or even just running with your friends, right? It doesn't have to be much, it just has to be a little bit and very consistently. The second psychprotip is that, if you struggle with getting in a little bit more exercise, then adding the kinds of things that might make exercise a little bit more fun. You can add some music to your workout. One great exercise move is just to get your favorite phone playlist and just play it for 20 minutes and just dance around your room or do that with your friends, right? And if you need suggestions, I will share my own personal Spotify exercise playlist for you to enjoy, which I'll send you all the linked to, so you can enjoy. But, exercise, simply moving our bodies, is a healthy habit that can improve our well being. There's a second healthy habit that I think is even more important for students your age, which is that if you really want to do the kinds of things that science suggests will make you feel better. You have to improve your sleep. This is an image of sleeping. I feel for your generation, this is something that people are not investing in a lot, but it's the kind of thing that we know matters a lot for people's overall mental health. This is the kind of thing that students don't engage in because they're often worried about their grades. In fact, my Yale students are so focused on their grades and not their sleep that they have memes that look like this where you ask. How did you sleep last night? I got a full 40 minutes, yeah, that's bad. You're supposed to be getting 70 hours a night and in your age group even 8-9 hours a night is sort of even more recommended, but you don't do that. And that's why you kind of come into class looking like this sometimes. Now you might be saying, okay, I care about sleep of course, but I have to study right because I'm focused on my grades. We already learned that grades weren't necessarily helpful for happiness or helpful for the things you expect. But let's say, okay, is it really the case that not sleeping is going to help you get good grades or staying up studying is going to help you get good grades? Well, there's lots of data on this, in fact, Hartman and Pritchard looked at this in a sample of college students, really big sample of college students. And they looked at college students sleep and what was going on with their academic performance in their GPA. And it's not what you might think, for every night a college student reports not sleeping well, on average they're great GPA will go down by 0.2 points. If you do this by every night a college students not sleeping, this can add up to take a real hit on your GPA. In addition, the evidence suggests that if you're not sleeping well, for every student that reports you're not sleeping well, you see a 10% increase in the likelihood that you might need to drop a class, right? Which is often you know you're failing it or you're not doing so well like this isn't great. And when you look at the negative impact that just having bad sleep can have on your academic performance, it's as bad as if you self report that you're going through a really stressful semester. Or students who have drinking and drug use problems, right? So we know substance use can obviously affect your academic performance, just not getting enough sleep is that bad. So you might say, okay fine, not getting sleep bad, but I know what I do. It's not like I don't sleep during the week, but then I catch up on the weekends. I do like one night and you're like Sunday night I'll just do a bunch of sleep and kind of catch up, that's going to be helpful, right? The evidence suggests sadly, not so much. In fact, one study by Philips and colleagues looked at this directly, they created what they called a sleep regularity index. This means are you getting kind of consistent sleep over time? And the way they define this is, what's the probability that you're in the same state across 24 hours? So if you're up at 8 p.m on Monday you're also up 8 p.m on Sunday. That's how they kind of did the math on this. And they looked at whether or not that correlated with your college GPA. And this is the graph I'm going to show you now, I'm showing GPA and the correlation with this sleep index. So, bigger numbers are more regular sleep. And what you find is that there's a big correlation between your college GPA and your sleep regularity. As you're getting more regular sleep, your GPA is just necessarily going up. So these correlations suggest is not that you want to skip sleep to study, you actually have to prioritize sleep to get the academic benefits that you really might want from studying. So, getting less sleep, hurting your grades, but getting less sleep is also hurting your happiness. In fact, one of my favorite studies to show my college students is this one by Dinges and colleagues. They brought college students into a sleep lab and tested their mood across different levels of sleep. So students either got normal sleep which is seven day hours a night, that's on average. They do that for two days and then they spend a week getting restricted sleep. Now, this isn't like pulling full all nighters or getting two hours or anything. They're getting five hours a night, which actually on average is what a lot of college students get. This is the restricted sleep condition and the question is, what happens to your mood? So I'm going to show you the different conditions from normal restricted. And then the researchers are nice, they let students go back to normal sleep at the end of the session and I'm going to plot what's called the profile of mood score. So bigger scores are better mood, like they're kind of happy and joyous when you're at the bottom of the scale, it kind of looks like you're clinically depressed. And this is what happens after a single week of not getting enough sleep. Basically, by the end of that week of five hours a night, you look like you're clinically depressed. I actually think we could solve most of the mental health problem in college age students and high school students, if we just forced you all to get a little bit more sleep. And so, sleep, really good. And that means we have to pay attention to the things that might be affecting our sleep. We need to really pay attention to what you might call our sleep hygiene. What are you doing right before you go to sleep or what do you have near you when you're trying to sleep? And the problem is that, a lot of teens your age one of these next to them and you sleep with your phones, which makes sense it's your alarm clock. It's your like, thing that you're attached to your hips, you don't want to give it up. But of course this thing is emitting a lot of blue light that might be affecting our wakefulness. It's got on the other side of it, a lot of anxiety provoking information, it's going to affect your attention. Right, is this thing affecting your sleep? And the answer is really yes, and especially in your age group. In fact, Wood & Scott did a study where they looked at students social media use and the quality of sleep that they're getting. And what they find is that, the students who report the worst sleep quality were the ones who use social media at night. The ones who are using social media right before they went to bed. And in fact, what they find is the more social media use you have, not only the poor sleep you get, but also the higher scores you have for anxiety, the lower self esteem you have. Like it has a whole host of mental health problems just like having your phone near you before you go to sleep, not very good. And so, how can we fight all the bad effects of sleep deprivation? Having our phone near us, how can we promote better sleep hygiene? Of course we have our psychprotips there back. And the answer is, again, a very simple one which is like just sleep, seriously just sleep more. I know there's stuff to do, I know there's so much attractive stuff but if you can just get the right amount of shut eye, you really will improve your mental health much more than you expect. And along with that, I think consider the possibility of finding ways to sleep that's pretty far away from your phone. Again, it's not great to fall asleep kind of like this and that is what many of us do. And the excuses often for teens your age is like, well, I need it for my alarm clock, right? Just invest in a cheapo, old school 80s alarm clock. They have them, you can get them for cheap, it really will keep your phone far away, so you're not tempted to pick it up in the middle of the night when you wake up. It's kind of out of sight out of mind. And so, that's kind of the behaviors that we need to make us happy in terms of our healthy habits. We need to promote more exercise, moving our bodies, but we also need to engage in sleep. [MUSIC]
