Exercise for happiness

My two sons love watching TV and playing games on our phones. I know how easy it is to let hours slip by with them engaged in this way every day. According to a survey children aged six to eleven are thought to watch an average of 28 hours of television, video and computer games a week (four hours a day), with two to five year olds watching an average of 32 hours (Nielsons, 2009 How Teens Use Media - A Nielsen report on the myths and realities of teen media trends). Another survey found that four hours a day was a minimum for six to fourteen-year-olds, but that this often doubled during the weekends and school holidays (Rideout, V.J., Foehr, U.G. & Roberts, D.F. 2010 GENERATION M2 Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds). Parents clearly need encouragement, support and advice on getting their children up and off the couch - myself included.


The long term effects of this level of sedentary behaviour are mammoth and include obesity, delayed speech, aggression, lack of physical and psychological development. Most worryingly is that starting out life like this sets up a really strong pattern for continuing life like this. I certainly don't want my children to struggle with any of the above problems as they grow up. I need to give my children the right example of physical activity and engage them actively every day. For under 5's this needs to be at least 3 hours of a day (not consecutive). We all need to take responsibility in this, parents, schools and government.


Something else that I believe is overlooked in this dilemma is our children's general happiness and their ability to be happy throughout their life. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a hungarian professor, is the architect of the concept of 'flow' - a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. (Csikszentmihalyi,1990). He developed this concept from his work in trying to understand human happiness and studying the creative processes of artists and the like. When in the flow we are also at our happiest. When in a state of apathy we are at our unhappiest but don't necessarily understand why. Activities that induce apathy are typically ones where we are not challenged nor require any skill - eg watching TV. The more time we spend doing them, the stronger the pathways of apathy we create in our psyche and the more we diminish our interest and ability to engage in activities requiring challenge and skill thereby denying ourselves the joy that comes from being in the flow.

Lets be mindful of the effect of our choices today on our children's and our own future happiness!


http://www.bhfactive.org.uk/userfiles/Documents/guidelineswalkers.pdf
http://www.boysdevelopmentproject.org.uk/downloads/reports/BDP_A4Factsheet(refs)%20copy.pdf
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html