Your Best Career Move could be Going for a Run
Jackson Roatch
People Analytics @ WEX | I/O Psychology | Talent Management | Employee Listening
The link between physical activity and cognitive performance is too strong to ignore
Throughout human evolutionary history, we moved around, like a lot. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived very active lifestyles as hunter-gatherers. Even as recent as 1800, over 80% of the American workforce worked in agriculture, which was pretty physically demanding. Now, the script has abruptly flipped and an estimated 80% of the jobs we do are relatively sedentary service jobs.
This evolutionary mismatch is a large contributor to the increase in chronic disease, with physical inactivity being linked to higher risks of coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, breast and colon cancer, and overall mortality1. That said, I’m not a medical expert and I’m not here to tell you that exercise is good for you, because you already know that. Instead, I’m here to tell you that exercise could be the best thing that ever happened to your career.
The Moderating Mediator Blog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
领英推荐
Subscribe
Learning: Take back your inner child
It’s common knowledge that kids pick things up quickly. Everyone will recall people saying things like “you should learn piano while you’re still young” from their teens and twenties. It is true that children and adolescents learn more easily, thanks to an increased level of neurogenesis (new neurons forming), as well as a lower level of neural inhibition (the neurotransmitter GABA mediates neural stability as we age, which actually helps us hang onto what we already know).
But it doesn’t have to be this way - part of the reason we are slower to learn as adults may be related to our inactivity...
Registered Nurse
3 个月Insightful!
Data Scientist | People Analytics (AI + HR) Advocate??| Sustainability Practitioner??| Addict of Project Management with Trello??
3 个月Getting off work with mental exhaustion, a slow nice jogging can help clear your mind through exercising your body. This is my experience to sustain my healthy life via weekly jogging routine.
Sr. Associate Director, People Analytics ? | Storyteller ?? | Speaker ?? | Trusted Advisor ??
3 个月Love this, thanks for sharing. Some of the most innovative work I've done has its roots in my morning runs!
People Analyst ? HR Analyst ? Speaker ? Data Visualization ? Podcast Host ? 1st Gen-Everything ? Everything is Figure-Out-Able ????
3 个月Hakeem Lawrence