Perceived Physical Activity and Mortality: Study
health.harvard.edu
health.harvard.edu
The second study is more convincing, since it relies on randomly assigned groups. However, I don't think they measured the participants' actual level of activity during the course of the experiment? It's possible that the different interventions led to differences in activity level, during the experiment period, which led to the physiological improvements later seen.
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical in not accepting the study's conclusion. It just seems too fantastic, that someone can lose weight and reduce their mortality, merely by deluding themselves on how active they really are.
Feeling in better shape (and not actually being so) is a byproduct of optimism.
I agree completely. The base human emotions are all prone to delusion, but have substantial effects on the human body. "Unjustified" confidence and optimism can still have a great impact on physiological health. However, "perceived physical activity" is such a hyper-specific and abstract thought, that it doesn't engage our reptilian brain the same way something like "confidence" would. Hence why I find the study's conclusion pretty surprising.
An example from my experience is when an oncologist lies about a terminal cancer patient being in remission in the belief that a false confidence will cause them to last longer.
http://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-weak...
The control for a placebo is no intervention, and not only has placebo effect been measured, but differential placebo effects by administration method have been measured (a placebo treatment that involves piercing the skin, for instance, has a bigger effect than a pill.) This is why a valid placebo needs to match administration method of the intervention being tested.
When you test a treatment vs. placebo, and speculate that there is a "placebo effect", it means that you are supposing that lying about treatment produces a therapeutic effect.
But you can't test a placebo vs. nothing, because a placebo is not a treatment, and nothing is not a placebo.
Giving a sugar pill and disclosing you are giving a sugar pill is not the same thing as lying about treatment (unless the recipient believes it is efficacious). Lying about it being efficacious doesn't help your experiment unless it's a credible lie.
Giving "nothing" cannot be a control because it is obviously different from a sugar pill. So you cannot do a blind test.
The idea of testing a placebo effect is an epistemological morass.
-Give people an effective drug tell them so.
-Give people a placebo tell them its a real drug.
-Give people a real drug tell them it may be placebo.
-Give them a placebo tell them it may be placebo.
It would certainly tell us something about the placebo.
I get your point but GP seems to understand uncertainty better.
You can't force me to believe.
it's larger in the sense that part of it is essentially impossible to control for; people in a clinical trial are predisposed to, at a minimum, think about the issue which is being investigated, which likely causes some sort of change in their mindset and subsequently their body. there's no real way to measure that adequately.
but it's smaller in the sense that the body isn't a system like in the Matrix where "the mind makes it real". if someone tells you that you drank lethal poison (but in actuality you drank a placebo), you might feel bad, but you won't die. the reverse is not necessarily true, bizarrely.
if you get a (unbeknownst to you) placebo/sham knee surgery as part of a trial to investigate the merit of a genuine surgical procedure designed explicitly to reduce pain, it'll reduce your pain almost as effectively as "the real deal". but here's the clincher. if you are told beforehand that it is a placebo, it'll still reduce your pain, although if i am remembering the study correctly it was a smaller benefit than those who were not told they received a placebo.
so if you know you're getting a placebo, the effect is WAY larger than it "should" be. but that's for a subjective variable -- pain. but when the subject isn't prompted about the effects of the placebo, or is administered a totally implausible placebo which can't possibly fix the issue -- like a pill to cure a severed arm -- it's even more impotent than we would expect.
someone mostly happy may avoid a lot of stupid complications
Not to belittle the researchers, but trying to outperform a brain that gets data about the individual situation 24 h a day is a quite hard task.
It's sad that we sacrifice health for more money only to spend it on health-related issues we accumulate from our career choice.
I always thought that maybe having to carry a medicine ball up a hill in order to deploy a service would be fun.
Fittingly Sisyphean.
Ahh, well - you gotta put something on the old tombstone someday right?
Besides, they owe neither you or me an explanation. Our hypothetical people said that’s not a workable option, what else ya got?
I bet almost everyone can find at least half an hour for their health if they wanted to. Very few people actually have a "I don't have time!" excuse. These people better be spending every single minute of their existence at work, doing something essential with their family, or sleeping then. Even then, could they seriously not function with half an hour less sleep? Can they not do something physical with their kids like sport or even just a walk? Maybe you and some others actually don't have time, but most do. Even Obama found time for hourly golf and reading pretty much every day. I really dislike the victimhood/making excuses mentality. I don't think it's a good thing for most people. But yes, I understand that for a very small portion of people, they really don't have time.
Also, walking your dogs could be a form of exercise.
Exercise can be done - but only if you adopt the "5 minutes are actually fine if there is interruptiom" mindset parent recommends. And only if you did not exercised for long, because otherwise those small chunks are frustrating and make you hate them (as you are painfully aware of difference between old one and this one).
But the all-or-nothing attitude I mentioned above is problematic if someone has in mind that they're going to work out for an hour in the morning. For one reason or another they suddenly only have 45, 30 or 15 minutes for a workout and they write it off because they don't have time for their "workout" rather than using the time they do have.
But even if one only has 5 minutes you can make something with that time, whether it's a set of pushups, squats, mobility work or a quick jog. Then later in the day if one finds another window do something then.
IMO the best approach is try to move 5 minutes a day, everyday, regardless of the form it takes. Build the habit that you do something every day. Then build from there. Modulate intensity and movements. If you can do more do it, if you can't, don't stress over it.
You don't even need an hour. 30 minutes does wonders. It doesn't need to include a trip to the gym either. Pushups, situps, squats and such go a long way.
I live in the inner part of a mid sized Great Lakes city. Commute and lunch are short walks, groceries and shopping is a bike ride, friends and social groups are with in biking distance and the city's cultural and social activity is centered in walkable neighborhoods. Bike culture offers rides across any social group you can think of. Off road bike paths connect the country in the warmer months.
Even on a regular work day I'll walk or ride in the evening to wind down. In a city there are many routes and parks to wander through, the landscape and texture constantly changing thought the year. The routine keeps you going even through the snowy winter months. You can walk or ride as fast or slow as you want to adjust the "workout".
In contrast a lot of my exurban coworkers spend an hour plus per day commuting to work in the car, and live in isolated developments that are unwalkable past the arterial they are on. Exercise becomes a drive to a gym or park for and is easy to forgo in a busy day.
I recognize not every city is affordable enough to live and work in a short distance, but I'd trade any amount of yard space for an accessible city.
It didn't involve stretching. It was just the most comfortable position for brushing teeth for a tall (and very limber) person where the sink was too short. I tried to avoid it and found I was very uncomfortable trying to stand "normally" to brush teeth.
So he may not be stretching at all. He might just be making himself comfy.
Also, if anyone find the stretches he does comfy I don't know what.
Or maybe we'll just look like the 'bros in Silicon Valley. Ok, point taken :)
The second is mitigated by the fact that you're just doing smaller sets. We're not talking about a full work out. If you're sweating after 10, 20, 30 pushups or 30, 50, 75 squats, you were probably sweating anyways. Get a fan.
Soon you run out of excuses and you're back to "if you had the discipline, you would do it." Just like eating healthy.
Please get personal trainer's help before you exercise again.
Doing a few exercises every 30 minutes is far better than doing nothing and you could argue that doing any more than that has decreasing marginal returns in terms of your fitness indicators. But it's still not the same as having a physical purpose that you can hone and push yourself in.
But as I said, it's only sometimes.
I've worked manual labor jobs. They suck, and they damage your body. If you think sitting all day long is bad for your health, imagine what even just pushing a broom thousands of times a day is doing to say, your rotator cuff.
Pack a healthy lunch, keep your hours reasonable, get up from your desk and walk around every couple hours, exercise in your free time, and your office job won't kill you.
As to which type of job is more "fun" - a construction foreman once told me that he always sees these guys who try working construction to get away from their office job, who try to find meaning/enlightenment through manual labor - a sentiment you hear here a lot - and they always go back to their office job. Always.
But the guys who manage to escape the jobsite for the office - they never, ever come back.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/construction-workers-topped-r...
Personally, I really couldn't agree more with what you're saying. The prospect of doing manual labor for a living just sounds awful. Getting dirty and smelly, blowing out my knees and ruining my back, having my brain stuck in idle for 8 hours all day every day, massively increasing my probability of suffering a crippling or fatal work-related accident. And an office job has the possibility of leading to a work-from-home situation, which would allow you to get whatever level of exercise of whatever type you want every single day of the week.
>Now look at long-term health and economic prospects of the two careers, beyod short term satisfaction with survivorship bias.
Economics seems to be the real reason the original poster saw people switch away from manual labor after trying it for a while. Construction workers may be happier and more fulfilled day to day, but software engineers are paid more and it's hard to say no to a larger, more consistent paycheck.
You'd be surprised how many times manual labor requires solution finding. Even figuring out a leaking pipe or a problem in the electricity panel requires ingenuity. Designing and making custom furniture can be complex. A competent construction worker / repairman can be like a dev and payed like one (& sometimes harder to find). Take a look at those DIY videos to see what I mean. Not to mention the tooling these guys have in their shops ...
I know people who work(ed) construction who are actually very smart and they constantly belittle their own intelligence because they don't have a college degree or have a job that works with computers. Vice versa I know people who attend graduate school at tech institutes who are actually stupid in many ways but are so full of themselves because they've managed to memorize enough to pass engineering classes.
Believe you. I've been wet an got electrical shocks from wet equipment more than once on a particular site.
But part of it is probably also that office jobs typically pays better and people find it hard to return to a lower salary.
What I liked best was when I had my own office but lots of trips to install, maintain, upgrade and verify the systems I programmed ;-)
But enough IT types talk about RSI problems, wrists and such, that it ought to be on the radar screen if you are considering a physical job.
An uncle of mine had a physical job in a hospital most of his life and suffered from spinal stenosis, which I believe caused incredible pain in his retirement.
My mother was a computer programmer, but the whole reason she got a college degree was because she studied like mad in high school, because she was driven by escaping manual labor on the family farm. None of her siblings became farmers.
3 years ago I had a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic, which affected the nerves in my dominant arm. This was painful to the point of waking me up from sleep and my arm was almost useless in certain ranges of motion. Prior to this I had neglected working out for about 5 years, but started again; it took about a year but my arm is back to normal now and I can do more consecutive pushups than my age... and I'm 58.
Ignore the pain and workout.
What helps me is having someone, anyone around, to distract me from myself.
but I'm not sure "always" is the right answer ... always.
I do agree that a lack of physical exercise can cause its own type of pain that counterintuitively can be relieved with movement, or the best thing after a long run is a brisk jog the next day, but if I severly sprain an ankle, maybe it's best to just rest that ankle for a while.
The job was to help with building a hotel during a sweltering hot summer in Georgia. I'd be soaked in sweat before noon. We spent all day carrying heavy pieces of drywall up and down rickety staircases that somehow never collapsed, injuring our fingers, stepping on rusty nails, walking through rooms full of brightly colored dust and gas with no masks on, etc. I felt like I'd cut into my lifespan after just a few days. My whole body hurt by the time I got home, and I was so exhausted I couldn't do anything else.
Construction work can be simple, sure. But it's not easy.
When I was a removal man, one guy had to come back to work earlier than recommended after open heart surgery as they only got the UK statutory sick pay which was fuck all. We were taking a sofa out of a building over a first floor balcony when the sofa slipped and banged him right in the sternum. I can still remember the scream of pain he made :-(
The only problem is that I now have to wear shorts to work or I get excessively sweaty during the day, so it may not be feasible in less permissive work cultures.
When waiting for the computer forces us to idle, most of us try to fill the void with attempted multitasking. Be it half-assing something productive or trying to grab some instant gratification from our favorite distractions, it doesn't matter, it throws us or our the flow. This is why faster compilers raise productivity by much more than the directly saved man-minutes.
Now what if we could actively speed up the build? (or whatever else we are waiting for?)
Imagine a system that throttled down a bit during "unattended" builds (developer staring at hacker news would count as "unattended"), and only opened up fully when the user does "the compile thing", similar to your idea of carrying a medicine ball for deployments. It could be something hardly physical as repeatedly (impatiently!) tapping a button, but it would feel much better with a more physical activity.
What I envision is a big, satisfying crank. The Compiler Crank. With a subtle sound (or haptic) effect that stops when the build is done, bonus points for force feedback via modulating the resistance according to occupied cores.
It's not intended as a fitness device, just something to keep you occupied with something that does not cause the dreaded context switch, and does not promise occasional gratification (never ever try filling those gaps with Solitaire!).
Whatever productivity it would waste during hn-induced "unattended" builds, I think it could make up tenfold by maintaining high engagement whenever engagement is sufficiently high to actually use the device.
Just drink a lot of coffee so that you're forced to get up and go to the bathroom every 20 - 30 minutes. (Or mint tea, if you want the same effect without the caffeine.) As a bonus it will also prevent Parkinson's.
It would probably be pretty bad for me if I had milk or sugar, but luckily I like just plain black tea.
“No matter how they ran the numbers, if people thought they were “a lot less active” than their peers, this was associated with a statistically significant higher risk of death: at least 18% when compared to the general population (those whose data were not included), and up to 71% higher when compared to people who thought they were “more active.” Again, this is regardless of actual physical activity or other health risk factors (smoking, being overweight, etc.).”
This was -after- controlling for actual fitness (eg. BMI). That doesn’t mean “perception matters more than BMI,” it means “perception matters a lot in explaining the variance that remains after removing all the variability explained by actual fitness.”
The second study wasn’t just about “activity perception.” It came with a positive message from authority figures, and offered an additional validation of an otherwise low-prestige job. Both of these things might contribute to a motivation-driven short term effect that has nothing at all to do with long term self-perception not long term mortality.
Knee-jerk, hobby-horse-compliant hypothesis: reduced levels of perceived activity are a symptom of below-average/impaired interoception [1], and effects of that deficit (less efficient homeostatic feedback, inability to recognize progressive injury and illness in its early stages) are responsible for the increased mortality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoception
> Interoception is contemporarily defined as the sense of the internal state of the body. It encompasses the brain’s process of integrating signals relayed from the body into specific subregions—like the brainstem, thalamus, insula, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex—allowing for a nuanced representation of the physiological state of the body. This is important for maintaining homeostatic conditions in the body and, potentially, aiding in self-awareness.
It effects more than motivation. Take stress for example. Under stress - e.g., "am I fit enough?" perhaps? - the body releases cortisol. To the best of my knowledge, cortisol has been linked to weight gain. Stress effect sleep, which has system-wide implications. Etc.
The mind is the body and the body is the mind. The Western separation of the two is a myth that should be considered irrelevant at this point.
Our current population is only 347 million and the birthrate is about 1.25%. Running a total for the last 20 years or so I can't get more than 300 million adults or so.
Any math folks that want to analyze the number of unique adults entering/leaving the US from 1990 to 2011?
That is to say, there are so many cases of thoughts seeming to affect reality that are difficult or impossible to explain with existing science. Those who do not accept such possibilities naturally do not see proof of them, and those who do accept those possibilities may see them or even perhaps imagine that they see them when there may be a simpler explanation.
I find it ironic that some rabidly religious people cannot accept any explanation for events other than what their book(s) tells them, while at the same time strictly "scientific" people likewise behave the same, but using different books. Neither group sees their mirror image in the other...
Rather, science has explained many of these cases already.
Humans are prone to confirmation biases, are really bad at probability, and have quite faulty memories.
Those facts combined result in phenomenon that exist outside science because any time science sheds light upon them, it turns out that it is a construct of the human brain unrelated to reality.
> strictly "scientific" people likewise behave the same, but using different books
Scientific people do not hold on to books with no evidence and accept challenge. Science is more about the methodology and reasoning than about the current conclusions. If a scientist is ignoring something counter to their books, it's because the books have provided more scientific evidence than the challenging opinion.
There's a massive difference here, and simplifying science down to "it's like religion, but the bible is other scientist's books" is neither helpful nor accurate.
But regarding science and possibilities, how often in history had science said somethingwas not possible or real, and by rules of science at that time they were correct, but later with more understanding science began to allow the observed thing to be "real".
Science, its definitions and rules, are ever changing and advancing. Thus it is fair to say that at any given time we are dumber than we will be in the future.
Researchers had a different measure of fitness.
If the researcher's measurements are less predictive than people's estimates, one possible reason is that there's some powerful mental effect going on.
However, a more parsimonious interpretation might be that self-perceived fitness was a better measurement than the one the researchers came up with. This isn't completely unreasonable because the subjects have access to more information about their own health than do the researchers.
Thems some odd numbers
There's a tribe in Africa that comes to mind. They studied them, because they don't eat that much and they do a ton of activity. It turns out, when they run, they just burn fewer calories than most people. So, intake, calories burned, overall health, it all seems to not follow a hard and fast rule, apart from the intention of the mind.
Ignore politics for a second, the amount of time he spent on his feet and the amount of energy it must have required during the campaign, and how Trump's doctors say he's really healthy(assuming you believe them), but his diet looks pretty bad, but you know in his head, he's saying, "I'm the healthiest, I'm so healthy, my health is great, it's the best".
Take-away from article? "I'm so healthy, I'm the healthiest, my health is huge, it's the best."
You can’t really quantify fitness, there are too many subtypes (running? swimming? weightlifting?) This study used blood pressure and weight (among others) but those can vary wildly based on genetics and diet, I’m not sure they’re reliable indicators.
The point of the article (as I understand it) is that positive thinking can influence your health. Fine. But let’s not get carried away: you’re not going to roll out of bed and complete an Ironman without training just because you think you can.
EDIT: Mods have updated the title to better reflect the first underlying study (which focuses on mortality, not fitness).
But 1) even with the focus on mortality, it's still hard to correlate PMA and mortality and not control for diet, exercise, history, genetics, etc. and 2) if PMA doesn't correlate w/fitness, it's hard to see how it can make you live longer (i.e., can you be morbidly obese and positive and live longer than an athlete with a bad mental attitude?)
PMA is good. But I'm having a hard time believing you're going to live longer -- seems like there are 50 other factors that are more important.
But even for that study, I'm a little skeptical of their results. There are so many factors that figure into mortality, it's hard to believe a positive attitude can really be singled out as significant.
Diet? Age? Exercise level? Family history? Weight? Where does positive thinking sit on this list?
Whether you're using it as a proxy for fitness or mortality I think it's a questionable correlation, IMHO.
Should be reliable enough
You can't claim to be exactly fit if your pressure is 180/120 or if your BMI is high (unless you're obviously an exception - and most of those that complain about BMI aren't)
10 years ago I was playing competitive rugby, basketball and training for the former 3 times a week and was genuinely very fit. Now, I've got a decent amount of fat on me and am no-where near as healthy as I ought to be. Yet my weight and height haven't changed, so neither has my BMI. Nonetheless, I've lost a reasonable amount of muscle and instead put on a lot of fat.
On the other hand, my blood pressure definitely has got worse.
For starters, it can't distinguish between muscle and fat. So anyone muscular is obese per BMI.
More: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bmi-is-a-terrible-measu...
And that's why I said
> unless you're obviously an exception
Most of the time complaining about BMI is just an excuse for overweight individuals
If needed body fat can be assessed separately.
The formula is kept simple `weight / height^2` to help 19th century doctors. A more accurate growth rate for healthy weight is something like `weight / heigth^2.5` [1]
This oversimplification causes standard BMI treshholds to underestimate obesity for short people (<1.6m), and overestimate obesity for tall people (>1.8m).
The linked article talks quite a bit about waist fat being explicitly bad. That's an interesting measure for me (the waist/hip ratio) and as someone who's currently hovering around a BMI of 26 (and is average fitness), I plan on making that waist/hip measurement when I get home tonight and seeing how measure relative to their research.
I've been planning to start a bit of a weight loss program (primarily food focused with maybe a 10-20% exercise increase) and if there's specific concerns related to waist fat then I'll do some more research on how to address that.
The number of people with a BMI over 30 who aren't obese is extremely small and they're very easy to spot. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lee Haney won Mr Olympia with BMIs of around 30. Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman had off-season BMIs of over 40, but they were the most muscular men in recorded history.
IMO, "BMI is meaningless" is the new "I'm just big boned". The select group of people who really are lean at >30 BMI know that they're a healthy weight, while a much larger group of people are simply using the imperfection of BMI as a means to delude themselves. I'm happy to be corrected, but I haven't heard of a single incident of someone being incorrectly categorised as obese and advised to lose weight by a medical professional simply because of their BMI.
My point is, there is no one universal definition of fitness.
The most reliable measure I've heard of is belly fat, which you can measure with a calipers. But you can't wish away belly fat with positive thinking, so I think the writers of this article are taking this study a little too far, IMO.
The article seems to be mixing up "fitness" and "chance of death", which, while they are related, are probably not as directly correlated as they seem to be in the article.
But I also am skeptical of the underlying studies. So many factors in mortality rate I'm having a hard time believing they were able to control for all of those (weight, age, diet, exercise, family history, etc) and isolate "positive thinking."
Sounds like a myth people believe about weight lifters.
At the high level I think of fitness as the combination of: Speed, Strength, Power, Endurance, Flexibility, and Balance.
Then athleticism would include all of the fitness indicators plus some sport-specific technique and skill (or proprioception).
The point that the mental state of mind has some impact on fitness is important though. First, it makes sense if you think about it because we know mental stress definitely causes unhealthy physical states.
Second, a healthy mental state leads to working out which leads to more fitness and healthier mental state, etc... It's a healthy cycle that is all connected, and for many people that first healthy mental state is the hardest part to change.
But I think the authors of this article, who cite a previous study got a little carried away. They cite a paper where researchers measured cleaning ladies after 4 weeks? You're not going from zero to hero in 4 weeks.
How they ate over that period probably had a far larger effect on their overall health than mental positivity.
I don't think the study actually supports this; more likely mental state impacts stress hormone levels which change blood pressure, heart rate, and immune system activity. That is not the same as physical fitness.
In the beginning I have grand plans of finishing near the peak of the Gaussian distribution of my age group. After 10km I am cursing myself for not training more. After 20km I am just focusing on finishing, and after 30km on not dying.
I have to ask, by whose standard?