“ Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. ” - Gandhi

This section links to resources for exercise and for using light therapy.  Exercise is an absolutely key component of what this website is primarily about - achieving improvements in our stress, health and wellbeing.  Try, for example, clicking on this exercise tag to see a series of relevant blog posts.  The gains from exercising more are so huge that they have major implications for government health budgets - unfit populations get sicker and cost much more to look after.  It's no surprise then to find that there are many excellent, nationally developed, internet sites giving high quality exercise information.   

There are a series of interesting recent research studies here highlighting the drastic reduction in physical exercise taken by young people as they move into their teenage years, the fascinating pro

Here are some articles - mostly published in May - that I found particularly interesting: 

I described the work of UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in an

exercise

guidelines

lifestyle

occupational health

research

In an earlier post (January 3, 08), I looked at how common sense isn’t common, at least for healthy behaviours. Only about 3% of the population are ticking all the right boxes for non-smoking, alcohol use, exercise, weight and diet. This is interesting and maybe surprising, but does it really matter much?

Common sense isn’t common, at least with healthy behaviours. The vast majority of us know that we should eat sensibly, be a reasonable weight, exercise regularly, not abuse alcohol, and avoid smoking. Do you know what percentage of people actually follow all this obvious advice? A survey (Reeves and Rafferty 2005) of over 153,000 US adults in 2000 found that only 3% ticked all four boxes when asked if they didn’t smoke, were a healthy weight (body mass index, calculated as weight in kilograms divided by square of height in meters, 18.5 to 25.0), consumed 5 or more portions of fruit and vegetables daily, and exercised in leisure time for at least 30 minutes, 5 or more times per week (this includes brisk walking).