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Most 'science-backed' productivity trends are useless, but here are the ones you should try
Meditate. Doodle in an adult coloring book. Eat clean.
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It can seem like there's a new trend aimed at making you slimmer, happier, or more productive every week. Most of them claim to be backed by psychological or physiological research, but many are not.
We created this list to help you sort out which tricks might be helpful and which ones are better ignored. Take a look.
In her book "Rethinking Positive Thinking," psychologist Gabriele Oettingen proposes that while thinking optimistically sounds great on paper, it falls short in reality. People who daydream about a better world, she says, may end up merely fantasizing about a reality rather than taking concrete actions to make it happen.
One study she coauthored of women enrolled in a weight-reduction program found that those who thought more positively about their future outcomes tended to lose fewer pounds than those who thought more negatively about them.
Some studies suggest that physical orderliness — a clean, neatly organized office, for example — may be linked with some positive outcomes, like eating healthier.
A 2013 study, for example, found that when they gave a set of volunteers in two types of rooms a choice between a chocolate bar and an apple, the people in a cluttered room were more likely to choose the chocolate. Those in the neat room were more likely to choose the apple. When the same participants were given the option to give money to charity, those in the orderly room tended to give more money than those in the disorderly room.
Decades of research has failed to find any substantial evidence that the vast majority of vitamins and supplements do any significant good. Some of them might even be harming us. Several supplements have been linked with an increase in certain cancers, for example, while others have been associated with a rise in the risk of kidney stones. Still others have been tied to an overall higher risk of death from any cause.
Horoscopes are carefully worded to be highly general, such as "You will face great difficulties ahead." Any result, from getting fired from your job to getting a raise, could be seen as fitting those expectations.
Yet they remain popular, something psychologists chalk up to something called the Forer Effect, which explains why we're biased to see "personalized" results as accurate just because they seem unique tailored to fit us individually. In 1948, psychologist Bertram Forer gave his students a sham personality test but told them each "result" was personalized. When asked what they thought about the test, they estimated it was 85% accurate.
One of the problems with the #EatClean trend is that it implies that most of the foods ou there are somehow dirty or bad for you. Plus, food marketers have taken advantage of "clean" labels to argue that their trendy products, like agave or coconut oil, are superior to traditional ingredients like plain old sugar or olive oil. And that's just not true (Olive oil is higher in healthier unsaturated fats than coconut oil, for example, and agave gets broken down the exact same way as sugar in the body).
Instead, in the words of food writer Michael Pollan, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
It sounds like common sense: Eat less fat, be less fat. But in practice, the idea simply doesn't work. An 8-year trial involving almost 50,000 women, roughly half of whom went on a low-fat diet, found that those on the low-fat plan didn't lower their risk of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or heart disease. Plus, they didn't lose much weight, if any.
While there are very few studies looking at the benefits of abstaining from alcohol in the short-term, at least one showed that a dry month can be at least somewhat beneficial for some.
After successfully abstaining from alcohol for at least 30 days, a majority of people in that study continued to drink less often, even six months later. Plus, when they did drink, these people also reported having fewer drinks. Most also described having an easier time refusing alcohol and they tended to show lower dependence scores on the 10-item Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test.
A study published in February showed for the first time that when we meditate — independent of whether we're expert meditators or total newbies — the practice appears to produce measurable brain changes in two key ways.
First, it appeared to facilitate more communication between two brain regions involved in self-control and focus, and second, it seemed to lower levels of a substance called IL-6 that's been linked with stress and inflammation.
One of the most popular personality tests, the Meyers-Briggs, claims to be helpful for choosing a career by analyzing your personality. But the test relies on binary choices. According to the test, for example, you're either "introverted" or "extroverted." In reality, ery few people would qualify as simply one or the other, as Dean Burnett points out in The Guardian.
This point is hammered home by the fact that statistical studies of the Myers-Briggs show that its data follows a normal distribution — where the data falls around a central value with no bias to the left or the right, forming a balanced hill shaped curve — instead of a bimodal one, where the data are lumped around two peaks.
Several small studies on people with specific health problems, from substance abuse to cancer, suggest that drawing and music therapy can help reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. Psychologists suggest this may be a result of the fact that creative activities can help quiet the mind by encouraging us to focus.
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