Part 2: Breaking Free from “Unhappiness Habits” with Ashish Kothari

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Hi dear friends. Welcome to the second episode in the special series that I'm doing on how we have made unhappiness a habit. In these series, I'll be highlighting a series of habits that we have created over the years that are resulting in us struggling with stress, anxiety, well being in general, a lack of satisfaction and happiness. So let's start with the first one in this episode which is around sitting.

Sitting is the new smoking, as the.

Mayo Clinic reminds ourselves. As early humans, we were always on the move. Hunting, gathering, farming, or simply walking long distances.

Even all the way till the 20th century with industrial revolution, there were still most of the jobs were pretty physical.

Required us to move, whether it was farming, amongst others. But in particular, if you look at.

How our world has changed and how.

Technology has changed our lives, quite dramatic shifts in our movement every day. You know, we've gone from times where we on average only sat down three hours a day other than when we were sleeping, to now where an average American would sit for six and a half to eight hours daily. Think about that. Eight hours daily. Now, if you are like any of my former consultant friends, right, I spent a lot of time in consulting, as.

Some of you who've been listening to this podcast.

Now that number is actually much higher because, you know, we work long hours, sometimes 8, 10, 12. All of that was sitting. But it wasn't just that. Think about all the time we spend flying from our homes to our offices, sitting in taxis, commuting from hotels to client sites and back going out to celebrate in team dinners. That number is much, much higher. It might even be 12, 16 hours.

That we are actually spending sitting.

And a big chunk of that actually is every week. Even in my case, you know, I used to spend close to 16 hours just on planes. But now think about what that is like. You're literally sitting on a chair. If you're an economy straight up, it's.

Almost like sitting in a straight jacket constraint.

Our bodies aren't designed for that. And I know personally, I paid a huge price and I had a story, oh, I'm just not that flexible. In fact, to tell you the truth, in my 40s, my flexibility, my ability to touch my toes, turn around was worse than my mother, who was in our 70s. So that's the toll we pay on our physical bodies. That was just on flexibility. Now we know from the research why sitting is actually so bad for us, how we have made ourselves into, you know, we are creating our core source of so many of our ailments we suffer from. There are several health risks we know of. We get high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol levels, which then result in heart disease, higher insulin levels, which result in diabetes. We know that those who don't move suffer from higher depression and anxiety. In fact, the reason the Mayo Clinic called sitting the new smoking is because those who sit for eight hours or more have almost the same level of risk as obesity or smoking. Now imagine if you are also overweight and sleeping less. Think about the effects of what we are doing. We are spending all our time working, hustling for wealth or worth or meaning. But we are paying a huge price.

That'S going to come back in our.

Later years in form of all these chronic ailments that we are going to suffer with. To tell you how fast you know and how extreme the effects of sitting are on our body, we know that our metabolism, even with 20 minutes of sitting, slows down. Our bodies know that we are in.

This slow, slower metabolism, relaxed state.

So our literally our metabolic rates drop by 10, 12% within 20 minutes of sitting. Our ability of the body, as a result, to break down fat goes down. It's a really big issue in our lives today. Now we know also on the contrary. So we know we've studied ill effects of sitting, but we also know both from academic research as well as research, which I would call more pop culture research, done in recent years around the effects from those who do move. So the first one is the research.

That was actually done at Cambridge that.

Shows that those who move are more happier. They tend to be happier. I also would be remiss to Ms. To explain the research done as part of the Blue Zone. So if you haven't seen this documentary on Netflix, I would watch it. It just came out. There was an original book by Dan Buettner that he published way earlier. For those who don't know what the blue zones are, Blue Zones are these areas in the world where people live significantly longer. There are places like Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Nicoya region in the Costa Rica, Icaria in Grise, and Loma Linda right here in California. And when Dan studied the habits of these people, it wasn't that they exercised more, but they just moved more as part of their day to day life. They had a lot of continuous moderate intensity exercises. You know, the places they lived with tended to be hillier. In some cases, they walked a lot up and down mountains, up and down streets. They did a lot of labor intensive things. You know, they farm, they garden. So like even I saw women in their late 70s and 80s, you know, sitting down, squatting to take things out of the ground. I can tell you I'm 50 and I have a hard time squatting. Definitely not for that long periods because, you know, that's the price we've paid. That's the price we've paid from our years of sedentary life and sitting that I'm now keenly aware, that I wasn't aware in my 20s and 30s and 40s. In fact, what was also surprising for me was this research that was done at a medical institute that showed that if you sit for long periods of time and they were looking at those people who work out versus don't work out, moderating exercise in the mornings. And what they found was when we compared those who sat and did moderate exercise versus those who moved and did moderate exercise, sitting was negating the effects of exercise. So if we think just because we work out 30, 45 minutes in the morning, three, four times a day, three, four times a week, it's going to offset the effects of sitting.

It's not going to.

So how do we actually overcome this? How do we recognizing this, shift our day to day habits in order to introduce more movement? Now, every one of you is familiar at this point. I don't rarely come across people who don't know the dictate or the actual rule of thumb that says walk 10,000 steps or more. But how do you incorporate that in your day to day life? Even though people know it, people don't practice it. And that's kind of a core part of our mission at Happiness Squad. And My mission is helping more people.

Go from knowing to doing.

And in helping them do that myself. There are many days I might only get 5,000, 6,000 steps, but those days are becoming smaller and smaller and more and more of my days have higher number of steps. And if I don't get higher number of steps, at least more time that I spend standing rather than sitting. So here are five things that I would recommend. Number one, implement standing breaks. As I mentioned, even after 20 minutes of sitting, the effects of sitting in terms of lower metabolism start to show up. So stand every 30 minutes. If you can't every hour and a.

Half to two hours, take a short break, go out for a walk.

In fact, you can combine a really powerful effect of a walk in terms of your insulin resistance and your ability of the body to digest glucose, which is after your lunch, go for a 10 to 15 minute walk. There was a 2023 study by Columbia that showed that if you engaged it a light activity, even for just five minutes, you almost had a 60% reduction in blood sugar spikes after a meal. So that's a really big deal. I think even 10, 15 minutes. Forget about the fact that you're actually combining two other things with that, which is one, if you're going out for a walk, you're taking the benefit of sunlight. And second, if you so happen to walk out and you have some trees or a park or nature around where you work, you're combining the benefits of.

Nature, which I'll talk about shortly.

Three, invest in a standing desk. You know, I have one that can stand up, that I can just raise up and down. Many offices are investing in it. If you don't have an office that invests in a standing desk, you can literally buy something for $250 on Amazon, which is a little stand that you can raise up and down. So there is no reason why we can't incorporate more standing. Fourth, if possible, make some of your meetings into walking meetings. Moving meetings, take your team out. You'll notice that the creativity goes up as people walk outside.

Are more in natural surroundings, walking and talking.

My son always, you know, imitates me.

Most of my calls are done walking and pacing up and down.

So just walk around. We spend so much of our times on phones. Every time you get a phone call, remind yourself to stand up and take the call. Walking up. Also, when looking at, rather than solving for convenience, which we all have gotten used to, you see our brains and our bodies, we want to do the minimum effort because we have so much going on, go For a little bit more effort. So for example, maybe a couple of days a week, bike or take the bus to work. Or if you are taking your car, park a little bit further. You know, don't park at the closest parking spot, maybe park a little bit further. If you have a multi rise parking.

Garage, park at the top most and.

Walk down, don't take the elevator down. So small little hacks that we can create to introduce more movement. If you are working as a team, this is something that is not new. There's many people who are doing it. Have a little movement competition with your team. Who has the maximum number of steps. You know, I did this with a client I was working with in a factory floor. It was quite amazing. The effects of that and a good fun, good competitive fun. How it encourages people, how it motivates people, how it inspires people to incorporate something that we know is so good for ourselves. So that's the first habit that I invite you to break.

Stop sitting, start moving.

Let's move to the second habit that we have created that is again wrecking havoc on our physical well being, our mental well being, our emotional well being. And that is the habit of sleeping.

Less than six or seven hours a day.

By the way, it's not just the quantity of sleep, but also the quality of sleep. Not only are not we sleeping enough, but our quality of sleep is, is terrible. Dear friends, we've gone from ancient times where we slept 10 hours a night to about nine hours in the 18th century, to eight hours in the 19th century, to today. Most Americans on average, on average, are sleeping 6.8 hours per night. When we know from all the research done by leading researchers like Matthew Walker and others that Most Americans need seven to nine hours of sleep. Most of us need seven to nine hours of sleep. 40% of us are sleeping less than.

Seven hours a night.

And we are paying huge amounts of cost for that habit of not sleeping enough and not sleeping at a high level of quality. We are paying a high price in terms of heart disease. We are paying a hard price in.

Terms of weaker immune systems.

We are paying a hard price on the effect of not enough sleep on obesity. In fact, just after four days of six hours or less of sleep, four days of six hours or less of sleep to all my consulting friends or accounting friends or those who work in investment banking or these high intensity roles, after four days of six hours or less of sleep, our insulin levels rise and we start craving food with high.

Glucose and high fat.

We literally are craving junk fruit and Then we are trying to fight it.

And not eat it.

No surprise when I in team rooms, you know, often the snacks you always went out for were the chips. I myself was addicted to it or sugar. So we pay a high price physically, as I mentioned, you know, in terms of weaker immune systems, heart disease, we.

Also pay a high price mentally.

Do you notice a level increase in incivility in workplaces? What happened? Can it be linked to fact that people are sleeping less and less?

When we sleep less, we tend to.

Be more irritable, we tend to be more anxious, we tend to be more stressed and that is how we show up. We are quick to lose temper with colleagues, we are quick to lose temple with families. We are also feeling incredibly high levels of stress.

Cognitively, we pay a high price too, our performance decline.

In fact, research done by Matthew Walker.

Showed that after 10 days of seven hours or less, 10 days of seven hours or less,.

We are operating at the same level of cognitive performance.

And if you went 24 hours without sleep, think about that. 10 days of 7 hours or less sleep puts you at the same level of performance as 24 hours without sleep. But because the decline is gradual, we just don't notice it.

You know, I experienced it firsthand in many teams in my earlier years where we worked long, long, long hours late in the night. Now, most of our clients were paying for our ability to think, not our ability to move mountains with our bodies. And when you wake up early morning on Monday at a 4am or a.

5Am to go to the airport and you take a flight and you land up fueled by caffeine, around 9, 10, 11 or 12, and then you work that night and then you go out, you don't get enough sleep. I could physically see, I could literally see with every day how it took.

Longer to get things done, how the creativity of the teams were down because people are working longer and longer hours, weren't sleeping enough during the week. But more importantly, because of late night.

Caffeines and fueling up with lattes or triple shot espressos at 4pm Because I'm going to have to work till 12.

We are literally taking away from our ability to think creatively.

We feel more tired, we have a mental fog that we are operating in. It also results in much higher level of errors that we make. So it's not just the price on creativity and productivity, things taking longer, our error rates go up. In fact, almost every year, close to 6,000 accidents, road accidents, are attributed to people feeling too tired. The most famous and well known story around this and how this can cause such a big issue is Arianna Huffington's where she literally collapsed. She fell down because of not enough sleep and tiredness and she wrote the book the Sleep Revolution and created Thrive Global. I'm a huge fan of her and our work, but we are still not making enough progress. Dear friends, when it comes to individually or as companies, in making sure that our employees are getting enough sleep.

We would never board a plane. We would never board a plane where.

We knew the pilot hadn't had enough rest. But we show up at work all the time. We work in factories where people are showing up with not enough sleep. We are riding buses where people are showing up with not enough sleep. We are seeing doctors who are suffering from high burnout, oftentimes driven by the.

Amount of workload, but also because of.

Not enough sleep, making life and death decisions. This is a massive issue in our current world that we've created foreign.

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Now back to the episode. Now before we can address it, we we have to actually understand what is causing this.

Of course it is.

We are trying to do too much and busyness that we are putting into our lives, constantly feeling not enough, hustling for worth. But there are several other things that are fundamentally affecting the quality of sleep that we are giving. It's not just about the quantity, it's about quality. So let me highlight some Gone are the days when we woke up to the natural sunlight, sun going up and sun going down. Natural circadian rhythms. We now spend so much of our time indoors in artificial light.

On top of that, because of bad.

Habits that we've picked up because of our addiction to tv, our screens, our phones.

I know of so many who even.

5, 10, 15 minutes before they're going to bed are watching something on their email, on their screens, watch or they're watching tv. There's so much mental activity our brains are just not getting Enough time decompress. All that blue light also affects the melatonin production, the natural chemicals that our brain produces to put us to sleep. We further affect the melatonin production and the natural ability of our body to be able to recover and recharge through our caffeine habits that we've put together.

Look, I still remember.

It's not that long ago that we.

Used to do team runs. 3 o', clock, 4 o'. Clock. Hey, who wants a caffeine run?

Who wants a Starbucks run? I'm sure others go to their cafeteria and get themselves a coffee. Notice if you do that and combine that with the fact that caffeine has as six hour half life depending on our unique bodies, four to eight hours is kind of the range. But six hours is the agreed average.

What that means is if you have.

Coffee at 4 o', clock, at 10 o' clock in the night when you're getting ready to sleep, half of that caffeine is still running through our body. And that caffeine, those molecules literally get in the way of of melatonin attaching to the r neural pathways that stimulate sleep.

So if we say, hey, I don't feel that sleepy.

Just imagine, is it because you're having caffeine that late that you're convincing yourself that you don't need enough sleep and you sleep later and later? Because that's not true.

Maybe it is because of the amount.

Of caffeine that we are now drinking. The fourth is just irregular sleep schedules. You know, we just have so much. Especially now when we are working in global companies. There's a call in the morning, there's a call in the night. I'm meeting with Asia Pacific now, now.

I'm meeting with Europe.

And many people feel they have to be on constantly.

But what we are doing, when we.

Are doing that is some days we're waking early, some days we're sleeping late. We have irregular sleep rhythms. If on top of that you travel around for your job because of all the different time zones, you're further interrupting natural circadian rhythms of our bodies. I have, I have to tell you this. For the longest time I convinced myself and everybody else that I didn't have a time zone.

You see, I could always fall asleep.

Whether when I went from Colorado and Mountain time to east coast and then the same week went from east coast to the west coast and then I came back. Oh yeah, I can sleep anytime. I don't have a time zone. In Covid when we stopped and I spent more time in one Zone after six to nine months as I took my first flight. Oh yeah, I have a circadian rhythm. I had just convinced myself because when I went to sleep, I fell asleep out of exhaustion or because we were out and we had a dinner and we had alcohol. It wasn't that I didn't have a time zone.

It wasn't that I was not right.

Time zones didn't apply to me. It was that my body literally didn't know where I was and when I was sleeping. Yes, I was falling asleep.

But I also remember so vividly that.

When I wake up, I never woke up fresh. So if you wake up and you don't wake up fresh, or if you need an alarm clock to wake up versus naturally wake up. Look at your sleep. Look at what's getting in the way of your sleep. So those four things you know, light, artificial light, blue light from screens, caffeine, irregular sleep schedules, travel, all of those are some things that we've just integrated into our lives today. It doesn't have to be that way, dear friends.

So here are five recommendations I would.

Offer to improve your sleep quality and quantity. Number one, try as much as possible to stick to a sleep schedule. Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even on weekends. Trust me, it'll make a big difference. Second, see if you can cut out or avoid caffeine after noon. Worst case, 2pm you will notice instead of caffeine, maybe do movement, go for a walk, go out in the sun. Find some other ways. There's a beautiful breathing technique in Pranayama that's called Bhastrika.

You can look it up.

B H A S T R I K A that is a natural way to get more energy into our body through more aggressive, vigorous breathing. There are different ways in which we can fuel up. Caffeine isn't the only one when we feel the lethargy sticking in.

Third, try, if possible, to limit screen.

Time at least one hour before you go to bed. Read instead. Fourth, see if you can optimize your sleep environment. Darker curtains, cooler temperatures can all make a big difference in our body's ability to go to sleep. And friends, if despite all that, you are struggling to fall asleep, don't pick up the phone or turn the light. Instead, I invite you to practice a body scan, focusing on your breath and checking in all the way from the top of your head, slowly through your body at each level, noticing your ears, your eyes, your nose, your lips, your shoulders, your chest, your belly, your arms, your hands, your Thighs, your calves, your knees, your feet, feeling each toe and then on the way back, inviting them to relax and go to sleep. And go all the way up and notice how the effect that has on you to relax and hopefully within the first scan, you go to sleep.

So that's habit number two for this.

Episode that I would highlight. Break the habit of not sleeping enough and not sleeping deeply enough. We already covered the habit of sitting.

So here's the last one, friends, which.

Is our disconnection from nature. We have made a habit of spending so much time inside versus spending time outside. And again, we're paying a huge price for it. Today we spend more than 90% of our times indoors, often in front of screens for 10 plus hours a day. Think about how contrasting that is even from 100 years ago, forget about 200, 300 or 500 years ago, how contrasting that is. On top of that, in cities where we are living, which are getting more and more crowded, we are getting rid of natural spaces around us, we're literally beating nature out of our environment and paying a huge price for it. We're paying the price in forms of increased stress and anxiety, higher levels of depression and irritability. In fact, we have this artificial hum. If you're living in some of the big cities, like New York or Chicago or la, London, the cities have a hum, I feel it every time now, actually go and land in one of these cities. And that vibration, that energy, that artificial energy in which we are living is in such a sharp contrast to the natural rhythms of nature. Natural rhythms that are proven to increase happiness, lower our levels of stress. There was a recent study done in Denmark that found that children who have less exposure to green spaces had a 55%, 55% higher chance of developing mental health challenges later. Look, we all experience it ourselves, you know, notice if your attention, your ability to manage stress, your mood, your anxiety levels are higher and how that might be related to actually disconnection from nature and spending more time inside our boxes in regulated environments and temperatures.

I invite you to consider when was.

The last time you'd left all your devices and truly spend time in a natural setting? Maybe in a local park, in a forest preserve, in a natural. In a national park. When we spend time in nature, we get so many benefits. The first country to study the effects of this more consciously of urban settings and the effects it was having and created a practice was Japan in the 80s. They created a practice called shinrin yoku, or forest breathing. And what they found was that it had massive effects on mental, physical, social, emotional well being of those who spend time in nature.

By the way, you don't have to.

Spend a lot of time, even 10 minutes, as per a study recently done at Cornell in natural settings is shown to increase our happiness and lower the effects on mental and physical stress by spending time in nature.

Now, one of the things that I.

Really got intrigued by as I delved more into this topic, I read a book called the Inner lives of Trees was how trees and natural settings, how all of these plants naturally give away chemicals to ward off insects and other things that get in the way of the forest's well being. When we spend time walking through nature, we inhale those phytonocytes which are found to increase the activity of our own immune cells that fight off infections. So we can use nature as a core part of our healing. When we spend time in nature, our own energy levels, our own vibrations sink in with the lower, slower vibrational energies of nature. We can benefit from that. In fact, I've firsthand witnessed and seen the benefits of that. And I've done work with teams in nature, together with companies like Trail Heaven who do nature retreats four or five days with leadership teams. I have seen the benefits when we use nature to do so much of the healing work in helping down regulate nervous systems, helping shift people from fear and scarcity, and feeling like there is not enough time, there's not enough space to the natural rhythms. If you go spend time in nature and just really tune, you start to notice that these trees, these mountains, these streams, the grass, they've been around forever. We are reminded of the timeless nature, timeless nature of everything around us and how small our lives are in terms of the time we occupy. So if you look at how disconnected we have become, my invitation is to re engage and connect deeper. So how do we do that? How do we do that if you're in urban cities? How we do that if we have busy lives? You know, we can start to take so many tiny steps and you know, I'm a big believer of tiny, small steps that we can start to take into our lives, not massive big changes. I'm not inviting you to leave your jobs and go to a hut or move away from big cities to more natural settings. I know that's not practical for so many of us, but here are some ways that you can start no matter where you are, no matter what setting you work in. One is let's start to include small little breaks in our day. 10 minutes at a time, step outside, be in the sunlight, if your office facility has a park around, that's great. There are always parks in big cities we can access. But even if you can't do that, get nature inside. Invest in getting a small green plant. Put it next to your home office or at your desk. That itself will have a massive benefit for you. Second, invest in activities together, both with your team or with your family, that include nature.

It might be gardening, it might be.

Every weekend going on a hike like we do as a family, or even simply sitting in the park disconnected from technology.

You could be a huge advocate for.

Promoting green spaces in your local communities. You can be a huge advocate for bringing in more plants into your office environments, which are increasingly becoming sterile. Be that voice. Be that voice of change, friends. The science is there. And then finally, see if you can spend time, at least once a quarter, really surrounding yourself, escaping away, exploring the beautiful national parks or regional parks that are around. Go spend time, spend some meaningful time in nature with your family and use that moment, that opportunity to disconnect from devices, to connect more deeply with each other and connect more deeply with this beautiful energy and space that's all around us.

So three tips, dear friends, three benefits.

For you from three habits that we talked about in this particular episode of how we've made unhappiness a habit and how we can make truly happiness our competitive edge by breaking those habits and building new ones. Move more rather than sit more. Spend more time outside in nature rather than spend time indoors and increase your quality of sleep, both the quantity and quality to seven to nine hours versus feeling that we don't need to sleep as much. If you do these three things, you will start to notice a meaningful shift in your levels of stress, anxiety, dissatisfaction and instead you will start to feel happier, healthier, and feel a deeper connection to those around you. Take care and have a great day.

That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend.

Support and spread positivity.

Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.