Marie-Josée Shaar

Have you heard someone boast that they had worked 70 hours last week? Were you impressed or did you think the speaker was exaggerating or inefficient? Why do some take pride in proving that their work is more effortful, difficult, or even painful than that of others? This need to feel indispensable comes at the expense of health and happiness.

Usually, the difficulty resides not in understanding why we should exercise, but in finding and maintaining the motivation to get it done. If you need extra help committing to an exercise routine, here are my top 10 recommendations, based on positive psychology research, to help you overcome the challenge.

On the outside, busy seems to rhyme with happy. Busy people seem successful, needed and important. Busyness is, after all, serious business. Yet on the inside, busy is often a cousin of misery. We make it through the day, run to soccer practice, shorten our night’s sleep, survive through the week, and finish off what is left on our to-do list over the weekend. It is customary to describe our workload with words like crazy and expressions like “no time to breathe.”

After a first career in the fast-paced corporate world, Marie-Josée Shaar, MAPP 2007, founded Smarts and Stamina to promote healthy lifestyles. Like all our regular authors, she has a Master in Applied…