中午散步對辦公室久坐者的好處

The Benefits of a Lunch Hour Walk

中午散步對辦公室久坐者的好處

To combat afternoon slumps in enthusiasm and focus, take a walk during the lunch hour.

為了避免一到下午熱情和注意力出現(xiàn)驟減，你可以在午餐時間散散步。

A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.

一項新研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，甚至連最溫和的午餐時段漫步也能馬上明顯振奮情緒，提高工作中的抗壓能力。

It is not news, of course, that walking is healthy and that people who walk or otherwise exercise regularly tend to be more calm, alert and happy than people who are inactive.

當然，這些都不是新聞：散步有益健康，經(jīng)常散步或進行其他運動的人通常比不運動的人更平靜、更敏銳、更快樂。

But many past studies of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on somewhat long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of exercise change people emotionally.

但是，過去的很多關(guān)于散步和其他鍛煉對心情影響的研究都重點關(guān)注長期、漸變的結(jié)果，觀察的是幾周或幾個月的鍛煉對人們情緒的影響。

Fewer studies have examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in people’s moods, depending on whether they exercise, and even fewer have focused on these effects while people are at work, even though most of us spend a majority of our waking hours in an office.

很少有研究調(diào)查鍛煉對心情更突然的影響，比如按天或按小時記錄的變化，更少有研究關(guān)注它對工作的影響，盡管我們大多數(shù)人醒著時的大部分時間是在辦公室里。

So, for the new study, which was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports this month, researchers at the University of Birmingham and other universities began by recruiting sedentary office workers at the university.

所以，在本月《斯堪的納維亞醫(yī)學科學雜志》(Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science)發(fā)表的一項新研究中，伯明翰大學和其他幾所大學的研究員們開始招募大學辦公室里久坐的工作人員。

Potential volunteers were told that they would need to be available to walk for 30 minutes during their usual lunch hour three times a week.

他們告訴可能參與的志愿者，需要在午餐時間散步30分鐘，每周至少三次。

Most of the resulting 56 volunteers were middle-aged women. It can be difficult to attract men to join walking programs, said Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani, the study’s lead author and now a professor of exercise science at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Walking may not strike some men as strenuous enough to bother with, she said. But she and her colleagues did attract four sedentary middle-aged men to the experiment.

最終參與的56名志愿者大多是中年女性。這項研究的主要作者、現(xiàn)澳大利亞珀斯柯廷大學鍛煉科學教授塞西莉·瑟格森-圖瑪尼(Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani)說，吸引男士參加散步項目比較難以實現(xiàn)。她說，有些男士可能覺得散步的運動強度不夠，不值得參與。不過她和同事們還是吸引了四名久坐的中年男士參與實驗。

The volunteers completed a series of baseline health and fitness and mood tests at the outset of the experiment, revealing that they all were out of shape but otherwise generally healthy physically and emotionally.

實驗開始時，志愿者們完成了一系列基礎(chǔ)健康和情緒測試，發(fā)現(xiàn)他們身材走形，但是身體和情緒基本健康。

Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani and her colleagues then randomly divided the volunteers into two groups, one of which was to begin a simple, 10-week walking program right away, while the other group would wait and start their walking program 10 weeks later, serving, in the meantime, as a control group.

然后，瑟格森-圖瑪尼博士和同事們隨機把志愿者分成兩組，其中一組馬上開始一個簡單的為期十周的散步活動，另一組等十周后再開始散步活動，在等待期間充當對照組。

To allow them to assess people’s moods, the scientists helped their volunteers to set up a specialized app on their phones that included a list of questions about their emotions. The questions were designed to measure the volunteers’ feelings, at that moment, about stress, tension, enthusiasm, workload, motivation, physical fatigue and other issues related to how they were feeling about life and work at that immediate time.

研究者們?yōu)榱嗽u估志愿者們的心情，幫他們在手機上安裝了一個特殊的應(yīng)用程序，包括一系列關(guān)于情緒的問題。這些問題意在評估志愿者當時的感受，包括壓力、緊張、熱情、工作量、積極性、體力以及對生活和工作的即時感受。

A common problem with studies of the effect of exercise on mood, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said, is that they rely on recall. People are asked to remember hours or days after the fact how exercise made them feel. Given how fleeting and mysterious our emotions can be, recalled responses are notoriously unreliable, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said.

瑟格森-圖瑪尼博士說，關(guān)于鍛煉對心情影響的研究存在一個普遍問題——這些研究都是依靠回憶，通常是在幾小時或幾天后讓人們回憶鍛煉帶來的感受。瑟格森-圖瑪尼博士說，眾所周知，情緒易變而神秘，回憶起來的情緒反應(yīng)不可靠。

Instead, she and her colleagues wanted in-the-moment assessments from people of how they felt before and after exercise. The phone app questions provided that experience, she said, in a relatively convenient form.

而她和同事們想要的是人們在鍛煉前后的即時感受。她說，手機應(yīng)用程序中的問題能相對便捷地記錄這些感受。

Then the first group began walking. Each volunteer was allowed to walk during one of several lunchtime sessions, all of them organized by a group leader and self-paced. Slower walkers could go together, with faster ones striding ahead. There was no formal prescribed distance or intensity for the walks. The only parameter was that they last for 30 minutes, which the volunteers had said would still allow them time to eat lunch.

然后，第一組開始散步。志愿者可以在幾個午餐散步時段中任選一個。所有人都由一個小組領(lǐng)導組織，速度自定。走得慢的人可以一起走，走得快的人可以在前面大步走。沒有規(guī)定散步的距離或強度。唯一的要求是走夠30分鐘，志愿者們之前說過，這樣他們?nèi)杂袝r間吃午餐。

The groups met and walked three times a week.

這些小組每周相聚散步三次。

Each workday morning and afternoon during the first 10 weeks, the volunteers in both groups answered questions on their phones about their moods at that particular moment.

前十周，每個工作日的上午和下午，兩組志愿者都回答手機應(yīng)用程序中關(guān)于某個特定時刻心情的問題。

After 10 weeks, the second group began their walking program. The first group was allowed to continue walking or not as they chose. (Many did keep up their lunchtime walks.)

十周后，第二組開始進行散步活動。第一組的人可以自行決定是否繼續(xù)(很多人的確繼續(xù)進行午餐散步)。

Then the scientists compared all of the responses, both between groups and within each individual person. In other words, they checked to see whether the group that had walked answered questions differently in the afternoon than the group that had not, and also whether individual volunteers answered questions differently on the afternoons when they had walked compared with when they had not.

然后，研究者們比較了所有的回答，不僅是兩組之間的對比，還有個人自身的對比。換句話說，他們想知道，散步組和對照組下午對問題的回答是否相同，單個志愿者午餐散步后的下午對問題的回答是否與沒有散步后的下午相同。

The responses, as it turned out, were substantially different when people had walked. On the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably more enthusiastic, less tense, and generally more relaxed and able to cope than on afternoons when they hadn’t walked and even compared with their own moods from a morning before a walk.

結(jié)果發(fā)現(xiàn)，散步之后，人們的回答明顯不同。志愿者們說，他們明顯感覺，與午餐沒散步的下午相比，甚至與散步前的上午相比，在散步后的下午，他們更有熱情，不那么緊張，總體來說更放松，處理問題的能力更強。

Although the authors did not directly measure workplace productivity in their study, “there is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and enthusiastic at work is very important to productivity,” Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said. “So we would expect that people who walked at lunchtime would be more productive.”

雖然，這項研究的作者們沒有直接評估工作效率，但是瑟格森-圖瑪尼博士說，“現(xiàn)在有強有力的研究證據(jù)表明，在工作中感覺更積極、熱情，對提高效率十分重要，所以我們可以想見，午餐時散步的人效率更高。”