Just 15 minutes can change your life. Just fifteen minutes a day. That’s one quarter of one hour of your daily 24 hours. Fifteen minutes of your daily 1,440 minutes. A smidgeon over 1% of your day.
Would that be too much to ask for to potentially transform your health? To reduce your blood pressure, stress, sense of anxiety and depression, risk of viral infection and even prevent diabetes?
To believe 15 minutes can radically transform your health sounds too good to be true. And yet it isn’t. By simply committing a meager 1% of your day to an intentional activity, habit or practice can have life-changing effects.
Look, 15 minutes of anything isn’t actually going to change your life. Not a single solitary 15 minutes. But everyday for a month? For a year? For 10 years? That’s where the power of accumulation comes in. Take a basic goal like reading more. Okay, so if you pick up a book and read 15 minutes today but don’t touch that book again for the rest of the year, not much has changed. But if you read 15 minutes everyday – without fail – for an entire year you will have read 5,475 minutes or about 91 hours.
The power at play here is known as the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. This is a fascinating finding akin almost to a natural law that explains for all manners of inequalities ranging from income, business success, dating success to why in the Amazon rainforest just over 1% of the species make up about 50% of the forest.
Basically, there is potent power in the accumulation advantage. Like how 15 minutes becomes nearly five and a half thousand. The point here is that small or micro wins, actions, habits matter a lot when done consistently. That’s why one good habit often becomes many good habits, and similarly why one bad habit usually becomes many bad habits.
It is also why 15 minutes of exercise a day over a three year period was more than double as effective at preventing diabetes than prescription medication.
Okay okay, you caught me, it wasn’t 15 minutes. It was about 21 minutes. It was in fact 150 minutes a week. This 2002 study published in The New England Journal Of Medicine [1] took 3,234 non-diabetic people who were on the cusp of type-II diabetes and put them into one of three intervention groups for a follow-up period of three years. One group received standard lifestyle guidelines and the diabetes prescription drug metformin, a second group received the same lifestyle guidelines and a placebo and the third group received intensive lifestyle support to achieve the goal of doing 150 minutes of physical activity a week, of which brisk walking sufficed.
The results showed a 58% lower incidence of diabetes in the group that walked 21 minutes a day versus a 31% lower incidence in the prescription drug group. That’s essentially twice as effective despite one of the researchers, Wendy Kohrt, being initially “very disappointed” with the design of the study because she thought the “bar for exercise has been set too low”. [2] Apparently, 21 minutes a day was more powerful than big pharma.
[In the spirit of transparency, this study also demonstrated something else of profound importance – the power of lifestyle over pharmaceuticals. As much as the 150 minutes of exercise played a part, that group received significantly more lifestyle information and coaching than the other two. Which again proves the power of health coaching and what we can do for you.]
But the next two mind-blowing studies have no caveats.
On July 24th 2013 Miwa Sado dropped dead at 31. Her heart couldn’t take it anymore. The cause of death is officially recorded as karoshi, Japanese for death by overwork. She wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last. Who knows if 15 minutes of regular shinrin-yoku would have saved her life, her level of exertion was certainly extreme, but studies suggest it would have done her and millions more red lining themselves a shocking amount of good.
Shinrin-yoku is Japanese for forest bathing, which consists of nothing more than sitting or walking in natural environments, including city parks. Studies from Japan have proven that simply spending 15 minutes amongst nature will drop blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones as well as feelings of anxiety, depression and hostility. Forest bathing improved blood pressure in heart disease patients, dropped sugar level in diabetics, and increased NK cell production by 150% in those with weak immune systems. Hundreds of more studies have backed up the benefits of forest bathing, including in micro amounts like 15 minutes [3].
Despite living in urban jungles very different to the natural jungles of our evolutionary past, it only takes micro slices of time in nature to do outsized good to our physical and mental wellbeing. With one caveat, even though I know I promised no more caveats. These two following studies again prescribe a schedule shattering additional 5 minutes of time over and above 15 minutes!
Rachel Hopman, a University of Utah psychologist, produced a study with demonstrable improvements in calmness, attention and creativity by taking a 20 minute stroll through a city park. [4] With -one more! – crucial caveat – no cell phone! [The many poverties cell phones bring to our health and wellness is a massive topic for another day however.]
Just twenty minutes was again demonstrated to hold medical magic in a University of Michigan study that concluded that “the greatest payoff, in terms of efficiently lowering levels of the stress hormone cortisol, [is spending] 20 to 30 minutes sitting or walking in a place that provides you with a sense of nature” three times a week [5]. [Again – no cellphone!!!]
To summarize, 21 minutes of daily exercise doubles a pre-diabetic’s chances of steering clear of diabetes, 15 minutes of forest bathing flat-out improves heart, kidney, liver, hormonal and mental health, and 20 minute walks in a natural to semi-natural environment boost mood, memory, creativity and calmness.
There’s one final closing argument in favor of the power of 15 minutes. The reasons people “fail” at making lifestyle and behavior changes are multifaceted, but reliably enough it’s because they overreach. They want to make too many changes too quickly or take on a new habit for too long, and upon predictably being unable to keep up, they revert to default. This is then internalized as a personal failing of their character, ability or resolve when in actuality it’s biology. The brain will attempt to solve for dissonance – being uncomfortable – in the simplest manner it can find, which usually means reverting to well-traversed neural pathways aka the behaviors and habits it knows. It’s like hiking. Walking down the well-trodden path comes with minimal effort. But when one veers into the wilderness, it gets difficult and uncomfortable very quickly, so our brain will solve for this by encouraging us to get back on the path.
That’s why micro, 1% type changes, like committing to a 15 to 20 minute walk twice a week, then 4 times a week and eventually every day are infinitely more achievable and impactful than what for many are unrealistic targets like going to the gym for an hour. By shrinking the goal it becomes doable, accessible and successful. The consistent micro-successes then compound, and before you know it one year later those 1% daily wins mean you are 37 times better than when you started.
So ask yourself again, is scheduling 15 minutes of your day to something as simple as taking a stroll outside really too much to ask for?
[1] – Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group. “Reduction in the Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes with Lifestyle Intervention or Metformin”. 2002. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa012512
[2] Michael Easter. “The Comfort Crisis”. 2021. Page 247.
[3] Michael Easter. “The Comfort Crisis”. 2021. Page 113.
[4] Rachel Hopman-Droste, et. al. Measuring Cognition in Nature-Effects of Distraction of Memory Performance Acknowledgments. 2016. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330425613_Measuring_Cognition_in_Nature-Effects_of_Distraction_of_Memory_Performance_Acknowledgments
[5] Michael Easter. “The Comfort Crisis”. 2021. Page 116.
[6] Jame Clear. “Atomic Habits”. 2018. Page. 16.
Photo by Yaniv Knobel on Unsplash
Disclaimer:
Remember dear reader, I am neither a doctor nor any sort of medical physician in any capacity. None of the information presented above can be construed as any sort of medical advice in any sort of manner. You as the reader is solely responsible for creating and implementing your own physical, mental and emotional well-being, decisions, choices and actions. As such, the reader agrees that the author is not and will not be liable or responsible for any actions or inaction taken by the reader or for any direct or indirect results. This information is simply presented and whatever you decide to do with it is your choice and your responsibility.
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