The Importance of Exercise and its Positive Cascading Effects on Our Daily Lives
http://www.psycap.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-cascade-effects-of-exercise.pdf
Going to the gym has been an essential part of my routine at Cornell and has always been one of my favorite ways to start my day. I have always thought exercise puts me into a good mindset for the day. Throughout my several years of lifting, I have noticed that whenever I would not go to the gym that day, my productivity levels would be extremely lower on average compared to when I did go to the gym. This has always been something mysterious to me, but as I am learning more about information cascading in this class, I am starting to understand the logic of some of this behavior. Good habits and routines can also be seen as a cascading effect, as when you do one positive thing throughout your day, you are heavily influenced to do another positive task to keep this habit going.
Exercise is, without a doubt, something all people should incorporate into their lives as it is beneficial for their physical and mental health. In the article above, studies were done on 179 participants who would complete a questionnaire on a daily basis about whether they exercised and how they felt. Through Multi-level modeling analyses, the studies showed that starting your day with exercise created ” a positive cascade, increasing positive social and achievement events experienced on the same day and positive social events on the following day.” While you can break the cascade by making the choice of doing a less productive task during the day, the effects of exercise encourage you to keep the positive cascading effect going. The benefits from this cascading effect may only last on a daily basis, but with a healthy routine like this, people may find overall more satisfaction from life.
We talked a lot about how people’s decisions in cascades heavily affected other people’s decisions in class, yet it was interesting to see how our own activities can have the same cascading effect on us. While we mainly apply the concepts of information cascades in more behavioral economics and network settings, it’s essential to acknowledge that this concept can also be applied to our individual decisions as well, which can determine how successful we will be in the future.