Live Longer & Be Happier!

IMPROVE MENTAL WELL-BEING

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking,” wrote Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle in Scientific American.

A YMCA study showed that people who had a physically active lifestyle had a wellbeing score 32% higher than inactive individuals.

SLEEP SOUNDLY

Stanford University’s School of Medicine found many benefits to be had by cycling for 20-30 minutes every other day, They tasked sedentary insomnia sufferers with cycling and the result was the time required for the insomniacs to fall asleep was reduced by half, and sleep time increased by almost an hour.

BE A BETTER DRIVER

Cyclists who drive are better behind the steering wheel than motorists. The link between cycling and safer motoring was revealed by an insurance firm offers specialist motor insurance policies for cyclists. Nick Day of Chris Knott Insurance said an analysis of his firm’s crash data showed that cyclists make less than half the number of insurance claims as non-cyclists.

This analysis correlates with an earlier study found that cyclist-drivers tend to have faster reaction times than non-cyclists.

WARD OFF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

University of Illinois researchers found that a 5% improvement in cardio-respiratory fitness from cycling led to an improvement of up to 15% in mental tests. They figured this was because cycling helps build new brain cells in the hippocampus, the region responsible for memory, which starts to wither after age 30.

FEEL MORE

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. “You remember them as they actually are,” he added, “while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”

GO GREEN

Road transport is responsible for 22% total greenhouse gas emissions. Bicycles are part of the solution, not part of the problem. The carbon footprint of a person on a bike is famously low. Bikes don’t have exhaust pipes; they don’t emit deadly pollutants and they don’t slurp war-mongering fossil fuels.

“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process,” wrote philosopher Ivan Illich in his environmental polemic Toward a History of Needs.

Thanks for your Wisdom Carlton Reid