New research seems to prove the theory that brainy people

spend more time lazing around than their active counterparts.

Findings from a US-based study seem to support the idea that

people with a high IQ get bored less easily, leading them to spend
more time engaged in thought.

And active people may be more physical as they need to

stimulate their minds with external activities, either to escape
their thoughts or because they get bored quickly.

Researchers from the Florida Gulf Coast University gave a classic

test dating back three decades - to a group of students.

The need for cognition questionnaire asked participants to rate

how strongly they agree with statements such as "I really enjoy a
task that involves coming up with new solutions to problems",
and "I only think as hard as I have to".

The researchers, led by Todd McElroy, then selected 30 thinkers

and 30 non-thinkers from the pool of candidates.

Over the next seven days both groups wore a device on their
wrist which tracked their movements and activity levels,
providing a constant stream of data on how physically active they
were.

Results showed the thinking group were far less active during the
week than the non-thinkers.

The findings of the study, published in the Journal of Health

Psychology, were described as highly significant and robust in
statistical terms.

But the weekends showed no difference between the two groups,

something which has not been able to be explained.
Researchers suggested the findings could lend weight to the idea
that non-thinkers get bored more easily, so need to fill their time
with physical activity.

You may now have another excuse to binge watch television shows and take naps during the day.
A new study reveals that intelligent people live a more sedentary lifestyle, as they rarely become bored and
spend more time lost in their own thoughts.
Researchers found that those who fill their day with physical activity are often 'non-thinkers,' and do so to
stimulate their minds in order to escape their own thoughts.

n a study published to the Journal of Health Psychology, researchers from the Florida Gulf Coast
University explained that 'the relationship between cognition and physical activity is an important question
for the human experience, and the interaction likely extends across the lifespan.'

The researchers pulled from previous works to explain that physical activity levels are associated with
physical behavior.
For example, a past study found that those deemed non-thinkers became bored much easier and also
experienced the negative effects that comes with it.
Those with high 'need for cognition' appeared to avoid this behavior because they were able to provide their
own mental stimulation.
'Thus, high-NFC individuals seem more content to 'entertain themselves' mentally, whereas low-NFC
individuals quickly experience boredom and experience it more negatively,' reads the paper.
In the study, participants were sorted using a 'Need for Cognition' test.
Based on this, half were deemed 'thinkers' and the others were 'non-thinker's.
Participants were each given an 'actigraphy device' to wear over seven days.
This allowed the team to monitor the 60 students' movement and activity levels, and receive a stream of
data to analyze.
After the seven days, the team compiled the data and found the 'thinkers' were much less active than the
'non-thinkers'.

Answer the questions as following: 1 = extremely uncharacteristic; 2 = somewhat uncharacteristic; 3 =

uncertain; 4 = somewhat characteristic; 5 = extremely characteristic.

1. I would prefer complex to simple problems.

2. I like to have the responsibility of handling a situation that requires a lot of thinking.
3. Thinking is not my idea of fun.
4. I would rather do something that requires little thought than something that is sure to challenge my
thinking abilities.
5. I try to anticipate and avoid situations where there is likely a chance I will have to think in depth about
something.
6. I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours.
7. I only think as hard as I have to.
8. I prefer to think about small, daily projects to long-term ones.
9. I like tasks that require little thought once I've learned them.
10. The idea of relying on thought to make my way to the top appeals to me.
11. I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new solutions to problems.
12. Learning new ways to think doesn't excite me very much.
13. I prefer my life to be filled with puzzles that I must solve.
14. The notion of thinking abstractly is appealing to me.
15. I would prefer a task that is intellectual, difficult, and important to one that is somewhat important but
does not require much thought.
16. I feel relief rather than satisfaction after completing a task that required a lot of mental effort.
17. It's enough for me that something gets the job done; I don't care how or why it works.
18. I usually end up deliberating about issues even when they do not affect me personally.
Using the 9-point scale, the highest possible score on the Need for Cognition Scale is 72 (18 items
multiplied by 4 points each) and the lowest possible score is -72.
Source: Wabash College

However, the weekends proved to be the same for each group, as 'activity levels for high- and low-NFC
individuals did not differ significantly'.
'It is important to note that part of the 'weekend effect' in our study may be due to our sample population,
which consisted of college students,' explains researchers.
'Although college students are a standard participant pool in the vast majority of experimental psychology
studies, their behavior and habits may be more indicative of young adult behavior than adult behavior in
general.'
After the seven days, the team compiled the pulled samples and found that they 'thinkers' were much less active than the 'non-
thinkers'. However, the weekends proved to be the same for each group, as' activity levels for high- and low-NFC individuals did
not differ significantly'
'It is reasonable to assume that this 'weekend effect' may change as people progress through different life
stages, which is a question that future researchers may want to consider.'
Researches also note that those who are more intelligent and lazier may endure negative side effects from
their sedentary lifestyle.
'Ultimately, an important factor that may help more thoughtful individuals combat their lower average activity
levels is awareness,' shares the British Psychological Society regarding the study.
'Awareness of their tendency to be less active, coupled with an awareness of the cost associated with
inactivity, more thoughtful people may then choose to become more active throughout the day.'
SMART PEOPLE ARE LONERS
Evolutionary psychologists have found that among the extremely intelligent, more frequent social interaction
is actually linked with reduced satisfaction.
They looked at data from a large long-term study, which surveyed adults from 18 to 28, which provided self-
reported levels of life satisfaction.
People living in more densely populated areas reported lower levels of life satisfaction, as did more frequent
socialisation with friends.
But among 'the extremely intelligent' more frequent social interaction was found to be linked with reduced life
satisfaction.
They propose that the 'savannah theory' is at the root of modern happiness. This theory dictates that the
factors which made early humans satisfied are still true with modern life.
The researchers believe smarter individuals may be able to better adapt to the challenges of modern life,
and may find it easier to leave their ancestral social roots behind in order to forge ahead in life.

Daydreamers and sofa-lovers rejoice, a new study has revealed a correlation between
laziness and a high IQ, meaning that staring off into space or avoiding the gym could mean
that youre not just being lazy, youre actually demonstrating your intelligence.

According to the study published in the Journal of Health Psychology, people with a high
IQ get bored easily, leading them to spend more time thinking so even though they may not
look like they are doing anything, they are actively engaged in thought.

On the other hand, people who are active tend to participate in physical activity to occupy
themselves when bored and to avoid high-level thinking.

The researchers, from Florida Gulf Coast University, got students to take a psychological
test to identify those who expressed a desire to think a lot and those who preferred to avoid
anything too mentally exhausting by rating how strongly they agreed or disagreed with
statements like: I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new solutions and I only
think as hard as I have to.
They then took 30 thinkers and 30 non-thinkers and fitted them with a fitness tracker that
monitored their physical activity for a week.

The results revealed that the thinking group were far less active from Monday through Friday
than the non-thinking group, with those who agreed with statements that didn't require a high
level of thinking partaking in a much higher level of physical activity. However, there was no
difference between the groups during the weekend, something which the researchers
havent been able to explain, though they admit the sample size being small and the study
for only a short period of time means more research is needed to conclusively draw a
correlation.

However, if youre feeling smug that your laziness is a sign of your intelligence, which makes
you too busy thinking profound thoughts to exercise or be active, lead author Todd McElroy
has a different view.

"Ultimately, an important factor that may help more thoughtful individuals combat their lower
average activity levels is awareness," said Mr McElroy. "Awareness of their tendency to be
less active, coupled with an awareness of the cost associated with inactivity. More thoughtful
people may then choose to become more active throughout the day."

Do you ever get reprimanded for laziness? Well, now you have a good rebuttal.

New research from the Journal of Health Psychology seems to supports the theory
that intelligent people spend more time being lazy than people who are more active.
The findings show that people with a high IQ get bored less easily, leading them to
spend more time thinking, rather than doing, while active people tend to be less lazy
because they need to stimulate their minds with physical activities, either because
they want to do less thinking or because they get bored fast.
Researchers from the Florida Gulf Coast University gave a 30-year-old test called
the "Need for Cognition to a group of students, to find 30 participants who
expressed a strong desire to think a lot and 30 other participants who preferred to
avoid any tasks they considered mentally taxing.

The classic test asked students to rate how strongly they agreed with statements such
as, "I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new solutions to problems" and
"I only think as hard as I have to."

After the 30 "thinkers" and 30 "non-thinkers" were selected, they were given an
accelerometer to wear on their wrist for seven days to measure how physically active
they were during the week.

"Ultimately, an important factor that may help

more thoughtful individuals combat their lower
average activity levels is awareness."
The results showed that the "thinking" group were "far less active" during the week
than the "non-thinking" group, however on the weekends, results showed that there
was no significant difference in the activity rates for both groups, something which
researchers were unable to explain.

However, study lead Todd McElroy explained that the downside to being lazy, even if
you're intelligent, is that it could lead to a sedentary lifestyle, which could lead to
negative health effects. He also said in the study that everyone should try to lead a
more active lifestyle to improve their health.

"Ultimately, an important factor that may help more thoughtful individuals combat
their lower average activity levels is awareness," McElroy said, according to The
British Psychological Society. "Awareness of their tendency to be less active, coupled
with an awareness of the cost associated with inactivity, more thoughtful people may
then choose to become more active throughout the day."
Laziness isn't the only indicator of a high IQ, either. According to other studies,
intelligent people use more curse words, stay up late at night and are really messy.

Which of these two scenarios best describes you?

Each day you attempt to maximize productivity by completing as many

tasks as humanly possible, to the point of exhaustion.

Or, you complete tasks deemed of highest importance and once done,
you feel peaceful about spending the remainder of your day on yourself,
on activities that matter to you.

The second scenario describes a growing trend of workers who are

redefining what it means to be productive during any given day.

Yet some, falling into the more traditional way of life/work patterns, find
these individuals lazy. After all, who finishes their workday at 2 p.m. or
dares to spend a leisurely lunch catching up with friends during the
middle of the week?
Laziness has such a negative connotation when considered
independently of the context it is placed within. But is there ever a time
where laziness could play an important role in your daily plan?

Yes! Creative laziness can and does play an important role within the
lives of successful, and more importantly, happy, productive people.

Creative laziness doesnt describe doing absolutely nothing or wasting

lifes valuable time. What it does describe is planned, focused time
dedicated toward not rushing, feeling overwhelmed or a sense of
gnawing dissatisfaction. Creative laziness allows us not to do, but to be.

To begin building your own pathway toward creative laziness, here are
five easy steps to follow:

Ask yourself: Does it really need to get done?

Dont find yourself in a position of feeling constantly overwhelmed by

what seems like a never-ending, never-shrinking to-do list. Get into the
habit of asking yourself this question about every task; not everything
has to get done. If you find yourself answering this question with a
resounding no, simply delete this task from your to-do list and move
on.

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, suggests that 20
percent of our efforts drive 80 percent of our results. Focus your time
and energy on tasks that matter and give yourself permission to ignore
or delete those that do not. And remember, not everything that needs to
be done has to be completed right now.
 Ask yourself: Can someone else complete the task (aka can you
outsource it)?

Dont be a hero; not every task must and should be completed by you.
As you begin each day, review your list of to-dos (which should now be
shorter as you have eliminated unnecessary items) and consider
whether someone else could complete any of the tasks as well as you,
on your behalf. Delegate those tasks to others to free up personal time.

Tackle your to-do list strategically.

Often, the most important tasks we need to complete during any given
day are the ones that we most dread and theyre usually the ones we
avoid completing. Not only do we often avoid these tasks, we typically
spend a great deal of time and energy fretting or thinking about these
things.

Begin your day completing the task(s) that are most critical to achieving
success. Following this simple suggestion will not only free up additional
time for you to enjoy being lazy, but will put you in a better state of mind
throughout the remainder of your day.

Allow yourself to have daily stopping points.

How do you know when your day is wrapped up? Are you finished when
the clock displays a specific time? Or, are you finished when the tasks of
highest importance have been completed? When do you allow yourself
to relax, to kick back and be lazy?
Clearly define what a successful day looks like for you. Then, once you
have achieved this definition, allow yourself to enjoy some much earned
down time without feeling guilty.

Schedule free time.

This doesnt imply that you must fill up every moment, of every day, with
some sort of activity. Instead, it means the exact opposite. Each day
ought to have time dedicated to being lazy recharging, if you will.
Without scheduled down time, preferably daily if not weekly, you are
likely to run out of steam the essence of burnout.

What you choose to do during your allocated free time will be dependent
upon what you believe or feel is relaxing to you. Reading, watching TV,
taking a bubble bath, meditating, practicing self hypnosis, or simply
sitting outdoors and mindfully taking in your surroundings are just a few
of the things you may choose as your form of daily creative laziness.

You dont have to live your life rushing around like a busy little bee or a
racing car driver, throttle to the floor all of the time! With focus and
dedication, you can regain control of your lifes calendar and allow
yourself to spend more time being creatively lazy.

Do this and youll enjoy the beauty of simply being and of being alive.

Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing. Lao Tzu

As children we were told that we would never amount to anything if we were lazy and that
hard work was the key to success. But what if laziness and procrastination could actually
help you go further in life?
There are a few reasons why being an eager beaver isn't always a good idea. Some
problems may end up getting solved without any effort from you. And is a first-mover
advantage all it's cracked up to be?

It's the second mouse that gets the cheese. The hapless first mouse could end up getting
trapped in its efforts to get ahead.

Bill Gates once said that he would always "hire a lazy person to do a difficult job" at
Microsoft. Why? "Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."

Here are some of the ways you can use your laziness to your advantage and turn
procrastination into an asset.

Too lazy to be lazy

Sometimes, laziness can be used to protect you from yourself. According to Karthick
Venkatesh, who posts advice on question-and-answer network Quora, he has a 29-character
password for Facebook and Twitter.

"When I have to work, I just log off from these," he says. "So, whenever I feel like taking a
break and using Facebook, I am just too lazy to type my password.

"Eventually, owing to my laziness, I go back to work and have a really productive day."

Remembering social media passwords is exhausting work

Why procrastination works

If you wait until the last minute to complete a task, you are forced to focus on the project at
hand. According to Quora poster Caroline Sin: "Theres nothing like not having enough
time to complete a project to make you realise whats critical, and what isnt."

"If I start early on a project and stick faithfully to my schedule, I almost always do more work
than I need to," she explains. "A lot of that work I simply throw away. But if I wait until the last
minute to work on something, the stress of it automatically narrows my focus to whats
important, and I quickly jettison the rest. I throw no work away, I work quickly and efficiently,
and I get it done."
Work will always swell to fill the amount of time allotted to it, argues another Quora user, so
limit the space into which it can expand.

Make the machine do it

Phones, lifts, cars, all these things were invented to avoid or minimise work. Lazy people
automate as much as possible. Rather than tweeting throughout the day, for example, they
will use a service like TweetDeck to schedule tweets for the whole day in one go. Job done;
time for a cup of tea.

Human beings were supposed to work less, not more, following the rise of the machines. In
his 1930 work Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, British economist John Maynard
Keynes wrote that by 2030 he expected a system of almost total "technological
unemployment" in which we'd need to work as few as 15 hours a week.

Working less doesn't mean being less effective. Devotees of the "Pareto Principle" believe in
the 80-20 rule: basically, just 20pc of your efforts deliver 80pc of the results - there is the
"vital few and the trivial many".

The idea was originally conceived in 1906 by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who created
the formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country (20pc of people
owned 80pc of the wealth). However, it is now a much-vaunted time-management technique.

Of the things you do during your day, only 20pc really matter - in theory. Lazy people can cut
down on 80pc of their workload by identifying and focusing only on those things.

Are you lazy? Or just really good?

You may be lazy because youre good at your job.

Really efficient people will naturally have more downtime than their peers.

If you finish a task, and find yourself watching cat videos or liking endless pictures on
Facebook, is it because you've finished your work early? Are you twiddling your thumbs
because you have nothing else left to do?
Take Tobi Ltke, the CEO of the e-commerce platform Shopify, couldn't be bothered to work
with difficult customers anymore, so he got rid of them. Lazy? Perhaps. But the result was
that he could spend more time focusing on valuable customers.

"If you go into business school and suggest firing a customer, they'll kick you out of the
building," he says. "But it's so true in my experience. It allows you to identify the customers
you really want to work with."

In 2007, Tim Ferriss published his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, in which he extolled the
virtues of the Pareto Principle and of working as little as possible. The self-help book was a
worldwide success, selling 1.35m copies in 35 languages.

According to Ferriss, to be truly productive, we must check our email just once a day and
outsource every small daily task to virtual assistants, focusing only on those tasks that
generate the largest return.

You can only be lazy if you're clever

Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord was Germanys chief of the
army before the Second World War. He said that all his officers were two of the following:
clever, diligent, stupid or lazy.

According to the general, the most dangerous officer was one who was stupid and diligent.
He couldn't be trusted with any responsibility because he would always make mischief.

However, officers who were both clever and lazy were qualified for the highest leadership
duties, because they possessed the intellectual clarity and the "composure" necessary for
difficult decisions.

They are masters at avoiding busywork such as pointless meetings, he claimed, they
delegate to others to get things done efficiently, and they focus on the essentials rather than
being distracted by unnecessary extras.

Make money while you sleep

Lazy entrepreneurs build businesses that generate revenue, even when they aren't
anywhere near their desk.
Online products such as training videos, e-books or subscriptions to online content or
services could all make money while you sleep, and require minimal input from the business
owner.

The explosion in peer-to-peer lenders has also offered lazy people the opportunity to make
money by effectively doing nothing - just collecting the interest. Caveat: there is always risk
involved in issuing loans.

But there are even ways of making traditional business models successful while being lazy. If
you are selling a product, for example, create a range that is like a McDonald's menu.

Produce five things - burgers, fries, chicken, salad and soft drinks - and just package it all
differently and sell them in different combinations to cut down on time and effort.

These couch potatoes could be making a chunk of change right now

How to build a lazier society

Working just four hours a week might seem ridiculous to many, but how about a four-hour
workday?

A shorter working week would have interesting theoretical benefits. If everyone worked fewer
hours, more people would be required to get the job done, reducing unemployment.

Less work would produce slower economic growth but it would also reduce the
consequences of that growth, such as pollution. Work, as a commodity, would increase in
value - sweat equity is frequently dismissed these days because everyone puts in such long
hours.

It would also solve the eternal question: how to achieve a work/life balance. A four-hour
workday would leave plenty of time for family and child care.

There could also be resulting health benefits. Burn-outs, stress and inactivity would be
reduced, which would reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's.

Should you be more lazy?

Are you lazy and successful?