Tag: habits
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A Vacation That Really Rests You
For many families, summer means longer days, a break from school, and family vacations. If everyone’s getting increasingly sleep deprived, that summer vacation can be more than just a getaway — it can actually help the body restore balance to its sleep and waking schedule. And better sleep means everything is better, from your energy…
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The Cost of Getting Lean
Many people begin an exercise program excited to “look like their goal body” — often a celebrity or model. The fitness industry and mass media promote this kind of goal heavily, in the way they market imagery and make claims for the recommendations they give, but they often hand-wave the realities behind the photos. Even…
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Is Breakfast the Most Important Meal of the Day?
Over the last few decades, claims have grown up around breakfast — notably that people who eat “a good breakfast” have all kinds of good outcomes, like easier weight control and better metabolic function. There isn’t a lot of great science on this, because studies are notoriously bad at food tracking, but there’s also no…
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Rude Treadmills
Dr Lahiri of The Mindy Project is offended when the treadmill asks her how much she weighs, but it thinks it has a good reason. It’s planning to use that information to estimate calories burned during the session. Unfortunately, calorie burn varies so much from person to person that the simple physics-based calculations gym machines…
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The Habit Loop and the Golden Rule
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks extensively about the “habit loop” and the “golden rule” of habit change: a habit has a trigger, a routine (the habit itself), and a reward. The trigger is sometimes referred to as an anchor (as in, “when I wake up, I always…”), and the reward may be,…
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Life Hacks and To-Do Lists
“Life hacks” entered the language around a decade ago when Danny O’Brien talked about them in the context of programming. In programming a hack is “a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix.” This idea has exploded in popularity and has inspired contrarians, who deride life hacking as…
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How Do I Get My Partner to Exercise?
Johns Hopkins has presented data for a large group of middle-aged couples, who were asked about exercise habits at two medical visits conducted roughly six years apart. If one was getting at least the recommended amount of exercise each week at the first of those two visits, it was quite likely the other would be,…
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What Makes Habits Stick?
Habits can help us build a solid foundation of good health, low stress, and readiness to act. For scientists, as Isaac Asimov noted, few discoveries are of the “Eureka!” variety but instead something closer to, “Hmm, that’s funny…” combined with having a sense of good questions to ask to figure out what’s happening. You, too,…
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Are You a Rebel?
When we are trying to establish a new habit, we are often advised to seek accountability partners of some kind. That could be a workout partner, for example, or a family member that you share (healthy) shopping and cooking tasks with. Some people benefit from working with a personal trainer, and others can go it…