Behaviors

Recommendation to postpone difficult conversations when you are too activated to think clearly and revisit them later when both people are calm, cool, and collected.

Be aware that sugar is added to savory products such as spaghetti sauces and salad dressings.

Suggested as part of school precautions during infectious disease periods.

Recommended in the context of school infectious disease precautions.

Recommended in the context of school infectious disease precautions.

Make environmental changes around food availability and quality because food environment affects health.

Physical activity was named as a key health behavior affecting overall health.

Create distance from devices and draw explicit boundaries around social media use, especially for young people.

Protect time for unstructured play so kids can negotiate situations, resolve conflict, collaborate, be creative, and have time to reflect and think rather than having every moment hyper-structured.

For kids already on social media, protect the hour before bedtime and the entire night as technology-free time to preserve sleep and create device boundaries.

Parents should model the same device boundaries they want children to follow by keeping their own devices away during sacred times like meals and bedtime.

Do behavior change with one or more other people for accountability and support rather than trying to do it alone.

Engage in physical movement as a baseline self-care practice.

Think through, discuss, or write your life story to identify when things changed, what influenced those changes, and what questions to ask next.

Write out your life history or narrative, including age ranges, places lived, and key events; organize notes by periods such as 0–5, 6–10, and revisit them over time to add newly remembered events.

If experiencing thoughts of self-harm, not wanting to be alive, despair, hopelessness, or feeling unsafe or unstable, get clinical help rather than relying on self-inquiry alone; advocate for yourself and push to get in front of a clinician.

During liminal states between sleep and wakefulness, block outside sensory input, especially social media and the news, to allow unconscious insights to surface.

If there is something you feel you cannot bring into consciousness because it might take over your mind, that is exactly what should be examined, provided it is done safely.

Use old pictures, talk to people who knew you at different stages of life, reflect on how you behaved and what you felt inside, and anchor yourself to memories in order to identify changes and extrapolate patterns.

Examine yourself with some dispassion or observational distance by mentally standing outside yourself and observing without excessive negative emotion.

Stop and ask why you do things automatically, such as going to work or staying busy, in order to uncover unconscious drivers.

If a habitual route leads to unwanted drinking, interrupt the chain by driving a different way home; if needed, have a friend ride with you or even put yourself in the back seat so you cannot drive there.

He rejects the advice 'never go to sleep angry'; instead, don't use exhaustion to force agreement because people feel differently after sleep.

During long, demanding operations, take time off or decompress rather than running yourself into the ground; sometimes that means stepping away, having a beer, kicking back, and blowing off steam.

Laughter, joking, and good-natured ribbing with supportive colleagues can help lighten emotional heaviness.

Insert a deliberate transition gap between task A and task B to improve task switching. Even 10-15 seconds helps; commonly 60-90 seconds to 2 minutes, and up to 5-10 minutes if the prior task involved deep focus. If only a very short transition is available, explicitly recognize it as transition time and count from 10 to 1 or 1 to 10.

During the transition period, keep attention relatively free of new inputs. Do not look at your phone, text, use social media, forage for information, insert extra tasks, or attend to irrelevant environmental stimuli. The goal is to limit the total amount of new information entering the nervous system before the next demanding task.

To build tenacity and willpower, add some exercise that is not already part of your routine; continuing habitual exercise may maintain but not further build this capacity.

Periodically add small, safe, mildly aversive challenges that create manageable friction and build tenacity; examples include adding one extra set at the end of 3–5 sets of an exercise, doing 100 jumping jacks after a hard run, or sitting still for 5 minutes after a lesson and thinking about the material instead of jumping on your phone. Do not overdo them all day long.

Resist checking your phone during workouts, including text messaging and reading email, as a small act of willpower training.