1 . We are all creatures of habit. We tend to wake up at the same time each day, brush our teeth, have morning coffee and travel to work, following the same patterns every day.     1    

Behavioral scientists who study habit formation say that many of us try to create healthy habits the wrong way.     2     Here are two tips, backed by research, for forming new healthy habits.

    3     For many of us, our morning routine is the strongest, so that’s a great place to build a new habit. While brushing your teeth, you might stand on one foot to practice balance. Many of us fall into end-of-the-day patterns as well. Do you tend to sink into the sofa after work and turn on the TV? That might be a good time to do a single daily yoga pose.

    4     Wendy Wood, a research psychologist, calls the forces that get in the way of good habits “friction”. In one study, researchers changed the turning of lift doors so that workers had to wait nearly half a minute for the doors to close.     5     Many people are therefore convinced that taking the stairs was easier than waiting for the lift. It shows how sensitive we are to small friction in our environment. Just slowing down the lift got people to take the stairs, and they stuck with it even after the lift went back to normal timing.

2 . Stress is unavoidable in life. We all face it daily, whether it is a small inconvenience or a major life challenge. Stress negatively affects all aspects of our lives both personally and professionally.     1     So what can we do about it? Here are some helpful tips to fight stress, defeat it and move on.

Prioritize

    2     The longer you let something sit, the more it will weigh on you and take up valuable brain space.

Practice self-care

Here are the key aspects to self-care that so often get forgotten：

●Drink water. Prevent tiredness, help digestion, your skin and your sleep.

●Stretch. Get oxygen flowing into your muscles before or during a stressful situation.

●Exercise regularly. Don’t let your busy schedule take priority over your health.

●    3     Read, take a bath, go for a run, listen to music, or phone a friend.

Communicate

Find a network of people who you can vent (宣泄) to. This is a fantastic way to reduce bringing work troubles and stress home with you. You have the opportunity to blow off the first build-up of steam.     4    

Breathe

Breathing deeply brings more oxygen into your body, producing endorphins (内啡肽). They fight with cortisol, a chemical which is a result of anxiety or stress. Did you know breathing is responsible for most of your body’s detoxification (排毒)     5     This critical part of calming yourself down allows you the space and time to focus on the problem at hand and have a quiet mind to tackle what’s ahead of you.

3 . Forget privacy, young internet users want to be tracked

On every smartphone there sits a tracker’s paradise (乐园) of location data ready to be shared.     1     And this tech is marketed as convenient, not frightening.

What is an acceptable level of online surveillance (监视)? I had assumed we all agreed that the ideal was none.     2     A quick enquiry on my friends found that those who were, like me, in their 40s and older either had no idea they could use their phone in this way or had relatively little interest in doing so. But friends a decade or so younger all seem to be tracking one another at will. They don’t find the idea of monitoring or being monitored in this way upsetting. They say it makes them feel safer.

    3     It is just that they are realistic about the privacy that is available. They know that if you own a smartphone and don’t want to disable useful things like maps, then your location is already being watched. If app creators, smartphone makers and ad companies are already tracking your location, then why not share the information with people you know?

If you want to start tracking the people you know, then there are some rules involved. It’s fine to use tracking to check that a friend has got home safely at the end of a night out, for example, but not to surprise them on the street. And think carefully about whom you share data with.     4    

Location tracking as a safety measure, particularly for elderly parents and children, is appealing.     5     Once you grow comfortable sharing your location with your family and friends, perhaps one day you’ll be happy to share it with your employer or even government agencies.

4 . People mean well when they encourage us to be strong when we face the challenging moments of our lives, but that effort is an artificial construct.

    1     Your desire to be strong is a dam you build to control the flow of complex feelings. On the outside, everything is fine. People see you pushing forward and they admire this “strength”. However, unless you keep building that dam higher, it will eventually overflow. It usually happens when we least expect it.

Instead of resisting weak moments, I have learned to embrace them. When I embrace weakness, I feel peace. I sense love. There is freedom in that decision that isn’t present when my focus is on staying strong.     2     An effort to “stay strong” denies you the feelings your heart longs to experience under those challenging circumstances.

The strongest bonds I see between two people are the ones that get developed when both are willing to embrace their weaknesses with each other. Those moments offer honesty, and chances to demonstrate loyalty and love.     3     We think we’re stopping a series of difficult emotions, but actually we’re blocking love from reaching us from the other direction.

Could I be hurt by allowing myself to show and share my weakest moments? Of course, hurt people sometimes hurt others.     4     And I believe that if someone has embraced their weaknesses and feels free, they can one day inspire others through their journey.

It is tempting to be strong, but building a dam will not offer a long-term solution.     5    

7 . A wildfire is an uncontrolled fire that burns among wild land plants. Wildfires can burn in forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems, and have been doing so for hundreds of millions of years.

Wildfires can start naturally or be human-made.     1     Wind, high temperatures, and little rainfall can all leave trees, shrubs, and fallen leaves dried out, causing a fire easily.

Wildfires that burn near communities can become dangerous and even deadly if they grow out of control. For example, the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, California destroyed almost the whole town of Paradise.     2    

Still, wildfires are important to the continued survival of some plants. For example, some tree cones need to be heated before they open and let out their seeds. Plants depend on wildfires in order to pass through a life cycle.     3     And others require fire just a few times a century for the species to continue.

    4     They can kill insects and diseases. Fires can make way for new grasses and shrubs that provide food and living space for animal sand birds. Fires can clean up pieces of woods on the forest floor and open up space to let sunlight through to the ground.

While many plants and animals need wildfires, climate change has left some ecosystems more sensitive to fires.     5     The historic practice of putting out all fires also has caused an unnatural buildup of shrubs, which can be riskier in causing wildfires.

8 . How do you like to sit on a chair?     1     They might be no friend of a campaign called “The Great Cross-Out” where people are encouraged to keep healthy by not crossing their legs for a whole day.

    2     The list of suggested consequences of one knee crossing over the other includes nerve damage and raised blood pressure. But both of them deserve close examination.

It is true that maintaining a particular position for many hours can lead to nerve damage. But when a study examined a series of patients’ notes in order to identify the chief causes, sitting on a chair with one knee over the other didn’t feature. In reality nerve damage is an unlikely consequence of leg-crossing.     3    

How about blood pressure? When you get it checked, the doctor tends to ask you not to cross your legs.     4     But when the measurements are repeated just three minutes after uncrossing the legs, blood pressure will be back to the earlier levels

So if you like crossing your legs, you’re unlikely to do yourself any damage, provided you don’t stay in the same position until your legs are numb (麻木的).     5     Whoever is sitting next to you on the bus or the train will be grateful to you for taking up less room than the man-spreaders.

9 . How to Be More Interesting

No one is boring and no one needs to be perfect. But maybe you feel that you are boring and need to be more interesting.     1     If you’re looking to be more interesting, then you’ve come to the right place.

Loosen up and be natural. One reason why many people fail to become interesting people is that they worry too much over the small things and don’t come across as natural. Their effort backfires (产生反作用) on them, because they are just trying too hard.     2     Live a life one day at a time.

Be positive and optimistic. Interesting people are happy people. This is one of the reasons why we find them so interesting; whether we admit it or not, we want to know how and why happy people are so happy.     3    

Build an open personality. Be available to the world and look for excitement instead of waiting for it to find you. Celebrate flexibility and a “just go with it” attitude. Often times people aren’t interesting because they are reserved.     4     Of course, to some extent, this is true, but you can also take this too far. By holding back too much, you’re limiting your potential and in the process becoming less interesting. The more reserved you get, the more static(停滞的) your life.

    5     Being interesting means doing things you’ve never done before and being willing to share those experiences with other people. People who are boring and dull normally possess a very small comfort zone. So try to constantly expand your comfort zone and dare yourself to try new things; this is the quickest path to becoming more interesting.