Five Things to Try This Month (Minor holidays / 15-minute sprint)

5 Things to Try This Month

Schedule a regular “family update”

Stay connected with family members you don’t see every day with a regular email to tell them what’s going on in your life. It’s ok to be boring—sharing day-to-day minutiae helps everyone stay connected and makes it easier to find things to talk about when you do see each other.

Do a 15-minute sprint

If your attention is splintered, try blocking out fifteen minutes to focus on an individual task. Start your sprint by removing potential distractions—get water or coffee, check your email, use the bathroom, put your phone in airplane mode. Then set a timer and get to work.

Turn deprivation into indulgence

When you’re changing a habit, reframe it as giving yourself a positive experience (sleep, calm, pride, clarity) instead of focusing on what you’re denying yourself. For instance, instead of telling yourself, “I have to go to bed if I’m going to be any good at work tomorrow,” say “I’m going to bed early to feel the luxury of stretching out and relaxing tonight, and waking up naturally tomorrow, instead of being yanked out of sleep by an alarm.”

Celebrate a minor holiday

Take the opportunity to get festive for a minor holiday like Pi Day or April Fool’s Day. You don’t need to go all out — wearing a themed t-shirt or using fun plates for breakfast is enough to create some whimsy and delight.

Make a gathering cozier

To make your space feel warmer and more intimate, try turning off overhead lights and instead use lamps or string lights to create a soft, inviting glow.

Consult insurance-covered dietitians

Feeling better starts with small habits. Nourish connects you 1:1 with real dietitians, and most users pay $0 with insurance. Get help with energy, weight loss, diabetes, fertility, or IBS. Personalized support from the comfort of home.

INTERVIEW

Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon is the bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. His new memoir, Leaving Home, is available now.

Q: Can you suggest something we might try to help ourselves to become happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative?

I’m going to duck this one. I think we could all do with spending less time telling other people what to do. The world is way too full of advice. Be kind. Listen. Try to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Exercise. Get a decent night’s sleep. Eat more vegetables. That’s about it, really. And we don’t need other people telling us those things.

More seriously, I think we take on far too much personal responsibility for our own health and happiness. And the powers that be like it that way because it enables them to shuck their own responsibilities. So much of our health and happiness is in the hands of employers, landlords, city planners, food manufacturers, politicians, doctors, drug companies…

Q: Do you have a Secret of Adulthood? A lesson you’ve learned from life the hard way; something you’d tell your younger self?

I’m not entirely sure I’ve reached adulthood yet so I’m probably not best qualified to answer this question. The longest I’ve held down a “proper” job is 5 weeks c. 1987. I’m simply unable to turn up at the same place every day five days a week and be told what to do by someone else. Indeed I might go so far as to say that my entire career as a writer, an illustrator and an artist has been a long term project to delay adulthood as long as possible. [Gretchen: I’m getting Rebel vibes from Mark…]

Q: What simple habit boosts your happiness or energy?

I am genetically at least 50% dog so: long runs in forests containing very few people. I have experienced very rocky moods throughout my entire life and have, at times, been profoundly unhappy, often for no clear reason. But I have never been unhappy running on my own in the countryside. Throw in hills and water along with the trees and it’s even better. Unhelpfully, over the last three years I’ve suffered from Long Covid and the inability to go on long runs was one of the most depressing aspects of the condition. Thankfully I’m coming out the other side now and starting to run again is a joy, albeit a painful one given how unfit I’ve become.

Q: Is there a particular motto that you’ve found very helpful?

I was for a long period haunted by a paralysing fear of death (I write about it in Leaving Home). I would dearly love to have come across a form of words that somehow lifted me out of that particular pit, but in my experience it’s actions and time which solve problems that deeply rooted. I recall only one phrase that gave me some comfort: “Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

I have just now, for the first time, looked up the source of quote. It comes from Susan Ertz, an Anglo-American writer, author of a number of novels, including, “Woman Alive… a science fiction novel set after all women other than the titular heroine have perished in a plague” (Wikipedia).

Q: Has a book ever changed your life? If so, which one and why?

I was determined, as a child, to become a scientist, and pretty much all my reading was chosen to further that end. Over time, however, I discovered that the life of a scientist involved a great deal of drudgery and repetition, a host of dead ends and very few moments of revelation.

Thankfully, at the age of fourteen or so, I realised that literature could provide me with much of what I’d previously been looking for in science – not least a hotline to the profound mystery of being human in a world of breathtaking complexity. Better still, there were some books which contained moments of revelation on almost every page.

There were specific books which started this journey – The Collected Poems of R S Thomas and the novels of Patrick White played a pivotal role – but it was the possibilities of literature in general which opened my eyes and altered my course.