Tiny Changes, Big Results

Welcome to my Weekly Thoughts Newsletter, where you'll find my take on the week's news stories, my favorite pieces on how we can thrive even in our stressful world, and some fun and inspiring extras.

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@ariannahuff / Instagram

Quittin’ Time: The social fitness network Strava has determined that January 19 is the day people are most likely to give up on their fitness resolutions for the new year. That’s because most of us start off too big, deciding to take on ambitious goals that aren’t realistic. How many of us resolve to go to the gym an hour a day, or lose 10 pounds by Valentine’s Day, only to give up feeling like a failure? But there is still time to increase our chances for success — by making our goals tiny. As B.J. Fogg, the Stanford behavioral scientist and author of the new book I just finished reading and have heavily underlined, Tiny Habits, writes in The Wall Street Journal, “to be effective, change doesn’t have to be hard at all — and shouldn’t be. Tiny adjustments that come easily and make us happy are the ones that work best.” Read More on Thrive: Why You Should Celebrate After Every Tiny Win

“Aren’t You Happy?”: Silvio Horta, the creator of the hit T.V. show “Ugly Betty,” fatally shot himself after an ongoing struggle with addiction and depression. In a 2008 interview, Horta revealed that when the show caught fire people would constantly ask him, “Aren’t you happy? You must be thrilled. You’ve got a hit show. You must be having the time of your life.” But in fact he felt exhausted and isolated. “I didn’t want to socialize and I had so much work to do. That was it. That was my life.” Perhaps one takeaway from this tragedy will be a change in how we define success. Because for far too many people, career success is not synonymous with happiness. Having a hit show or becoming an S.V.P. or E.V.P. or joining the C-suite doesn’t mean not hurting inside and needing support. Read More on Thrive: Why We Need Another Version of “Parts Unknown”

Grim Milestones: Indeed, new data shows just how pervasive our mental health crisis is, especially for young people. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for young Americans (accidents are the first). And after declining for nearly two decades, the suicide rate rose 56% between 2007 and 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As Richard Friedman writes in The New York Times, “Our collective failure to act in the face of this epidemic is all the more puzzling since we are living at a time when people are generally more accepting of mental illness and stigma is on the wane.” Read More on Thrive: This New Brain Science Could Help You Unlock Better Mental Health

Posting Your Best Sleep Stats: Athletes are all about results. And one study highlights the connection between sleep and peak performance, specifically when it comes to avoiding injury: Adolescent student athletes who get under eight hours of sleep are 70% more likely to be injured. In an interview with Thrive’s Sleep Editor-at-Large Shelly Ibach, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins spoke about how quality sleep helps him attain peak performance. And as Canadian Running Magazine recently put it, “What if someone told you that something you were doing every day was making you 70% more likely to hurt yourself? You’d probably stop doing that thing.”

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Before You Go

@ariannahuff / Instagram

Book of the Week: The Power of Bad, by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister. Neuroscience tells us our brains have a negative bias, which can alert us to threats. But in The Power of Bad, Tierney and Baumeister point out that all this negativity has, well, a negative side, leading us to operate from a place of fear instead of possibility in everything from marriage and parenting to sports and finance. It’s a clarion call to accentuate the positive — my personal favorite way of doing that is focusing on what I’m grateful for — and a worthy follow-up to their 2011 book Willpower, which revealed that willpower isn’t a fixed, genetic strength, but a muscle that can be strengthened. Read More on Thrive: Instead of a Day of Thanks, How About a State of Thanks?

Podcast of the Week: Sinéad Burke is a writer, educator, and activist with achondroplasia, a genetic disorder that results in dwarfism. In this week’s episode of our immersive podcast “Meditative Story,” Burke explains how she compensates for all the things that are physically out of reach for her in the classroom, including the blackboard, by enhancing her students’ learning experience through stories, games and music. Her insight is powerful: we have more power than we realize to turn obstacles into advantages. 

Cartoon of the Week: This one’s for the procrastinators.

@newyorkermag / Instagram