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9 most common New Year’s resolutions — and how to make them happen
We look at the most common New Year's resolutions and get expert advice to help you check them off 2019's to-do list.

- The top three New Year's resolutions for 2018 were to eat healthier, get more exercise, and save more money. Care to guess what the top three are this year?
- We check in with experts to devise strategies for tackling the most common New Year's resolutions.
- Knowing exactly what you want to accomplish and how you will do it can help increase your chances of success in 2019.
With New Year's rounding the corner, everyone is sharing their 2019 resolutions, and it's giving us that auld déjà vu. According to a 2017 YouGov survey, the top three resolutions for 2018 were eating healthier, getting more exercise, and saving more money. According to a 2018 survey, the top resolutions for next year are — wait for it — to exercise more, lose weight, and save money.
Clearly, we've missed the mark. To kick off New Year's right, let's look at last year's most popular resolutions and see how we may be able to make them happen in 2019.
Eat healthier
Photo credit: Stella de Smit on Unsplash
Eating better is a laudable goal, one many of us could strive to improve on. Don't fall for dietary fads, though. They help us neither live healthier nor lose weight.
"Everyone is blaming dieters for regaining weight they lose, and that's just wrong — it's not their fault they regain weight, and it's not about willpower, or any lack thereof," Dr. Traci Mann, of the University of Minnesota's Health and Eating Lab, told the Washington Post.
Mann notes diets trigger three physiological changes that make it difficult for us to maintain them. The first is neurological (dieters' brains become programmed to notice food more); the second is hormonal (diets increase the hormones that make people feel hungry); and the third is biological (when you try to lose weight, your body starts to store calories as fat).
"For practically any diet — crazy or not crazy sounding — in that first six to 12 months, people can lose about 10 percent of their starting weight," Mann continues. "But the short run isn't the whole story. Everyone acts like the short run is the whole story, and that anything that happens later is the dieter's fault and not really part of the diet."
If your resolution is to eat healthier, don't diet. Speak with your doctor to devise healthy meal plans that don't starve your body but, instead, focus on healthier foods — fruits, vegetables, less salt, more fish, and so on — that you can enjoy for the long run.
Get more exercise

Again, don't start exercising with the goal of losing weight. Many factors combine to create your metabolic rate, including basic body functions, digestive functions, and physical activity. Physical activity only accounts for 10 to 30 percent of the total rate, and exercise is an even smaller subset of that.
With that said, exercise is one of the best habits for maintaining a healthy mind and body and increasing quality of life. Here are two tips to make it stick:
First, don't push yourself to exhaustion every workout session. Trainer Firas Zahabi argues that consistency in training will benefit you far more.
"Let's say the maximum number of pull-ups you can do is ten," Zahabi explains. "Should I make you do ten pull-ups on our workout? No, I'm going to make you do five, because I'm setting you up to work the next day. The next day we're going to do five. And then we're going to do six."
If you can do ten pull-ups but need a three days to recover, then the maximum number you can do a week is eight. But if you can do five a day consistently, you can manage 35 pull-ups a week. Whatever the exercise, Zahabi's flow-state method allows you to increase volume without sore muscles.
Then, reward yourself immediately after the workout. As Charles Duhigg told Big Think, enjoying a reward, such as a piece of chocolate, immediately after the workout wires your brain to associate exercise with that pleasure. Soon the endorphins will kick in at the thought of the exercise, with or without the chocolate.
Save more money
Not an ideal way to start saving in 2019, but better than some people's plan.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
We all need an emergency fund or to save for retirement, but everyday expenses cut deeper into our paychecks with each year.
According to the USAA Educational Foundation, one way to help you save is to pay yourself a committed percentage first. Figure out how much of your monthly gross you can safety set aside — they recommend 10 to 20 percent — and treat it like taxes. It comes right off the top. No excuses.
Another good saving technique is pay down your credit card bill as quickly as possible. In 2018, the average interest rate on a new credit card hit a record of 16.71 percent. Meanwhile, the average savings account's annual percentage yield is a mere 0.09 percent. Kill the credit card debt, so it doesn't offset what you manage to save.
Focus on self-care
Plan on improving self-care for your New Year's resolution? Then make sure you to sleep like this in 2019. Image source: Pixabay
This one will mean different things to different people, so we'll stick to the activity that is the cornerstone of all self-care: sleep. According to the CDC, thirty-five percent of American adults get fewer than seven hours of sleep a night.
If you are one of those adults, here are a couple tricks to getting your sleep schedule back on track:
- Stick to the same sleep schedule every day.
- Keep your bedroom cool, free of light, and limit as much noise pollution as possible.
- Don't drink alcohol before bed. Try chamomile tea or warm milk instead.
- Avoid the bright, blue-tinted light of electronics before bed. It wrecks your circadian rhythm.
Remember, the average adult should get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night, but everybody is different. Find your required sleep time and make sure to get it.
If sleep isn't your self-care resolution, make sure you know exactly what it is you want to change. Don't simply tell yourself, "I want to get fit and healthy." Vague, indefinite goals will ensure you don't have a means to navigate to that end. The more specific your resolution, the better your chances.
Read more
Reading more: the coziest resolution you can make this year. (Photo from Pexels)
The best trick for reading more is to always have a book at the ready. Neil Pasricha, at Harvard Business Review, recounts this illuminating story:
A good friend once told me a story that really stuck with me. He said Stephen King had advised people to read something like five hours a day. My friend said, "You know, that's baloney. Who can do that?" But then, years later, he found himself in Maine on vacation. He was waiting in line outside a movie theater with his girlfriend, and who should be waiting in front of him? Stephen King! His nose was in a book the whole time in line. When they got into the theater, Stephen King was still reading as the lights dimmed. When the lights came up, he pulled his book open right away. He even read as he was leaving.
The same goes for doctor's offices, break rooms, and airport terminals. These small moments add up to a lot of quality reading time.
Another tip is to do your reading with a physical book or dedicated e-reader. Not a tablet or smartphone. Tablets and smartphones may lure you away from reading with just one more YouTube video to watch, Facebook post to like, or Twitter kerfuffle to leap into.
Make new friends

All you must do to make friends is banish your social jitters, be confident in yourself, and not alienate people with boorish behavior. Simple, right? Obviously not or it wouldn't be on this list. Don't think this one is just here for the introverts, either. While many extroverts have mastered chitchat, many can feel they lack those deeper social connections.
Entrepreneur and author Andrew Horn shared with Big Think his advice for gaining confidence in conversation. He said:
In any moment you can ask yourself am I doing this because I want to or because I think people will like it? If we're basing it off of the reality that someone else will like it, we'll never really know. We open ourselves up for that social anxiety, the fear of negative judgment, the unknown of external validation. So, we can always ask ourselves what do I want to do right now? What is interesting to me? What will feel good to me? And act off of that to eliminate social anxiety to bring more confidence into our conversations. So that's how we find our authentic voice and use it.
Horn notes that looking for external validation only burdens you with social anxiety, making it more difficult to find friends or conduct business. Ironically, it is through internal validation that we find the confidence to connect with other people.
How do we manage internal validation? Horn recommends creating what he calls the "curiosity compass," a series of questions that you genuinely want to ask other people. Such questions help make connections because you will be interested in their answers and because others enjoy the feeling of being found interesting.
Learn a new skill/hobby
We want to learn new skills or hobbies as a means to enrich our lives. Instead, we find ourselves idling our free time away with another TV binge. Of course, we tell ourselves, once we catch up with the current season, we'll definitely learn to play the piano. Except Netflix just ordered two more seasons of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
A paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology looked at why people devote their time to "passive activities," such as Facebook or watching TV, compared to "flow activities" like learning a new skill or hobby. Participants reported they engage with passive activities because they are easier and more enjoyable. While participants believed flow activities would result in a deeper, more lasting happiness, they found the effort to engage a major hurdle.
The researchers suggest people use techniques to reduce the effort of getting into the flow. If you're looking to try your hand at creative writing, for example, you should have your computer set up ahead of time and know where you are going to start writing. Blacklisting sites like Netflix and Facebook may not hurt either.
Get a new job

Most people find employment through networking, leading them to the cliche, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." There's some truth to that, but risk-taking expert Barnaby Marsh believes there's a deeper truth at play. He argues that it really centers on people developing social networks were an opportunity one person can't capitalize on can instead be passed on to another.
And when you're astute to many, many opportunities, by definition you can't pursue and you can't take all of them. But what do you do with them? The best thing to do is to share those opportunities with other people that you know who could use those opportunities. And as you share them you're creating a bond and the preconditions for prosocial activity to happen in the future. Lucky people almost always share their luck with other people, and it comes back to benefit them in great ways.
Connecting with others, and sharing what luck and talents you have, is a great way to lay the seeds for networking a new job.
Don't make a New Year's resolution
One way to not be disappointed by your resolution is to not make one. The problem with this approach is that New Year's resolutions are decent tools for change.
According to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, New Year's resolvers reported higher success rates than nonresolvers at modifying a life problem. Forty-six percent of resolvers were successful, while only 4 percent of nonresolvers managed the feat.
"Self-efficacy, skills to change, and readiness to change assessed before January 1 all predicted positive outcome for resolvers," wrote the researchers.
While you can certainly avoid failure by not making a resolution, the New Year's atmosphere of newness appears to open our mind's willingness to accept that change. Even if it's not the most original resolution, it can still bring a valuable change to your life.
(Didn't find your New Year's resolution on the list? No worries. Check out our article on brain hacking your New Year's resolution for more general advice on how to make change stick.)
U.S. Navy controls inventions that claim to change "fabric of reality"
Inventions with revolutionary potential made by a mysterious aerospace engineer for the U.S. Navy come to light.
U.S. Navy ships
- U.S. Navy holds patents for enigmatic inventions by aerospace engineer Dr. Salvatore Pais.
- Pais came up with technology that can "engineer" reality, devising an ultrafast craft, a fusion reactor, and more.
- While mostly theoretical at this point, the inventions could transform energy, space, and military sectors.
The U.S. Navy controls patents for some futuristic and outlandish technologies, some of which, dubbed "the UFO patents," came to life recently. Of particular note are inventions by the somewhat mysterious Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, whose tech claims to be able to "engineer reality." His slate of highly-ambitious, borderline sci-fi designs meant for use by the U.S. government range from gravitational wave generators and compact fusion reactors to next-gen hybrid aerospace-underwater crafts with revolutionary propulsion systems, and beyond.
Of course, the existence of patents does not mean these technologies have actually been created, but there is evidence that some demonstrations of operability have been successfully carried out. As investigated and reported by The War Zone, a possible reason why some of the patents may have been taken on by the Navy is that the Chinese military may also be developing similar advanced gadgets.
Among Dr. Pais's patents are designs, approved in 2018, for an aerospace-underwater craft of incredible speed and maneuverability. This cone-shaped vehicle can potentially fly just as well anywhere it may be, whether air, water or space, without leaving any heat signatures. It can achieve this by creating a quantum vacuum around itself with a very dense polarized energy field. This vacuum would allow it to repel any molecule the craft comes in contact with, no matter the medium. Manipulating "quantum field fluctuations in the local vacuum energy state," would help reduce the craft's inertia. The polarized vacuum would dramatically decrease any elemental resistance and lead to "extreme speeds," claims the paper.
Not only that, if the vacuum-creating technology can be engineered, we'd also be able to "engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level," states the patent. This would lead to major advancements in aerospace propulsion and generating power. Not to mention other reality-changing outcomes that come to mind.
Among Pais's other patents are inventions that stem from similar thinking, outlining pieces of technology necessary to make his creations come to fruition. His paper presented in 2019, titled "Room Temperature Superconducting System for Use on a Hybrid Aerospace Undersea Craft," proposes a system that can achieve superconductivity at room temperatures. This would become "a highly disruptive technology, capable of a total paradigm change in Science and Technology," conveys Pais.
High frequency gravitational wave generator.
Credit: Dr. Salvatore Pais
Another invention devised by Pais is an electromagnetic field generator that could generate "an impenetrable defensive shield to sea and land as well as space-based military and civilian assets." This shield could protect from threats like anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles that evade radar, coronal mass ejections, military satellites, and even asteroids.
Dr. Pais's ideas center around the phenomenon he dubbed "The Pais Effect". He referred to it in his writings as the "controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma) via accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration under rapid (yet smooth) acceleration-deceleration-acceleration transients." In less jargon-heavy terms, Pais claims to have figured out how to spin electromagnetic fields in order to contain a fusion reaction – an accomplishment that would lead to a tremendous change in power consumption and an abundance of energy.
According to his bio in a recently published paper on a new Plasma Compression Fusion Device, which could transform energy production, Dr. Pais is a mechanical and aerospace engineer working at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), which is headquartered in Patuxent River, Maryland. Holding a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Pais was a NASA Research Fellow and worked with Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. His current Department of Defense work involves his "advanced knowledge of theory, analysis, and modern experimental and computational methods in aerodynamics, along with an understanding of air-vehicle and missile design, especially in the domain of hypersonic power plant and vehicle design." He also has expert knowledge of electrooptics, emerging quantum technologies (laser power generation in particular), high-energy electromagnetic field generation, and the "breakthrough field of room temperature superconductivity, as related to advanced field propulsion."
Suffice it to say, with such a list of research credentials that would make Nikola Tesla proud, Dr. Pais seems well-positioned to carry out groundbreaking work.
A craft using an inertial mass reduction device.
Credit: Salvatore Pais
The patents won't necessarily lead to these technologies ever seeing the light of day. The research has its share of detractors and nonbelievers among other scientists, who think the amount of energy required for the fields described by Pais and his ideas on electromagnetic propulsions are well beyond the scope of current tech and are nearly impossible. Yet investigators at The War Zone found comments from Navy officials that indicate the inventions are being looked at seriously enough, and some tests are taking place.
If you'd like to read through Pais's patents yourself, check them out here.
Laser Augmented Turbojet Propulsion System
Credit: Dr. Salvatore Pais
Could muons point to new physics?
New data have set the particle physics community abuzz.
- The first question ever asked in Western philosophy, "What's the world made of?" continues to inspire high energy physicists.
- New experimental results probing the magnetic properties of the muon, a heavier cousin of the electron, seem to indicate that new particles of nature may exist, potentially shedding light on the mystery of dark matter.
- The results are a celebration of the human spirit and our insatiable curiosity to understand the world and our place in it.
If brute force doesn't work, then look into the peculiarities of nothingness. This may sound like a Zen koan, but it's actually the strategy that particle physicists are using to find physics beyond the Standard Model, the current registry of all known particles and their interactions. Instead of the usual colliding experiments that smash particles against one another, exciting new results indicate that new vistas into exotic kinds of matter may be glimpsed by carefully measuring the properties of the quantum vacuum. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's go piecemeal.
It is fitting that the first question asked in Western philosophy concerned the material composition of the world. Writing around 350 BCE, Aristotle credited Thales of Miletus (circa 600 BCE) with the honor of being the first Western philosopher when he asked the question, "What is the world made of?" What modern high energy physicists do, albeit with very different methodology and equipment, is to follow along the same philosophical tradition of trying to answer this question, assuming that there are indivisible bricks of matter called elementary particles.
Deficits in the Standard Model
Jumping thousands of years of spectacular discoveries, we now have a very neat understanding of the material composition of the world at the subatomic level: a total of 12 particles and the Higgs boson. The 12 particles of matter are divided into two groups, six leptons and six quarks. The six quarks comprise all particles that interact via the strong nuclear force, like protons and neutrons. The leptons include the familiar electron and its two heavier cousins, the muon and the tau. The muon is the star of the new experiments.
The Standard ModelCredit: Cush via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC0 1.0
For all its glory, the Standard Model described above is incomplete. The goal of fundamental physics is to answer the most questions with the least number of assumptions. As it stands, the values of the masses of all particles are parameters that we measure in the laboratory, related to how strongly they interact with the Higgs. We don't know why some interact much stronger than others (and, as a consequence, have larger masses), why there is a prevalence of matter over antimatter, or why the universe seems to be dominated by dark matter — a kind of matter we know nothing about, apart from the fact that it's not part of the recipe included in the Standard Model. We know dark matter has mass since its gravitational effects are felt in familiar matter, the matter that makes up galaxies and stars. But we don't know what it is.
Whatever happens, new science will be learned.
Physicists had hoped that the powerful Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland would shed light on the nature of dark matter, but nothing has come up there or in many direct searches, where detectors were mounted to collect dark matter that presumably would rain down from the skies and hit particles of ordinary matter.
Could muons fill in the gaps?
Enter the muons. The hope that these particles can help solve the shortcomings of the Standard Model has two parts to it. The first is that every particle, like a muon, that has an electric charge can be pictured simplistically as a spinning sphere. Spinning spheres and disks of charge create a magnetic field perpendicular to the direction of the spin. Picture the muon as a tiny spinning top. If it's rotating counterclockwise, its magnetic field would point vertically up. (Grab a glass of water with your right hand and turn it counterclockwise. Your thumb will be pointing up, the direction of the magnetic field.) The spinning muons will be placed into a doughnut-shaped tunnel and forced to go around and around. The tunnel will have its own magnetic field that will interact with the tiny magnetic field of the muons. As the muons circle the doughnut, they will wobble about, just like spinning-tops wobble on the ground due to their interaction with Earth's gravity. The amount of wobbling depends on the magnetic properties of the muon which, in turn, depend on what's going on with the muon in space.
Credit: Fabrice Coffrini / Getty Images
This is where the second idea comes in, the quantum vacuum. In physics, there is no empty space. The so-called vacuum is actually a bubbling soup of particles that appear and disappear in fractions of a second. Everything fluctuates, as encapsulated in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Energy fluctuates too, what we call zero-point energy. Since energy and mass are interconvertible (E=mc2, remember?), these tiny fluctuations of energy can be momentarily converted into particles that pop out and back into the busy nothingness of the quantum vacuum. Every particle of matter is cloaked with these particles emerging from vacuum fluctuations. Thus, a muon is not only a muon, but a muon dressed with these extra fleeting bits of stuff. That being the case, these extra particles affect a muon's magnetic field, and thus, its wobbling properties.
About 20 years ago, physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory detected anomalies in the muon's magnetic properties, larger than what theory predicted. This would mean that the quantum vacuum produces particles not accounted for by the Standard Model: new physics! Fast forward to 2017, and the experiment, at four times higher sensitivity, was repeated at the Fermi National Laboratory, where yours truly was a postdoctoral fellow a while back. The first results of the Muon g-2 experiment were unveiled on 7-April-2021 and not only confirmed the existence of a magnetic moment anomaly but greatly amplified it.
To most people, the official results, published recently, don't seem so exciting: a "tension between theory and experiment of 4.2 standard deviations." The gold standard for a new discovery in particle physics is a 5-sigma variation, or one part in 3.5 million. (That is, running the experiment 3.5 million times and only observing the anomaly once.) However, that's enough for plenty of excitement in the particle physics community, given the remarkable precision of the experimental measurements.
A time for excitement?
Now, results must be reanalyzed very carefully to make sure that (1) there are no hidden experimental errors; and (2) the theoretical calculations are not off. There will be a frenzy of calculations and papers in the coming months, all trying to make sense of the results, both on the experimental and theoretical fronts. And this is exactly how it should be. Science is a community-based effort, and the work of many compete with and complete each other.
Whatever happens, new science will be learned, even if less exciting than new particles. Or maybe, new particles have been there all along, blipping in and out of existence from the quantum vacuum, waiting to be pulled out of this busy nothingness by our tenacious efforts to find out what the world is made of.
- Benjamin Franklin wrote essays on a whole range of subjects, but one of his finest was on how to be a nice, likable person.
- Franklin lists a whole series of common errors people make while in the company of others, like over-talking or storytelling.
- His simple recipe for being good company is to be genuinely interested in others and to accept them for who they are.
Think of the nicest person you know. The person who would fit into any group configuration, who no one can dislike, or who makes a room warmer and happier just by being there.
What makes them this way? Why are they so amiable, likeable, or good-natured? What is it, you think, that makes a person good company?
There are really only two things that make someone likable.
This is the kind of advice that comes from one of history's most famously good-natured thinkers: Benjamin Franklin. His essay "On Conversation" is full of practical, surprisingly modern tips about how to be a nice person.
Franklin begins by arguing that there are really only two things that make someone likable. First, they have to be genuinely interested in what others say. Second, they have to be willing "to overlook or excuse Foibles." In other words, being good company means listening to people and ignoring their faults. Being witty, well-read, intelligent, or incredibly handsome can all make a good impression, but they're nothing without these two simple rules.
The sort of person nobody likes
From here, Franklin goes on to give a list of the common errors people tend to make while in company. These are the things people do that makes us dislike them. We might even find, with a sinking feeling in our stomach, that we do some of these ourselves.
1) Talking too much and becoming a "chaos of noise and nonsense." These people invariably talk about themselves, but even if "they speak beautifully," it's still ultimately more a soliloquy than a real conversation. Franklin mentions how funny it can be to see these kinds of people come together. They "neither hear nor care what the other says; but both talk on at any rate, and never fail to part highly disgusted with each other."
2) Asking too many questions. Interrogators are those people who have an "impertinent Inquisitiveness… of ten thousand questions," and it can feel like you're caught between a psychoanalyst and a lawyer. In itself, this might not be a bad thing, but Franklin notes it's usually just from a sense of nosiness and gossip. The questions are only designed to "discover secrets…and expose the mistakes of others."
3) Storytelling. You know those people who always have a scripted story they tell at every single gathering? Utterly painful. They'll either be entirely oblivious to how little others care for their story, or they'll be aware and carry on regardless. Franklin notes, "Old Folks are most subject to this Error," which we might think is perhaps harsh, or comically honest, depending on our age.
4) Debating. Some people are always itching for a fight or debate. The "Wrangling and Disputing" types inevitably make everyone else feel like they need to watch what they say. If you give even the lightest or most modest opinion on something, "you throw them into Rage and Passion." For them, the conversation is a boxing fight, and words are punches to be thrown.
5) Misjudging. Ribbing or mocking someone should be a careful business. We must never mock "Misfortunes, Defects, or Deformities of any kind", and should always be 100% sure we won't upset anyone. If there's any doubt about how a "joke" will be taken, don't say it. Offense is easily taken and hard to forget.
Not following Benjamin Franklin's advice.Credit: Ronald Martinez via Getty Images
On practical philosophy
Franklin's essay is a trove of great advice, and this article only touches on the major themes. It really is worth your time to read it in its entirety. As you do, it's hard not to smile along or to think, "Yes! I've been in that situation." Though the world has changed dramatically in the 300 years since Franklin's essay, much is exactly the same. Basic etiquette doesn't change.
If there's only one thing to take away from Franklin's essay, it comes at the end, where he revises his simple recipe for being nice:
"Be ever ready to hear what others say… and do not censure others, nor expose their Failings, but kindly excuse or hide them"
So, all it takes to be good company is to listen and accept someone for who they are.
Philosophy doesn't always have to be about huge questions of truth, beauty, morality, art, or meaning. Sometimes it can teach us simply how to not be a jerk.
Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.
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