You want to lose weight. Get out of debt. Stop smoking. Eat more kale. Call your grandma more often.

I do understand why people don’t like New Year’s resolutions: They can be a source of failure, year after year. Folks often pick resolutions that are inherently unrewarding, that necessitate relentless hard work, or that remind them of their mortality in a way that makes them feel small instead of grateful.

I know because I’ve made all of those mistakes. But now? I love New Year’s resolutions. I use them to transform myself in small increments, taking turtle steps toward new habits. I begin slowly around the winter solstice, and inch myself toward a newer, better self. By spring, my new habits have taken hold, and the green leaves of growth unfurl.

Over the years I’ve learned a lot of tricks for successfully keeping my resolutions. And in the last three years, the science around willpower and habits has made great advancements, which helps a lot.

The first and most important factor in keeping your resolutions is to make the right resolution. Make the wrong one and you won’t keep it; you’ll just add another habit to the “fail” list.

This year, pick just one resolution that research shows will make you happier. Here are are three of my favorites:

1. Spend more time with friends. Study after study shows that we tend to be happier when we feel connected to our nearest and dearest, when we feel like we are a part of a group or a clan. Even introverts don’t like to feel lonely; this may seem like the science of the blazingly obvious, but it bears repeating. Do you frequently feel isolated or lonely? Make a resolution to routinely reach out to others.

Not sure how, or feel too busy? Join or start a group that meets regularly—maybe on the first Monday of the month, or every Friday at lunch. Some of my closest friends have come from book clubs, church groups, and standing family dinners. When we routinize our friendships, we remove the hassle of scheduling, and increase the odds that we’ll actually spend time with people we love or want to get to know better.

2. Everyday, find a way to give something to somebody. My favorite happiness booster is to give thanks: to a higher power for the abundance that surrounds me; to my dad for taking my kids to ice cream; to my main squeeze for all the ways he supports my work.

Equally good is to give something else—a helping hand, a compliment, a much needed $5 bill—even if it is just a tiny act of kindness. In a world that is more focused on getting than giving, a New Year’s resolution to do one kind thing each day, or to give thanks in one small way, is a pretty radical act. When we make giving a habit, we make gratitude and kindness central themes in our lives. In so doing, we transform our lives with joy.

3. Get more sleep and exercise. I know, that’s not one resolution, it’s two, but the science around these physical happiness boosters is pretty compelling. Studies are clear: You’ll be less stressed, less sick, and less grouchy in the New Year if you get more shut-eye. Try increasing your sleep 10 minutes a night for a week, and then another 10 the next week, and so on until you are regularly getting your eight hours.

If you aren’t active, you want to lose a few pounds, or you frequently feel a bit depressed, try adding more activity into your life in a way that feels fun or luxurious. I like to hike with my friend Jen and her ecstatically joyful dog Lou. It takes a couple hours out of my day (that’s the luxurious part, since I’m so strapped for time) but it leaves me feeling as bright and happy as Lou. On days when I don’t have time for a hike, I walk on a treadmill while watching Modern Family. This is luxurious and fun because I don’t watch TV at any other time.

It is miraculous to me that people can change themselves simply because they want to. New Year’s resolutions are an amazing act of creation, an art form where the canvas is the self. Cheers to making 2014 your happiest year yet!

Want more advice for keeping New Year’s resolutions? Sign up for Cracking the Habit Code, my FREE 21 day online class to help you make and keep resolutions that stick.

The holidays are not always a happy time for many people, particularly for adults who are disappointed or hurt year after year — that their family isn’t what they want it to be, that they got stuck with all the gift-buying and holiday tasks, that they always do do do for everyone, everywhere, and no one seems particularly grateful.

Which makes the holidays a fruitful time to think about forgiveness. If we want to feel happy over the holidays, we need to let go of grudges from last year and prevent those same old transgressions from happening again — and in many (often very difficult) cases, anticipate the times we’ll be expected to hold hands with family members who have hurt us.

My point: This holiday season will be a lot happier if we aren’t angry and resentful. I’ve blogged before about how forgiveness is something we do for ourselves, to lead happier lives:

Few people fully realize the huge impact the ability to forgive can have on their happiness, nor do most people think of this as a skill that they need to teach and practice with their children. But important it is: forgiving people tend to be happier, healthier, and more empathetic.

Fred Luskin, the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, has spent decades researching and teaching about forgiveness. Luskin emphasizes that forgiveness is not about forgetting, as the adage would have us believe, but about letting go. It is about choosing positive emotions over negative ones; it is a decision that results in an entirely different emotional experience.

Luskin has developed a program to help people learn to forgive even the most heinous acts. I’ve translated his forgiveness program here into skills and concepts we can practice ourselves:

• A good first step is to develop the ability to understand your emotions and articulate them when something is bothering you. Practice this by identifying and talking about your feelings, particularly when you are hurting.

• When you are upset, practice mindfulness. This will help turn off your fight or flight response so that you can respond to the upsetting situation more effectively.

• Another important way to practice forgiveness is simply to acknowledge how awful we feel when we ruminate about how we’ve been hurt, and remind ourselves of all the positive benefits for ourselves of forgiveness. When we feel hurt, it can help to recognize that what we are feeling is distress coming from what we are thinking and feeling right now, not from the original offense, whether it was months or just minutes ago.

• Remember that we suffer when we demand things that life is not giving us. We can hope for things, of course, and we can work hard to get what we want. But we cannot force things to happen that are outside of our control. When we expect something outside of our control to happen and then it doesn’t, we feel hurt and wronged. Practice letting go of desire for things you have no influence over, and redirect your energy towards things you do have control over.

• Talk with someone neutral about your desire for revenge, if that is holding you back. Remember that the best revenge is a life well-lived. When we focus on how we’ve been hurt, we give power to the person who hurt us because it causes us to continue hurting.

Forgiving is tough business. It takes courage and resolve to let go of negative feelings when we’ve been wronged. Fortunately this gets easier with practice — especially if we start with the small stuff and get in the habit early on — and it makes us stronger and better people.

Image courtesy of eekim

‘Tis the season for electronic gifts. But these days, parents need to provide their kids with much more than batteries for all their devices.

Everyday I read something that leads me to believe that tech devices are dramatically affecting our kids’ normal social, sexual, intellectual, and emotional development. What I’m most amazed by, frankly, is how uninvolved we parents tend to be in the online lives of our middle schoolers. Our tweeners tend to seem much more savvy than they actually are: They may have technical skills, but usually they don’t have the social skills they need to navigate the sophisticated online and social media world.

Smartphones, tablets, and computers are powerful, wonderful devices that I can hardly imagine living without. But our kids get addicted to them easily, and they often use them inappropriately.

Middle schoolers are not old enough (or developmentally ready) to have as much freedom online as they often do these days. Think of these devices like cars: Before kids can drive them alone, they need to know the rules. They need clear roads with bright lines painted for them to show them where—and where not—to go.

In order for parents to teach these rules to our kids, many of us need a crash course in them ourselves—consider it a new technologies boot camp. If your middle schooler seems to be spending more time on Facebook or texting than she is in-person with her friends, this boot camp is for you.

Step 1: Make it clear which SPACES are appropriate for device and computer use.

Just because we can take a laptop into the bathroom does not mean that this is an appropriate thing to do. These are the places where it is typically NOT OKAY to use a computer, tablet, or smartphone:

● The car, unless it is planned for a long road trip. If your kids are used to being on their devices while you shuttle them around town, re-introduce them to the car window. Encourage them to learn the names of the streets you are driving on. Talk to them. If they complain about being bored, remind them that boredom is not a health hazard, but technology overuse is.

● Bedrooms and bathrooms. If you think your middle schooler is mature enough to have a computer in his or her bedroom, read Catherine Steriner-Adair’s book The Big Disconnect. Believe me, it can forever change their development. Laptops, phones, and tablets get charged in the kitchen at our house.* (I do let my daughter take a smartphone into her room after school and before dinnertime, where she uses it to talk and text. She is not allowed to use it for Internet access in her bedroom. This means that kids do homework in our house in public spaces, not in their bedrooms.)

● Public spaces where others can overhear a conversation, like restaurants, school, or any place where someone is helping you, like in a check-out line at a store. Remind kids that when we are texting or talking on the phone, we are ignoring the people around us, which is especially rude when they are helping us with something.

Step 2: Identify appropriate TIMES to be on a device.

For example, here are some times when it is NOT appropriate in our household to be texting, snapchatting, Facebooking,** playing an electronic game, emailing, etc:

● While they are doing homework. I am aware that most middle-schoolers chat while doing homework and are better at multitasking than us middle-agers. But the ability to FOCUS (you know, do just one thing at a time) is a core life-skill that more and more of our kids are failing to develop.

● During meals. There is usually nothing so important that it can’t wait 20 minutes. Daily family meals actually ARE important to kids’ development, and need to be accorded that importance.

● During bedtime routines. In the evening all devices can be set to their “do not disturb” setting and put in their chargers (iPhones and iPads can be set to do this automatically) a half hour before bedtime.

Why 30 minutes? Because the low-energy blue light emitted by our tablets and smartphones stimulates chemical messengers in our brains that make us more alert, and suppresses others (like melatonin) that help us fall asleep. Changing electronic reader settings to have a black background may help if your kids like to read before bed on a tablet or electronic reader.

Step 3: Make it clear what is private, and what is not.

Here is the biggest ever newsflash for most seventh and eighth graders: They are not entitled to privacy in their texts, emails, Facebook or Instagram posts, etc. The computers, phones, and tablets they use are, in fact, owned by their school or their parents.

As such, schools and parents are accountable for everything that happens on them. This means parents have a responsibility to control all of the passwords on the devices they own, and they have the right to read all posts created or received on said devices.

Why? Two reasons. First, because everything that kids do online is much more public and permanent than they typically think. If they want to write a private love note, they should use a pen and the US Mail. If they want to have a private conversation, they should do it in person. Make it clear what is private (their journal, for example, or their bedroom) and what is not: all online communications.

The second reason that middle-schoolers are not entitled to privacy online is that kids usually behave differently—and by that I mean better—when they know that they are being watched by adults. They are emboldened by independence, and once they do something risky or against the rules online and get away with it, they are likely to do it again.

So collect your middle-schooler’s passwords, and USE THEM. Log in and read their posts and texts. (See Step 4 if you see something you don’t like.) Insist that they accept any and all requests to connect via social media with relatives and trusted adults: This can be a part of the village that helps keep an eye on your kids.

Step 4: Teach kids to seek help when things go awry—and have a plan yourself as a parent when they do.

Inevitably, our kids will be spammed, flamed, and even bullied online or via email. And they may make major mistakes themselves that have deep consequences. First, be clear about what you see as bad online behavior, and establish clear consequences should that bad behavior come from your child.

Second, teach them that their how they respond when something goes wrong usually matters a lot, so their first response should be to get help from you or their school. Establish an “amnesty” policy with them so that should they realize they (or one of their close friends) has made a mistake, they feel they can seek adult help repairing any damage.

If you aren’t sure how you’ll respond when things go wrong, or what situations middle-schoolers typically deal with online that you might need to help them with, take the time to read the last couple of chapters of Steiner-Adair’s The Big Disconnect.

Step 5: Actively teach kids to use their devices and social media accounts as a force for good.

On balance these technologies are good. They represent progress, not the death and destruction of our youth. But kids need to be taught how to use these sophisticated tools to make them happier, and to make the world a better place. (For ideas about how to do that, see this post about How to use Facebook to Increase Your Happiness.)

Perhaps this goes without saying, but kids will do what we do, not what we tell them to do, so the most important part of this boot camp is probably modeling these behaviors. When we text our work colleagues during dinner, we teach our family that work is more important than them. When we check Facebook during a red light in the car, we teach our kids that boredom is intolerable, and that it is safe to be online while driving.

But here’s the thing: We can also model positive behavior. We can turn our devices off, and keep them off at significant moments in our day. When we are online, we can post inspiring quotations and send our friends gratitude emails. We can text pictures of the kids to grandparents. And these technologies can make us more efficient (rather than just more distracted), and that efficiency can buy us more time with our middle-schoolers—who are readying themselves to leave our nest at any moment.

 

*A tangent that will make me seem like a luddite, but I can’t help throwing in: My kids use old-fashioned alarm clocks to wake up in the morning. One of them uses the “clock-radio” that I got for Christmas one year when I was in grade school. This in and of itself is amazing: My kids can’t believe something electronic was ever designed to last more than a couple of years and is still operable 30 years later.

**Note: My kids are not allowed to have Facebook accounts until it is legal for them to do so, at age 13. They have tons of friends and are somehow surviving socially being the “only kids in their entire school” who don’t have Facebook accounts. (Perhaps because many of their friends actually don’t have active Facebook accounts.)

The kids and I are preparing to go to a friend’s party, where we’ll be wrapping presents for less-fortunate children, like those spending Christmas in one of our local hospitals. Also knowing that the Salvation Army near us has said it’s short on toys this year, I asked each of my kids to take stock of their toys or books and select a few in really good shape for us to donate. Choose five, I suggested—one for every new toy they hope to get for Christmas.

I thought this seemed like a nice holiday tradition for us to start, and I hoped they’d get the non-materialistic message. Molly, however, heard something else.

“WHAT!?” she screamed. “I’m only getting FIVE toys for Christmas?! I WANT MORE THAN THAT!” And then there were nearly tears.

Holy cow, you’d think that my kids would have escaped all the materialistic mayhem at this time of year, what with their preachy mother and zero exposure to toy advertising, as we don’t get any TV stations and don’t listen to radio Disney. Apparently not.

Paranoid that despite my best efforts I’m raising materialistic consumers, I decided to look into why some kids are so materialistic while others could care less about having all the latest stuff.

Turns out that there are two things that influence how materialistic kids are. The first is obvious: Consciously or not, we adults socialize kids to be materialistic. When parents—as well as peers and celebrities—model materialism, kids care more about wealth and luxury. So when parents are materialistic, kids are likely to follow suit. Same thing with television viewing: The more TV kids watch, the more likely they are to be materialistic.

The less obvious factor behind materialism has to do with the degree to which our needs are being filled. When people feel insecure or unfulfilled—because of poverty or because a basic psychological need like safety, competence, connectedness, or autonomy isn’t being met—they often to try to quell their insecurity by striving for wealth and a lot of fancy stuff. Because of this, relatively poor teenagers ironically tend to be more materialistic than wealthy ones. And less nurturing and more emotionally cold mothers tend to have more materialistic offspring.

So materialism and the behaviors that go with it—desiring and buying brand name clothes and luxury items—can be symptoms of insecurity and a coping strategy used to alleviate feelings of self-doubt or bolster a poor self-image. But if what kids are really seeking is greater happiness and fulfillment, materialism is a terrible coping method. At best, it will only provide short-term relief; in the long-run it is likely to actually deepen feelings of insecurity.

One way to curb kids’ materialism is to limit their exposure to advertising. Another way, it turns out, is to try to meet their emotional needs, not their material ones. On that front, the research I cover in this blog suggests some good places to start; practicing gratitude, for example, or by emotion coaching—even simply by eating dinner together.

Epilogue: After her initial complaints, Molly has really gotten into the Christmas spirit—especially after we stopped to think about what it might be like to be poor or in the hospital over the holidays. All she needed to do was to think about how she has the power to help other people and her mood improved dramatically—and her generous spirit has emerged.

Selected references:

Goldberg, M.E., and Gorn, G.J., Perrachio, L.A., Bamossy, G., “Understanding Materialism among Youth”, Journal of Consumer Psychology 13 (2003).

Kasser, T., The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

Rose, P. and DeJesus, S.P., “A Model of Motivated Cognition to Account for the Link between Self-Monitoring and Materialism”, Psychology & Marketing 24, no. 2 (2007).

 

“To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.”

–Johannes A. Gaertner

Gratitude is a part of the happiness holy grail: compared with those who aren’t practicing gratitude, scientists have found that people practicing gratitude:

• Are considerably more enthusiastic, interested, and determined;
  .
• Feel 25% happier;
  .
• Are more likely to be both kind and helpful to others.
  .

Who doesn’t want these things?
What we’ve learned is that gratitude is a SKILL, like learning to speak German or swing a bat: it needs to be taught, and it needs to be practiced consciously and deliberately. If your family doesn’t have a regular gratitude routine, this is the week to start it.

Practicing gratitude can be blissfully simple: just count the things in your life that you feel thankful for, and ask your kids to do the same.

But this can be easier said than done, especially since some people just aren’t that grateful, and they really don’t want to be poked and prodded to practice gratitude.

One Size Does NOT Fit All
Turns out that not all people benefit from some gratitude practices. Having adolescents simply keep lists of things that they are thankful for doesn’t always increase their happiness and well-being in the ways that we would expect, based on the adult gratitude research. Why?

Many young teens are at that stage in their development where they are grasping for independence. So doing something that reminds them of how dependent they are on others, as gratitude practices can, can threaten their perception that they’re independent beings, liberating themselves from mom and dad. For these teens, then, it’s important to find gratitude practices that elicit feelings of appreciation but that don’t make them feel totally beholden to those around them. Putting the focus on what they feel grateful for about themselves or their own accomplishments can both elicit gratitude and emphasize their self-reliance.

The key with routine gratitude practices is creativity, and attention to the fact that we are simply trying to elicit a positive emotion—feelings of appreciation—just like we might try to elicit a smile from a baby. This means not insisting kids feel grateful, and certainly not telling them what they should feel grateful for; instead, it’s about creating an environment and situation where the feelings can naturally arise.

Here are some ideas for this holiday season:

• Start a tradition of writing “appreciations” on place cards. When hosting friends and family for a holiday meal, make large place cards for each person present, and then ask people to write things that they appreciate about one another on the inside of the place cards. Don’t ask people to write something about everyone present unless they want to – you don’t want to force the exercise. But do make sure that everyone has at least one thing written inside their place card, so that during the meal you can go around the table and share appreciations.
  .
• Start a gratitude calendar. In the spirit of advent calendars, one of my daughter’s fabulous teachers, whom I appreciate VERY much, had the kids create a calendar with pockets that hold slips of paper on which they write the things they are thankful for. The things they write on those little pieces of paper—and then proudly place in the pockets of the calendar they made—are heart-warming and heart-felt. Kids wrote things on a half-dozen slips of paper or more and were thankful for a range of things. Moms figured in heavily, as did pets, friends, and favorite toys. (They were also funny: Henry, for example, is thankful for his “gift for doodling,” while Judge is thankful for his “good looks and style.”)
  .
• Keep a family “gratitude list” or collection of things family members feel thankful for. Post a huge sheet of paper on your fridge and ask everyone to contribute to it when the spirit moves them. Anything can go on the list, no matter how large or small—people, places, toys, events, nature. Variations on this theme are endless. This year we are going to post the holiday card photos we receive from friends and family; under each card we’ll list the qualities those people possess that make us feel grateful for them.
  .

How does your family practice gratitude? What has worked and what hasn’t?

Selected references:

Bronson, Po, and Ashley Merryman. Nurtureshock: New Thinking About Children. New York: Twelve, 2009.

Emmons, Robert A. “Pay It Forward.” Greater Good, 2007.

Emmons, Robert A., and Michael E. McCullough. The Psychology of Gratitude. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Froh, Jeffrey, David Miller, and Stephanie Snyder. “Gratitude in Children and Adolescents: Development, Assessment, and School-Based Intervention.” School Psychology Forum: Research in Practice 2, no. 1 (2007): 1-13.

Froh, Jeffrey, William Sefnick, and Robert Emmons. “Counting Blessings in Early Adolescents: An Experimental Study of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being.” Journal of School Psychology 46, no. 2 (2008): 213-33.

Seligman, Martin E.P., Tracy A. Steen, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson. “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions.” American Psychologist 60, no. 5 (2005): 410-21.

Image courtesy of eekim

I’m on a new Dr. Oz show episode today! Tune in — I can’t wait to share my favorite Happiness Tips with you!

We Americans are often overwhelmed and exhausted. Did you know that 235 million people are currently grappling with feelings of time starvation and moderate to high levels of stress, exhaustion, or burn-out in the United States alone? ¹

While many things factor into this collective exhaustion, I’ve found, in my own life, that much of it stems from the sheer amount of stimulus and the build-up of, well, stuff. Here are several ways I filter out what I’ve come to think of as “junk stimulus.”

1. Rid your environment of physical clutter.
   • Clean out one drawer or shelf everyday religiously until everything in your home has a place—and everyone in your household knows where that place is. Commit to five minutes a day, everyday, until the job is done.
   .
   • Find a large box for donations or other “giveaways” and put it somewhere accessible until you are finished with this process. Donate or recycle anything that hasn’t been used for a year.* This goes for clothes, dishes, books, furniture (yes, furniture!), games, toys, shelf-stable food and spices, the super-awesome tortilla maker you’ve really wanted to try out since you picked it up in the eighties, and that tent you haven’t pitched for three years. Remember that your stuff is for today, not some imagined future. Be ruthless—you will thank me later every time you open a tidy, nearly empty, drawer or cupboard.
   .
2. Limit the amount of stuff you let back into your house.
   • Cancel all snail mail except things like hand-written thank you notes. Sign up to get your bills online. Cancel ALL catalogs and junk mail. (I like the free app PaperKarma. You take a picture of catalogs, mailers, credit card offers, phone books, etc., and they get you off the mailing list!) You can get everything you need online or in a digital version, including books, magazines, newspapers, season information from your local theatre, information from non-profits you love, concert schedules. You may have to call them to ask them to remove you from the list; I’ve had to plead and beg in the past. Again, be ruthless when you ask to be removed from these lists: All that direct mail is clutter.
     .
   • Put a recycling bin right by the door that you walk through with the mail, and don’t open junk mail that comes through—photograph it for PaperKarma, then rip it up and recycle it.
     .
   • Don’t go into a store without a list of what you need, and don’t let yourself buy anything that isn’t on the list. (This works wonders with my children, especially in places like Costco.)
     .
3. Get rid of all unneeded media and audible stimulus.
   • Turn the ringer off on your land line, if you still have one and you still get junk calls (even though you are on the Do Not Call registry). Have friends call your cell phone, and use your landline to check messages or to dial out only.
     .
   • Turn off your TV unless you intend to watch something specific. Don’t expose yourself to advertising—it is junk stimulus in and of itself. Record your shows and fast forward through the ads.
     .
   • Identify sources of irritation or unwanted stimulation in your household, like whining, too-loud music, background television, or a pet hamster that runs endlessly on a squeaky wheel (and smells bad, to boot). Make a concrete plan for how you will eliminate this junk stimulus over the next few weeks.
     .
   • If your home or workspace is noisy, play soothing music or put white noise on in the background—ironically, it will help filter out noise. This is a proven way to sleep better! (I like the app White Noise.)
     .
4. Prune niggling tasks, because if you feel hassled by a long task list, this, too, is a source of junk stimulus. So weed that puppy down with gusto until it is a realistic representation of what you actually can accomplish given your current status as a human being (and not a super computer).

• Automate as many of the routine tasks on your list as you can. Set your bills up on auto-pay. Create a standing grocery order (I use planetorganics.com, and they choose seasonal fruits and vegetables for me). Install a timed watering system for potted plants. Get an automatic pet feeder. Note: Don’t automate anything that brings you joy.
  .
• For most people, email is a to-do item that never quits. Rein it in. Which emails do you really have to read? Which must you respond to? Consider boldly deleting everything that you don’t absolutely need. I love gmail’s new tabs—they allow me to batch-delete emails that I don’t have time to read before I get sucked in and read them anyway. And I use a “bypass the inbox” filter for a lot of emails—they just go straight to a file, where they wait for me until I have time for them. Feel free to respond to email on YOUR terms; there is no law in the universe that says that you must sacrifice your sleep, well-being, or other priorities simply so that you can get through your email.
  .
• Prune your to-do list with this question: If it turns out that my life is a lot shorter than I hope it will be, which of the things on my list right now will I wish I hadn’t wasted time on? Pay particular attention to anything you do just for prestige, praise, or to feel superior to others, anything that makes you tense or anxious but doesn’t contribute to your growth over the long haul, and anything that involves toxic people or situations.
  .

How do you feel when you’ve pruned all this clutter? What other things do you do to eliminate junk stimulus?

*Warning: this process will probably be derailed if you start trying to sell your stuff—that is a totally different project. Donate it to a good cause; write-off the donation if you’d like.

^{1. American Psychological Association, “Stress in America,” 2009.}

---

Three ways working parents can combat exhaustion that don’t require radical social change

Feeling maxed-out? Like you’d like to lie down so badly you are having “hospital fantasies”? (Not familiar with that term? Hopefully you aren’t as tired as this woman, who writes about her hospital fantasy: “I stumbled back to work when my son was 6 weeks old. He had colic and chronic ear infections, so I really didn’t sleep for a year. No exaggeration. I would fantasize about having a minor car accident on the way to work. Nothing serious—just enough to lay me up in the hospital for a few days so I could sleep!”)

It’s not that I don’t think we have societal problems  that are causing this kind of exhaustion. I do. But there are things that we can do as individuals to prevent burnout and breakdown.

1. Get enough rest. I know, I know, you don’t have time to sleep. Or you think you are the exception to the rule—you don’t need the seven-to-nine hours of sleep that doctors and experts prescribe. Maybe you wish you could get more sleep, but you just can’t find a way to put sleep above your other priorities.

Ask yourself: What are your other priorities? Your health? Your happiness? Productivity and success at work? Raising happy and healthy children? Here’s the truth: You will not fulfill your potential in any of these realms unless you get the sleep your body, brain, and spirit needs.

But that’s not all: We also need to rest during the day. We are not computers, able to run continuously. This means that we need to rest between periods of productivity. After about 90 to 120 minutes of high output, we need a period of recovery—or stress and exhaustion start to build, and productivity starts to decline. Rest periods needn’t be long (10-15 minutes will do) if you truly take a break: Go for a walk outside, read an article that really interests you (but isn’t on your task list), chat with a coworker or neighbor, eat your lunch outside or near a sunny window.

In the wild (or, say, kindergarten), human beings naturally take breaks to refuel with a snack or a meal. Don’t squander this natural rest period by wolfing down your lunch while you read your email, or by sipping a latte while driving to work and calling that breakfast. Practice eating mindfully, paying attention to your food and the people you are with. Notice what you are eating and how quickly or slowly. Breathe. Relax.

2. Do only one thing at a time. Multi-tasking talent is nothing to brag about. If we just focused on one task at a time, we’d actually be more productive in the long run, and we’d be less exhausted at the end of the day. This is because multi-tasking exhausts more energy and time than single-tasking does. Take it from productivity experts Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy:

Distractions are costly: A temporary shift in attention from one task to another—stopping to answer an email or take a phone call, for instance—increased the amount of time necessary to finish the primary task by as much as 25 percent, a phenomenon known as “switching time.”

It is often harder for me to single-task than it is to multi-task. I have to totally remove all distractions to single-task: I do my best writing at a desk I’ve set up in a large closet that doesn’t get phone reception, with my email disabled. I group my daily tasks into two categories: “Think Work” and “Action Items.” Then I block off time on my calendar for both things. I do my Think Work at the closet desk totally uninterrupted, setting a timer so that I take a break every 60-90 minutes.

My Action Items take less focus, but I still tackle them one at a time in sequence—not parallel. Unless I’m working my way through my email, my email application is closed. I answer the phone only for scheduled calls. I leave my iPhone in do-not-disturb mode (so that I can see if my kids’ school is calling, but that’s about it) and reply to texts when I’m taking a break. Having these “rules” for myself has dramatically increased my productivity.

3. Reduce the amount of “junk stimulus” that you need to deal with. We are bombarded, day and night, with loads of, pardon my language, CRAP. TV ads (or even news!) we aren’t interested in that we watch anyway, making us anxious. A mailbox full of advertising and other “dead tree marketing.” Emails upon emails, mingling with Facebook posts and Tweets and texts. (I’m having an event this weekend, and I got nearly 100 texts about it yesterday. That might be super exciting for a teenager, but I thought I was going crazy.)

Left unchecked, all this junk stimulus will bleed us dry. It’s exhausting even as it is sometimes entertaining. This week, take notice of all the clutter in your life.

Start with your environment. Where is there “junk stimulus”—stuff that makes you feel tired when you see, hear, or otherwise experience it? Consider visual clutter, like that over-stuffed kitchen drawer you open every day looking for a paper clip. Ponder auditory clutter, like whiney kids who make you tense, or the neighbor who really does need to fix his car alarm. Think about online and media distractions. (You might enjoy them, but for mental health reasons, consider indulging in them only occasionally, as a treat.)

Next week I’m going to give you my three-part plan for eliminating junk stimuli and other crap of all kinds. This week: Get some rest, allow yourself to focus, and start noticing the junk that is cluttering your life.

Inspiring display of selflessness to make the world a better place.

Is it even possible to work less in today’s economy?

Are you caught in a “Time Bind”—where you feel like you don’t have enough time to get your work done AND spend time with your children and spouse AND take care of your own basic needs?

Sociologists have been very excited about a “natural experiment” occurring in Korea. In 2004, the Korean government began mandating that businesses cut their workweek back, from six to five days. Researchers now have almost a decade of data about how these widespread changes have affected people’s satisfaction with their jobs and, importantly, with their lives.

What is exciting about this situation is that it should improve our understanding of how number of hours worked per week affects job and life satisfaction. We already have research that shows pretty clearly that working long hours is correlated with work-family conflict and other forms of misery—but we don’t know whether working long hours causesunhappiness or whether, say, unhappy people disproportionately work for companies which require longer hours.

If I regularly worked one less day per week, I think I would definitely be happier with my job, my work hours, and with my life overall. Truly, I can’t think of any maxed-out mom, or even just any working parent, who doesn’t dream of someone mandating that they work less.

That’s why I was surprised by the results: The most recently published study on this topic seems to show that the Korean Five-Day Working Reform did not have “the expected positive effects on worker well-being.” Ten years and one less workday per week, people aren’t happier with their jobs or their lives overall.

Say what? Despite a dramatic correlation between working less overtime and feeling happier, researchers didn’t find that the government-mandated reduction in work hours made people happier on average when they controlled for things like income. Their theory about why: Employers didn’t reduce employee workload when they reduced their work hours. Workers actually only reduced their work time by four “official” hours per week, not eight. This means workers had four fewer hours in which to do their work; either they crammed it in by working more efficiently in fewer, longer days, or they kept working the same amount of time but did their work off the books.

Maxed-out workers need less work, not less time to do the same amount of work. Part of what I find so harrowing about parenting is the time pressure. It’s stressful to have the same amount of work but less time in which to do it.

All this is to say that the obvious solution to our Time Bind—a government mandate that we work less—is probably not coming soon to a workplace near you.

But I’m not saying that our government doesn’t need to help maxed-out parents.

The problems plaguing working parents aren’t our own individual problems. It isn’t that we feel “overwhelmed and overworked simply because [we’ve] individually taken on too much or done a bad job coping with [our] responsibilities,” as Sharon Lerner writes in The War on Moms.

Our collective exhaustion is sociological. Its roots come from the way our society and economy is structured. As Katrina Alcorn puts it in Maxed Out, “We lack the social and systemic supports that we need in order to realize our potential and share our talents with the world.”

At the same time, we set ourselves up for a lot of disappointment, not to mention feelings of victimization, when we hold fast to the belief that we need to change our institutions—our government, our workplaces, our marriages—before we can be happy in life and productive and successful at work. There are three important things we can do to prevent our own breakdowns.

Next week I will lay out three strategies for preventing burnout among working parents that will help you step away from the brink of breakdown.