James Clear author of Atomic Habits, adds that looking at data can be a good starting point. “For fitness habits, it could be things like your Apple Watch or Whoop band or MyFitnessPal. There are many different ways to get data,” he says. “It also can be true for habits that maybe you wouldn’t think about tracking.” For example, looking at your calendar for the past year to determine whether you spent enough time at home with your family, or whether you were traveling for work too much. “If you’re so busy that you never give yourself time to think about what you’re doing … it’s really hard to improve, because you’re just busy repeating the same thing again and again. You don’t have a chance to look at the bigger picture.”

Picking your Habit and Digging deeper to Create a Plan

Once you’ve done your review of the habits you’d like to break, you should pick one of them to start with.

“I look at a number of the challenges a patient is facing and then ask myself, ‘Which one is in the driver’s seat?’” says Mendelsohn. “Meaning if I tackle one of these problems, are the rest of them likely to get better?”

The next step is to decide how you’re going to go about breaking the habit you’ve chosen, based on your history with it and the context or cues that lead to you performing the behavior. These are just a few of the examples.

Don’t Spend Too Much

Imagine that you are spending too much and you want to change this habit. You’ve determined that you started overspending when you added your credit cards to your Apple Wallet or PayPal. It was then very easy to purchase things when you see an advertisement on Facebook or receive a link from a friend. “You want spending money to be as difficult and thoughtful as possible,” Wood says. “Putting all your credit cards on your phone that you carry everywhere is counterproductive—you are further automating the process of spending money.” To fix this, you decide to remove your cards from all online payment services so each time you want to buy something, you have to physically go and pull out the card, which then gives you a bit more time to think about the purchase itself. It is also possible to ask your friends not send products or unsubscribe from product marketing emails.

You can check your phone all the time

If you’re trying to check your phone less often, David Kadavy, author of Mind Management and Not Time ManagementHe suggests that you lock it up in a locked box for a portion of your day. “Make it as hard as possible to actually perform the habit,” he says. While you’re still going to get the cue to check your phone, the effort of going to the lockbox and unlocking it can help block the behavior from triggering. Or, say you’re trying to check social media less often: “Just delete the social media apps from your phone,” says Kadavy. “Block them with the parental controls or, at the very least, don’t have them on your home screen.”

Not eating healthy

Clear’s own negative eating habits are a perfect example. In the house he used to live in, there was a McDonald’s right after the highway exit on his way home. He would stop there at least once a week. “I looked at myself after the last one, and I was like, ‘Am I going to do this every time I drive home? Am I just going to stop here and eat here every single time?’” he says. “Ultimately, what I decided to do was to start taking a different path home. If I went left off of the exit instead of right, it would take an extra three minutes, but I wouldn’t pass the McDonald’s. I changed the environment so that I wouldn’t be exposed to the cue. That added enough friction and enough separation that the habit would change.”

Do not procrastinate

“A lot of people tend to procrastinate, then rely on anxiety and fear to motivate them to get tasks done,” says Mendelsohn. “This can be effective at getting things done, but at the cost of causing unnecessary stress. Breaking tasks down into smaller ones can be a harder strategy to implement at first, but more sustainable in the long run.” To help you get started, Mendelsohn suggests writing these tasks down using a pen and paper, as it can be “really helpful for people to keep their organizational strategies separate from the digital tools we use all day.”

Sometimes, substituting a negative behavior for a more desirable one can work at blocking it—but, Wood says you have to know what the cue is, and the alternative behavior has to be both easy and rewarding. Say you’ve decided to drink a glass of water whenever you have the urge to look at your phone, instead of locking it away somewhere or putting it facedown next to you. “For most people, drinking a glass of water isn’t going to be as interesting as looking at their phones, so I don’t know if that’s going to work particularly well,” says Wood.

If your chosen way to try and break your habit isn’t working, maybe it’s time to try something else. Another thing to keep in mind is that “for some specific behaviors, like quitting smoking, multiple attempts is actually a good thing,” Wood says. “Because most people who ultimately quit have to keep trying until they figure out the right thing that will work for them.”

So don’t get discouraged if it’s taking a while to break your habit. Sometimes, you need to change your approach or look deeper at the context and cues that allowed you to perform the task.

Despite wide availability and vast improvements in speech recognition, most folks rarely use voice assistants. And when we do talk to Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri, it’s often just to ask about the weather. But there are a few voice commands you could be using today to enhance your TV viewing experience, because, let’s face it, navigating with a TV remote is a pain.

Imagine you’re halfway through an episode of Andor The doorbell will ring if you are watching your favorite television show or pause the action. To pause and rewind, you can speak a command. You can also use voice commands to launch a streaming app, check who directed the show, or even find out what the actor on screen just said. 

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You Will Need

All the best TVs and TV streaming devices have some form of voice control built in. The most versatile are Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Roku voice commands, but others offer at least some of the same functionality. Your remote can support voice commands if it has a microphone icon. 

Sometimes, you can use your smartphone, smart speaker or display to control the TV. As long as it’s in the same space and is connected to the Wi-Fi network, this will work. This is handy if you don’t want to have to reach for the remote and press that microphone button before you issue a command. 

There’s usually some setup required for all this to work, like adding your smart TV to the Google or Apple Home apps, Samsung SmartThings App or by installing Roku. With Amazon’s Alexa, you can pair smart speakers to your Fire TV by opening the Alexa app, tapping Learn More > TV & VideoSelect your Fire TV and choose the Echo speaker that you would like to use for controlling the TV. You may also need to link your streaming services accounts, but that’s usually part of the setup for streaming devices like Chromecast with Google TV.

Everything You Need to Know

You can use simple voice commands to communicate with your service. These include:

• Play
• Pause
• Resume
• Do not stop
• Start playing from the beginning
• Volume down
• Volumes up

Watch What You Like

Because it’s such a pain to type anything using a remote control, voice commands are great for launching apps, specific shows, and movies, or finding content that you might like. These are some commands you might try:

• Start Netflix
• Open Hulu
• Sam Rockwell: Show me your movies
• Play Stranger Things Netflix
• Please show me sci-fi television shows
• Action movies for 4K
• Check out all Martin Scorcese movies

With Google Assistant, you don’t even need to know the name of the movie, you can say things like, “Stallone, boxing movie” and Rocky will pop up, or “funny vampire movie” to get How we work in the Shadows.

To the Future and Back

You can use voice commands to be more precise than a remote for fast forwarding or rewinding, although it is sometimes difficult. These are some examples:

• Pause for 10 seconds
• Jump ahead 30 seconds
• Go back 10 seconds
• Move fast forward for three seconds
• Play next episode

Apple Music Replay, which is 2022’s year-in review feature, can be found on Apple Music. You can access your highlights online by signing in with your Apple ID credentials and then selecting Get started Enjoy the highlight reel You can see your musical listening history for the last year to get a visual tour.

Apple Music Replay provides a range of statistics. These include the time you spend listening to music, what songs you listen to most often, which artists you most enjoy, and what genres captivated you the most. Continue scrolling to find out more about your listening habits.

In the actual Apple Music apps—for desktop and mobile—this highlights reel isn’t actually available, which seems strange. If you click on the app, you’ll find the highlights reel. Listen Now tab, is a playlist that collects together a selection of your most-played songs over the past year—you can choose to add this to your library if you want to keep it.

YouTube Music

YouTube Music by David Nield

As soon as YouTube Music is opened, you might get invited to view your 2022 Recap.

YouTube Music refers to its End-of-the-Year Listening Digest Recap. If you go online and open the YouTube Music app, you will see the Recaps section. To see your profile picture, scroll to the top right. You can choose your channel. Recaps will be provided for each season, including spring, winter, fall and winter.

Your listening history is split into your favorite tracks, artists, and genres, and you also get a few other nuggets of info too—such as how many of your tunes you go back to and listen to again, or which live versions you preferred over the year. Your top 100 tracks of the year are also available in a playlist.