Friends News #5 - big plans 🤝 big calendar

Interesting Links

My goal in sharing links with you is to entertain, add value to your life, or show you things you might have not seen before. It’s not to sell you anything.

🏋🏻‍♂️ Strong App: This has been my favorite app to track workouts in for almost two years now. I'm terrible at remembering how much weight I lifted last time I did a movement. You can also save workout templates on it and my favorite part is that it has built-in rest timers.

🗓 Big A## Calendar: One of my recent purchases has been this wall calendar that lets me see all 366 days of 2024 at a glance. I still live by the digital calendar on my phone on a day to day or weekly basis but this wall calendar has been tremendously helpful to plan for future events.

📧 Inbox Zero: One of the productivity books I've been reading recently changed the way I think about my email inbox. I used to just let emails pile up there regardless of whether I took action on them or not. I had never learned a system for organizing emails until I came across the Inbox Zero method. Now, my personal and school inboxes are kept up daily just like my physical mail and I feel more like an adult that has their sh*t together. If you're curious, these were the videos I watched for gmail and outlook.

🎧 Currently listening to: Beyonce's Cowboy Carter on repeat 🔁.

📖 Currently reading: The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo.

Medical Tidbit

Every issue of this newsletter includes a medical tidbit. I might share suggestions for health optimization or answer one of your health-related questions. So if there is something you’ve always wanted to know, drop it in a reply to this email. Chances are someone else has this question too. Let’s learn together 🤓.

Today's Tidbit: The Fresh Start Effect

You know how around the beginning of each year everyone makes plans to exercise? Or how people plan to start their diets on Mondays? Psychologists published a paper on this in 2014 and called it the "fresh start effect". In the paper they discussed that the start of a week or year represents a "temporal landmark" where we distance our current selves from past imperfections and motivate us to act more in line with our new positive self-image. Another thing that happens is these temporal landmarks interrupt our day-to-day minutiae, make us zoom out on our lives and focus on achieving goals.

Now, although knowing about the fresh start effect is interesting in and of itself, things get much more fun when we talk about the practical applications of this effect. How could we intentionally use the fresh start effect to change our habits and move closer towards better versions of ourselves? We can start identifying more temporal landmarks and plan habit changes around them. This could be quitting smoking at the end of a financial quarter or starting a gym routine at the beginning of a season as opposed to a calendar year. This episode from one of my favorite podcasts features one of the psychologists that authored the paper. They discuss the fresh start effect in depth and how else we can use it. Give it a listen if you want to learn more about the psychology of behavior change 😁.