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You want that new video game so badly, but you’re trying to knock your credit card balance down. Or you’re binging your favorite TV show and can’t wait to find out if a character lives, but it’s late, and you need to be alert for work tomorrow. Just exert a little self-control, you tell yourself. But it’s so hard!

People frequently think of self-control as something that requires willpower—the effort of giving up some immediate pleasure for a long-term goal. A study from last year found that people in the U.S., the Netherlands, and China tend to write about self-control with words such as “difficult” and “unpleasant” and about people who show self-control as “virtuous.” For decades, psychologists held a similar view. In fact, one prominent theory in the 1990s called ego depletion stated that if you used the willpower “muscle” too much, it would get tired and become less effective.

But in the past decade, the science has shifted. Scientists noticed that some people found self-discipline to be completely effortless, yet still stuck to their goals better than those who had to exercise a lot of willpower. People who possess naturally high levels of self-control may create habits that rarely expose them to temptations to veer off course, says psychologist Denise de Ridder, who studies self-control at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

There has been a sea change in the field away from the “willpower” understanding of self-control towards one that focuses on specific strategies or habits that make self-discipline easier, says psychology researcher Johanna Peetz of Carleton University in Ontario. Here’s what scientists have learned.

The Importance of Routine

One of the first clues that the conventional wisdom about willpower was wrong came in 2015. In six varied experiments—one of which lasted more than a year—researchers studied high school students’ self-control. The result: whether students who reported high self-control were pursuing good grades, regular exercise, or better sleep, they relied on routines for studying, exercising, or going to bed. These structured habits—doing the same thing in the same place at the same time of day—were more likely to lead to long-term success than attempting to squelch counterproductive impulses in the moment. People with these good habits reported doing them automatically, without having to think about it.

Since then, other researchers have studied what the average person struggling to stay on track might learn from people who naturally show self-control. In an experiment, de Ridder and colleagues found that establishing small, repeated habits can help achieve goals. They recruited participants who reported struggling to stick to goals, then asked them to pick something they wanted to get better at, such as eating more healthfully, exercising, or protecting the environment. They were encouraged to pick a modest daily goal—for example, exercising for 10 minutes, eating some vegetables for lunch or recycling. Participants logged their progress with an app for three months and through questionnaires. Although the study did not find a connection between the participants’ capacity for self-control and their habit formation, those who completed the study and consistently achieved their small goal reported that they felt they had developed a stronger habit.

Practice Makes Habits Easier

Establishing habits like these can make sticking with a challenging behavior feel easier over time, de Ridder says. In a 2020 study, she and her colleagues followed another group of people who chose a goal that had been hard for them to achieve and kept diaries about their progress over four months. The goals fell into the same general categories as those in the other study. Participants chose, for example, to eat fruit at breakfast, be more patient with a friend, or save money in the supermarket. The more times people practiced the behavior, the more they improved their ability to use self-discipline. Establishing a habit does require effort at first, de Ridder says, but after about three months, it often gets easier.

It makes sense to see self-control not merely as foregoing pleasure, de Ridder says, but also as being able “to create adaptive routines and strategically avoid conflicts, which in turn leaves more room for attending to what one finds important in life.” These structures can help organize your surroundings in a way that makes doing what you think is good for you feel more natural.

Mindset Shift

Habits are not the only advantage people with high self-discipline may have. A 2025 study found that they may actually prefer doing something meaningful—that advances their goals—rather than something that’s just fun or relaxing. In an at-home experiment, participants completed psychological profiles that measured the strength of their self-control trait. Then they were asked to name four things they would do if they had an unexpected free hour. They rated these activities—reading, sleeping, baking, exercising, grocery shopping, and the like—by whether they found them primarily enjoyable or meaningful.

The participants were then told to do anything they liked for the next hour (while being compensated). The people high in self-control chose activities they rated as meaningful, such as exercising or doing chores; the others went for the purely enjoyable, such as taking a nap or listening to music. “Those high in trait self-control would not choose to just lay down on the sofa and dream away for 60 minutes,” says University of Zurich psychologist Katharina Bernecker, lead author of the study. They didn’t have to use willpower to suppress an urge for a nap. “We concluded that maybe the story that they are so good in impulse control and suppressing pleasure may not be the full story.” In fact, they take pleasure in doing activities that are constructive.

Is it possible for the average person learn to reframe their preferences so that they will enjoy doing the hard—but meaningful—thing that’s been haunting their to-do list? There’s no proven tool yet to help a person do this. Nevertheless, creating small habits can still help make a tough task easier. Think about what’s tripping you up and what habits you might use to help.

If you’re having trouble clicking off the screen at night, you could try setting your alarm for half an hour before bed and training yourself to click off as soon as your alarm blasts. If you want to take up running, but something always derails you, create a routine in which you run one mile every day before breakfast.

After a few months, the research suggests, pursuing your goal will get easier. Who knows? If given a free hour, you might even prefer to take a run than a nap.

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1st mind-blowing Eiffel Tower fact

Gustave Eiffel

Eiffel_shutterstock_editorial_2550891a_large © Images Group/REX/Shutterstock

Gustave Eiffel did not design the Eiffel Tower

himself

Two of his senior engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, drafted the first version in 1884. At first, Eiffel wasn’t impressed by their sketches—he thought they looked too plain. But once architect Stephen Sauvestre added the signature arches and glass pavilion, Eiffel got on board and began promoting the project under his name.

Eiffel_shutterstock_117401284 © Artgraphixel/Shutterstock

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2nd mind-blowing Eiffel Tower fact

Spain didn’t want it

Before Paris said yes, Barcelona said no. Eiffel initially proposed the tower to city officials in Barcelona, but the idea was rejected. Historical records suggest that it was turned down either due to budget concerns or a lack of interest in such a bold and unconventional design.

Eiffel_shutterstock_242818009 © Everett Historical/Shutterstock

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Eiffel_shutterstock_242293924 © Everett Historical/Shutterstock

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Success in President Trump’s war on Iran now appears partly to depend on whether Washington can reopen the Strait of Hormuz, stave off global economic decline, and avoid another endless war.

Turkish history offers both a warning and a way forward about how to deal with this vital waterway, which Iran has effectively closed, sharply reducing the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Specifically, the lessons concern the Dardanelles, the narrow strait linking the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara and, beyond it, the Bosporus and the Black Sea.

The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the world’s most important energy choke points, carrying oil equivalent to one-fifth of global consumption and roughly one-fifth of the global liquefied natural gas trade. That is precisely why the temptation to address the problem militarily is so dangerous.

On paper, choke points can create a false sense of simplicity, especially for a superpower that enjoys a vast technological and military edge over its adversary. To war planners in Washington, a narrow passage can look like a technical problem to be overcome by force. In reality, strategic waterways are never merely geographic bottlenecks; they are tests of sovereignty and the balance of power.

That is what the British and French discovered during World War I when they tried to force passage through the Dardanelles, then controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The Gallipoli campaign, as it was named for the peninsula that runs along the strait, of 1915-16 was Winston Churchill’s brainchild as first lord of the Admiralty. The Ottomans had entered the war on Germany’s side and seemed weak. Britain’s idea was to free up passage in the strait, knock the Ottomans out of the war, and reopen supply routes to Russia. Instead, the campaign became one of the war’s bloodiest disasters for the Allies, killing more than 130,000 men — roughly 44,000 Allied troops and at least 86,000 Ottoman soldiers — and costing Churchill his post.

In Turkish memory, Gallipoli is a story of national birth. Mustafa Kemal, the Ottoman officer who would later become Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, made his name in the defense of the straits. “Canakkale cannot be passed,” a reference to a city on the strait, remains a potent slogan.

The British defeat also left the Ottomans blocking Russia’s only viable warm-water exit to the Mediterranean for grain exports and military aid, deepening the economic and military crisis that fueled revolutionary unrest at home, hastening the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, and the Bolshevik seizure of power.

A U.S. effort to open the Strait of Hormuz by force would be risky, military experts warn. Iran can exploit the advantages of asymmetric warfare, mining the passage and using drones, missiles, and small-boat swarm attacks to make fighting for a narrow waterway costly even for a superior navy.

But for President Trump, the choice does not need to be between a military gamble and acquiescing to Iranian control over the strait — and, by extension, over global energy markets. The United States can borrow a page from Turkish history and push for a negotiated maritime agreement, taking inspiration from the 1936 Montreux Convention. The document is foundational for modern Turkey and ensures that this critical waterway stays open while acknowledging the sovereignty and security concerns of the state that overlooks it.

For much of the 19th and early 20th century, control of the straits stood at the center of Russia’s imperial ambitions and European great-power rivalry. After World War I, the new Turkish republic accepted a regime of free passage and demilitarization under international supervision. But by the mid-1930s, Europe was rearming, collective security was eroding and Turkey feared growing pressure from both the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy. Ankara pushed for a new convention that would guarantee safe passage without sacrificing the republic’s own survival.

Thus came the Montreux Convention, which was signed by 10 nations, including France, Britain, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and several other Black Sea nations. Montreux preserved freedom of passage for merchant shipping in peacetime while restoring Turkey’s sovereignty over the straits. It also gave Turkey greater discretion in time of war to impose restriction on warships — which Ankara invoked early in the war in Ukraine to restrict the Russian fleet’s access to the Black Sea. In other words, Montreux was a rules-based compromise between openness and sovereignty: It kept commerce moving while recognizing that the state controlling the waterway could not be expected to ignore its own security.

This model offers a useful lesson and perhaps an off-ramp in talks with Iran, even though Montreux is not a copy-and-paste model for Hormuz. Turkey in 1936 was revising an existing international regime in peacetime; Hormuz sits inside an active war.

The geography is also more complicated. The Dardanelles are controlled by one state, Turkey. Hormuz lies between Iran and Oman, with the main shipping lanes largely in Omani waters. Any Hormuz version of Montreux would have to be very specific: no attacks on merchant shipping, no mining of transit lanes, rules to avoid conflict between naval forces, provisions during wartime to allow for restrictions on warships from non-Gulf states. There should also be some outside mechanism — through Oman, the United Nations, or a small contact group of Arab Gulf nations — to monitor compliance.

Washington should test Iran’s appetite for tying a cease-fire to a multilateral framework that guarantees freedom of passage. At its core, a Hormuz convention would need to do what Montreux did: give Iran something it values in exchange for legally binding, verifiable commitments to permit commercial passage. A durable peace in the Gulf is unlikely to come from pretending Iran has no residual capacity to threaten the strait. Nor can the international community accept a situation in which Tehran turns a global artery into a weapon. A deal would have to recognize the security concerns of Iran and the other Gulf states, such as Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and be tied to a broader cease-fire.

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Chantal Jahchan

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The Australian biotech company Cortical Labs recently posted a video in which 200,000 living human neurons grown on a silicon chip played the 1993 first-person shooter Doom. The neuron-controlled main character wandered corridors, encountered enemies, and fired weapons—clumsily, and it died often. But the neurons were playing nonetheless.

The demo could mark a genuine inflection point. The neurons appeared to exhibit what Cortical Labs’s chief scientific officer, Brett Kagan, calls “adaptive, real-time goal-directed learning.” The stakes extend well beyond gaming, in part because AI’s appetite for electricity has been rapidly growing. Though neurons are unlikely to replace microchips, they can perform some calculations far more efficiently, and studying them could offer new approaches to computing—and, perhaps, to testing neurological drugs.

To be clear, Cortical Labs’s neural cells aren’t extracted from brains. “You can essentially take a small bit of blood or skin,” Kagan explains, “isolate certain types of cells, turn them into stem cells and then, from those stem cells, generate an indefinite supply of neural cells.” Each of its computing units can house about 800,000 neurons in a self-contained life-support system that can keep them alive for up to six months. The interface relies on electricity—“the shared language between biology and silicon,” as he puts it. When brain cells are active, they generate small electrical pulses, and the system can deliver small pulses back to them.

But wiring is the easy part. The hard part is getting cells in a dish to do anything purposeful. “The temptation is to anthropomorphize and say, oh, they like [playing Doom],” Kagan says. “But this isn’t an animal or a human or anything even as complex as an insect. It’s a system. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Does a computer like or dislike the reward function on a [reinforcement-learning] model?’”

The solution to motivating neurons drew on the free energy principle, which was developed by neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. The principle holds that neural systems are driven to predict their environment. “If I reach for an empty can of drink and I successfully predict the outcomes of my actions, that’s sort of a world I can live in,” Kagan says. “But if I reach for it and sometimes it turns into a chicken and sometimes it turns into a firework, that world would be impossible to live in.”

To train the neurons, the team built a simple feedback loop. Wrong moves produced random, unpredictable signals—white noise. Right moves produced structured, predictable ones. “Any signal that the cells could not possibly predict is something that the cells would then just have to learn to avoid,” Kagan says, “because that would be the only way to create predictability in this environment.” In effect, chaos was punishment, and order was reward.

In October 2022, Cortical Labs published a proof-of-concept study in the journal Neuron. Kagan and his colleagues showed that within minutes, neurons on microchips could learn to play Pong, the classic video game in which a player repeatedly intercepts a ball—think two-dimensional ping-pong. But Pong only involves a bouncing square and a moving line. Doom has corridors, enemies, three-dimensional navigation, and a lot of things that are trying to kill you.

To make that leap, Cortical Labs organized a hackathon with Stanford University. Independent researcher Sean Cole paired the neurons with a standard learning algorithm. The hybrid system outperformed the algorithm running on its own, suggesting that the biological cells were contributing to the learning process.

Cortical Labs frames its ambitions around two tracks. The first is medical: “93 to 99 percent of clinical trials, depending on how you cut it, in the neuropsychiatric space fail,” Kagan says. Many of those drugs are tested in neurons in a dish, but he points out that brain cells are not meant to sit in an information void. “We’ve actually published and shown that when you have cells in a game environment or a world environment, they’re fundamentally different in how they respond to drugs, how they exhibit disease,” he says.

The second track is computational. Neurons form “the most powerful information-processing system that we’re aware of,” Kagan says. “The complexity of it far exceeds anything we’ve built with silicon.” Silicon transistors, he says, have first-order complexity—a binary state, 0’s and 1’s. “Biological neurons have at least third-order complexity, probably much higher. They can hold at least three interacting dynamic states at any one time.”

That complexity, researchers argue, could translate into major energy savings. Feng Guo, an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington, sees Cortical Labs’s biocomputing platform as capable of “high-level computing.” In a 2023 paper in Nature Electronics, Guo and his colleagues introduced “Brainoware,” a system that uses three-dimensional brain organoids for computing. For Guo, the energy argument is decisive. The human brain uses just 20 watts—less than a dim lightbulb. “If you want to create a similar computing power for the silicon-based AI computing system, that would be at least a million times higher,” he says.

Still, Kagan is careful not to oversell the future. “A pocket calculator will outperform me at long division any day,” he says. “But your best state-of-the-art [reinforcement-learning] AI algorithm isn’t as good as going into someone else’s house and finding the way to make a cup of tea.” Biological computing is “a new tool in the intelligence toolbox,” he says.

Don’t expect a personal computer run on a brain in a vat anytime soon. Kagan speaks realistically about the research still to be done, but says that “you move from science fiction to science once you can work on the problem.” A few years ago, biological computing had one published game of Pong to its name. Now it has a commercial platform, an application programming interface that developers can connect to, and a video of neurons stumbling through Doom—badly, but they’re learning.

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The classic video game Doom at OXO Video Game Museum in Madrid, Spain. Eduardo Parra/Europa Press via Getty Images

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Then the pandemic happened. In the years since, women have slowly regained their foothold in the labor force, although working mothers in particular have faced an uphill battle between strict in-office policies and ballooning childcare costs. As of February, however, women have overtaken men in the workforce yet again. A report from Indeed’s Hiring Lab last week highlighted that the gap has closed, driven in large part by job growth in sectors that are dominated by women. 

Between February 2024 and February 2026, the U.S. economy added 1.2 million jobs. A significant portion of this growth—over 814,000 jobs—was on account of women, and across sectors like healthcare that tend to draw more female workers. Even in a sluggish job market, healthcare is one of the few industries that has continued adding jobs and helped keep the economy afloat.

In fact, over the last year, significant job growth in healthcare has offset losses across the rest of the workforce: The U.S. economy added a total of 156,000 jobs overall, due to 375,000 new healthcare jobs. This pattern is even clearer over the past year: The share of jobs held by women has increased by nearly 300,000 since February 2025, while men saw an overall drop in employment of 142,000 jobs.

It seems this uptick in women’s labor force participation reflects a broader shift that was already underway, before it was derailed by the pandemic. But as Indeed notes, the gender gap isn’t closing because record numbers of women are entering the workforce. The real driver of this change is a notable decline in men’s labor force participation, as employment has dropped in sectors that have historically been dominated by men, such as manufacturing and construction.

It’s also clear, from recent data, that women’s employment is not exactly secure: In the first half of 2025, about 212,000 women left the workforce. There was also a noticeable dip in employment for certain women, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, which found that the number of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 dropped by nearly three percentage points between January and June of last year. 

With the rapid adoption of generative AI, new forces threaten to undermine labor force participation for all workers, just as men are facing other headwinds in the job market. And while there may be new opportunities available to women in the workforce, the very issues that have long limited their career growth—from pay inequities to caregiving responsibilities—still loom large, even as the economy continues to rely on their labor.

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