James' World 2

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We’re supposed to do things routinely for our health, like brushing our teeth, showering, and exercising.

And there are basic hygiene tasks to maintain or boost your financial health, too — actions you can take annually to make sure you’re on track to meet your goals.

Think of this routine as a quick checkup for your finances. Life Kit has more suggestions for handling your finances, but here are five good habits to get into every year –– no appointment necessary.

Look to the future

Ask yourself where you want to be three, five, or ten years from now. Brent Weiss, a certified financial planner at Facet, asks his clients this question when helping them devise their financial goals. And then he asks: “What has to happen in your life for you to look back and say, ‘That was a wildly successful period of my life?’ But here’s the trick. You can’t mention money.”

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While the impulse may be rooted in shyness or social anxiety, people who fail to read the room rarely suffer from passivity. They don’t enter as much as barge in. Subtle and restrained are not calling cards.

“They gotta make a splash,” says Laura Dudley, associate clinical professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University.

Confidence isn’t the problem. The issue is the inability to adjust. Think about if you’re home alone. You know that you can act a certain way, i.e., wear no pants. If company is there, you know enough to put on clothes. It’s about understanding context, and with a party, event, meeting or playground conversation, it means seeing and hearing what’s spoken and unspoken.

Properly reading a room requires a willingness to watch and bend to the situation, all of which can feel initially foreign. But it all falls into the possible-to-do category.

Reading a room begins with raising your awareness. If you were recently at a barbecue and reviewing the events, and think, That conversation went sideways fast. Was it me? — that’s enough self-reflection to lead to change. But if you cling to the attitude of, I am how I am: Deal — you’ll never be able to read the room because every interaction is about you, when it’s pretty much the opposite.

“Every relationship is a negotiation,” says Darrin J. Griffin, associate professor, chair of the communication studies department at University of Alabama, and co-author of Lying and Deception. “It needs concession. To win, it’s gotta be a win-win.”

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A handful of years ago, some friends and I were all in the midst of a romantic drought. It had been so long since we’d felt excited about anyone that we started to worry that the problem was with us. Had we simply grown incapable of that kind of feeling? We imagined that our jaded little hearts might look like peach pits, shriveled and hard.

This was the era, though, when we started using the phrase glimmer of hope. Glimmers came whenever we felt a giddy kick of affection—maybe for a friend of a friend, or the bartender at our favorite place, or the pottery-class buddy at the next wheel over. The hope was that these crushes—which were rarely communicated to their subjects—signaled that our hearts might someday soften up and become, once again, hospitable to life. Anytime we glimpsed a light at the end of our tunnel of romantic numbness, we’d text one another: Glimmer of hope!!!!

These glimmers helped us power through the seemingly endless tundra of uneventful singlehood. Whether they were reciprocated wasn’t really the point. It was about the feeling: the sweet, hopeful rush.

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Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Rawpixel.

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Asylum seekers have stretched New York City to its limits, according to Mayor Eric Adams, who described an “unprecedented state of emergency” this week as he called upon New York state and federal lawmakers and agencies to offer more support.

Adams’s office estimated that the city would spend $12 billion over three fiscal years to shelter and support the tens of thousands of migrants projected to arrive over that period.

A number of circumstances have converged to push people to New York City, including the end of Title 42, the health directive originally put in place under the Trump administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as efforts by Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas to send people who have crossed the southern US border to states run by Democrats.

But many choose to come of their own volition; New York City has a right to shelter directive, which means the city has an obligation to shelter those who request it. However, a long-standing affordable housing crisis has also helped push the city’s shelter system to the brink, overwhelming facilities to the point that asylum seekers are already sleeping in the streets outside of shelters.

But even as Adams called on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Congress to provide more funding to care for asylum seekers and institute comprehensive immigration reform, Adams’s administration is seeking to amend the rules of the right to shelter decree, which would give City Hall the ability to suspend the right to shelter in some situations.

“This is one of the most responsible things any leader can do when they realize the system is buckling, and we want to prevent it from collapsing,” Adams said in late May when City Hall initially requested the changes.

Though Adams called Hochul and the state government a “partner” at a press conference Wednesday, it’s not clear exactly how closely the two governments are working together, given a recent court order seemingly designed to force the two parties to make a cooperative plan to manage the situation.

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Mayor Eric Adams speaks during a public safety announcement on gun violence at New York City Hall on July 31, 2023.Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

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And so apologized William Carlos Williams, presumably to his wife, Flossie, in his 1934 poem “This Is Just to Say.” My own apologies tend to be somewhat less elegant, and certainly less worthy of publication. In my defense, however, I don’t directly repurpose my apologies as content for The Atlantic, explaining to my wife before a large audience that although I have been an insensitive jerk for the millionth time, it was totally worth it.

Apologizing well, after all, is tricky. It requires personal strength, a good ear, and a fair bit of psychological sophistication, which is why so many apologies are unsuccessful. If you have something you need to apologize for—or if you would just like to be ready to deal with the fallout from your next screw-up—here is your primer on the art and science of contrition.

From a neurocognitive viewpoint, apologies are extremely complex, involving at least three distinct processes. First is cognitive control, because you are making a choice to say you are sorry even though doing so is difficult and uncomfortable, which involves the lateral prefrontal cortex. Second is perspective taking, which involves thinking about how something you have said or done was experienced by another person and putting yourself in their position, implicating the temporoparietal junction. Last is social valuation, the way you calculate how much your apology will help everyone involved as opposed to just yourself, which mobilizes the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

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Sometimes, it’s easier to tell a friend you like their mediocre gift or sugar-coat your feelings about their new love interest than share how you really feel.

It might not always feel great after the fact, but according to Gail Heyman, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, learning to lie is a natural part of human development.

In one 2017 study from Hangzhou Normal University and UCSD, Heyman had toddlers play a one-on-one game with an experimenter in which the toddlers hid a treat under a cup while the experimenter closed their eyes. The children were told they could keep the treat if the experimenter did not find it. When the experimenter opened their eyes, they had to look under whichever cup the kid pointed to.

“So if the child pointed to the wrong cup, then the experimenter would pick the wrong cup and then the child would win the prize instead of the experimenter,” said Heyman.

Over the ten-day experiment, most of the young children figured out how to deceive the experimenters and win the treats. Heyman’s research suggests that we learn to lie early and can do so without any special instructions. But as we get older, and our cognitive abilities expand, our fibs become more sophisticated.

Jacquelyn Johnson, a psychologist based in Los Angeles, says that many of our white lies can happen reflexively and are motivated by our desire to preserve our sense of belonging.

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Whether you’re in the middle of a deep slumber or tossing and turning in the early hours of the morning, a vivid dream can be a highlight of your sleep routine that you never expected. But as wild as dreams can be—fantastic adventures, terrifying nightmares, or really strange mysteries—they’re notoriously hard to remember when you wake up. If you’ve ever wondered why you can remember dreams that feel unremarkable and not others, you’re not alone.

“We remember dreams when we wake up during a dream for long enough to think about it for at least a few seconds,” explains Jade Wu, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. “Often, we dream, wake up very briefly, and that dream is gone forever because we never encode the memory of it into long-term memory.”

Believe it or not, many of your dreams occur in the early hours of the morning, adds Wu, as dreams almost always occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep periods. Many often drift in and out of REM sleep periods, a type of sleep where eyes dart around without sending any information to the brain all while your heart rate and breathing quickens. These periods of sleep get longer and occur more frequently after we have fallen asleep and remained asleep for an extended period of time.

Usually, those who are dreaming in the middle of the night “are likely just waking up after an earlier bout of REM and remembering their dream,” says Wu. And most times, the dream is nearly instantly forgotten. Why? “We don’t encode dreams into memory the same way we do real experiences. There are fewer sensory details and contextual clues,” she explains. “We also have less time to transfer those memories of dreams into long-term memory, usually [with] just a few seconds or less, since that’s usually how long we’re awake in between REM and other sleep stages.”

Why can I never remember my dreams?

As we’ve learned, REM sleep (lots of eye movement and heart-pumping breathing!) often leads to vivid dreams—in fact, nearly 80% of all dreams take place during this memory-boosting period of sleep, says Rebecca Robbins, Ph.D., an instructor at Harvard Medical School and researcher at nearby Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

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