James' World 2

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Kimberly M. Wetherell loves watching television after a hard day at work. The 46-year-old audiobook narrator, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y, likes to binge on shows like “Good Omens” and “Fleabag.”

But when it comes time to unwind, Wetherell, like many people, finds herself craving what she calls “comfort TV,” favorite old sitcoms like “The Golden Girls,” or “Seinfeld.”

“When I go to bed, my mind is still racing. My brain will be going over the anxiety of the day. I start overanalyzing things and my brain just won’t turn off,” she told TODAY. Watching ‘The Golden Girls,’ she explained, is “like hanging out with old friends.”

Not only does she have every one of Blanche, Rose, Dorothy, and Sophia’s wisecracks memorized, she has a special place in her heart for the show’s canned laughter.

“Something about a laugh track brings me back to when I was a kid and I watched TV in the ‘70s and the ‘80s. There’s something familiar and soothing about it. It allows me to turn my brain off and drift off to sleep,” she shared.

Reruns as a healthy ‘regression’

Will Meyerhofer, a New York-based psychotherapist, and author, says watching our favorite old shows can be a useful tool for dealing with anxiety and mild depression.

“For my clients, these old shows are like the food they grew up with. ‘The Brady Bunch’ or ‘The Facts of Life’ or ‘The Jeffersons’ is like that beloved baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread with just enough mayo the way mom used to make,” he told TODAY.

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Image by Malte Mueller/Getty Images

Watching “comfort TV” like “The Golden Girls” can help when we’re feeling anxious.NBC via Getty Images

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One unlikely day during the empty-belly years of the Great Depression, an advertisement appeared in the smeared, smashed-ant font of the New York Times’ classifieds:

WANTED. Five hundred college graduates, male, to perform secretarial work of a pleasing nature. Salary adequate to their position. Five-year contract.

Thousands of desperate, out-of-work bachelors of arts applied; five hundred were hired (“they were mainly plodders, good men, but not brilliant”). They went to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like millionaire who was devising “a new plan of universal knowledge.” In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, each man read three hundred books a year, after which the books were burned to heat the manor. At the end of five years, the men, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive fifty thousand dollars. But when, one by one, they went to an office in New York City to pick up their paychecks, they would encounter a surgeon ready to remove their brains, stick them in glass jars, and ship them to that spooky manor in Pennsylvania. There, in what had once been the library, the millionaire mad scientist had worked out a plan to wire the jars together and connect the jumble of wires to an electrical apparatus, a radio, and a typewriter. This contraption was called the Cerebral Library.

“Now, suppose I want to know all there is to know about toadstools?” he said, demonstrating his invention. “I spell out the word on this little typewriter in the middle of the table,” and then, abracadabra, the radio croaks out “a thousand-word synopsis of the knowledge of the world on toadstools.”

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Vegetables are an essential part of eating healthy, but getting enough vegetables can be a challenge for those of us who, to be totally honest, never learned to like them. I was once a vegetable hater, so I totally get this. But you can learn to like veggies, even if you despised them as a kid.

If you’re envisioning a banquet full of the same horrible-tasting dishes you turned your nose up as a child, relax. There are two important things to remember. One is that there are far more vegetable dishes in the universe than the ones you’ve already tried, and certainly some of them will be to your tastes.

The other is that our tastes really do change over time. Most of us go through a picky stage as children, then expand our palates a bit as teenagers and young adults. We also tend to taste bitter flavors less strongly as we age. That’s good news if you always felt Brussels sprouts or broccoli tasted too bitter to you. I rediscovered a lot of vegetables in my twenties, and sometime in my thirties, I found myself on the opposite end of the pickiness spectrum, eating pretty much everything I formerly hated—even black licorice.

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Smells hover just below our conscious awareness, conjuring up emotions and memories that shape how we perceive and navigate the world.

An unexpected whiff of a long-forgotten snack or a dusty book can transport a person to years past — enabling a kind of time travel that makes hazy memories more vivid.

It’s puzzling then that smell is a sense that, according to scientists, has been largely — and unfairly — ignored in most attempts to understand the past. A growing number of researchers now want to reconstruct ancient aromas and use them to learn more about how we used to live.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people who caught the disease temporarily lost their sense of smell, prompting a newfound appreciation of the importance of odor in their lives. New research projects are underway to understand what the past smelled like and identify what contemporary scents should be preserved for posterity.

“It’s a very vital sense. Smell was also very important in the past and it was probably even more important because in the past not everything was so sanitized,” said Barbara Huber, a doctoral researcher of archaeology at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.

The challenge of finding past smells is how to capture an ephemeral phenomenon: Archaeologists typically find and study things we can touch, and these are the artifacts we encounter in museums.

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Smell

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Last month, I decided to get a snack from a convenience store. As I walked to the door, there was another customer ahead of me. And he opened the door for himself without bothering to look back.

How rude, I thought. Who doesn’t hold the door open for someone behind them! I got my snack, returned to my car and stewed about the incident. Didn’t he see me? Did he do that on purpose? The thoughts consumed me as I drove around running errands — and even continued over the next few days.

I knew I was wasting a lot of emotional energy on a seemingly trivial moment. And it got me wondering — why was I taking this incident so personally? And how do I manage my feelings about it?

To help answer these questions, I turned to Ethan Kross, psychologist and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It; psychotherapist Sana Powell, author of Mental Health Journal for Women: Creative Prompts and Practices to Improve Your Well-Being; and clinical psychologist Adia Gooden. They told me it’s human to get upset when we feel offended by something that someone did or said, because we may feel their actions or words are a personal affront to our character.

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Stretching can feel like a real hassle, but it really is crucial to preventing injury and maintaining a good range of mobility—especially if you’re engaging in serious weight training. You should always throw some basic stretches into your pre-and post-workout, do what feels good, and talk to a doctor if something hurts in more than an “oooh yeah, that’s the stuff” kind of way.

But just because stretching is a core pillar of fitness doesn’t mean it comes naturally to everyone who works out. Even if you don’t work out, you should still be stretching. We talked to two of our favorite fitness and mobility experts to find out which stretches are crucial for everyone.

What parts of the body are most in need of attention?

For people who don’t get much physical activity in—or just don’t pay much mind to stretching—hips are an important place to start limbering up.

“Having mobility in your hips is important for decreasing and preventing lower back pain,” says Mike Watkins, a licensed athletic trainer, injury rehabilitation specialist, manual therapy expert, and founder of Festive Fitness & Wellness in Philadelphia. “Shakira said it best when she said ‘hips don’t lie.’”

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We asked experts for the moves everyone should work on. Unsplash

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Humans grow up with a powerful drive to learn how things work and why certain patterns and properties exist in the world. Wonder, a word with multiple related meanings, has one sense that captures this desire to know. You employ wonder when you ask questions such as ‘How do fish breathe underwater?’ or ‘Why do air conditioners drip water?’ Wonder, as I describe it here, is more than the sort of curiosity that motivates someone to seek a simple factual answer (eg, ‘What is the biggest kind of dog?’) Wonder moves someone to seek out explanations – especially about the patterns of cause and effect that underlie phenomena. It is also different from awe, which can occur as a more passive state of amazement. Wonder involves active thought and engagement. It invokes conjectures about ‘how’ and ‘why’. It might even launch speculations about different possible worlds. Wonder motivates targeted explorations and discoveries.

In its most mature forms – in adults who have flourished as lifelong wonderers – wonder promotes sustained excavation of the rich causal architectures of the world. It helps us to appreciate everything around us more fully. We come to see a more richly textured and dynamic reality. For example, through wondering and learning about how and why songbirds sing, how the first flowers break through frozen ground, and how animals hibernate, we come to see and experience the first days of spring in more immersive and rewarding ways. Each instance of wondering in turn launches a branching network of new instances and opens a door to the potentially endless joy of successive discoveries. If this sounds overly euphoric, it is exactly how renowned polymaths describe their lives, from childhood to their final moments.

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Temptation is part of life. It is commonplace to find yourself in situations where what you want to do and what you feel you should do are in conflict – for instance, choosing between a delicious dessert versus sticking to a diet, or playing video games instead of studying, or watching a movie rather than going to the gym. During these times, you likely aspire to make the ‘right’ decision – the decision that propels you towards your long-term goals. Successfully resisting temptations or, in other words, exerting high self-control more often is probably something you strive for. There’s certainly a widespread cultural belief in the value of greater willpower and self-discipline, as a glance at any self-help shelf or magazine rack will attest. Yet research by us and others tells a far more interesting and nuanced story about the pros and cons of being someone with ample self-control.

Unsurprisingly, a good deal of past research has focused on the positive outcomes and impacts of having high self-control. Findings show that people with greater self-control experience benefits such as higher productivity and success at school and work, greater success and satisfaction in their relationships, and they are viewed as more trustworthy by their peers. Naturally, these impressive outcomes shine a highly favorable light on the trait, and they jibe with the way that willpower is vaunted in popular culture. But, in fact, there’s growing evidence that self-control is not an exclusively beneficial characteristic – it can also come with various downsides, suggesting we would do well to take a more nuanced view of this trait and our desire for more of it.

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A customer at Happiness Forgets cocktail bar in London. Photo by Ian Teh/Panos

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