Treat sleep like it’s a friend, make a single-item to-do list, and other unexpected ways to improve your life.
Unless you live a charmed life, chances are there are aspects of it you’d like to improve. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning, to find time for family and friends, to tackle that to-do list of mundane tasks, to get the printer to actually work.
Out of these everyday difficulties, a market for life hacks was born: seemingly simple ways to optimize and streamline life. Some of these tips proved useful — dropping a pin in Maps where I parked my car has prevented many panicked searches — others, not so much. Oftentimes, however, the most effective step toward self-improvement is the most straightforward. Small and accessible shifts can manifest the most change without totally upending our established routines.
Experts, ranging from authors to academics, offer their bite-size, low-lift advice on how to live a better life. While these tips are meant to be easily implemented, by no means should you attempt them all — just try what speaks to you and your circumstances.
Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Try to get natural light every day (and treat sleep like your friend)
“Number one in my mind is having light during the day, particularly in the morning. Sunlight is free. Even if it’s overcast, there’s still lots of bright light outdoors. It’s a triple whammy of being good because you get light, you get fresh air, you get to move your body. Going outside during the day is such a good thing for your sleep and overall mental and physical health.
My number two is to treat your sleep as you would treat your friend. This means prioritizing them and making sure you have time and space for them, but also not being overbearing and chasing them down and forcing sleep to happen. If you strike that balance between being there and holding space for your friend, sleep, but also being chill about it and not being too overbearing, then you’re going to have an easier time having the sleep health that you need.”
—Jade Wu, author of Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications
Outsource help with dating, work, or whatever else is on your mind
“Weekly, share one of your hopes, dreams, goals, or dating and relationship needs with a new person. This will increase the amount of people who are willing to help you reach your goals.”
—Lamont White, dating coach, television personality, and founder of Better Way to Meet matchmaking services
Start a (small) to-do list
“The simple hack that has transformed my life is putting absolutely everything I want to do for myself, my family, and my work on a digital to-do list that I can check off every day. It seems so simple, but something about seeing those small tasks and checking them off daily has allowed it to become a permanent pattern for me. I recommend that people start doing this with one small task and slowly build up competence before they add more. Every time you check it off, you get the rush of having completed a task and you’re building a consistent habit.”
—Whitney Goodman, psychotherapist and author of Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy
Cut through the chaos with meaningful rituals
“I think it’s important to create your own rituals. I’ve found that my own personal rituals help keep my work-life harmony in check. Whether it’s my monthly supper club or my morning ritual of preparing a hot beverage, I find that these things ground me in even the busiest of times.”
—Tina Wells, business strategist, advisor, and author of The Elevation Approach: Harness The Power of Work-Life Harmony to Unlock Your Creativity, Cultivate Joy, And Reach Your Biggest Goals
Take a breather before dealing with your finances
“Before you look at your finances, give yourself a two-minute transition exercise. For many of us, money is a serious stressor. We may not notice that we’re experiencing a fight-flight-or-freeze response as we sit down to go over accounts, but our body knows it. Set a timer for 120 seconds and do some deep breathing, make a list of three things you’re grateful for or appreciate about yourself, or simply journal for a page or two. Suppressing emotions and telling ourselves our anxieties are stupid or wrong leads to negative coping mechanisms like avoidance, while learning to self-regulate as a part of money management facilitates acceptance and presence of mind.”
—Amanda Clayman, financial therapist
Say hi to your neighbors
“My tip is to acknowledge the people I pass on the street: a smile, a nod, or a hello. I live in a small-ish town and while I know this can be a safety issue for some, I have found in my little community that I feel more a part of it, and feel like I’m contributing, even if it’s this very small acknowledgment on daily walks. My goal is to not be rushing around with blinders on all the time, just going about my business, but to actively work at noticing the people around me. I find I say things like, ‘Please go ahead’ now more than, ‘Oh I’m so sorry’ after having bumped into someone or cut them off. The small reminder to just pick your head up, make eye contact if you can, and offer a smile, nod, or even a hello has been a very worthwhile one.”
—Lizzie Post, co-president of the Emily Post Institute and author of Emily Post’s Etiquette, The Centennial Edition and Higher Etiquette: A Guide To The World of Cannabis, From Dispensaries to Dinner Parties
Prioritize the people who prioritize you
“Choose people who choose you back. This was something I realized on my own that changed so much about my relationships. We should be choosing the people in our lives who are actively choosing relationships with us as well, and anything less isn’t a relationship we have to accept.”
—Lane Moore, author of You Will Find Your People: How To Make Meaningful Friendships As An Adult
Reach out to that friend you’re thinking about right now
“If a friend comes to mind, contact them. It could be a text, a DM, a meme, or even an email. If all you say is, ‘Thinking of you. I just wanted to say hi,’ that is good. Even better: if you reminisce about a specific memory of the two of you together. Share something they’d find interesting — like a meme, news story, mutual interest — laugh again with them about a joke you once shared, or, if you can, honestly say, ‘I miss you.’ If they respond, plan to connect again — to talk on the phone, make a Zoom call, or get together in person. Get it on the calendar and make it happen. And if they don’t respond, give them the grace. People are busy, texts get lost, and even when we appreciate being contacted, we don’t always know what to say.”
—Jeffrey Hall, professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas
Make out with your partner… every day
“One small thing you can do to live better is make out with your partner every night before bed. Over time, couples in long-term relationships stop touching and kissing throughout the day. For many couples, the only physical contact they have is when they’re having sex or trying to initiate it. But if this is the only time you’re touching or kissing, that starts to create pressure. If your partner tries to touch you, you might find yourself pulling away because you don’t want it to ‘lead to more.’ Or you might start avoiding physical contact altogether. Instead, if you make the conscious intention to make out every night, you’ll start to break that connection between touch and sex. You’ll stop being so on guard around your partner, and you’ll be able to relax into the contact. Making out every night will help you feel closer to your partner, and you may even get those butterfly feelings from the beginning of your relationship back.”
—Vanessa Marin, sex therapist, and Xander Marin, authors of Sex Talks: The Five Conversations That Will Transform Your Love Life
The growing oil and gas industry means more incidents like East Palestine.
There’s a common thread linking many of the high-profile chemical spills that have made headlines across the country lately: the oil and gas industry.
Philadelphia residents were on high alert after the Trinseo latex plant 20 miles from the city released at least 8,100 gallons of acrylic polymers into a tributary for the Delaware River on March 24. Those acrylic polymers were made up of compounds known as butyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, and methyl methacrylate; all are produced from fossil fuels.
Last month, East Palestine, Ohio, faced a Norfolk Southern train derailment with highly volatile toxic chemicals, including butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride — which is also derived from oil. On March 28, 10 barges, including one containing 1,400 metric tons of methanol — yup, you guessed it, made from oil or gas — broke loose in the Ohio River in Kentucky.
Many other incidents don’t make national news: The Guardian reported that the US has averaged a chemical accident every two days so far in 2023. Every year, there’s an average of 202 accidental chemical releases at facilities, according to EPA data.
This adds up to a major threat to water quality. “In the US, chemical exposure probably is the biggest threat to water quality, particularly drinking water quality, whether that is direct chemical exposure from facilities like what happened in Philadelphia or chemical exposure from products,” said Joel Tickner, who is a professor of public health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and leads the nonprofit Green Chemistry & Commerce Council.
All these events are usually lumped together in the vague category of a chemical spill, but it’s important to get more specific than that. Petrochemicals — as this class of compounds are known — are ubiquitous today, used to make some form of the plastic found in detergents, cosmetics, clothing, packaging, and more. (The Trinseo plant near Philadelphia, for instance, was basically making paint.)
There’s a reason plastics and petrochemicals are in nearly everything. They’re dirt cheap — and useful. The industry has become extremely efficient at converting fossil fuels into sets of materials that are lighter in weight and pliable, making them as adaptable for medical equipment as they are for lip balm, nail polish, clothing, and single-use coffee cups.
But the adaptability comes at a cost. These chemicals can conceivably be produced and transported safely — at least on paper. But the volume of accidents shows how often they aren’t. In 2022, according to federal data, there were more than 20,000 recorded times hazardous materials caused injury, accidents, or death while in transit. “It’s a very risky chain every step of the way,” said Judith Enck, a former regional EPA administrator and president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics.
Those risks aren’t going away anytime soon. Petrochemical production in the US is booming, derived from the larger boom in US oil and gas supply. And the industry’s broadening footprint means more communities are coming in direct contact with carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors that affect humans and animals in ways scientists still don’t fully understand. Most of the time, people aren’t coming into contact with petrochemicals through train derailments, but in more mundane ways.
From fossil fuels to plastics: The full life cycle of petrochemicals takes a dangerous toll
The final form of plastic you buy at the store may be relatively harmless, but the building blocks it’s made up of are often hazardous to human and animal health. “Oil and gas is the basis of most of our chemistry,” Tickner said. “We built most of our modern chemistry on these seven fairly toxic, challenging chemicals and then you essentially iterate off of those.”
Those seven basic chemicals are methanol, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, and xylene, and they can pose a variety of risks. Benzene, for instance, is a known carcinogen. Eventually, benzene may be transformed into something as benign as food packaging, but “that plastic that you have bought has a history somewhere else,” Tickner said. The manufacturing “might go back to a community in Louisiana that is highly exposed to benzene or ethylene oxide or some other material.”
There are more than 11,000 facilities that store, use, or handle hazardous materials in the US, according to the Government Accountability Office. But they tend to be concentrated in a few parts of the country, often in or near communities of color. Louisiana, the Ohio River Valley, and Texas have all seen expansion of petrochemical plants. The map below from Oil and Gas Watch shows the zoomed-out landscape for proposed and operating petrochemical facilities (yellow dots) and their pipelines (yellow lines) across the US:
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Oil Watch, Environmental Integrity Project
It’s cheap oil and gas that has helped fuel the rise in chemicals manufacturing. Traditionally, most plastics have come from imported petroleum, but fracking and expanded drilling have given rise to a domestic petrochemicals industry. The 2010s were a decade of historically low natural gas prices, and the cheap fuel made plastics an even more attractive proposition.
These chemicals are produced in a variety of ways, but today the biggest proposed expansion in the US is in ethane cracker plants. These are facilities that use high heat capable of breaking (or “cracking”) the bonds in natural gas’s methane to produce ethane. That ethane is then used to create a huge array of plastics.
One of the products that come from cracking ethylene is vinyl chloride, the same chemical that the derailed train carried in East Palestine. It’s transported as a chilled liquid, but when exposed to the outdoors it becomes a highly explosive gas. The risk of an uncontrolled explosion led responders in East Palestine to vent the vinyl chloride and burn it, producing a black cloud of smoke over the town of 4,700. Residents now worry that the fallout from the smoke will lead to contaminated groundwater in the years to come.
Carnegie Mellon professor of green chemistry Terry Collins noted that the steady rise in petrochemicals nationwide is making it increasingly difficult to keep drinking water safe. Some plastics and petrochemicals mimic hormone molecules found in our bodies and can therefore interrupt growth and development, especially in children. “We’ve got this going on galore,” Collins said.
Everyday exposure to petrochemicals production is a reality for many
As the East Palestine incident highlighted, there’s no completely foolproof way to process and transport these highly flammable and corrosive chemicals. Trains can derail, and pipelines can rupture.
But controlled burns, like the one in East Palestine, happen regularly at petrochemicals plants.
Rachel Meyer, an Ohio River Valley field coordinator for the environmental advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force, has seen just how common it is for a facility to flare its chemicals to avoid any fires or explosions. She lives at the center of fracking operations and petrochemical plants in southwestern Pennsylvania. She is 20 miles from the Norfolk Southern derailment but also a few miles from a giant new plastics plant, Shell’s Monaca facility in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.
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Andie Grey, Eyes on Shell
The giant Shell Monaca plant is less than six months old and, last month, the plant responded to malfunctioning equipment by flaring gas to avoid explosion. “It was so bright at nighttime,” Meyer said. “It was this reddish orange color. And I could see that on clouds all the way out where I am.” Residents have seen that glow from 17 miles away.
Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog environmental group, notes the facility has already had 14 records of violations and 34 malfunctions from its construction and operating phase, and the plant already exceeded its annual limits for smog-forming air pollutants within its first few months of operation.
The Shell Monaca plant is one of the largest ethane plants yet to open in the US. Smaller incidents tend to be self-reported by companies, often with a lag time so residents don’t immediately know the reason why the air may smell or there’s an orange nighttime sky.
There are many paths to protecting the public from petrochemicals’ harms. Of course, more work can be done to prevent accidents and promote train safety, while also taking risk management seriously. But safety also starts with rethinking our petrochemicals reliance entirely.
Train derailments, routine flaring, and equipment failures show a far darker side than the oil and gas industry usually lets on. From the industry’s view, plastics and petrochemicals will ensure demand for oil and gas for decades, even as the US transitions away from gasoline-powered transportation.
All these incidents showcase how the impacts from plastics seep into our lives long before they’re tossed into the trash.
President Tsai Ing-Wen is shoring up allies, but a meeting with Speaker Kevin McCarthy is drawing threats from Beijing
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-Wen is in the midst of a 10-day trip to the Americas, with stops in Belize, Guatemala, and the US as the island faces an increasingly belligerent Beijing. Tsai’s trip underscores Taiwan’s vulnerable position as its international allies face a pressure campaign from the People’s Republic of China to switch diplomatic ties from Taiwan to the mainland.
Beijing has threatened conflict over Taiwan, which according to its “one China principle” is part of the mainland, to some extent for decades. The tension most recently reached a fever pitch when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August of last year. At the time, Beijing retaliated by sanctioning Pelosi and firing ballistic missiles toward Taiwan, as well as announcing it would extend planned military drills. Now, with Tsai headed to the Americas to shore up support for Taiwan, Beijing has threatened “resolute countermeasures” should Tsai meet with current Speaker Kevin McCarthy next week, as she’s tentatively planned to do.
Just as existential for Tsai, though, may be her scheduled visits to Belize and Guatemala, particularly given the fact Honduras, a former diplomatic partner, recently changed its allegiance to Beijing. Though the US is Taiwan’s most powerful friend and security partner, the US government walks a fine line where the island is concerned. Officially, the US recognizes the People’s Republic of China and respects what it calls the “one China policy,” but practices strategic ambiguity where the two are concerned.
Taiwan itself is in a difficult position, too, as its official number of diplomatic partners dwindles from 14 to 13. Tsai’s visit to Belize and Guatemala will reinforce those countries’ commercial, diplomatic, and military commitments to Taiwan. But China has a tactic of using its relative economic might as a cudgel, typically by persuading poorer nations into infrastructure and lending deals that later make those nations economically beholden to Beijing. Honduras’s decision to switch allegiance may have had an economic payoff for the Central American nation, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu alleged.
Five Central American and Caribbean nations have switched their diplomatic ties from Taiwan to Beijing since Tsai took power, and it isn’t clear that diplomacy can stanch the bleeding. And in regard to Tsai’s US visit, Beijing has warned that it’s watching the situation closely should Tsai meet with US officials.
What Tsai’s Central American visit can do for Taiwan
Though Tsai will bookend her trip with stops in the US — she started off in New York and plans to visit McCarthy in his California district before heading back to Taiwan — her Central American stops are critical too, Kitsch Liao, assistant director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub told Vox in an interview.
Much of Taiwan’s national security is connected to the threat from China, which can be dealt with in two different ways — cross-strait relations or international diplomatic relations. “Cross-strait doesn’t work if China doesn’t want to play with you,” Liao said, and China is not particularly disposed to work with Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Therefore, international support and diplomatic engagement, whether with official partners like Belize and Guatemala or powerful security partners like the US, does play an important security and intermediary role for Taiwan.
From a purely military perspective, Taiwan’s allegiances aren’t terribly strategic, but Taiwan does have priorities other than defense, like trade. Taiwan has a strong trade relationship with Guatemala, and has invested millions in the Central American country’s agricultural, manufacturing and tech industries, and Taiwan’s ties with the Marshall Islands in the Pacific are crucial for its fishing industry.
Of course, there’s also the symbolic importance of having official diplomatic relationships — they give credence to Taiwan’s sovereignty, a threatening concept for Beijing. That’s why, since Tsai became president in 2016, Panama, Nicaragua, and El Salvador in Central America, Sao Tome and Principe and Burkina Faso in Africa, the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, and the Solomon Islands and Kiribati in Oceania, have all broken ties with Taiwan in favor of Beijing, many citing economic concerns for the switch, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Honduras, the most recent country to shift its allegiance to China, has been dealing with economic insecurity, including $600 million the country reportedly owed to Taiwan. China has made a concerted effort to isolate Taiwan, relying on the economic coercion it practices elsewhere — providing loans or support for infrastructure projects, only to exert more influence or take over those projects when the recipients of its largesse can’t pay China back or complete the planned construction.
“I expect that to continue,” Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND corporation, said of China’s campaign to peel off Taiwan’s allies.
Another method of influence is the so-called “golden passport” programs in certain Caribbean nations, according to the research of Leland Lazarus, associate director of the national security policy program at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy. In a recent report, Lazarus found that some Caribbean nations’ citizenship programs for foreign investors see a large percentage of Chinese applicants, who then wield political influence in those countries. In St. Kitts and Nevis, a diplomatic partner of Taiwan, an estimated 60 percent of applicants to the citizenship program were from China.
Since Honduras’ defection, Taiwan’s three Latin American partners — Paraguay, Guatemala, and Belize — have all reaffirmed their support for Taiwan, touting shared democratic ideals. Guatemala and Belize both reaffirmed their position that Taiwan is a sovereign nation.
Of course, there is an argument that Taiwan should work on cultivating relationships with powerful security partners like the US, according Grossman. “Taiwan shouldn’t worry about the Hondurases of the world,” Grossman told Vox in an interview, but rather “focus on powers including Australia, Japan, even the Philippines,” nearby nations that could provide military support in the case of an attack by China, especially if for some reason the US weren’t in a position to or were unwilling to come to Taiwan’s aid.
“Time is not on Taiwan’s side here,” Grossman said.
China is unpredictable, but the context of Tsai’s visit is important
The US plays a peculiar role in Taiwan’s existence; though Washington officially recognizes Beijing, the US is also Taiwan’s most important security partner. In many senses, it plays both sides, but perhaps most importantly, Liao told Vox, the US not only engages in deterrence against China, but it also must keep Taiwan from formally declaring sovereignty and igniting a major conflict.
Taiwan’s internal politics and public opinion currently favor independence, as does Tsai and her DPP. But that’s not always been the case, and the rival Kuomin Tang, or KMT, party favors more conciliatory relations with China. Taiwan will hold elections next year, and as of now the DPP and KMT are in a dead heat in opinion polls, according to the Economist. Still, 61 percent of people polled consider themselves Taiwanese — not Taiwanese and Chinese. That’s a sentiment the DPP must harness in order to remain in power next year.
A visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California is on the schedule for April 5 — Tsai will meet McCarthy there, according to the Washington Post. She reportedly met top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries during her visit to New York, Punchbowl news reported at the time.
The fact that the visits are occurring on US soil as opposed to in Taiwan is relevant; McCarthy reportedly initially planned to travel to Taiwan to meet Tsai, as his predecessor Pelosi had done to China’s great chagrin. Tsai isn’t traveling to Washington, DC, and her visit isn’t an official state visit. From Washington’s perspective, she’s transiting through the US as she’s done before during international travel.
China has vowed retaliation should Tsai and McCarthy follow through on their meeting, although it’s not clear what that retaliation would look like should it occur. For their part, neither Grossman nor Liao is convinced that Beijing will launch an all-out attack on Taiwan, or even respond as strongly as it did after Pelosi’s visit. Still, it’s impossible to know what the calculus is in Beijing, especially when factoring in internal jockeying for influence and power, as well as public opinion.
China, Grossman told Vox, continues its belligerent behavior “because they think they can,” without considering whether it makes sense. “They operate on a hair trigger,” he acknowledged, but “I don’t think this is the moment” for a major offensive, primarily because the People’s Liberation Army isn’t prepared for an amphibious assault on Taiwan.
Beijing subscribes to an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy, increasingly showing its might in hopes that it can force an adversary to back down or at least engage in negotiation. But with US-China relations at an historic low, particularly in the military arena, there’s no path for de-escalation — increasing, as Liao said, “the chance for miscalculation and miscommunication.”