#life kit

[nprbooks]

Photo Illustration by Becky Harlan/NPR

This summer we're doing a hella fun series of podcast crossovers between Pop Culture Happy Hour and Life Kit designed to introduce readers to genre fiction -- and today's episode makes me so happy because it's ROMAAAANCE! Give your day the HEA it needs with this great conversation between some of my favorite bookworms: PCHH host Linda Holmes, Code Switch's Karen Grigsby Bates, Unfriendly Black Hotties host and frequent PCHH guest Christina Tucker and romance author Adriana Herrera. Check it out here, and hear some great recommendations! (Nthing KGB's recommendation of The Kiss Quotient, which is one of the all-time great contemporaries.)

-- Petra

[npr]

'Tiny Habits' Are The Key To Behavioral Change

Want to start a new habit? Think small. That's the counterintuitive idea in BJ Fogg's book, Tiny Habits. Fogg explains that making small behavior changes requires just a little motivation and lots of celebrating — and can lead to big change.

Changing our behaviors can feel like a monumental task. We pressure ourselves to go big or go home. Not surprisingly, these big expectations are often unrealistic, and that's a recipe for disappointment and self-criticism.

Instead, we should think small — as in tiny behaviors that can become habits. The idea is to make these behavior changes so small that they're easy to do, according to BJ Fogg, a behavior scientist at Stanford University and author of the new book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything.

"It's easier to create habits and change than most people think, and it's faster than most people think," Fogg says. "It can even be fun, if you do it in the right way."

[nylainnoho]

Spend the day with me: first day edition!

Hello Friends, 

Here in Noho, us Smithies are just finishing up our first week of classes! In honor of finishing this first week I wanted to share a day in my life post for the first day of classes. Before we start, I also wanted to show you all my desk setup since this is where all of the magic happens. 

MORNING

8:00 am: Good morning! I am on the track team so my day started with a lift from 8:00 am to 8:45 am, this is something that I will be doing every Monday and Friday for the entire semester. It usually struggle with getting up, but since it was the first day, I had the first day jitters and didn’t have much difficulty getting up. 

9:00 am: After I finished lifting, I headed up the road to Tyler. Right now we are ordering all of our meals through GrubHub and you are able to grab and go once your meal is ready. I think I had to wait about 15 minutes for my breakfast to be done that day. 

9:15 am: There are a few public spaces that we are allowed to eat in, but I usually eat in my room and listen to a podcast or talk to friends and family. One of my friends put me on to NPR's Life Kit podcast and now I am putting you all on! After my breakfast I also like to spend some time writing in my journal really about anything that comes to my mind. I try to do this frequently (not every single morning), but on the mornings that I feel like it. 

9:35 am: After breaking my fast I took a nice shower and really took my time to get ready. Some mornings I rush, but I wanted to feel extra good for the first day.

10:55 am: Finally, the golden time! This is when my first class, PSY269: Categorization and Intergroup Behavior started! This is a psychology course and some of the main things we will be discussing will be prejudice, discrimination and other things related to how groups interact with each other. I really enjoyed our first class. 

12:00 pm: Class finished a bit early this day, so after I went and grabbed lunch with my friends. I was able to snap a picture of my lunch and this meal is the Indian Curry Bowl from Lamont. I think they are pretty good and probably get this meal for lunch or dinner at least once a week. I usually like to have something to look at or listen to while I eat and on this day I watched Youtube and Facetimed a friend.

AFTERNOON

1:40 pm: After lunch, I started my next class, AFR117: History of African American People to 1960. I also loved this class. We reviewed the syllabus and did a small breakout room activity where we looked at a few quotes and discussed what we thought about them. I think the quote my group looked at was really important so I will share it here. Let me know if you have any thoughts about it or questions about what I thought. Here it is: “This history continues to be mistaken by some as a burden when it should instead be recognized as a tremendous responsibility.” --Peniel Joseph

3:15 pm: I had my next class, PSY 202: Research Methods for Psychology. I have taken a class with this professor in the past and I really enjoyed it. Research Methods is also required for the psychology major, so that is part of the reason I am taking this class too.

4:30 pm: Once my Research Methods class ended I had a bit of time until dinner! I will use this time to let you all know that most classes (except labs and maybe a few others) last for an hour and 15 minutes. 

EVENING

5:00 pm: There is a big dinner rush at five and I contribute to it. The most popular dining halls for dinner right now are Tyler and Comstock. This night I had pizza for dinner! 

7:05 pm: After dinner, I had my final class AFR289: Race, Feminism, and Resistance in Movements for Social Change. The professor for this class is amazing and I was so excited to take another one of their classes! This class--and pretty much all of my classes are discussion-based. We all came to class having read a piece by Meg thee Stallion and we discussed this as well as the syllabus and other things to expect from the class. 

8:20 pm: Finally, at 8:20 pm I was finished with all of my classes. I *try* to stop doing school work at 8:30 pm (although it does not always happen), so I was done for the night. I listened to some music, brushed my teeth and did my other night activities and was off to bed! That was my day!

Thank you, my loves for sticking with me in this post! I am so looking forward to the rest of this semester and I hope that you all are excited too. I am sending you my good energies. Chat soon. Tootles.

--xo, Nyla in Noho 

[vensulove]

do you guys have any podcast recs??? can be fiction or nonfiction!! (pls read the tags)

[sirladysketch]

Life Kit from NPR

Tools to help you get it together.

Might be of use/help to some people?

[npr]

A Conversation with Tara Brach: Mindfulness Tools For Big Feelings

Have you ever noticed how tough it is to be present? We spend so much time planning and worrying about the future or dwelling on the past.

"We're in a trance of thinking. We're time traveling," says Tara Brach, a world-renowned psychologist and mindfulness teacher. "We're in the future, we're in the past."

And all this ruminating gets in the way of enjoying life — we can miss out on the good stuff.

Read the rest of the story at NPR.org

[nprbooks]

Image via CSA-Images/Getty Images

Our pals over at the Life Kit podcast talked to White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo about ways to disrupt the systems of racism we live in. 

“It's important to recognize that all white people have been socialized into racist systems and it's inevitable that we all have blind spots,” she says. “It is akin to swimming with a current, rather than against it. Instead of asking if you've been shaped by these systems, ask yourself how you've been shaped by them.”

Check out that full conversation here.

-- Petra

[npr]

How To Buy A Car (Without Being Taken For A Ride)

New cars these days have better safety features and more tech gizmos than models from a decade ago. And let's face it: Trading in a beat-up clunker with grimy seats is an enticing idea.

But many Americans make big mistakes buying cars. Take new car purchases with a trade-in. A third of buyers roll over an average of $5,000 in debt from their last car into their new loan. They're paying for a car they don't drive anymore. Ouch! That is not a winning personal finance strategy.

But don't worry — NPR's Life Kit is here to help. Here's how to buy a car without getting over your head in debt or paying more than you have to.

Image Credit: Jan Stromme/Jan Stromme/The Image Bank/Getty Images Plus