This will sound stupid. But if you press your thumb onto the center of your hand, and then close the others fingers around and press, you’ll suppress your gag reflex.
This saved me when I had to take some medicine as big pills. Without this trick they often got stuck in my throat, and it could take me minutes to properly swallow. With the trick? No problems anymore.
I also use this for pills.
Just for pills.
The pills.
Yes.
Not really a “hack” but I don’t know why most people get into phone contracts.
Since college, I have always just bought unlocked phones with cash and then used the carrier’s prepaid plans and set it to auto pay.
I pay so much less than most people I know, I get all the same service, and my phone isn’t tied to a contract or carrier, so I can cancel my plan whenever I want and switch to another carrier by just buying their SIM card for ~$20.
My current phone is an unlocked Pixel 6a that I got on sale new for $300. I have unlimited talk, text, and data for $45 a month. And if I get sick of my current carrier or they bump my cost, I can just switch to anybody else for just the cost of a $20 SIM card.
I have so many friends and family members that complain about their phone bills being super high and their service sucking, but they can’t cancel their contracts without paying off their huge balances plus the interest and usually cancelation fees. Plus, because their phone is tied to the contract/carrier, they can’t even keep transfer the phone to the new carrier and have to get sucked into a “phone trade-in” deal and the cycle continues.
And for the folks saying that most people can’t afford to save up and buy a phone outright, there are a lot of places that offer payment plans for the phone, or you can buy it on credit and pay it off that way, which would likely be less interest over time. Or you could buy unlocked used/refurbished phones for 25-50% off their normal price.
Maybe it makes sense if you get a stipend from your company, or you bundle it with a bunch of other packages like cable TV or internet, but for just a cell phone, I just don’t get locking yourself into a crazy contract.
This seems like an American problem. This used to be the case in the Netherlands as well but over the years people have learned that SIM-only subscriptions are so much easier and cheaper that the majority of people now use SIM-only. In fact I know of no one around me that does it differently.
Also $45 per month is still expensive lol. I pay €12 a month. Sure, not unlimited but I never call or SMS so the 100 a month I get for that is way more than enough and I never finish the 10GB of data a month either. I can make either unlimited for really not that much more.
Wrestle the pig first, every day. Whatever is your worst, most unpleasant, annoying task for the entire day, do it before you do anything else. It minimizes your stress and worrying and puts it in the rearview mirror.
For a second I thought you were talking about masturbation.
How much better life is by simply not drinking alcohol.
Or soda. Or sugary drinks in general.
I hate the talk about soda. It’s a flavored carbonated drink and carbonation isn’t killing people. When schools banned sodas from vending machines, they replaced them with yoohoo and other drinks that had as much or more sugar than the carbonated drinks they removed. -stepping off my soapbox-
Depends on the person. I’m content only have 1 at a time. I don’t have an addictive personality though. For some people this is great advice. Others, it doesn’t affect.
I feel like there’s a subtlety here. Ocassional Glass of wine with dinner versus binge drinking.
Of course the problem is that the first drink makes then next one more attractive and degrades impulse control… so YMMV.
Having a glass of wine every day is not healthy.
I drink pretty much only on the weekends and that’s pretty seldom.
Is one glass of wine really that bad though? Like compared to a glass of grape juice? Because of the sugars and calories and is alcohol in this percentage range (approx 14%) enough to cause damage to your liver over time?
Again I’m talking about one glass
I’m going on holiday to Greece next month, so have decided to forgo my usual weekend ales until then. Partly to be a little more comfortable in my swimming shorts, but also because £10/15 a weekend adds up to a few cold pints of Mythos by the beach.
But I was amazed at how fresh I felt last Monday morning after not having drunk any beer over the weekend.
I had better seafood in Greece than anywhere else in Europe. Fresh grilled octopus with a squeeze of lemon, fried sardines, squid salad, everything just perfect. (Note: I haven’t done Nordic countries, and they might do cod/coldwater-fish/etc. better, but that’s be a different style.)
If you have a goal to find something (eg. buy a car), write your goal down, including details like make and model. You’ll start to see adverts, special deals and cars of the model you want parked with for sale signs. There’s nothing mystical about this - you’re surrounded by things like that, but the specific act of writing it seems to tell your unconscious mind to bring it to your attention when you pass them.
Buying lots of identical pairs of socks massively reduces the amount of time you need to find matching pairs after drying them.
Drink water instead of soda, alcohol, other sugary drinks. Eventually you’ll find yourself to be an expert water connoisseur and prefer water over pretty much all beverages.
Almost all bottled water is loaded with microplastics. Ideally, drink water from a filtered tap.
Filters are usually made out of plastic :)
There’s a difference between high quality plastic performing filtration while it’s cold plastic and cold water vs crap plastic that’s regularly exposed to high temperatures during transport and storage with the same water contained the entire time.
Maybe, I’m no expert. But, I’ve seen a test showing a consumer water filter increasing microplastics by 1000%. Could just be only that specific filter or filter type. I believe it was a Zero filter, which I think uses resin beads for ion exchange.
Interesting, I used ZeroWater for a while … and know others that do. But yeah, searching around it seems it’s only ConsumerLabs.com that came up with that result and all other filters were removing (at least some percentage of) microplastics.
I’m not sure how much I trust that ConsumerLabs.com test: https://www.consumerlab.com/methods/water-filters-review/water-filters/
Repeatability isn’t really established by testing one device, one time. I’m not an expert either, but that result seems quite surprising.
I have a reverse osmosis system now personally…
Put $20-50 behind your phone in the phone case.
If you ever forget / lose your wallet, you’ll have a little cash.
Given the opportunity move somewhere where your rent to pay ratio is better.
I’d make more living in a big city. I have much more leftover every month by living in a small town far away from everything.
If you need to remember something for the next time you go out, put your shoes somewhere odd. When you go to leave, you’ll remember you moved them, which will remind you why you moved them.
Or you won’t be able to find your shoes, panic because you’re running late, and forget about the thing you needed because of said panic.
That’s why you always leave a note.
Learn to cook the base of meals in different cultures. Like a Sofrito.
Most of the best classic dishes in the world really start with three or four ingredients and are just variations. You shouldn’t overthink it or buy rare ingredients. You’re better off picking one and mastering the basic steps. Learning to cook isn’t about learning to recreate a chef-cooked meal. It’s about learning to cook simple, cheap ingredients.
Is it even a life hack, or an essential life skill. Most us didn’t formally learned, but have seen/helped our parents from an early age and one day, we ended up in a student room meaning it was time to cook
When the pandemic happened, there were people who didn’t know how to make the easiest meals. I was shocked. So, my rule on recipes is that nothing is too basic.
Just how much cheaper and longer lasting keeping thing like rice, dried beans and flour can be. It’s amazing to me that no matter how empty my cupboards/fridge is I can always make fresh tortillas, refried beans, and rice in like an hour.
My wife’s Italian. Replace your items with always having a bottle of sauce and a packet of pasta in the cupboard, and there’s always a meal to be had no matter how empty the fridge is.
My GF is Italian too. One of the most important things I learned from her is literally this. Also, as long as you have any kind of vegetables in your house, you are always one step away from a pasta sauce.
100% For us, a passata, an onion, and some garlic is the minimum needed.
Probably helps that the FIL delivers us boxes of homemade passata all the time - we never have less than a dozen bottles on our storage shelves in the garage. But even if we were to ever run out, a couple of store-bought bottles in the pantry is our fallback option.
You can just pinch the end of a banana to start peeling it. The effort required is far less than trying to overcome the ripping force of the stem.
When I was in the end of my PhD, everything except writing my thesis made me feel guilty. I ended up learning to find joy and peace in doing laundry and washing dishes. They became my guilt-free breaks — I had to do these things. FYI - I didn’t enjoy washing dishes before.
Washing dishes has become a really powerful part of my day, haha. Not only is it still a guilt-free break but it is a daily reminder to be mindful. I’ve noticed that whenever I drop and break a dish, my mind is not present. In fact, in those moments my mind might actually be drifting somewhere negative.
Maybe not so much a “hack” as a … lesson? Or something? But yeah, the whole cliche about having the right attitude and being present and mindful. I try to apply it in other parts of life, not just the dishes.
You have discovered the subtle art of procrasticleaning
You can rename files in Windows using the
F2key. This works for a lot of Microsoft products including editing a cell without overwriting it in Excel.Works in most softwares. Also F1 often opens a help menu/manual (although those are usually kinda useless IMHO lol)
F3 lets you edit an Excel cell without using your damned mouse on Windows. So handy, I added the shortcut to my non-Windows setup.
