Lifestyle

New year’s resolutions, as guided by TED talks

The flip of the calendar is a chance to hit the personal reset buttons. This is the year we’re all going to read more, travel more, eat better, lose 15 pounds and find a new job.

There’s a whole “self help” section of your library devoted to answering those questions.

But if you’d like to learn how to hold your breath for 17 minutes, survive a nuclear attack or tie your shoes better — TED is your guide. The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference premiered as a one-off show 30 years ago, in 1984, the brainchild of graphic designer Richard Saul Wurman. But the nonprofit has since gone global, with conferences sponsored annually in many countries.

Under the slogan “Ideas worth spreading,” most TED talks also are available online and through services such as Netflix. There are hundreds of videos in categories as diverse as happiness, insects, nuclear weapons and medicine.
Here is a sampling of what we learned from TED (so you can too):

How to tie your shoe

While the title of this one makes it sound like a parody video, it’s for real. In less than three minutes, speaker Terry Moore shows how one minor adjustment to the shoelace loop that we’re all familiar with yields a stronger (and better looking) knot.

How to do it: When you create a bow as you’re tying your shoes, rather than going over the top of the bow, put the lace under. This creates the strong version of a shoelace knot.
Your shoes might never come untied again.

Resolution: Challenge your long-held beliefs and make small, incremental changes for the better

Keep your goals to yourself

As you plan your resolutions, you might not want to tell anyone what they are. As speaker Derek Sivers explains, “Telling someone your goals makes them less likely to happen.”

It’s counterintuitive, but it’s a quirk of our brain wiring. When we tell friends that we’re going to do something potentially remarkable (learn Chinese, run a marathon, etc.), the positive feedback we get tricks our brains into thinking that the goal has been met, so we then put less effort into meeting that goal. It’s the grown-up version of getting a “participant” medal.

Resolution: Keep your mouth shut

Get good ideas

Based off his book “Where Good Ideas Come From,” bestselling journalist Steven Johnson examines how we get to our “lightbulb moments.”

He eschews the traditional loner/genius. Instead, our ideas come in “chaotic” environments or “liquid networks” where many different people come together opening up for innovative ideas. Coffee shops, or spaces “where ideas have sex,” are building grounds for new ideas.

Resolution: Hermits rarely have “Eureka!” moments. Surround yourself with people to get your next breakthrough idea.

Survive a nuclear attack

Dr. Irwin Redlener, Columbia University disaster-preparedness expert, gives the rundown of what it takes to survive a nuclear terrorism attack. Though nuclear war is much less likely than it was during the Cold War, he still cautions that there’s “still enough nuclear weapons in the arsenal of superpowers to destroy the Earth several times over.”

If that doesn’t sober you up, then these steps to surviving an attack will. If you survive the initial blast (and that’s a big “if” for people anywhere near where the bomb detonates), he cautions to “avert your eyes.” Looking at a blast, he explain, will either blind you temporarily or permanently, nullifying the rest of the your escape plan. Keep your mouth open so your ear drums don’t burst. You then have 10 to 20 minutes to run down wind or cross wind to avoid the impending mushroom cloud of lethal radiation. Find shelter in either a basement or a high floor (ninth floor or higher, he says). Once you’re evacuated, cover all skin, eyes, mouth, as well as you can. The shelter should have a shower to decontaminate your skin and clothes from radiation. Stay in the shelter for at least 48 to 72 hours.

Knowing just these basic facts can save thousands of lives, he says. With proper preparation, if a bomb dropped in Manhattan, there would be up to 200,000 deaths; without it, he says, the death toll could hit 700,000.

Resolution: Dust off that basement bomb shelter.

Live to be 100

World explorer Dan Buettner discusses the world’s “Blue Zones,” areas with the highest concentration of people who live 90+ years. These places include Sardinia, where men in particular live longest; Okinawa, where old people are most respected; and the Seventh-day Adventists, who boasts the highest life-expectancy rates in the US. The human body is built to live to 90 years old (give or take), but our life expectancy is 78. Here are a few pointers, gleaned from the Blue Zones that can get us back those 12 years: Move, but don’t actively exercise (all Blue Zones enjoyed their physical activity); be spiritual (this helps reduce stress and thus inflammation); eat and drink in moderation (none of the “Blue Zones” diet, but they don’t gorge either); and choose your friends wisely. The last is most important, Buettner says. “Your friends are long-term ventures — and most significant thing you can do to add more years to your life and more life to your years.”

Resolution: Quit the New Year’s diet. Get new, healthy friends.

Run better

Christopher McDougall, author of the behemoth bestseller “Born to Run,” sets up the premise that human beings are naturally skilled at long-distance running. We’ve been doing it for 2 million years — and though at the fast game, we’re woefully slow (even a squirrel would beat Usain Bolt, McDougal points out). But the long game? That’s where we excel.

Our ancestors likely hunted antelope and pray in packs and ran them to death. We didn’t run faster, we ran for longer times than our prey. So why are we so bad at running now? Why do we view running “as punishment because you ate pizza the night before,” McDougall asks. We’re bad, in part, because we have too much equipment. Those expensive “fancy cushioning shoes” won’t make you run faster or better — they’ll actually hurt you, says McDougall. Instead, he says, join the growing group of barefoot runners (McDougall is a convert) who have forsworn shoes and with it all running-related injuries. “We need to get back to the playfulness and joyfulness and nakedness” to run better.

Resolution: Baby, ditch those cross trainers — you were born to run barefoot.

Hold your breath (For 17 minutes!)

Magician David Blaine uses his guest spot at TEDMD (a medical arm of TED talks) to discuss the absurd measures he undertook to enable him to hold his breath for 17 minutes. He met with various doctors, who basically told him he was crazy to attempt it — anything more than six minutes, he was told by one neuroscientist, could cause serious brain damage. The warning didn’t stop Blaine. Instead, he started a grueling four month prep that included losing 50 pounds, submerging himself in freezing-cold water and spending his nights in a hypoxic tent to increase his red blood cells. He made it to 17 minutes in front of Oprah. You won’t, but he included some practical tips if you’d for some reason like to increase your breath-holding abilities. First he says, don’t move a muscle when you’re holding your breath. Then “purge” (or hyperventilate) to get all the excess CO2 out of your body. Take a huge breath and just hold it in. “Relax throughout the pain,” he suggests.

Resolution: If you’re a nut, you can do anything.

How to be more happy . . .

We tend to believe happiness will be one consequence of success. If we get a new job, we’ll be happy. But then we need a raise. And a promotion. If we continue to think this way, no matter how much we achieve, the finish line will forever be receding into the distance, says psychologist Shawn Achor. “And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there.”

Our external world is accountable for only 10% of our long-term happiness. What really matters is our attitude.

“What we’re finding is it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.”

But we can’t just tell our brains to be happy, right? No, but we can train them. Thanking people, journaling about positive experiences, exercise, meditation and random acts of kindness have all been shown to help promote a positive outlook on the world. And that has ripple effects that increase productivity and skill in the workplace, not to mention making everyone happier.

Resolution: See the glass as half full.

. . . And less sad

Thanks to 2 million years of evolution, humans are able to use their big brains to run through future-event scenarios.

And most people tend to overestimate how various events might affect their happiness. Romance, jobs, political disgrace — it doesn’t matter. No matter what we do, our brains tell us everything worked out for the best. Aside from a few exceptions, if something happened to you more than three months ago, it’s probably not affecting your current state of happiness.

As speaker Dan Gilbert says in an early TED talk from 2004, our brains are even able to manufacture happiness, but the problem is that they’re also bad at predicting the conditions under which that happiness will arise. So don’t worry about it.

Resolution: If something bad happens, take comfort from the fact that you’ll get over it — eventually.

Be confident in your choices

Speaker Barry Schwartz did a supermarket survey and found 285 varieties of cookies, 230 kinds of soup, 175 salad dressings and 40 different kinds of toothpaste.

Schwartz says that when people are confronted with too many choices, they might find something that is exactly perfect for them, but they end up less satisfied with their choice. Too many choices induce worry: Because shoppers can’t taste 285 cookies at the store to decide which is best for them, they leave feeling like they might have chosen incorrectly.

“It’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision.”

Resolution: Be happy with the decisions you make. Because it probably was the best one.

And what not to learn from TED:

No compilation of informational and inspirational videos can be perfect. In October alone, 61 different countries hosted 332 TEDx events, the little x indicating that these are licensed events run by anyone with the organizational skills required to host a dinner party. That’s a lot of talking, and not all of it’s good. So here’s a short list of some of the worst TED videos:

How to Use One Paper Towel, TEDxConcordiaUPortland: Wash your hands, shake them 12 times and fold one paper towel in half to dry. There, we just saved you four minutes and 28 seconds of your life. In case you forget the instructions, the video demonstrates how to dry your hands — four times!

Cold Shower Therapy, TEDxLUC: If you can grit your teeth and force yourself to take a cold shower every morning for 30 days, you can conquer your fears of jumping into any new endeavor. A nice premise, but it’s stated over and over and over for nearly 11 minutes. At. A. Slow. . . . Pace. We never learn, though, why a cold shower is better than doing something else unpleasant like, say, pouring ketchup on your corn flakes every morning. Realistically this video could be two minutes long. And the best part: The speaker knows it! He also has a two-minute version on YouTube. Watch that one instead.

Why Botox is Great, TEDxVancouver: Dr. Jean Carruthers, who is one of the pioneers of Botox treatments, rambles on for a solid 10 minutes about the history of the injection. She then admits — spoiler alert! — that she too is a big fan of the treatment. “I haven’t frowned since 1987.” You’d have to be blind not to figure that one out on your own. There hasn’t been a more successful ad against using cosmetic treatments than this meandering, awkward TEDx talk.