If checking your phone is the first thing you do when you wake up, you may want to rethink your morning routine. Tristan Harris, Google’s Design Ethicist, explains:

When we wake up in the morning and turn our phone over to see a list of notifications—it frames the experience of ‘waking up in the morning’ around a menu of all the things I’ve missed since yesterday.

You are immediately thrown into catch-up mode. So much has happened since you went to bed. There are emails to respond to, messages to read, Snapchats to watch, Instagram photos to see, not to mention all the breaking news you need to stay abreast of.  Your mind and your morning are hijacked.

Email deserves a special mention. It functions as a benevolent dictator—well-intentioned but ultimately toxic. A recent British survey of 2000 people across a variety of industries found that checking email early in the morning or late at night is linked to greater stress. Not surprisingly, those who received a constant stream of email throughout the day along also reported more stress than those who did not leave their email application running.

In a related study, participants were asked to check their email frequently for one week. The following week they went on an email diet—they checked email three times a day and disabled all notifications.  Their stress levels decreased and their moods improved.

Why do we allow our daily lives to be hijacked by technology when we know (and studies show) it stresses us out. Harris cites FOMSI (Fear of Missing Something Important) as one of the main reasons:

Another way apps and websites hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing something important.

If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because (aha, I win) you might miss something important.

This keeps us subscribed to newsletters even after they haven’t delivered recent benefits (“what if I miss a future announcement?”) This keeps us “friended” to people with whom we haven’t spoken in ages (“what if I miss something important from them?”) This keeps us swiping faces on dating apps, even when we haven’t even met up with anyone in a while (“what if I miss that one hot match who likes me?”)…But if we zoom into that fear, we’ll discover that it’s unbounded.

Harris concludes:

Imagine if tech companies recognized that, and helped us proactively tune our relationships with friends and businesses in terms of what we define as “time well spent” for our lives, instead of in terms of what we might miss.

How are you spending your time?

The old saying tells us that the way to a person’s heart is through their stomach. Many companies are applying this theory to win the love of their employees. As one survey of more than 1,000 full-time office workers demonstrates, on-the-job happiness jumps dramatically when free food is offered.  Providing snacks like granola, chips, cookies and candy seems like a surefire strategy to keep employees smiling and satisfied.

There can, however, be a downside to this smorgasbord of snack food. Unlimited access to unhealthy treats obviously can lead to overeating and weight gain. But the impact is so much more than that. As one 20-something who used to work at a startup in Brooklyn with an all-you-can-eat candy bar told me,

The amount of Swedish Fish I used to eat on a daily basis was obscene.

In addition to gaining weight, she describes how grazing all day on candy affected her productivity.

I would feel like the Energizer bunny and then totally crash.

The spikes in blood sugar made it hard to concentrate and took a toll on her motivation and mood.

All that sugar turned me into a monster. After eating five fistfuls of Gummi Bears my nerves were frayed. Everyone knew not to come near me.

People tend to eat food that is easy to see and easy to grab. The less effort required, the more they consume. When goodies are within arms’ reach, they are especially hard to resist. Consider the following scenario: You get up from your desk to grab a water and notice some chocolate chip cookies sitting in pretty wicker basket nearby. You weren’t even hungry but now those cookies are calling your name.

Still, before you get rid of all the high-calorie snacks in the office and risk the wrath of your employees, consider research that suggests ways to keep free food available, but in ways that help them avoid over-indulging.

A recent study, for instance, highlights the influence of proximity on snacking: When snacks were close to a beverage station, people ate more of them than when they were farther away. Even a couple of feet made a difference. In fact, research showed that the probability of snacking increased by more than half when the drink station was right next to the snack supply.

As a result, it may be as simple as adding a little distance between the drinks and the high-calorie snacks.  Put the candies and cookies in a different location, in an area that is less convenient. If you want to encourage healthy eating, place the fruit and vegetables front and center. In addition to being good for the body, these healthy snacks are also good for the mind. As one study showed, the more fruits and vegetables people consumed, the happier, more engaged, and creative they tended to be.

Google harnessed the science of behavior to design a strategy nicknamed Project M&M to combat the problem of staffers eating too many M&Ms. In staff cafeterias, they placed the M&Ms in opaque containers and placed dried fruit and nuts in clear glass containers. It was an ingenious and simple intervention. They didn’t remove the M&Ms altogether, they simply placed them out of sight. The result? Over the course of seven weeks, the 2,000 employees at their New York offices consumed 3.1 million fewer calories.

As a doctor, I witness the effect of diet on mental health first-hand. When I was training to become a psychiatrist, I rarely paid attention to what my patients ate. Unless the person had an eating disorder or depression-associated weight loss, their diet did not get much airtime. I couldn’t have cared less about how many diet sodas they drank or how much candy they ate. Little did I know back then about the relationship between diet and brain health.

These days, I grill my patients about what they eat and literally prescribe a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. I share these proximity strategies, recommending, for example, that they keep a bag of carrots or an apple within arm’s reach.  They can trick themselves out of wanting unhealthy snacks if the hassle of obtaining them is too high.

Ultimately, If they are going to grab a snack, it may as well be mood-enhancing. The only side effects are feeling and looking good.

We are creatures of our environment and this is especially true when it comes to food. Create a workplace that encourages healthy habits. Just be sure to make the healthiest options the easiest options available.

Now, please pass the crudité.

“My friends and employees know me to be a humble guy,” explained my patient “John.” He was astonished to later learn that a number of these people described him as “pretty arrogant,” in a survey he commissioned as part of a behavioral assessment tool to improve performance at his company. He had a heart-to-heart with a good friend who more or less agreed with the survey’s findings. How could he have gotten it so wrong?

Most of us think we have a pretty good idea about how other people see us—how nice we are, how funny we are, how interesting we are, how attractive we are and so on. We assume that others see us as we see ourselves. Psychologists call this “egocentric bias”—when we are locked inside our own heads, we lose the ability to be objective.

To get a better view of yourself, you could hire a team to do 360 interviews as John did. Another less-expensive option is to think more abstractly. In a 2010 study, researchers split participants into two groups and asked them to judge how attractive they were to another person. One group was told to put themselves in the other person’s shoes. The other group was told to imagine how they would be rated by the other person in several months’ time. Those who tried to put themselves in the other person’s shoes did terribly—in fact, there was no association between how they thought others would rate them and how they actually did rate them. On the other hand, those who thought about their future selves did much better. Related research yielded similar findings in general evaluations, not just attractiveness.

We are blinded by how much we know. Thinking about ourselves in the future, though, moves our mind to a more abstract level, allowing us to better see ourselves through others’ eyes.

If you want to get a better picture of yourself, think forward.

When someone visits a psychiatrist for the first time, it’s usually at an inflection point. Something big has happened, is happening or is about to happen. Helping patients navigate their way through this transition is the goal.

Over the years I have learned an important lesson—in addition to discussing the “big issue” that brings a patient in the door, it is equally important to focus on the everyday. Talking about how the person spends their time and conducts their daily life is essential. Understanding their habits and rituals not only helps me understand who they are, it also enables me to recommend small changes that may help them feel just a little bit better. Oftentimes, a minor tweak in their day-to-day routine can help them feel stronger even within their stress.

As writer Annie Dillard said,

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Dillard’s words ring true for all of us. The actions we perform on an everyday basis determine who we are in the long run.

Here are seven ways to make the most of your everyday:

1. Learn something new

Every single day, look for an opportunity to expand your knowledge. Listen to a podcast, read an interesting article, learn something from a friend. Remember, everyone you meet knows something you don’t.

2. Make someone’s day

Do something, anything, for someone else. This is an immediate mood booster. Going out of your way to be kind to others also helps you feel more in control.

3. Use your strengths

You excel when you get to do what you do best. According to research, employees who use their strengths outperform those who don’t and feel more fulfilled.

4. Fortify yourself

Actively decide to eat well, move more, and sleep better. Every bite of food, every extra step, and every extra hour of rest has a significant impact. Your everyday decisions affect the quality of your health and life.

5. Think forward

What are your long-term goals? Do at least one thing that brings you a step—even a baby step—closer each day.

6. Do something meaningful

No matter how small, do something that somehow improves the world. It may be as simple as picking up a piece of garbage on the street.

7. Take a moment

Spend, at minimum, 30 seconds reflecting on what you have accomplished and appreciating what you have. Expressing thanks is one of the simplest ways to feel better.

By purposefully following these seven steps, your full-day can also be fulfilling.

I spent years studying damage, deficit and dysfunction in the human mind. I don’t remember once in my training hearing the words “joy,” “awe” or “wellbeing.” We talked about “happiness” but only in a negative sense. During a manic phase of bipolar illness, patients may experience excessive happiness. The diagnostic criterion of mania includes a persistently elevated or expansive mood and inflated self-esteem. This is a bad thing. It has negative consequences like irresponsible spending or reckless sexual behavior.

Genuine happiness is not given much thought in the training of psychologists and psychiatrists. The goal of treatment is to get a patient “back to baseline” (not clinically sick) and the goal of most research is to gain a better understanding of mental disorders.

Studying what people are like at their best has not received much attention until recently. In 1998, Martin Seligman was the President of the American Psychological Association. He had a successful career studying depression and was known for his work on the theory of “learned helplessness” as a model for depression. Yet the singular focus on illness troubled him:

Psychologists (and psychiatrists) have scant knowledge of what makes life worth living. They have come to understand quite a bit about how people survive and endure under conditions of adversity. However, psychologists (and psychiatrists) know very little about how normal people flourish…

Seligman set out to change that. He broke new ground by founding the modern field of Positive Psychology.

Positive psychology proposes to correct this imbalance by focusing on strengths as well as weaknesses, on building the best things in life as well as repairing the worst. It asserts that human goodness and excellence is just as authentic as distress and disorder, that life entails more than the undoing of problems.

Positive psychology has flourished over the past two decades, leading to a greater understanding of optimal human functioning and resilience.

Seligman’s life changing book, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, outlines his groundbreaking theory of wellbeing known as the PERMA model. The theory holds that the following five elements are the building blocks of a good life:

1. Positive Emotion (P) 

Positive emotion such as peace, gratitude, satisfaction, pleasure, inspiration, hope, curiosity, awe, and love are life-enhancing. A “dose” of positive emotion creates an upward spiral of positivity.

2. Engagement (E) 

When we’re truly engaged in a situation, task, or project, we experience a state of flow: time seems to stop, we lose our sense of self, and we concentrate intensely on the present.

3. Positive Relationships (R) 

We are “social beings,” and good relationships are essential for wellbeing. Strong social connections are linked with good physical and mental health and are also protective against stressors.

4. Meaning (M) 

Meaning comes from serving something larger than ourselves. It puts life in perspective. It may be a religion, a cause, or an overriding sense of purpose that we belong to something bigger.

5. Accomplishment/Achievement (A) 

Mastering a skill, achieving one’s goal, and living life in concert with one’s values is important for wellbeing. Working towards a goal is rewarding in itself.

The good news is that all five elements of PERMA can be cultivated.

Your assignment: get more PERMA in your life today.

“A fried egg and cheese with bacon please.” This was the breakfast I craved at 5:30 am when I was an intern after an all night shift in the hospital. What I didn’t realize at the time was how not getting enough sleep influenced what I ate.

There is increasing evidence that not getting enough rest negatively impacts eating habits and leads to excessive food intake.

After a bad night’s sleep, the hormone controlling appetite is affected, emotional stress is greater, more food is desired to compensate for lack of energy and impulsivity is increased, all of which affect the amount of food that you would consume in a day.

As anyone who has ever stayed up all night for work or other reasons knows well, we crave greasy food. According to research, there is a reason pizza and doughnuts are so much more appealing than avocado on whole grain toast after a late night. The lack of sleep increases the brain’s response to unhealthy food:

High-calorie foods become significantly more desirable when participants are sleep-deprived. This combination of altered brain-activity and decision-making may help explain why people who sleep less also tend to be overweight or obese.

The paradox is that consuming unhealthy food after a late night exacerbates exhaustion and actually makes us feel worse. These “comfort foods” turn out not to be not so comforting after all. In fact studies show that eating comfort food to help us feel better is a myth.

Keep this in mind next time you pull an all-nighter. The fried egg and cheese may sound appealing but you will have a much better and productive day if you have oatmeal (without the extra brown sugar) instead.