JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The end of the calendar year means chillier temperatures, festive treats, time with loved ones and often, a renewed enthusiasm for self-improvement.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Resolution No. 1, obviously, we'll lose 20 pounds. No. 2, always put last night's pants in the laundry basket. Equally important, we'll find nice, sensible boyfriend to go out with.
SUMMERS: Here we are at the end of another year, and you might be wondering, should I even bother to make resolutions? Or maybe you don't even know what to resolve to do or not to do. As always, Life Kit has us covered. Host Marielle Segarra spends a lot of time talking to people about changes that can make your life better. And she's here with me to talk about getting the year off to a great start. Hey there, happy almost New Year.
MARIELLE SEGARRA, BYLINE: Yeah, happy almost New Year.
SUMMERS: OK, so, say for 2025, you decide to walk 5,000 steps every single day, but pretty quickly, you realize that's actually a lot more steps than you thought, so you start ignoring your fitness tracker. Sometimes, even when a goal feels reasonable and doable, we just let it slide. Give us some advice. How can we stay on track?
SEGARRA: Yeah, that's the classic story, right? You have this big goal, and then you drop it by mid-January. Well, we have done a lot of episodes about this every New Year's. This year, we are focusing on something called accountability partners. Basically, the idea is, enlist the buddy system, right? We are social creatures, as humans, and a lot of the time we are more interested in pleasing other people than we are in pleasing ourselves. So there is a way to harness that for our own goals, and probably, the classic example of this is, you know, you have a friend who you go to the gym with or who you go running with. And you know that you're going to show up because you don't want them to be waiting outside in the cold for you, but you wouldn't do it on your own.
But you don't actually have to have the same goals. Some people do this where they have an accountability partner who they met online or who was an acquaintance, and they just agreed to do this. And they'll get on Zoom once a week and talk about, what are your goals for this week? Did you hit your targets for whatever you're interested in, last week, etc.? Or they'll be like, we co-work, basically. Once a week, once a day, I'll practice my juggling while you practice the tuba on mute. And it actually gets people much closer to their goals than if they were going it alone.
SUMMERS: There are a couple of topics that usually dominate resolutions this time of year. I'm thinking of things like fitness and weight loss, giving up smoking, drinking or other bad habits. But I know that you've talked to a whole lot of experts over the last year. What stands out as some of the best tips that people don't normally think about?
SEGARRA: Yeah, we cover a lot of personal finance. And one is, if you have money in a savings account, to make sure it's in something called a high-yield savings account because you might have your money just sitting there essentially losing value because of inflation and earning next to nothing in interest. But there are other banks that'll offer you between 4- and 5% interest, and there's no risk associated with that. You just have to make the switch and make sure it's a bank that's FDIC insured, insured by the federal government.
Another one in the money realm is if you find yourself shopping too much and spending more than you want to, make a buy list. So basically, anything that you want to buy, you put on this list, and you let it sit there for a week or a month, and you come back to it, and you'd be surprised how often you're like, I can't believe I wanted to buy that thing. It stops you from making a lot of impulse purchases.
And then we cover health a lot, too - health and safety. And we did an episode on CPR that was really important, I feel like, because a lot of people are afraid to do CPR if they're not trained. We would definitely encourage everyone to go take a CPR class. But even if you haven't, if you see someone unresponsive, not breathing, first, you're going to call 911. If there's a bystander, you might point to them and say, hey, you, call 911. If you're by yourself, you put the phone on speaker phone, call while you start doing compressions.
And for compressions, you're just putting one hand over the other, arms straight, elbows locked, push in the center of the person's chest to the beat of the song "Stayin' Alive." So it's like, (singing) ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive. Push, push, push, push, stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
You keep doing that until the person wakes up or until help shows up.
SUMMERS: Marielle, you've said in the past that you prefer to think about intentions rather than resolutions. So what are some of your intentions as we look ahead to 2025?
SEGARRA: Yeah, I have these kind of rolling intentions. I had them written on a posted above my desk for a while. The verbs for me right now are move, play, create, connect and rest. And I aim to do those every day, if possible, every week, for sure. And they can mean different things, but I try not to set super rigid goals for myself, at least at this moment in my life. What about you? Do you have an intention this year?
SUMMERS: You know, I don't know if I have an intention, but one thing we've been talking about a lot at home is - I don't know. Obviously, I host a news show, so I work a lot, and that means sometimes some of those household things can fly by the wayside. I used to be a great meal planner, and then I kind of fell off of meal planning. So that means there's a lot of, like, impulse takeout, where it's like, I don't even necessarily want to eat that thing. I just want to not cook, or I didn't plan well enough and there's nothing in my fridge. So I really want to get back to...
SEGARRA: Yeah.
SUMMERS: ...Being more intentional about, like, what I feed my body. I love cooking. I love eating good food, even when I don't cook it. So just trying to be a little bit more intentional with that - not really, like, a healthy diet goal, but just a - I don't know - thinking more about what I'm consuming.
SEGARRA: Well, we have multiple episodes of Life Kit that can help you with that.
SUMMERS: That is Marielle Segarra, host of NPR's Life Kit. Marielle, thanks for coming back, and Happy New Year.
SEGARRA: Yeah, thanks for having me.
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