TED Radio Hour - Stay Resolved

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Original Broadcast Date: January 13, 2023. Resolutions are easy to make, even easier to break. But what if a story or idea can motivate us in a whole new way? This hour, TED speakers offer different perspectives on our most common resolutions. Guests include neuroscientists Wendy Suzuki and Sandra Aamodt, science journalist Catherine Price, behavioral scientist Wendy De La Rosa, and authors Pico Iyer and A.J. Jacobs.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's Manoosh. We are putting the finishing touches on a brand new episode to help you kick off 2024. We're going to help you rethink some of the biggest topics that might be keeping you up at night this year. That's coming next week. But meanwhile, we thought we'd share our New Year's show from last year because we love this one. It's about the things that people resolve to do most. In fact, you have probably made one of these things your New Year's resolution. Last year, this year, you'll probably do it again next year. So every year, this one's a keeper, so enjoy.

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know.

what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Minush Zummerody. And today on the show, Resolved. So, you know, I arrived at New York University on January 15th, 1998, as a bright-eyed bushy-tailed young assistant professor. This is Wendy Suzuki. She's now a full, tenured professor of neural science and psychology at NYU. But in 1998, she was just a newbie, hoping to make a name for herself.

I wanted to make a splash and I wanted to discover something new about the hippocampus and how memory worked. And that was such an exciting time. Because Wendy started her own lab with grad and a grad and a student. PhD students, all helping her do cutting-edge research. And I just focused so hard because as a research scientist, I had six years to prove myself to get tenure. And if I got tenure, then I would have a job for life. But there's a really, really high bar.

So Wendy went to work. I was going to just work, work, work, work, and do nothing else. After six years, Wendy was on the cusp of getting what she wanted, tenure. She was well established and respected in her field. But all that work? Work, work, work, work. It took a toll. I had no friends and I was eating so much takeout and I didn't move my body at all.

And I just felt really, really bad. You were burned out. I think I was lonely. I was unbalanced. I'd gained 25 pounds. But it was really this feeling of how come I'm not happy. despite the fact that part of me said, you have no right to be dissatisfied.

You have this, you know, tenure track position. You can get to do all this cool stuff. But nonetheless, I was unhappy. And I did not know quite what to do. And I said, okay, I'm going to give myself a vacation. I need a break. So she took one and went to the Kotawasi River in Peru for an adventurous rafting trip.

And I went and being outside and getting more physical was just such. It felt so good. But at the same time, I'm looking around and every single person on this trip was stronger than I was. There were 16-year-olds that had more upper body strength than I did. And 65-year-old. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so weak. I need to do something. I never want to feel like the weakest person again.

What did you do? Literally, the next day after I got back from Peru, I remember I had all these bug bites on my legs because of all the insects. But I marched down to the closest gym to my work, and I signed up. And it was that, like, I can't feel, this is, something's wrong. I'm feeling too weak. And I need to feel stronger. And that was my resolution. Wendy resolved to be stronger, healthier, to improve herself, as so many of us vowed to do, especially this time of year.

As we know, however, resolutions, they are easy to make and even easier to break. But what if you got a different perspective on why you should keep going with a new healthy habit? What if an idea or story could motivate you in a whole new way? Well, today on the show, resolved the most common resolutions people make and new reasons to stick with them, from saving more money to eating better, seeing the world, and spending more time with family. And let's go back to Wendy Suzuki. She had been working out at the gym for a little over a year when she had a revelation. I was writing a grant in my office, and this is something that neuroscientists and

researchers have to do a lot. And it's usually just as a horrible, you know, pulling out your hair process. You never know whether it's good enough. You're competing against Nobel laureates. But I said to myself one day, wow, writing went well that day. And I had never, ever had that thought gooth through my mind. And I realized that I was not only feeling better and more energetic, but my memory seemed to be working better. My hippocampus that I was studying in my own lab, seemed to be working better, and my focus was working better. And that is what really made me sit up and take notice and say, what's going on here? And how can I get more? What's going on with my brain? I really like this feeling. Exactly. It was a truly a turning point

in my career and in my life. So as a curious neuroscientist, I went to the literature to see what I could find about what we knew about the effects of exercise on the brain. And what I found was an exciting and a growing literature that was essentially showing everything that I noticed in myself. Wendy Suzuki continues her story from the TED stage. Better mood, better energy, better memory, better attention. And so now, after several years of really focusing on this question, I've come to the following conclusion.

That exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today for the following three reasons. Number one, it has immediate effects on your brain. A single workout that you do will immediately increase levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. That is going to increase your mood right after that workout,

exactly what I was feeling. My lab showed that a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention, and that focus improvement will last, for at least two hours. And studies have shown that a single workout will improve your reaction times, which basically means that you are going to be faster

at catching that cup of Starbucks that falls off the counter, which is very, very important. But these immediate effects are transient. They help you right after. What you have to do is do what I did, that is change your exercise regime, increase your cardio-respiatory function

to get the long-lasting effects. And these effects are long-lasting. lasting because exercise actually changes the brain's anatomy, physiology, and function. Let's start with my favorite brain area, the hippocampus. Exercise actually produces brand new brain cells, new brain cells in the hippocampus, that actually increase its volume, as well as improve your long-term memory. You say in your TED Talk that we now know that exercise promotes brain cell growth. But do we know how? Yeah. So what's happening is that there are signals that come from the muscles

themselves. There are proteins released by the muscles when they are working, when you're out on your power walk or doing your kickbox class. The muscles release proteins. The liver releases ketones. And the fat tissue also releases substances. All of these signals are. are going up through the blood-brain barrier into the brain. And one of the biggest things that they do is they release what are called growth factors in your brain. These growth factors we know are the key to growing new hippocampal brain cells. There are lots of other neurotransmitters and neurochemicals that get signaled that give you, what I like to call a bubble bath of neurochemicals every single time you move your body.

That is what you're doing. You're changing the neurochemical milieu of your brain in a positive way. Number two, the most common finding in neuroscience studies looking at the effects of exercise, long-term exercise, is improved attention function dependent on your prefrontal cortex. You not only get better focus in attention, but the volume of the hippocampus increases as well. you not only get immediate effects of mood with exercise, but those last for a long time, so you get long-lasting increases in those good-mood neurotransmitters. But really, the most transformative thing that exercise will do

is its protective effects on your brain. Here you can think about the brain like a muscle. The more you're working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets. Why is that important? Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases

and normal cognitive decline in aging. So with increased exercise over your lifetime, you're not going to cure dementia or Alzheimer's disease, but what you're going to do is you're going to create the strongest, biggest hippocampus in prefrontal cortex, so it takes longer for these diseases to actually have an effect. You can think of exercise, therefore, as a supercharged 401K for your brain, okay? And it's even better because it's free.

So there are long-term, wonderful effects of exercising on the brain. We've talked to other researchers about that on the show. But you've also done research into how exercise can make me feel better right now. So, I mean, I'm going to ask the question everybody wants to ask, right? What is the minimum I need to do in order to feel better right now? Ten minutes of walking, walking with a W, has been shown to have significant improvements on mood states, significantly decreasing anxiety and depression levels and also increasing positive mood states. But what if you are not exercising regularly?

How much exercise do you need to start to see clear brain benefits? And the answer is two to three times a week of 45-minute exercise. And after three months, our exercise group had significantly higher baseline mood rates. In other words, they were happier at their baseline. Number two, they had better performance on a task of focused attention, a very classic one, that some of your listeners might have heard of the stoop task. And they also did better on recognition memory, which is dependent on the hippocampus and the surrounding structures there.

Do you think that that could be maybe the one thing that could keep people going? Like if they know that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain? Yeah. Maybe that's the nudge that they need. It could help, absolutely. People have a vague notion that exercise might be good generally. But yeah, if they really knew all the things that exercise was doing for their brain, imagine a watering can with growth factors, that you are watering your hippocampus with growth factors. You're making it that much more fluffy, that much more big and fat. Every single time you move. your body. Wendy Suzuki is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University. She's also the author of the book Healthy Brain, Happy Life.

You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, Resolved. I'm Manus Shumerodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. Before we get back to the show, I want to ask you to please consider becoming a member of TED Radio Hour Plus. You'll get extra advice, stories, and expertise from TED speakers every other week and no ads ever. And you'll be supporting public radio. Listener support is crucial to keeping us going. Our first plus episode of the year is out in a couple weeks. If you're not a plus subscriber yet, just go to plus.npr.npr.org slash TED. Or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anousse Zamoroti.

On the show today, resolved. We are rethinking New Year's resolutions. What works, what doesn't, and what just makes things worse, like dieting. So the reason that dieting is so hard is that the brain reacts exactly the same way to someone who deliberately loses weight as it doesn't. to someone who is starving. This is Sandra Amit.

She's a neuroscientist who's written a lot about why dieting tends to fail. Basically, our brains, they prefer to keep us alive. Yeah, your brain literally thinks you are experiencing a famine and responds accordingly. So that you are actually going to burn fewer calories as you move around because your brain is trying to keep you from starving to death. I got interested in this topic in the first place because of my own history. I started dieting when I was 13 and of normal weight, which happens to a lot of girls especially. My mom said something about how I was eating like a fat person and it freaked me out.

So I went on my first diet and gained the weight back as almost everyone does. And I lost and gained the same 15. pounds about twice a year, every year from then until I was 40. And what happened when you turned 40? So I found out about some of the scientific research that indicated that my brain was actually doing what it was supposed to do in causing me to gain that weight back. And so in 2010, as my New Year's resolution, I decided to quit dieting, stop weighing myself, and I was going to do my absolute best to stay weight neutral, to let my body settle at the weight it wanted to be.

Was that scary to make that New Year's resolution for you? Oh, it was. Yeah. I had no idea what was going to happen. And, you know, like anybody who's put that much energy into trying to try and, you know, to control their weight. I had this fantasy nightmare that I was going to end up weighing 300 pounds and eating nothing but cookies for the rest of my life. So what did happen during that year? So in terms of my weight, it was shockingly uneventful. I basically stayed where I was.

And in terms of my mental health, it was revelatory. I mean, partly I was mad, right? because I had wasted an untold amount of willpower over the course of the previous 30-something years trying to control something that turned out I was better off not trying to control. But also the amount of space that that freed up, the amount of attention that I had for things that were more important to me than what I looked like. It was just amazing. So we shouldn't give people the impression that after you stop dieting, you just stop thinking about your body or about your health. Part of your investigation into what could work led you to start researching something called mindful eating.

What is mindful eating, basically? So the purpose of mindful eating from my perspective is to put your body's weight regulation system back in control of your eating, which is to say to eat when you're hungry and stop eating when you're full. And that is the way people were eating for hundreds of thousands of years before anybody invented diet apps and calorie counting. But a lot of us have lost track of how to do that. So we have to deliberately pay attention to our body's signals in order to move back in that direction. And that's basically what mindful eating means is to pay attention to how your body is feeling

without judging it. No judgment. Yeah. So as soon as you start thinking, oh, I shouldn't be hungry. Oh, I'm such a pig. Look what I ate. Any of that kind of stuff, you are no longer practicing mindfulness. To be mindful, you have to be aware of what's going on.

both physically and emotionally with yourself, but not immediately jump to close off your curiosity about that with judgment. Sandra says there are three steps to approaching a meal mindfully. The first mini-meditations. Where you just stop what you're doing, take a deep breath, focus on your body, and think through what am I feeling and what do I want right now? Am I hungry? Am I not hungry? Do I feel like something sweet, something crunchy, something salty? It's very quick. You can do it in the buffet line. Why am I reaching for another helping of lasagna? Am I actually really hungry? Or am I bored, stressed? That's when you can take it further with a body scan.

Which is a longer practice where you sit there and go through your body piece by piece and say, okay, what is my right big? toe feeling right on through to the tip of your head. And as people get better at that, they tend also to get better at knowing when they're hungry and when they're full. Now, Sandra says learning to listen to your body, it takes practice. One of the things that dieting does to us is it deliberately causes us to stop listening to hunger signals, right? If you're dieting, the whole point is that you eat when the diet says you eat, not when

you're hungry. A lot of us cope with that by trying to just forget that we're hungry. And so it does frequently take six months to a year after you start seriously concentrating on it to get back in touch and figure out what your body is trying to tell you. The third step, she says, is movement. Some kind of movement that you enjoy, that you want in your life not because it's good for you, but because you really love it, that it helps to reorient your idea of yourself

from, I am a person who looks like this, to I am a person who is strong, I am a person who is skilled, I am a person who can do these things with my body, which turns out to be a much better way in terms of mental health to think about your body than thinking about it in terms of the way it looks. Okay, so let's say someone has decided they are going to eat more healthfully this year.

You would say the thing that's going to keep you sticking to it is eating more mindfully. Is that right? Yeah, I would not choose a weight goal. And the nice thing about mindfulness is that you can't change something until you can see it. And a lot of our less desirable habits are also our most unconscious habits where you don't even notice you're doing the thing until it's done. And that's another place that mindfulness can help just by giving you that pause to say, okay, what are we doing here before your habits have completely run away with you? That's Sandra Amit. She's a neuroscientist.

Her book is called Why Diets Make Us Fat, and you can see her talk at ted.com. On the show today, resolved. Many of us promise ourselves that we are going to stress less. What does that even mean? Be less reactive when bad things happen? Manage our anger and anxiety better? Science journalist Catherine Price thinks the answer is simple.

add more play into your daily schedule. And crucially, redefine your definition of what is fun. Here she is on the TED stage in Vancouver in 2022. So you might think that you're already having plenty of fun. And that's because in our everyday speech, we often use the word fun to describe anything we do with our leisure time, even if it's not actually enjoyable and, in fact, a waste of time. So, for example, we scroll through social media for fun,

even though doing so often makes us feel bad about kind of everything. Or we'll say, that was so fun, we should do that again soon. In response to things that weren't that fun and that we don't want to do again, ever. But it's not really our fault that we're a little bit sloppy about how we use the word fun, because even the dictionary doesn't get it quite right. You know, it says that fun is amusement or enjoyment or lighthearted pleasure.

It's something for kids to have in play areas. It makes it sound like it's frivolous and optional. But when people recount the memories in which they had the most fun, they tell you about some of the most joyful and treasured memories of their lives. So in reality, fun is not just lighthearted pleasure. It's not just for kids, and it is definitely not frivolous. Instead, fun is the secret to feeling alive. So the first thing we need to start with is the fact that fun is a feeling and it's not an activity. When people do have fun, when they

experience this feeling, it's actually very easy to recognize because people who are having fun look like they're being illuminated from within. It's radiant. In fact, when I asked my daughter when she was about five years old what color fun would be, she said, said sunshine. So what is this sunshine? You know, what is this feeling that we call fun? Well, when people tell me their stories about fun, it's really interesting because the details are all different and often quite mundane, but the energy running through them is the same. And there are three factors that are consistently present. And those three factors are playfulness, connection, and flow. So by playfulness, I do not mean you have to play games.

I just mean having a lighthearted attitude of doing things for the sake of doing them and not caring too much about the outcome, letting go of perfectionism. Connection refers to the feeling of having a special shared experience. And I do think it's possible in some circumstances to have fun alone, but in the majority of stories that people tell me about their peak fun memories, another person is involved, and that's true even for introverts. And then flow is the state where we are so engaged and focused on whatever we're doing that we can even lose track of time.

You can think about an athlete in the middle of a game or like a musician playing a piece of music. It's when we're in the zone. It's possible to be in flow and not have fun, like if you're arguing, but you cannot have fun if you're not in flow. So playfulness connection and flow all feel great on their own, but when we experience all three at once,

something magical happens. We have fun. And that doesn't just feel good. It is good for us. In fact, fun does so many amazingly good things for us that I personally believe that fun is not just the result of human, and thriving. It's a cause. Fun is energizing. Fun also makes us present. A lot of us put a lot of work

into trying to be more present. You know, we do yoga classes, we meditate, and that is all great. But the fact that fun is a flow state means that when we are having fun, we simply are present. There's no other way for it to happen. Fun also makes us healthier. Now, being lonely and stressed out, as many of us have been, causes hormonal changes in our bodies that increase our risks for But when we have fun, we're relaxed and we're more socially connected, both of which have the opposite effect. And then lastly, fun is joyful. You know, we all so desperately want to be happy.

We read books about happiness, we download apps about happiness, but when we are in a moment of having fun, we are happy. So it makes me think that perhaps the secret to long-term happiness is just to have more everyday moments of fun. So how do we do that? How do we have more fun? So to start with, reduce distractions in order to increase flow. Anything that distracts you is going to kick you out of flow

and prevent you from having fun. And what's the number one source of distraction for most of us these days? Your phone. So today I want to challenge you to keep your phone out of your hand as much as possible so that you can take me up on my second suggestion, which is to increase playfulness by finding opportunities to rebel. I'm talking about finding ways to break the rules of responsible adulthood and give yourself permission to get a kick out of your own life.

So, for example, one person told me that some of the most fun she'd had in recent memory happened on a Friday morning when she and some of her friends ditched their work and their child care responsibilities, tucked flasks into their purses, and snuck out to a 10.30 a.m. showing of the movie, Bad Moms. So lastly, here's one more thing that you can do today to start having more fun. treat fun as if it is important because it is. I've been doing this myself for a couple of years now, and it's amazing to see how many areas of my life fun has touched.

You know, I'm more creative and more productive. Making sure that I am having enough fun has made me a better partner and a better parent and a better friend. And it has convinced me that my daughter was right. Fun is sunshine. It's a distillation of life's life. energy. And the more often we experience it, the more we will feel like we're actually alive. Thank you. That was science journalist Catherine Price. She's the author of The Power of Fun,

How to Feel Alive Again. You can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, resolved, ideas to shift our perspective and help us stick to those resolutions that we make. And now Let's talk money. The number one thing I think people want to feel is they want to feel control over their finances. This is Wendy DeLauosa. I'm a behavioral scientist and an assistant professor at the Wharton School. And Wendy researches financial decision making, which she says can come with a lot of emotional baggage. In the U.S., we view financial prosperity as this fully individualized,

accomplishment. So if you're struggling in your finances, it feels like it's only due to your own personal behaviors due to your own responsibility. Your failures. Yeah. And the thing is, that's just not true. It's not all about you. It's all about your environment. So more about outside forces. Right. Every company is getting smarter, faster, and better at helping you part with your money. Everything is being optimized to play with our psychological biases so that we spend as quickly as possible and as much as possible. In fact, online, we all know the experience of being haunted by the same ad over and over and over again. And so we're creating this environment where it becomes almost impossible to exert self-control and willpower. And then we blame ourselves for

it. And I want to just strip us away from that shame. One, because it's not a useful emotion, right? It doesn't lead to behavior change, but also because financial decision-making by and large is not necessarily a problem that we can teach away. What do you mean by that? So it's not about a knowledge gap. Okay. It's a behavioral gap. So for example, there was this beautiful study that reviewed the entire literature looking at what's the impact of financial education on financial behaviors. So I get you in a room, I teach you how to save, I teach you how to budget, ultimately what happens to your financial behaviors. And it turns out that financial education accounts for just 0.1% of the variance in your

financial behavior. No. Yeah. So not zero, but pretty freaking close to it. And it's just not the best tool in our toolkit. So how are we going to do this, Wendy? If we've made this promise to ourselves that this is the year, how can we set ourselves up to succeed and not feel just more shame

that we haven't actually done anything about our money situation? So this is what I call taking control and correcting our environment. When we come back, behavioral scientist Wendy DeLerosa explains some very subtle tweaks we can make to our financial world. On the show today, Resolved. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

I'm Anoush Zamoroti. Today on the show, Resolved. New perspectives on our most common resolutions. And we were just talking about getting a handle on our finances with behavioral scientist, Wendy Delirosa. Wendy says that to take back control, we need to think about redesigning our environment. So I'll give you sort of a quick example. Lots of people struggle with their credit card payments. But one of the reasons is because the due date is chosen randomly when you apply for your credit card. Your credit card is due the 25th of every month. For no discernible reason. It just is.

Right. And so if you get paid on the 15th and the 30th, I have. Actually, the 25th is a terrible day because you've probably already spent the paycheck that you gained on the 15th. What does that mean? Well, let's correct your environment. Call up your credit card company and change your payment date to the 16th. That's when you have the most resources, right? It's creating a self-control mechanism for yourself. So then you actually, not only do you maybe automate it, so you definitely pay it on time and you don't get any fees, but you also don't bounce any checks and you.

have a good credit standing. Right. I'll give you another example when it comes to saving. Lots of people think that the best way for us to save is to set up automatic deposits once a month from checking to savings. And that's fine, but it's not optimized. Some months, you're going to get more money. You may have a tax refund, you may have a bonus, or there's five Fridays and you're going to get an extra paycheck. And then some months, you may not have any disposable income. So what do you do? So what I ask people to do is to save the percentage of their income. And there are apps like capital with a queue or time, which is a no-fee online bank that allow you to do this within minutes. Right? You can set any time I receive a deposit over $100, save 10%. And that's great because why? If I get paid more, I save a little bit more. It sounds like you're saying instead of making that New Year's resolution saying to yourself, I'm going to stick to this all year long. I think, Wendy, you're advising that we just outsource it.

We get an app or we change a bill due date or we do something that does the work for us all year long. Yeah. And here's the thing. People fundamentally already know how to do this. They know what to do. the reason why we don't do is because it's hard because my children need my attention because my boss is asking too much of me because I don't have the time. And so if this is your resolution, here's what I want you to do.

Take a financial health day. Love yourself enough to put yourself first, find time on your calendar and say today, because I know what are the things that I need to do, I'm going to take a financial health day and knock some things off my list. I love this because it's not dumbing down, but it's also a little bit of setting and forgetting it. Exactly. Because the thing is, for most of us,

thinking and ruminating about our financial situation creates a negative emotional state. So what I want people to do is to say, look, I'm going to take control, I'm going to change my environment, whatever it is that you know you need to do To improve your own financial security, that's what you need to do in your financial health day. That's Wendy De LaRosa.

She's a behavioral scientist at the Wharton School of Business. Her TED video series is called Your Money and Your Mind. You can find it at ted.com. On the show today, resolved. And one of the most common resolutions that we make is to travel more. Especially right now, people want to get out to see the world. But it can be tough with crowds, limited budgets, maybe worries about contributing to climate change. While travel writer, author, and TED speaker Pico Ayer, Globetrotts for a living,

and he has some counterintuitive advice for us on how to see the world. Here's Pico. This last spring, two-hour flights took me all of 27 hours to complete. Just one week ago. I'd shown up at my local small-town airport at 5 a.m. to find a line snaking out of the terminal onto the street. All the TSA machines were down. A little later, sitting on an airport bus,

I saw 10 people at a lonely rural stop barred from entering, though all had tickets, because the bus was already full. As many of us have learnt the hard way, travel has never been so crazy or so crowded as over the past few months, as millions of us try to cram two years of lockdown dreams into a mere two weeks. So maybe the best New Year's resolution I can make is to travel less, or at least to remember that I don't have to travel far to be transformed.

That was one of the first lessons I learned during, lockdown. I was staying in my mother's house in the hills of California for months on end. I couldn't travel as much as I usually might, so I and my wife started taking walks, up the road behind the house. It was often early when we set out, so the sun was just showing up behind a ridge. Parts of the mountains were flooded with golden light. Other parts were enshrouded in thickest fog. Halfway up we turned around and saw the Pacific Ocean in the distance glistening, the Channel Islands so sharp in the clean air that we felt we could count every ridge. Here was a sight as beautiful as any I'd travel halfway across the world to see in Cape Town or

Rio de Janeiro, and there it was in my backyard. My parents have lived on their property for more than 50 years now, and I had never thought to walk to the end of the road 20 minutes away till lockdown. Naturally, I was as eager as anyone to get back on the road as soon as the pandemic began to ease. But every day I'm reminded that what you see is never so important as how attentively you look. And that travel, deep down, is not about movement so much as about being moved. As one of my favorite travelers, Henry David Thorough had it, it matters not how far you go, the further, commonly the worse. What matters is how alive you are. And aliveness is just what those of us still standing most want to celebrate. All of us know, often painfully, that the environment will be

much healthier if we become a little more restrained in our travels, as will our discomboburned, jet-lagged systems. And instead of trying to make up for lost time, maybe we can reflect on what we gained when time stood still. Even as airports and freeways are ever more jam-packed, walking remains as easy as ever, as does the simple art of looking. One day, suddenly, I started noticing hummingbirds in our garden.

Stuck close to home, my wife and I, discovered a silent golden beach only ten minutes from the house by car. Across the lagoon beside the beach, we watched egrets and cormorants and pelicans gliding across rich blue skies. When it began to rain one winter day, we turned around and saw a double rainbow arcing over the hills. As a wise friend of mine reminded me sending me a sentence from the great explorer and naturalist John Burroughs. To learn something new, take the same path you took yesterday.

I'm so glad that we can be out and about again now and see the world in ways that my grandparents could not have dreamed of. I happened to be in Antarctica when the pandemic broke out, and nothing I had seen or imagined had prepared me for the majestic silences above those icy spaces, They're penguins bustling over the slippery black rocks, the thousands shades of silver. But if the last two years have taught us anything, it's that distance has nothing to do with depth. And one place, seen deeply, yields many more treasures than a dozen glimpsed from a fast-moving window. Beauties are blooming right here, right now, if only I have eyes to see them. A dozen cultures, too, in a world in which much of the globe has arrived on our doorstep.

In the unhurried quiet of staying in one place, I wrote a whole book on Paradise, which for me can be found only in the midst of real life. I'm sure I'll still often be found on planes. My work and keeping up with friends and family demanded. I consider myself deeply blessed to get to see the world, at a time when so many of my global neighbors lack the means or the freedom to do so. But still, very often, you'll see me stepping out of my mother's house and walking towards a sight as radiant as any I can imagine

as the sun rises above the ridge and floods the whole area with golden light. That's writer Pico Iyer. His latest book is The Half-Kown Life in Searching, of paradise. And you can see his many talks at ted.com. Okay, we are coming to the end of our show. And the final thing that many of us resolve to do each year is to be more in touch with our family. Writer A.J. Jacobs has a very excellent, unusual and entertaining take on how we can do that by reconsidering just who even is part of our family. Here he is on the TED stage in 2014.

Six months ago, I got an email from a man in Israel who had read one of my books, and the email said, you don't know me, but I'm your 12th cousin. And it said, I have a family tree with 80,000 people on it, including you, Karl Marx, and several European aristocrats. Now, I did not know what to make of this. Part of me was like, okay, when's he going to ask me to wire $10,000 to his bank, right? I also thought 80,000 relatives. Do I want that?

I have enough trouble with some of the ones I have already. But another part of me said, this is remarkable. Here I am alone in my office, but I'm not alone at all. I'm connected to 80,000 people around the world. and that's four Madison Square Gardens full of cousins. So this email inspired me to dive into genealogy, which I always thought was a very stayed and proper field. But it turns out it's going through a fascinating revolution

and a controversial one. Partly this is because of DNA and genetic testing, but partly it's because of the Internet. There are sites that now take the Wikipedia approach to family trees. And what you do is you load your family tree on, and then these sites search to see if the AJ Jacobs in your tree is the same as the AJ Jacobs in another tree. And if it is, then you can combine until you get these massive mega family trees with thousands of people on them, or even millions. I'm on something on Jeannie called the World Family Tree, which has no less than,

a jaw-dropping, 75 million people. I'm on it, many of you are on it, whether you know it or not, and you can see the links. Here's my cousin, Gwyneth Paltrow, who... She has no idea I exist, but we are officially cousins. We have just 17 links between us. There's my cousin, Barack Obama. And he is my aunt's fifth-grade aunt's husband,

aunt's husband's father's wife's seventh great nephew. So practically my older brother. And my cousin, of course, the actor Kevin Bacon, who is my first cousin twice removed wife's niece's husband's husband's first cousin once removed niece's husband. So six degrees of Kevin bacon, plus or minus several degrees. Now I'm not boasting because all of you have famous people and historical figures in your tree because we are all connected. But does it really matter? You know, what's the importance?

First, it's got scientific value. This is an unprecedented history of the human race. And it's giving us valuable data about how diseases are inherited, how people migrate, and there's a team of scientists at MIT right now studying the world family tree. Number two, it brings history

alive. I found out I'm connected to Albert Einstein. So I told my seven-year-old son that, and he was totally engaged. Now Albert Einstein is not some dead white guy with weird hair. He's Uncle Albert. And it's not all good news. I found a link to Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer. But I will say that's on my wife's side. So I want to make that clear. Number three, interconnectedness. We all come from the same ancestor. And you don't have to believe the literal Bible version. But scientists talk about why chromosomal atom and mitochondrial Eve.

And these were about 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. We all have a bit of their DNA in us. Number four, a kinder world. Now, I know that they're family feuds, but I think that there's also a human bias to treat your family a little better than strangers. I think you look back at history, and a lot of the terrible things we've done to each other is because one group thinks another group is subhuman.

And you can't do that anymore. We're not just part of the same species. We're part of the same family. The more inclusive the idea of family is, the better. Because then you have more potential caretakers. And as my aunt's eighth cousin twice removed, Hillary Clinton says, It takes a village.

So cousin to cousin, I thank you. Goodbye. Okay, AJ. I'm resolved to be friendlier to my neighbors because technically they are also my family. That was writer A.J. Jacobs. You can find all his talks at ted.com. And thank you so much for listening to our show

about new reasons to stick to you. your New Year's resolutions. And I wish you all kinds of luck in addition to scientific research and fun facts about staying resolved this year. But if you do need more support in your endeavor, NPR's Life Kit team has a great resource. Go to npr.org slash new years. It is really delightful. This episode was produced by James Delahousie, Matthew Cloutier, and Fiona Gehran. It was edited by Sanaz Mexicanspur, James Delahousie, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Andrea Gutierrez, Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Montalione, and Catherine Seifer. Our intern is Susanna Brown, and our fellow is Malvica Dang.

Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablewe. Our audio engineers for this episode were Robert Rodriguez and Gilly Moon. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feeleyn, Michelle Quint, Jimmy Gutierrez, Danielle Beloreso. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.