With Thanksgiving coming soon, writing about gratitude quickly comes to mind. I, and countless other people, have written many times about gratitude as a happiness strategy. (In fact, I just tallied it—approximately one out of seven of my posts over the past 10 years have made reference to gratitude.) A…
About 20 years ago, I read one of my all-time favorite books, The Children, by David Halberstam, about a group of young people, including the late Congressman John Lewis, who put themselves in harm’s way to advance the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. In that book, I read…
The last couple of years have been challenging, to say the least. I write a lot about health and wellness, most often focusing on the importance of exercise and eating well. I also espouse what I call “Proactive Positivity.” In posts and speeches, I explain the way negativity tends to…
I recently stumbled on a piece on WebMD on sugar addiction. The piece provides information about sugar cravings and excellent advice on how to tame your sweet tooth. I recommend the entire piece. Here are some highlights: Your Brain on Sugar Your brain...sees sugar as a reward, which makes you…
A recent post, “Lessons from Mimi,” about inspiration from my mother-in-law, who passed away this year at 95, resulted in more feedback than most of my posts. The notes I received were inspirational themselves and I am sharing excerpts from some of them here. I am 69, and have been…
As I have written countless times, New Year’s Resolutions fail because we make too many, or ones that are too big. Instead, breaking down our goals into small pieces, and tackling one at a time for the 21 days it takes to create a habit, is the way to go…
Ten year ago, I published my book, Six Simple Rules for a Better Life. It’s been an eventful decade for me in many ways, and the book has been a very nice part of it. While the book didn’t become a bestseller (and I didn’t expect it would), it sold…
My mother-in-law (who my kids and I called Mimi) passed away this year. It was not from COVID. She was 95 (and would have turned 96 this month). Her body simply gave out. Incredibly, her mind was at 100% for about 94 of those years, and she wasn’t too far…
For those of you who receive updates of all articles posted on Six Simple Rules blog in your inbox, you might have noticed that the emails look a little different recently. That’s because we’ve switched the online platform we use to send the emails. The change shouldn’t cause any disruptions…
Early this year, I read the book “How to Change Your Mind,” by Michael Pollan, about psychedelic drugs, which are finding a place in the medical world to treat addictions such as smoking, alcoholism, and some forms of mental illness. In the 2020 elections, Oregon passed a law legalizing the…
A bunch of years ago, I read Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, by Peter Diamandis. Since that time, I have often read Diamandis’ newsletters. I wanted to share excerpts from one of his newsletters from late last year that came with the subject line, “Increase your healthspan,…
In a past post about the importance of reading food labels and understanding serving sizes, I wrote about serving sizes of breakfast cereals. A few years ago, I was on a mission to find a tasty, yet not-too-sugary granola. In the end, I moved to Bob's Red Mill Muesli, which…