64 Answers sorted by
611
My realization that smoking was associative, led me to try to do it alone. I told everyone in my social circle that i had quit, and smoked in secret when I had to. I don't generally espouse lying but it might be a prerequisite in this case. I stopped using smoking as an aid to social situations, or as something to do with my hands and mouth when i was pensive. I focused completely on the very process and did not accompany smoking with anything else at all. What this method encompasses is, being very aware of smoking, from lighting it, putting it on your lips, inhaling the smoke, exhaling, to flicking the ash and throwing the butt away. I also focused on the sensations in my mouth and lungs, as well as the blood rush. It reduced my daily intake immediately, made me despise smoking, and along with other measures, helped me kick the addiction for good.
5811
I was always wary of using drugs to solve my problems (I always thought I should just apply more willpower), but then my anxiety got so bad that I cried every day for nearly a year. Going on SSRIs immediately made a massive difference. I only cry about once a month now and have far more good days than bad.
Similarly, sucking it up and taking ibuprofen when I feel a migraine starting is way better than 'powering through' it. You requested only one problem-solution pair per answer, so I'll generalize this to 'significant life improvements when I stopped blindly rejecting drugs on principle.'
520
I used to have really strong emotions that could be triggered by trivial things, which caused both me and the people I was around a lot of suffering.
I managed to permanently stop this, reducing my emotional suffering by about 90%! I did this by resolving to completely own and deal with my emotions myself, and told relevant people about this commitment. Then I was just pretty miserable and lonely feeling for about 3 months, and then these emotional reactions just stopped completely without any additional effort. I think I permanently lowered my level of neuroticism by doing this.
418
I grew up in warm climates and tend to suffer a lot in cold weather. I moved to a colder climate a few years ago and discovered scarves. Wearing scarves eliminated 90% of this suffering. Scarves are not exactly a bold and novel invention, but people from warm climates may underestimate their power.
*
370I discovered a year ago something that substantially improves my mood and energy. In the shower each morning, I rub the sole of each foot for just a few seconds with a facecloth (or anything slightly rough would do). This produces a buzz (kinda endorphins + caffeine) that lasts all day, without wearing off as it is renewed by standing or walking. It hasn't diminished over time. It's an amazing free lunch. Not just making life 0.1% better, I'd genuinely say 30% better.
Perhaps I have particularly sensitive feet. But presumably this works for some other people, they just haven't tried it; after all, it took me decades to discover it.
2
280
Setting a recurring alarm at 9:30pm and taking melatonin right away. Got me in the habit of getting tired and going to bed more consistently.
230
Problem:
Regularly eating unhealthy snacks/food.
One-time solution:
Put all the unhealthy snacks/food in a hard to reach shelf in the pantry, and shove them all the way to the back.
Notes:
This solution is very effective in reducing the snacking and junk-food eating. It's based on two laws of behaviour change.
- Make it Invisible: If it's out of sight, it's out of mind. With the junk food tucked away, you'll be tempted a lot less, if not completely forget that those foods were even an option.
- Make it Difficult: Bending all the way down to reach into the bottom shelf of the pantry (for me, that's at floor level) is really tedious, and that bit of resistance is surprisingly effective in reducing my desire to get that snack/food.
Bonus point — A similar trick is actually well-known in retail: whatever product you put in the top shelf (waist-height) near the cashier will sell much more than any product you put in the bottom shelf (even if the bottom product is a much better-known brand).
* These laws come from the book Atomic Habits, which I've read twice and have grokked fully. As a result, I was able to easily come up with dozens of these one-time solutions for all my daily problems. I consider it a life-changing book and I highly recommend it (and I'd love to chat with anyone about habit design, just PM me).
221
Using duct tape to tape my floss to my toothpaste has moved my flossing compliance from ~80% -> ~98%
202
If it will take < 5 mins do it immediately.
It works for responding to e-mails, buying stuff for home, paying bills etc. Benefits which I noticed:
- It allowed me to have smaller backlog of quick task
- I feel I have less cluttered mind
- I feel I forget less stuff which I need to do
*
170Problem:
Endless watching of Netflix (or Youtube).
One-time solution:
Disable auto-play on Netflix (it's a config setting, which applies across all devices).
Notes:
Auto-play on services like Netflix is extremely dangerous, especially when watching TV shows whose plot advances episode to episode as if it's a really long movie. For me, watching videos is really immersive and induces a flow state, which famously causes time to dilate (in this case, it shrinks). Hence, without a clear signal that a "unit" of watching has completed, I would get stuck watching for hours at a time.
Additionally, the tiniest bit of resistance (i.e. having to reach for the controller/mouse to click the "Continue" button) seems to be just enough to allow me to regain a semblance of control.
Finally, I instituted a rule for myself: I can watch as much Netflix as I like, provided that before I click the "Continue" button, I must do at least 1 productive thing. Interestingly, most nights, after watching a single episode, I end up stuck in a flow state doing the productive thing instead and the whole evening turns out great!
*
170I only started doing cardio consistently once I paid the upfront cost of trying 14 different pairs of shoes till I found some that made my feet hurt less.
Getting rid of all but ~100 belongings permanently decreased how much time I spend cleaning since the worst things ever get still only takes 10 minutes.
Learning to make 3-4 meals, not in the sense of 'I know the procedure' but in the sense of 'I buy these specific things at these specific stores in these specific quantities and follow this exact procedure each time' ingrained it into muscle memory enough that it no longer occurs as aversive.
Buying a Reach Access flosser made me floss.
Practicing the muscle memory of opening a new note in my favored note taking app and reducing the number of buttons I need to press to do so eventually bootstrapped to a very robust note taking system.
160
Installing freedom.to, which lets me deactivate websites that are distracting, and sync them acros devices. (I previously tried various things to add a delay to particular websites, not of which worked nearly as well)
I think for Freedom to work, it needed me to also have an active project I was working on that I actually enjoyed. I think otherwise I would have found other ways to distract myself and eventually undermined it to the point that I gave up.
140
I had bad carpal tunnel pain and RSI due to my coding job 3 years ago, to the point where it was very painful to type, and moderately painful all the time. I was worried I would have to find a new career.
I solved it by seeing David Bacome at Psoas in SF. After about 7 sessions the pain went away completely. He also taught me how to do some exercises to help prevent it from happening again, which I do whenever I start feeling lots of tension in my wrists. It hasn't been an issue since then, and I have no problem using a keyboard for both work and many of my hobbies.
14-1
A friend tells me that they would have a new cold sore every ~3 weeks during winter months. After reading this paper: https://proceedings.med.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/A151218DG-WH-edited.pdf they told the local pharmacist that they needed the chickenpox vaccine since they never had it as a child (which was a lie). Since then (about 3 years), they have only had one cold sore which was much milder than the previously typical ones.
As a side note: it seems to me like it would be worth trying this as a pre-exposure prophylactic for genital herpes if you have sex with multiple people.
130
I replaced everything except the ceiling lights with no-blue lights and use F.lux on my devices. Now I get sleepy when I'm supposed to and never stay up late.
120
Problem: I had a lot of back pain. Some days I'd wake up in pain, and it wouldn't go away for 1-4 days afterwards. Almost once per week? No rhyme or reason.
Solution: Replace the blanket I was using to sleep. My blanket was too small, I would curl up too tightly to stay under it. Now I still very occasionally get the same problem, I'm guessing because of habits, but it's more like once every three months.
120
Getting up at the exact same time every day, unless I happen to wake up before my alarm goes off. It seems to have improved my sleep quality.
120
I started prioritizing my to do list each day by urgency+impact+ease, and I accepted the fact that time spent prioritizing is time very well spent.
110
Problem:
Spending too much time using your phone each day (surfing, messaging, watching videos, ..etc.).
Solution:
Change your phone's display settings to only display in grey scale.
Notes:
I saw this tip online a long time ago, and have tried it on several occasions to break an addiction to my phone (where I was glued to my phone for hours daily).
It's shocking how well this trick works. You realize after using your phone in this mode for a few days how effective colours are in getting and keeping your attention, all in the name of getting you more "engaged" with apps / your phone.
One the one hand, this one-time solution gets rid of all these temptations wholesale, on the other hand, it's almost nauseating to use the phone for a long period of time in grey scale. I don't know why, but I will literally end up tossing my phone away in disgust after a few minutes of using it in this mode, thereby very effectively solving the original problem.
*
110Signing up for email from Superhuman. I went from "always have a pile of unchecked email, very bad responsiveness, feeling of overwhelm" to "I look forward to checking my email and inbox zero everyday effortlessly".
The change happened basically immediately after the 1h onboarding session.
This was actually a major update in how building software to reduce frictions can cause qualitative changes to my productivity.
I could rave about superhuman for a long time, enough that this answer will just sound like an ad. But take it upon my karma and reputation as an LW user that it's just my genuine opinion.
110
Buying a pack of 5 phone chargers on Amazon. I didn't realize how nice it was to have two in my apartment, two in my car, and a dedicated travel charger until I spent $10 on it.
100
I spent a lot of time sitting, because computers are both my work and my hobby. I was thinking about solutions, and I had a few ideas, but I procrastinated for years.
Recently, a health problem made me look for a solution immediately. So I put a huge plastic box on my table, and put the monitor and keyboard on the top of the box, and now I use the computer while standing. At first it felt weird, and I quickly got tired. But after a few weeks, my body adapted and now it feels natural. And the health problem that inspired this change is mostly gone.
Another positive side effect is that the "activation energy" needed to leave the computer is much smaller when I am no longer sitting. Yet another is that my 2 years old daughter no longer tries to climb in my lap whenever I try using the computer.
From the rationality perspective, it is quite humiliating to notice how long it took me to finaly address a problem that could have serious health consequences, and how little time and effort the actual solution required, once the gun was metaphorically pointed at my head.
(To be honest, I am not completely satisfied with this solution, and would like to replace the plastic box with something better... not sure what exactly. But the difference is that now I procrastinate on minor improvements, having already solved the critical part.)
100
Glide floss. My teeth absolutely shred every other brand, but Glide is coated with Teflon. Made regular flossing possible.
I stopped watching news years ago. Improved my mental state massively.
Stretching every day, right after work, has been a win as well. It’s a good end to the day, I’m way more flexible, and overall feel happier.
Whenever I feel angry or frustrated, I ask myself what outcome I want from the situation, and focus on how to make that happen. Helps me avoid acting counterproductively on emotion.
101
My glasses didn't fit properly, causing them to slide down my nose frequently. I used hot water to bend the frames around my ears better, solving the problem.
90
1st problem: waking up on time/not going back to bed:
Moved my alarm clock into my office (which is situated right beside my bedroom). Forced me to get up, take a few steps, and consciously turn off the alarm. Since the closest place to rest was the office chair, I found myself not going back to bed and waking up on time with almost 100% compliance.
2nd problem: dishes
I don't have a dishwasher in my apartment, they all need to be done by hand. we (my partner and I) recently limited our cabinets to 4 of each item (cups, plates, bowls, cutlery) and the amount of dishes we need to do is now 90% less. We keep the other items in a closet incase we have company over.
80
Buying my girlfriend a vape. She smokes weed a lot and it's been said that getting a smoker to switch to vaping is one of the best things that you can do in terms of longevity. She also says that it is much more enjoyable.
(She likes the Pax 3 a lot; Vape Critic seems like a good resource for reviews.)
70
Recurring Freedom session across all my devices (laptop, phone, tablet) set to disable all apps and most websites (including messaging, news, and discussion sites) 30 minutes before bedtime every night.
71
Installing the Hide YouTube Comments chrome extension stopped my habit of reading and participating in the toxic comment section of YouTube. Absolutely essential for mental hygiene if you suffer from the same habit but at same time don't want to miss out on the great video content there.
70
Reading https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easy-Control-Alcohol-ebook/dp/B07B7QRWTH enabled me to quit drinking alcohol very easily. It was almost like it just turned off my desire to drink for good. ~3.5 years alcohol-free now.
60
I had been trying to use "positive self talk" for years, but still found that I was extremely harsh to myself.
For me, talk wasn't enough. Pairing the talk with physical acts of kindness dramatically improved my self-talk, efficacy, mental stability, and overall sense of well-being.
My methodology looks like this- whenever I do something for myself (even mundane daily tasks like making lunch) I consciously "give" myself the nice thing, saying something kind or reassuring while doing it (ie "I made this for you because I like you", "I put the warmer blanket on the bed, you deserve to be comfortable", "I got this for you because everyone deserves a little treat sometimes"). I have only been doing this a few months and the difference is a very noticeable.
This one is probably only relevant to people who didn't learn positive self-talk growing up, but it was a life-saver for me
61
Any gym equipment in your house, even just a couple 15-pound dumbbells.
Exercising used to be the #1 reason I leave my house, and I don’t leave my house much overall, so pre-COVID I thought I might as well keep using outside-the-home gyms. But I'm also somebody who finds doing 10+ minutes of "task-switching", like driving to the gym, to be a pretty big psychological barrier.
So finally I bought some weights and a treadmill, and now almost every day I'm like sure, at some point of this day I'll take 30 seconds to switch tasks from sitting in a chair to moving my body, it's a nice change of pace.
60
Taking Alexander technique classes improved my posture a lot, and cured the tendinitis I used to get in my shoulders.
60
Reading https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easy-Stop-Smoking-ebook/dp/B0051XSN50/ enabled me to stop smoking very easily, and I've not wanted a smoke in 25+ years now.
50
I get waylaid down rabbit holes as I work on the computer. Everybody is probably familiar with this - you start a Chrome tab to read about space exploration and two hours later you have 50 tabs open, the current one being about the nesting habits of robins :-)
A couple of years ago I started using the Evernote web clipper to save all these articles to my Evernote library. So now I don't go off track and I don't spend endless hours reading articles that are interesting but unrelated to my current projects.
My brain's FOMO related to not reading these articles appears to be satiated as long as it knows the article is safely saved in case I need it later!
50
Flossing in the shower.
I went from seldom flossing to flossing every single day, improving my gum health significantly.
50
When I revise my writing I find it hard to delete large chunks because it feels like a waste and I'm also worried that I might change my mind and need parts later.
I have a folder in Notes called "Writing Stubs," where I dump the would-have-been-deleted chunks (and also other temporary relevant bits of information, kind of like working memory). It makes me feel better that I have the original still and so, feeling more assured, I can ruthlessly delete large chunks from my writing which might be unnecessary or badly written. Speeds up the revision process.
50
My solution for keyboard RSI:
For software engineers, a normal QWERTY keyboard requires the pinky on the right hand to press a ton of different keys, and my pinky joint was getting sore.
I bought this Ergodox EZ keyboard and remapped the "P" and various brackets to extra keys that are easily-pressable with my forefinger or thumb. It took a couple weeks to stop being annoyed by the new layout, and a couple months to return to my old typing speed, but this is a lifelong ROI.
There's another major bonus: I can now separate my arms far apart when I type, instead of squishing them together to accommodate a one-piece keyboard.
50
Skincare - not using product.
Giving up facial soap and making sure shampoo didn't get on my face did what no cleaning regiment did.
I tried this as a teen with moderate - severe acne, and to this day my skin is even better than most people's
40
Earmuffs have helped me a lot for productive time. The silence lets me focus more on what I'm trying to work on. Compared to my noice cancelling headphones (qc 35 II) I can't play music even if I want to to so less likelihood of distraction. On occasion though, if they aren't enough by themselves I'll put earbuds inside the earmuffs with low wind noise. I can hear pretty much nothing external after that.
They also help me sleep on planes since they block out a fair portion of the noise.
This is the one I use: https://www.amazon.in/3M-Peltor-X5A-Over-Earmuffs/dp/B00CPCHBCQ
It looks ridiculous when you wear it. Really ridiculous, I won't lie.
30
Making my room 100% blackout (as in I cannot detect my hand waving in front of my face during daylight hours when I wake up) has reduced apparent sleep need by ~an hour. I used to need 8-9 hours, now I seem to need 7-8 hours. Some nights I'm even getting closer to 6.5 hours! Which would previously have barely felt like sleeping at all but now feels totally fine. This seems to bring me more in line with human norms. It is difficult to measure quality, but my internal 'go to sleep now' shifted forward an hour without affecting my waking time with no apparent negative consequence.
This was after already having two layers of 'blackout' material! But in the morning I could see there was some light on the sides that vaguely bothered me, or would wake me up more if I happened to look at it before waking up properly. I had not applied More Dakka, but there is a huge difference.
Although some of this is due to going to bed at 2-3 am, which means half of my sleep would be in partial light conditions. I have also always been particularly sensitive to light. I just wasn't aware it was having this big of a sleep quality reduction.
Heuristic that I should have applied earlier: if a sensation bothers you enough to grab your attention, it is probably causing you problems. Reduce it and see if it helps.
30
My purchase of an arduino kit at the end of highschool. This has essentially passively introduced me to a lot of basic electronics over the years without explicitly studying them. And so now I sometimes think "I want to measure my heart rate" or "I want to build a DIY custom keyboard" or "I want a physical pomodoro timer with just one button and 3 LEDs" and I can just order some parts, build the thing, and have a new tool that solves a simple problem.
I sometimes try to recommend other people build something simple with electronics occasionally, only to realize that they don't even have any kind of microcontroller. Whereas for me it has become nearly as primitive an action as 'make a simple bash/python script for this.' Having the ability to produce electronics has opened up a multitude of solutions that I didn't even quite realize until I noticed other people getting stuck without this capacity.
The mere presence of electronics in my life encouraged acquiring many other small pieces of knowledge such as what a diode is and why it is useful. What a transistor actually is (which I had theoretically learned in college, but when I needed to make an electrically controlled switch 'transistor' did not come to mind as a thing I could buy at the store). This also led to some skills like learning to solder and desolder, and learning to use a 3D printer. Which also was a massive boon that deserves its own answer.
30
Problem: I struggle with sleep. Both getting to sleep and staying asleep.
Solution: Custom gel earplugs, and soft fleece eyemask.
Improvement: %%.
Comment: I'm sensitive to light and sound, so the slightest noises and early morning light will wake me up. I didn't realise this may be the cause of the problem until three years ago; people told me it was because I was depressed, but it was the other way around. I tried a bunch of solutions but they were all irritating, and the plugs icky or wasteful. So I went to my local opticians for my earplugs (best £100 life spend.) And for the mask I found a material that didn't itch on my skin with soft pressure, and made it into a headband. I used to be a sleepless mess until my twenties. This was a big change.
30
Sound machine at night eliminates sound from other rooms when you sleep.
3-1
When partner is really upset, look at him or her in the eyes & say, "Darling, I'm here for you." (Buddhist)
*
30I feel very drowsy in the morning, if I get woken up by an alarmsound or vibration. Buying a light alarm clock has largely solved this problem for me. I wake up before the alarm rings about 80% of the time. It does not work that well if I am sleep deprived.
The main advantages for me are: I wake up more often before my alarm rings and the light is an immediate cue that it is time to wake up.
They are relatively expensive, but from browsing Amazon for 2 minutes I get the impression that you can get pretty good ones for 30-50$ (I personally bought one for ~60$).
30
Transition medication. The actual act is incredibly simple (just take pills a couple times a day) but has a disproportionately huge impact on the rest of my life.
I suspect this probably generalizes pretty well to things like antidepressants.
30
Reading 'Say Goodnight to Insomnia'. I struggled with horrible insomnia, now I have a ridiculous control over my sleep.
20
Minimalism saves me a lot of time and money.
Yoga relaxes me physically and mentally and eliminates my back problems.
Buying a light therapy lamp to place next to my computer screen in the morning improves my mood.
Getting outside every day, no matter what the weather is like, to breathe fresh air while walking has improved my mood.
This thread could help a lot of people who have replied to this post saying they are struggling with procrastination and distraction, which means they are fighting the wrong problem: https://twitter.com/reasonisfun/status/1047765669415211009.
20
Immersion reading, i.e. reading a book and listening to the audio version at the same time. It makes it easier to read when tired, improves retention, increases the speed at which I can comfortably read.
Most of all, with a good narrator, it makes reading fiction feel closer to watching a movie in terms of the 'immersiveness' of the experience (which retaining all the ways in which fiction is better than film).
It's also marginally very cheap and easy if you're willing to pay for a Kindle and Audible subscription.
20
>sleep
Buy new blanket that isn't falling apart. Semi-permanently reduced the ugh field.
>health
If I take "Doctor diagnosed X" as strong evidence that I have X, then I should find the latest treatment guidelines/summary articles for X once a year. Led to a possibly permanent treatment algorithm (full or nearly-full symptom management) for 2 chronic problems with little to no side effects. Also caught a medication error with the acquired knowledge. Also a found a treatment that greatly helps (but not eliminates/prevents) another chronic condition.
May also have turned up a life-altering diagnoses but that is to-be-confirmed by real medical experts.
>general knowledge acquisition
Using Sci-Hub. Reduces the "Relevant article in PubMed based on the abstract->paste the PMID->oh, this is useful" loop to <1 min.
If necessary, I can try to quantify the benefits of the above items but it's a little like the RENT song about measuring a year.
10
- Sleeping eyemask. Only downside is that I'm now spoiled for them!
- Compressed towels. I can carry a couple in a tiny coin-pocket, and then easily wash my face or whatever at the nearest sink. It's surprising soft for a disposable cloth!
- Carrying a pen and napkins with me literally everywhere I go (napkins in my light jacket pocket, pen in my own pocket). Sometimes I also have paper, but napkin-math is usually acceptable for me.
- Cheap glasses. I usually wear contacts, but sometimes my eyes are irritated, or I'm going on a midnight walk, etc.
- I've mostly been a pretty un-guilty person since essentially independently reinventing some of Nate Soares's Replacing Guilt series in my teens, but some of the advice still helps me. Best hack so far is pretending to be a new homunculus, which is just a generally useful trick to get yourself to take better actions, or to calm yourself. It only took like two shots to get it to work for me.
- Using shaving cream. Yes, I was shaving without it. Yes, it was painful. Please don't be like me and assume that they must not be doing much in your youth and then discard the idea for years. And get the kind that foams up if you used something that didn't!
- Lifegoal: try to do one productive thing, everyday (or at least most days). Your choice of how to chunk it. For example, make one new attempt (or progress on previous attempts) on whatever your biggest life problems are; or learn one thing.
- Use something like CeraVe (supposedly it having ceramides, lipids that mimic your skin oils, is why it works) to moisturize your hands, and/or face. Sometimes, the skin on my hands starts 'cracking' (including some bleeding!), and recently my face was doing the same. This mostly fixes that, though can take a bit if I haven't used it for a while and am trying to fix the 'cracking'.
Oh, and you can put moisturizer on your face.
10
I installed one of the opensource alarm app that requires extra effort to disable (my app makes me scan specific code from tea packet in the kitchen). I can "snooze" it up to ~3 times, but then I have to stand up and disable it (or sleep poorly with this noise - this is a common failure mode; it is not that common).
Pros: I wake up more energized, and it feels less painful. In addition, I wake up the right time more often.
Cons: Sometimes I still can't wake up. It relies heavily on motivation. In other words, it didn't turn me into "wake-up machine".
Also setting my favorite music to it was not a mistake: after ~6 months of using it as alarm sound, it didn't become worse or something (maybe a bit more boring).
10
Get a stationary bicycle (or treadmill desk). Work play games or watch TV while burning calories and building cardio.
10
Are you able to elaborate on the muscle contractions? If there anything in particular to look out for or are you able to give specific examples?
10
Haven't quite reached the 100% resolved/full-payoff state yet but I once had a doctor firmly tell a family member to (paraphrased) not settle for a partial improvement and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fhEPnveFhb9tmd7Pe/use-the-try-harder-luke. I notice that when I apply that seriously to my health problems, entire swaths of the problem space vanish. I can't say that I'm 100% fixed though because my doctors and I are still digging around in the much-reduced problem space.
If you require something that's fully resolved or has definite results, then I'd say:
- Aforementioned "1 thing" resulted in long-term pain relief in part of my body
- Checking UpToDate (<$50 for 1 week) before (and during) doctor visits dropped my stress greatly and showed me that certain problems might have a real solution. I am also able to have a much more intelligent and meaningful conversation with doctors
10
The Zettelkasten has resolved my problem, i.e. searching for a place where to keep and retrieve easily all the stuff I collect to study
00
I fixed my sleep in a few weeks using the (paid) online service Sleepio, which has been clinically proven (to the extent I think it's available via NHS prescription in the UK):
It took me from getting 1 night's full sleep per year, to sleeping a full night maybe 6 nights a week.
This was after I'd done my own research study for months trying out lots of different standard sleep improvement techniques - none of which made a significant difference.
Sleepio got me to try various things, and hit on one I hadn't considered, which was that I was allowing too much time to sleep in - i.e. setting my alarm clock too late. So I was sleeping too shallowly. It gradually made me compress my sleep into a shorter and shorter time until I was sleeping deeply enough to stay asleep throughout the night. Problem solved!
-80
In order to win Championships, some tennis players take ballet to make them more graceful and light on the courts. They create habits of working on themselves while each 0.1% amounts to the whole. It may also be a word of advice to create habits around the solutions to your problems i.e. the tennis player stretching every morning before the start of the day.
PROBLEM: flexibility, mobility
SOLUTION: ballet and dance classes
Sometimes, people have life problems that can be entirely solved by doing one thing. (doing X made my life 0.1% better, PERMANENTLY!) These are not things like "This TAP made me exercise more frequently", but rather like "moving my scale into my doorway made me weigh myself more, causing me to exercise more frequently" - a one-shot solution that makes a reasonable amount of progress in solving a problem.
I've found that I've had a couple of life problems that I couldn't solve because I didn't know what the solution was, not because it was hard to solve - once I thought of the solution, implementation was not that difficult. I'm looking to collect various one-shot solutions to problems to expand my solution space, as well as potentially find solutions to problems that I didn't realize I had.
Please only put one problem-solution pair per answer.