Forming good habits and sticking to them requires time, dedication, and consistency. Anyone who has tried to stick to a New Year’s resolution, health plan, or other self-improvement goal knows it is not easy. You would probably rather spend your time catching up on your favorite reality TV show, playing games on your phone, or doing something you would actually enjoy. Well, one doctor and her peers say, “Why not do both?”
On social media, Sohee Carpenter, a fitness coach with a PhD in sports science and an MS in psychology, recommended a technique known as “temptation bundling,” which pairs less enjoyable habits or chores with something you enjoy to make them easier to complete.
Temptation bundling, a term coined by economics and psychology professor Dr. Katherine Milkman, helps turn new habits or chores into something to look forward to. Milkman’s research shows the method is effective at shaping behavior, and many professionals vouch for it.
“Pairing dreaded tasks with something fun, enjoyable, and perhaps even indulgent can be a great way to give yourself the nudge you need to get the thing done,” licensed therapist Anindita Bhaumik told GOOD. “Tacking on something you can look forward to transforms the undesirable task from daunting to a small price to pay for the ‘reward’ you give yourself.”
Common examples of temptation bundling include saving a favorite TV show to watch only while on the treadmill or listening to a specific podcast while vacuuming. This can make goals like “30 minutes on the treadmill” or “vacuum every week” easier by pairing them with entertainment. It certainly beats committing to a new exercise routine with no incentive or putting off vacuuming until a dust bunny tumbles across the floor.
Many people already practice temptation bundling without knowing the term, and it extends beyond exercise and household chores. It can be reframed to let you bend certain habits while still keeping to unpleasant commitments, such as allowing yourself to order less healthy food only when dining with difficult family members. If you are trying to limit your coffee intake but need motivation to get through work emails, setting a rule like “I will only drink coffee while answering emails” can help you tackle both at once.
Struggling to get through a task you hate? What if you could pair it with something you enjoy? Welcome to Lesson 10 in our 11-part series on overcoming procrastination using neuroscience. Today, we’re focusing on Temptation Bundling. We often procrastinate on tasks that feel boring or unpleasant because our brains naturally seek out more pleasurable activities. Think about pairing a task like folding laundry with listening to your favorite podcast—it makes the time fly! By bundling something enjoyable with something unpleasant, you’re more likely to complete the task because your brain gets a dopamine hit. Here’s today’s tool: Pair a task you’ve been putting off with something enjoyable, like listening to music or treating yourself to your favorite snack. This method activates your brain’s reward centers, making it easier to stay engaged and finish the task. Your action step: Identify one task you’ve been avoiding and pair it with something enjoyable to get it done. Stay tuned for our final lesson, where we’ll discuss how getting enough sleep can drastically improve your performance and fight procrastination. #TemptationBundling#OvercomeProcrastination#Neuroscience#ProductivityHacks#StayEngaged#Motivation#WorkSmart♬ original sound – René Rodriguez
“One trend I’ve seen lately that I think is a particularly good ‘temptation bundle’ is getting together with friends for an ‘Admin Night,’” said Bhaumik. “Admin Nights are a scheduled hangout session where everyone brings their dreaded and mundane administrative tasks they’ve been putting off to do together. Paying bills, sorting your inbox, making appointments, all the boring life stuff is done in the supportive and relaxing environment of your besties.”
Bhaumik said that “Admin Nights” not only make paperwork more enjoyable but also provide the benefits of body doubling, which can help people stay on task. Getting a few friends to commit to a monthly “Admin Night” can help you take care of bills and other tasks while doubling as a low-cost hangout.
If this sounds like something you would like to try, make two side-by-side lists, one of things you enjoy and another of habits or chores you want to stick with. See which items from each list can be paired, and you may find routines that are easier to stick to while adding more enjoyment to your life.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest person lived to the ripe age of 122 years old. Such a lifespan is an incredible feat, but what if the average person could beat that record by 34 years? Recent research done in Russia has led scientists to believe that the average human lifespan could be up to 156 years.
The researchers at Skoltech Biomed Technologies Center developed a mathematical model that allowed them to “switch on” a variety of aging mechanisms. This allowed them to calculate a human’s lifespan where mortality risk never increased with age. After experimenting with different scenarios and conditions, they found the biggest barriers to longevity were caused by non-renewable tissues and somatic mutations.
What are these barriers against longer life?
Somatic mutations are DNA changes within a cell. They accumulate over time during a human’s life and cannot be reversed with any existing therapy. These DNA errors that pile up in our cells contribute to the aging process.
Many human organs like the liver and skin continually replace cells and regrow damaged portions of themselves. However, there are two organs that can’t do this: the brain and the heart. Brain tissue (neurons) and heart tissue (cardiomyocytes) cannot regenerate. This proves to be the most prominent biological limit that shortens our lifespans. This explains why issues like dementia and heart disease are prominent causes of death and morbidity later in life. Since those organs’ tissues don’t replace damaged cells, they’re prone to irrevocably decline over time.
“The key finding of the study is the discovery of substantial differences between tissue types. Neurons and cardiomyocytes, which lack the ability to divide, turned out to be the main limiting factors: when all other causes of aging are eliminated, somatic mutations alone reduce the theoretical median lifespan from 1,759 years (for a hypothetical non-aging human organism) to 156 years,” said Evgeny Efimov, a research intern at the Skoltech Biomed Technologies Center, researcher at AIRI, and one of the key authors of the study.
This suggests that somatic mutations and DNA damage is what ultimately prevents humans from living indefinitely, even if our brains and hearts regenerated cells like other organs.
So what’s next?
Now knowing these biological limitations, the researchers hope to study other areas of aging impacting the human lifespan that could plausibly be reversed. This includes mitochondrial dysfunction, telomere shortening, epigenetic drift, and loss of proteostasis.
The hope is to have a clearer priority list of issues for future therapies to tackle. This is not just to possibly extend life, but to improve lives in general. By developing a fully comprehensive theory of aging, Skoltech hopes to pinpoint which aspects of aging are within our scope to address. After all, thoroughly studying each puzzle piece that makes up human life gives us a better understanding of the whole.
Of course, other impactful factors in a person’s lifespan can be addressed today. As most know, things like diet, sleep, and exercise are among them. A person’s living environment can also negatively impact their lifespan if it doesn’t have clean air, access to clean water, and so on.
For now, the best method for living long is to follow instructions from your physician. Whether you make it to 156 years or not, living well is best for whatever time you’re given.
In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 states have passed laws banning or restricting cellphones in K–12 classrooms; in 2023, the U.S. surgeon general issued a formal advisory on social media and children’s and adolescents’ mental health; and bestselling books tell parents that smartphones are “rewiring” their children’s brains.
These concerns and policies are part of a quickly changing national and international conversation around how young people spend time on screens and its relationship to their overall health and development. My reading of the mounting research on this issue across disciplines is that the popular narrative blaming screens and smartphones for an adolescent mental health crisis runs well ahead of the current evidence.
I study adolescent digital media use and its influence on social, emotional and academic outcomes. A growing body of research suggests that one-size-fits-all solutions are not the answer and that managing appropriate use of digital media needs to take into account a child’s developmental milestones, how parents and adults around them use media, and the ways kids use it to connect and learn with friends and family.
Screen time: From monolith to multifaceted
Wide adoption of digital media and the internet broadened the range of experiences young people could have online. At the same time, the digital age introduced newfound uncertainties. As with the advent of radio, comic books and arcades, adults worried about how children might interact with or be affected by internet use.
Policies introduced by the academy in 2013 and 2016 continued to advise that school-age kids and adolescents – those ages 5 to 18 – be restricted to no more than two hours of “entertainment” screen time a day. The goal was to curb risks associated with heavy media use, among them disrupted sleep, online safety, cyberbullying and physical inactivity.
Originally created for young people’s engagement with stationary media that tend to be confined to one room or context – for example, watching television – these hourly limits became outdated with the integration of smartphones and other digital devices into everyday life. Compared with watching television, online media was far more difficult to track and define, and more nuanced in its use.
In January 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics retired its decade-old framework that had largely organized its advice around hourly screen limits. The new policy statement on children, adolescents and digital media diverges from this blanket approach. Instead, it suggests parents consider the larger picture in which this media use exists rather than lumping all screen use together.
Both the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics also recommend that when children under 24 months use screens, they should be limited to content and devices that encourage children and caregivers to interact. For ages 2 to 5, screen time – including TV and interactive apps on devices – may be extended to more solo use, provided it’s high-quality digital media designed around learning goals in mathematics and reading. But recreational use should be limited to roughly an hour per day.
For school-age children and teens, the newest guidance has begun to step away from fixed screen time limits and asks families to weigh online activity in the context of everyday life.
Doing so recognizes that a child’s digital experiences are shaped by diverse factors rather than the hours spent online. Current guidelines call on caregivers to distinguish among types of media, from television and social media to video games and interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots. They also call for taking into account a child’s individual characteristics, such as their interests and personality, family members’ own use of screens, and the type of content children are spending time on.
Rethinking screen time
Moving beyond strict screen time limits includes questioning the kind of digital activities kids and adolescents participate in. Do the activities encourage time spent interacting with others online, which can help young people develop important skills and competencies?
Scrolling an algorithm-based, auto-playing video feed likely does not equate to the same opportunities as video-chatting with friends, creating digital art or working with teammates in a multiplayer game. Research suggests these different uses relate to development in different ways and can help kids develop varying skill sets pertaining to everyday life and schooling.
Indeed, a large review of current research found that young people who take part in a range of digital activities, such as browsing the web, online gaming or interacting on social media, show positive associations with social connection, identity exploration, civic participation and learning.
The current evidence suggests parents and caregivers are best positioned to be digital instructors. Cutting children off altogether can carry its own risks for social and emotional development. Caregiver mediation of children’s screen time can produce widely different outcomes and effects, depending on whether the guidance is supportive or controlling.
Considering your own digital media use is the first step: Are family members engaging in problematic or heavy media use that children in the household might emulate? What applications and uses are most common in the family, and what positive or negative effects might they have, depending on the child’s age? How could these digital activities be safely integrated with other everyday experiences to increase their benefit for children? Conversely, what online time might be better spent on face-to-face experiences?
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Family Media Plan tool turns these ideas into concrete questions. For example, it recommends working out what each child needs from digital technology, what activities screens might be crowding out, and where their family or household can build in screen-free time. The recommendation is to talk with each child about why they are drawn to particular apps or online activities, what they encounter while browsing, and what might be lost when kids bring phones to gatherings such as mealtimes.
The debate over young people’s screen time is not going away. But the most up-to-date guidelines, and the growing body of research behind them, make a strong case for a more holistic approach. The guidelines treat digital media as a complex, diverse and evolving environment that children need to learn to navigate in the digital age. The risks and rewards depend, as with any developmental setting, on the child, the content and what online time might be crowding out.
An emergency room doctor and fellow mom has been noticing a troubling trend: Many parents are giving their kids something more powerful than bicycles to get around the neighborhood. As a result, she’s seeing more children come into the ER with injuries sustained in e-bike and e-scooter crashes. She recently went online with a plea to parents and young riders.
Dr. Meghan Elizabeth Beach Martin, known online as Dr. Beachgem, posted a video in her scrubs discussing her concerns after seeing so many children come into the hospital with e-bike injuries during the summer months. She’s worried that too many kids and parents don’t understand the proper safety precautions. As a mother herself, she even questions why children are allowed to ride these devices at all.
In the video, the doctor explains that some e-bikes can reach speeds of up to 28 mph. She says that if an e-bike goes any faster than that, it’s technically classified as a motorcycle. At those speeds, she regularly sees children with traumatic injuries and broken bones after hitting bumps, cracks in the road, or other vehicles. Many of them aren’t wearing helmets or protective pads, and some are even riding barefoot, making their injuries even more severe. Martin’s video has gained traction on Reddit and elsewhere online.
E-bikes and e-scooters, examined
Martin isn’t the only professional seeing a growing problem. The American College of Surgeons reports that there are more than 20,000 e-bike-related injuries each year. Meanwhile, a University of California, San Francisco study found that e-bike injuries doubled annually from 2017 to 2022. The same study found that e-scooter injuries increased by 45% each year during the same period.
Before riding an e-bike, it’s important to follow proper safety procedures. Make sure you and your child understand your area’s laws regarding e-bikes, including any minimum age requirements. Always wear a helmet and other protective gear when riding. Consider choosing an e-bike with safety features such as motor-interrupt brake levers and disc brakes. These are just a few of the many safety tips experts recommend.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has similar safety tips for e-scooter riders. Wearing a helmet is one of its top recommendations, along with taking other basic precautions. The agency also recommends checking the brakes before riding and slowing down for bumps, cracks, and other road hazards.
The vast majority of e-scooters and e-bikes are designed for only one rider, so avoid doubling up. Although laws vary by state and locality, wearing more protective gear is always the safer choice. Riders should also review local e-bike and e-scooter laws to make sure they are operating the vehicles safely and legally.
A little research goes a long way toward making sure you and your children can ride safely. It’s also important for parents to understand that many e-bikes and e-scooters can travel at speeds that make them very different from a traditional bicycle. The last thing you want is for you or your child to become another emergency room statistic.
