What’s your favourite mental hack? How do you trick your dumb human brain into doing its job right? Hacker News, a forum for people too nerdy for Reddit, traded their favourite tricks in a thread started by user simonswords82. Here are the best.

I'm a casual yoga-er, but when I meet people who are serious about yoga, they're always talking about their "practice." Basically, if you're really into it, you don't need to wait for a convenient class or a new episode from your favourite YouTube yoga channel. You work on what you want, where you want, on your own terms. If you're joining our December yoga challenge, now might be a good time to build your own home practice.

Procrastination is a vice many of us indulge in, and there’s a reason it’s so hard to quit. However, the long term effects of putting things off are actually hurting your brain.

If you have even the tiniest inkling that you might want to get in shape in the new year—or anytime really — don’t wait until January. The best time to start a gym habit is right now, when you’ll have the place to yourself.

We all want to establish good habits, and break bad ones. But most of us approach the process all wrong. Luckily, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits has some tactics to make sure those new habits stick.

There’s a lot of pricey sleep tech out there, not to mention supplements and products aimed at giving you more “energy” during the day. But most of us, if we’re feeling tired all the time, just need to get our butts to bed.

We’ve all heard that people don’t really change. Your mum will always be close-minded; your ex will always be selfish; and you’ll always be a tiny bit neurotic.

The minimalist habit tracker habitctl runs in the command line. (If you don’t know what the command line is, this is not the tool for you.) As such, it’s one of the simplest habit trackers you can use, while still being more sophisticated than a text file (which was developer Sebastian Morr’s previous habit-tracking method).

Everyone has goals they want to accomplish. But with busy schedules and work demands, it can sometimes feel like we let them slip away.

Whether we're springing forward or falling back, the biannual time shift is, at best, a discombobulating experience - but changing the clocks also gives us a ready-made opportunity to change ourselves.

It’s surprisingly easy to get stuck in a rut. Choose the same path two or three times when you start a running or walking habit, and suddenly that path becomes an unquestioned part of your workout. Or maybe you vary your location, but you always do a 5K at “oh my god I’m going to die” pace. Well, stop it.

When you just want to turn your brain off and sleep, meditation apps are perfect. A guiding voice, or the sounds of something peaceful such as rain, helps to fill the silence so your thoughts can’t creep in. The best ones strategically bore you into drowsiness. (You can look for sleep-focused meditation tracks, but I’m guilty of misusing the Headspace intro lessons for this purpose.)

We all hit a slump near the beginning of a fitness program. Not at the very start, when we’re excited to get going — more like a few weeks in. It may take six weeks to notice more muscle or better endurance, but how do you get through that time without losing hope?

iOS: Throughout the day, I always know I should be doing things to better my health and overall disposition: Standing at regular intervals, drinking a lot of water, telling my friends they are great and we should hang out, and so on. And while these thoughts hit me on occasion, they're never enough to create a regular lifestyle pattern. Thankfully, the free iOS app Aloe Bud is happy to help out.

Long before I noticed any fitness benefits of doing burpees every morning, I noticed something else: I really, really, did not want to get out of bed. Because once I got out of bed, I would have to do my burpees.

We're all probably a little more addicted to our phones than we'd like to be. I know that I instinctively pull mine out whenever there's a break in the action of the day be that when I'm on the train, between meetings, or even waiting on food at a restaurant. It's easy to take your phone out and get absorbed in what's happening on Facebook or Instagram.

If you made a simple creative action every day, what would you have at the end of 100 days? April 3 starts #The100DayProject, which invites you to answer that question for yourself. Past participants have done 100 days of collages, pompoms, illustrated quotes and dancing in public.

Everyone tells you that to build a new good habit, you should start small. Pick one incremental way to ease into your New Thing, and slowly work up from there. It's sensible advice, and I've never, ever taken it.

Epictetus, in Discourses, wrote: "And since strong habit leads, and we are accustomed to employ desire and aversion only to things which are not within the power of our will, we ought to oppose to this habit a contrary habit...". If you want to break a bad habit, try doing something new or develop a new good habit that contradicts your bad habit.