How to consciously uncouple from your phone

Stop using your phone as an alarm clock. Buy an old-school alarm instead and keep your phone in another room. This way, you won’t be sucked into the carnival of distress as soon as you wake up. In fact, try to make the first 90 minutes and the last 90 minutes of your day phone-free.

“Smell the coffee. Have a shower. Eat breakfast with your family. Start your work day with the task that is actually the most pressing,” says Julie Morgenstern, author of a number of books on time management. “Only once you’ve made significant progress should you engage with email.”

Write a list of the most pressing tasks of the day, in order of importance, and work through them sequentially. Designate specific times that are OK to go online: 10am, noon, 2pm, 5pm, 7pm. “Avoid doing it in the micro-moment,” she says. “That is a phenomenal way to break the habit.”

One of the main problems with phones is that they have so many functions. You check the time – and you read a maddening tweet. You look up a film showtime – and you read a vexing email from a colleague. Make a list of all of the functions and try to focus on the three or four that actually benefit you.

Another problem is that phone-use dominoes. If one person gets their phone out at a table, everyone else does. Designate a specific place in your home where phones are stored, perhaps by the front door. Encourage the whole family to keep their phones there, especially during mealtimes. Synchronise use. “The thing about breaking up with your phone is that it’s hard to do. It’s like sugar, it’s designed to be addictive. You can break your screen addiction – but you’re going to have to break it again and again.”

How to look after your clothes

You can fix a stuck zip with a regular graphite pencil. Run the pencil along both sides of the zip – it should start to glide open. If you’re sewing a button on a shirt, thread the needle with two, three or four strands of thread and knot them together. Then you should be able to sew it with just one stitch.

Wash less, but wash better. Avoid overfilling the washing machine, stick to low temperatures and handwash your delicates. “You can handwash all sorts of things,” says Lucinda O’Connor, founder of online clothing renovation service Clothes Doctor. “It reduces friction, it stops microfibres escaping, and it keeps clothes in much better shape.”

Leave a cashmere jumper to soak for about 20 minutes in cold water with a gentle detergent, rinse, leave it to dry flat on a towel. “It comes out super soft. If you put cashmere on a radiator, it often shrinks. If you put it on a towel, it dries slowly and retains its shape.”

O’Connor says that in her former life as a City analyst, she used to buy a new item every week. Since founding Clothes Doctor in 2017, she has kicked her fast-fashion habit. “I barely buy any new clothes now. I have a much smaller, more organised wardrobe. I don’t dry clean. But I do handwash and I do steam. Steaming kills 99% of bacteria and therefore odours and it gets the creases out, too. Buy a steamer! That’s my tip.”

How to raise extremely resilient children

Time to toughen up: ‘If you fail to recognise a child’s pain, you are teaching the child to desensitise themselves.’ Illustration: Phil Hackett/The Observer

A child in your care laughs, runs, trips – and goes flying. You hold your breath and wince as skin scrapes asphalt. “There is a school of thought,” says Philippa Perry, psychotherapist and author of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, “that you should say: ‘Don’t make a fuss, that doesn’t look like it hurts,’ and the kid will learn to be tough. This is not so.”

If you fail to recognise a child’s pain, you are teaching the child to desensitise themselves – to pretend they’re OK when they’re not OK – which will in turn desensitise them to other people’s hurts.

“That’s not the same as resilience,” she adds. As counterintuitive as it seems, the best way to build resilience is to take the child’s pain seriously – “Ouch! That looks really painful? Are you OK? Let me have a look” – but to contain it. Don’t be overwhelmed.

“We learn how to soothe ourselves in relationship with other people,” says Perry. “If your parents soothe the pain and contain it, a child internalises that soothing. At first it comes externally, from the parent – but after a while they learn to self-soothe.”

When it’s a knottier problem – say, a schoolfriend doesn’t want to play with them any more – invite the child to problem-solve with you, and then brainstorm solutions. “Work with them. Don’t shut any of their ideas down, even the mad ones. Just ask for more. If they come up with an idea themselves, they’re more likely to do it. Brainstorming is really where it’s at.”

How to absolutely, 100% own that room!

It’s not about you, insists Viv Groskop, author of How to Own the Room. “We all have moments where we suddenly feel that everyone’s looking at us and we might not be up to it. The key thing is to practise thinking, ‘It’s not about me.’ You need to project your focus outwards to the other people in that situation, whether it’s one person or 5,000.”

It’s exactly the same in any social situation – from addressing a business meeting to walking into a party where you don’t know anyone. “Think: ‘How can I be a good guest at this party? How can I be helpful to the host?’ You can always find someone else who feels like you do and say to them: ‘Do you hate this? Me too.’”

Instead of feeling the spotlight shining on you, imagine it shining outwards. “A lot of self-consciousness is us not wanting to take responsibility. We’re worried that if we take responsibility for this situation, we will somehow fail. But in most situations we can take responsibility. We can think about what the other person needs from this and concentrate on giving it to them.”

If it’s a public speaking engagement, most of the time people just want you to be clear and to look comfortable. “If you think you’re speaking too fast, think the words ‘massively long pause’ between sentences. It’s less the speed of speech that’s important, it’s more about allowing time for the thoughts to settle.”

Accept what you can’t control. If someone’s weird with you, it probably has nothing to do with you. “It’s not up to you to make everyone feel great.”

How to negotiate on absolutely everything

Drive a hard bargain: ‘Most people, especially most British people, would rather pay more than endure the discomfort of a negotiation.’ Illustration: Phil Hackett/The Observer

“Negotiation is about finding things that are high value to you and low cost to the other side,” says Ryan Gray of the Gap Partnership, a management consultancy that specialises in negotiation for big business. The art lies in “creating value” for both parties in the deal. “There are fundamentals of negotiation that transcend context,” he says.

Most people, especially most British people, would rather pay more than endure the discomfort of a negotiation. “Don’t buy back your own comfort,” he says. It’s one thing when you’re making small-value purchases. But it’s a life-changing amount of money when you’re buying a car or a house.

You can negotiate in any shop where there are salespeople on the floor – for example, mid-range clothes shops – as long as you’re “creating value” for the salesperson. He recently talked his way into a £200 clothes discount. “I was buying a suit for a wedding which was £600, and I was also in the market for a leather jacket, which was £400. I knew I was going to buy both, but I feigned disinterest and looked around the shop aimlessly. Eventually the salesman starts selling the jacket to me. So I said: ‘Look, if you do me the suit and the jacket together for £786 then I’ll get them both.’”

Unround numbers sound more credible; and it’s vital to get your figure out first, to “anchor” the negotiation. “If I’d have said £800, he wouldn’t have gone for it. As it was, he said: ‘I can’t do £786, but I can do 80%’. I’m like: ‘All right!’ The value for me was £200. The value in it for the shop was the ability to upsell and turn a single sale into a multiple sale.”

How to start a fire without a match

“I’d recommend the hand-drill method,” says John Plant, presenter of the Primitive Technology YouTube channel, on which he recreates Stone Age tools. “It’s basically rubbing two sticks together. People like Bear Grylls teach the bow-drill method, but it requires five components. The hand drill only involves three. It’s less reliant on technology.”

First, gather your materials and make sure they’re bone dry. You will need a tinder bundle: anything dry and fibrous. You will need twigs to use as kindling. And you will need firesticks. “You’re after low-density wood that’s light and dry when you pick it up. Any fast-growing trees at the edge of a clearing are good.”

Fashion your spindle: you want a round, straight piece of wood that’s about 60cm long with a diameter of about 1 to 1.5cm. Peel off all the bark. Now, make your baseboard: a thicker piece of the same timber, long enough so you can hold it steady with your foot. Use a sharp stone to gouge a small hole in the baseboard with a small notch in the side of the hole where hot powder can collect.

Put the tinder on the ground, put the base board on top of that, then put the spindle in the socket. The basic action is rotating the stick back and forward between the palm of the hand. “It’s speed you’re after rather than force,” says Plant. “You need to trigger the fast-twitch muscles. You’ve got more than enough energy in your body to start a fire. You just need to focus it.”

Making fire is difficult. Take heart from incremental progress. “The first milestone is making the fire stick hot. The second milestone is creating powder. The third milestone is smoke. The final step is producing a hot coal. Blow the hot coal so it ignites the tinder. Once the whole lot is starting to smoulder, you can put tiny little twigs on top of the tinder bundle and nurse the flame from there.”

How to master the yodel

Liddle-o-lay-hee-hoo!: ‘When you’re yodelling, you’re always entertaining.’ Illustration: Phil Hackett/The Observer

Take a deep breath right into your belly. Sing a low note from the depths of your diaphragm and siren up, higher and higher, until your chest voice breaks and you have to use your falsetto voice to keep going. That’s your “flip”.

“To yodel, you have to master that flip,” says Leah Daniels, a country singer from rural Ontario, Canada. The idea of yodelling is to flip rapidly between your chest and head voice. “It goes against everything we’re taught to do as singers – we’re taught to have a seamless voice from head to chest.”

Daniels got yodelling from her grandfather, a country and western aficionado who caught the yodelling craze in the 1940s and yodelled all the way to his retirement home. “He had this real knack for entertaining people,” she says, “and when you’re yodelling, you’re definitely entertaining people.”

Don’t hold back. Try saying “Hey!” loudly a few times to build up the requisite oomph. “You find it through bad singing,” says Daniels. “You need not to be afraid of sounding horrible while you’re finding it.” Once you have found your flip, you can start playing around with vowels. Ays, Ees, Ohs and Oohs are all good. Liddle-o-lay-hee-hoo is quintessential.

How to finally banish brain fog

You know those days when your brain feels all misted over and you can’t concentrate no matter how much you whack your head with your fists? Dr Mike Dow, author of The Sugar Brain Fix, reckons it has a lot to do with sugar – whose effects on brain chemistry (mostly bad) are only just becoming understood.

“Sugar is just as bad for your brain as it is for your waistline,” he asserts. Studies have shown that if you give a person sugar, they will perform worse on memory and cognition tests an hour later. Excessive sugar consumption leads to type 2 diabetes, which is linked to dementia and deterioration of brain function. A recent study appeared to implicate sugar in depressive disorders, as well as dementia and Alzheimer’s. “It’s not just about short-term brain fog,” he says, “it also has this long-term effect on mood and cognition.”

So stop buying sweets. Don’t keep biscuits in the house. Banish cakes from the office. Watch out for ingredients that are actually sugar, but pretend not to be (like brown rice syrup). Eat a good brain diet. One of the things that keeps us going back for sugar is the serotonin it releases. “You can combine different foods to promote the production of serotonin in your gut, which will mean you don’t miss the serotonin you were getting from sugar so much. Probiotics helps. The combination of vitamin B, vitamin C and the amino acid tryptophan – found in chicken, turkey, eggs, cheese, pumpkin seeds and peanuts – helps your body to manufacture natural serotonin.” A salad of, say, kale (vitamin B), tomatoes (vitamin C) and chicken (tryptophan) should leave you less at the mercy of sugar cravings.

How to defuse a tricky argument

“First: breathe!” says clinical psychologist Julie Gottman, co-author of numerous books on relationships with her husband of 30 years, John. “Make sure you’re calm enough to frame your words carefully.”

The Gottmans have observed more than 3,000 couples having “conflict conversations”, and followed them up over the course of 20 years. Some couples are notably better at negotiating these inevitable disagreements. They tend to start with “I” and name what they feel, rather than using “You”. “Just imagine someone pointing their finger at you and exclaiming, ‘You, you, you!’” says Julie. “Not good, right? So, say: ‘I’m upset.’”

Then, they describe what they’re upset about. “Combining both, this sounds like ‘I’m upset that the kitchen is a mess,’ or ‘I’m angry that the bills haven’t been paid yet,’” says Julie. “Notice, ‘you’ hasn’t been mentioned yet.”

They finish by saying what they need – something positive. “This gives the partner a way to shine for their partner, a recipe for how to succeed with them.”

Avoid phrases like “you always” and “you never” – these imply personality flaws in your partner. Criticism and contempt will stop your partner from listening to you. If they are cross with you, don’t go on the defensive (“No I didn’t!”) and don’t counter-attack (“Oh yeah? Well you did X.”) Try to hear the pain beneath the complaint. Take responsibility. Empathise with your partner’s feelings before you explain your behaviour to them. Gently remind them to just describe their own feelings – rather than your personality flaws.

How to be happy in 2020

“I think. It all depends. On how much. Time. You have,” says the Korean Buddhist monk Haemin Sunim, at the pace of a sailing boat on a windless day. If you want to be happy right now, try smiling. “A smile makes your whole body feel more open and calm. You can also take a deep breath. You do it naturally when you’ve just achieved something. But you can actually just do it by itself and it has more or less the same effect. In fact, you can do it now!”

If you have more time, Sunim suggests you count your blessings. Capitalism and digital technology conspire to give us incessant reminders of what we lack and can’t control. A good antidote is to keep a gratitude journal. Get into the habit of writing down the things for which you’re grateful. “If you’re actively looking for blessings, you notice them more.”

What if you have lots of time? “You can do things to make you spiritually, emotionally and intellectually grow. This feeling of being in contact with something that you didn’t know before – that is happiness. If we feel we are not growing, we try to find happiness by controlling other people. However, if you focus on your personal growth, you can be happy without depending on other people.”

What’s the use of my own happiness if the world is falling apart around me? “Well, here, you have to choose,” says Sunim. “You can choose to be a victim of our times. Or you can commit to compassion. Often you feel frustration and sadness because so many sad things are happening, particularly in the political and ecological realm. But underneath these frustrations is always compassion. From that place, you can ask: ‘What can I do better to improve the world from my own limited capacity?’”