Чтение и письмо: статья и отзыв (-ing и to после глаголов)

Five habits that will change your life — and why four of them won't
Every January the same list appears: get up at five, take cold showers, cut out sugar, meditate for twenty minutes, walk ten thousand steps. I have tried all five. Here is what I have learnt — and where I think the advice goes wrong.
Getting up at five worked for exactly nine days. I remember feeling heroic on day one and drained by day six; by day nine I had stopped setting the alarm. The advice assumes that everyone is an early riser waiting to be released. In my experience — and, more importantly, in the sleep research the columnists rarely cite — about a third of adults are night owls, and forcing them to rise early costs sleep, not laziness. The habit holds true for some; it is sold to all.
Cold showers I still take, and I swear by them. But I started them the same month I began walking to work, and I cannot tell you which one improved my mood. Correlation is not causation, and one man's bathroom is not a study.
Cutting out sugar completely meant reading every label, which I did for three weeks before I stopped bothering. What survived was a smaller change: I stopped keeping biscuits in the house. Try doing that before you try to give up sugar for ever.
Meditation I regret abandoning. Ten minutes was fine; the twenty demanded by the apps was the problem. The evidence here is actually good — dozens of studies, not one — but the dose in the headlines overstates what the research tested.
The steps, finally, are the one habit I would defend without conditions, and the one with the least glamorous evidence: more walking is better than less, for almost everyone, at almost any age. Nobody sells a course in it.
My conclusion is not that habits don't work. It is that the list applies a single prescription to eight billion different bodies, and calls the failures a lack of willpower. Pace yourself. Change one thing. And don't mistake a habit that suits a columnist for a cure that suits you.