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Good Habits, Bad Habits – Wendy Wood

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Good Habits, Bad Habits

The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

Wendy Wood

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $14.99

Expected Publish Date: October 1, 2019

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Seller: Macmillan


A landmark book about how we form habits, and what we can do with this knowledge to make positive change We spend a shocking 43 percent of our day doing things without thinking about them. That means that almost half of our actions aren’t conscious choices but the result of our non-conscious mind nudging our body to act along learned behaviors. How we respond to the people around us; the way we conduct ourselves in a meeting; what we buy; when and how we exercise, eat, and drink—a truly remarkable number of things we do every day, regardless of their complexity, operate outside of our awareness. We do them automatically. We do them by habit. And yet, whenever we want to change something about ourselves, we rely on willpower. We keep turning to our conscious selves, hoping that our determination and intention will be enough to effect positive change. And that is why almost all of us fail. But what if you could harness the extraordinary power of your unconscious mind, which already determines so much of what you do, to truly reach your goals? Wendy Wood draws on three decades of original research to explain the fascinating science of how we form habits, and offers the key to unlocking our habitual mind in order to make the changes we seek. A potent mix of neuroscience, case studies, and experiments conducted in her lab, Good Habits, Bad Habits is a comprehensive, accessible, and above all deeply practical book that will change the way you think about almost every aspect of your life. By explaining how our brains are wired to respond to rewards, receive cues from our surroundings, and shut down when faced with too much friction, Wood skillfully dissects habit formation, demonstrating how we can take advantage of this knowledge to form better habits. Her clear and incisive work shows why willpower alone is woefully inadequate when we’re working toward building the life we truly want, and offers real hope for those who want to make positive change.

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Good Habits, Bad Habits – Wendy Wood

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Finally, a Cookbook Without Annoyingly Perfect Photos

Mother Jones

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If you’ve browsed your local bookstore’s cookbook section lately, you’ll likely find hardbound books filled with beautiful photos of exquisite dishes. They’re fun to look at, but these close-ups of perfectly plated food can be intimidating. As most home cooks can attest, dinners rarely come out as appealing as those on the glossy pages of cookbooks.

When Samin Nosrat, a former Chez Panisse chef who taught Michael Pollan how to cook, decided to write her book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, she deliberately chose not to include photos. On our most recent episode of Bite, we talked to Samin about her book’s illustrations, drawn by artist Wendy MacNaughton.

“I wanted to create this universal idea for people,” Nosrat said. “As much as I love food photography, it is deeply stylized. You create this magical fake world of sets and props and lighting and perfectly cooked food and in some ways it’s a little disingenuous.” Drawings and handwritten notes on everything from clam sauce to whipped egg whites color the pages of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

Here’s a sampling of some of the great illustrations, and advice, throughout the book:

Wendy MacNaughton

Wendy MacNaughton

Wendy MacNaughton

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Finally, a Cookbook Without Annoyingly Perfect Photos

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5 Green Gadgets That Will Make Spring Cleaning a Breeze

It’s that time of year again. Time to roll up your sleeves and tackle all the dirt and clutter that happened while you were getting through the winter months. That’s right — it’s time to throw open the windows and get down to spring cleaning. To help you in your efforts, here are five green gadgets that will make spring cleaning a breeze.

Spring Cleaning Gadgets

1. Lay the Groundwork

First up is an app that will help you get started. While you’re perusing the cleaning aisle, list in hand, the GoodGuide app will help you find the best products. According to GoodGuide, the app gives ratings on more than 200,000 products based on their ingredients to determine if they are healthy, green and OK to use in your home. This app even gives information on the product’s manufacturer. Just type in the product or scan the bar code to view the details on the best products for spring cleaning.

Even if you don’t have a smartphone, you can use the GoodGuide database here.

2. Light It Up

If you’re like me, you don’t notice when a light has gone out in those multi-light fixtures until the last one goes. During spring cleaning, I make it a point to check all the light fixtures. I write down all the types of bulbs that are needed, and then when I’ve gone through them all, I go to my local hardware store to pick up replacement LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs.

Benefits of LED lights:

LED lights are extremely energy efficient. The U.S. Department of Energy says that increased adoption of LEDs over the next 15 years would “reduce electricity demands from lighting by 62 percent, prevent 258 million metric tons of carbon emissions, and eliminate the need for 133 new power plants.”
LEDs do not contain mercury (the other green bulb, CFL, or compact fluorescent lamp, does contain mercury).
LEDs do not heat up when they’re on, so they are safe to handle and less likely to start a fire.
LEDs last a long time. According to Bulbs.com: “Many LEDs have a rated life of up to 50,000 hours. This is approximately 50 times longer than a typical incandescent, 20-25 times longer than a typical halogen, and 8-10 times longer than a typical CFL. Used 12 hours a day, a 50,000 bulb will last more than 11 years.”

3. Dust and Dirt (and Other Yucky Things), Be Gone

My oldest daughter is like a canary in a coal mine. Whenever there’s a speck of dust in the house, she starts to sneeze. This makes dusting serious business in our house and dusting without toxic chemicals a necessity. The hardest places to dust are the softest places in our home: curtains, cloth upholstery and mattresses.

Dr. Michael Lee, the founder and president of Raycop, developed a green gadget that cleans and sterilizes these fabric surfaces. It’s an allergen vacuum that uses UV rays to sanitize these materials. Dr. Lee developed this product after hearing concerns from his patients about allergies and asthma symptoms caused by the microscopic irritants in dust, dirt and pollen.

Through Raycop’s scientific research and development, they have created this vacuum that traps and eliminates dust mites, pollen and dirt.

“Similar to the technology used in air purifiers and manufacturing cleanrooms, Raycop incorporates HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) into its devices. The HEPA filter captures particles as small as 0.3um and traps 99.9% of allergens without releasing them back into the air.”

This is a perfect green gadget for keeping your home clean and healthy all year-round.

Give It a Good Washing

This next on our list of spring cleaning gadgets is a must if you’re in the market for a new clothes washer. A front-load washing machine is the most energy efficient on the market and will help you wash all your linens and things as you march through your spring-cleaning to-do list.

Front-load washers require less water; they use between 18 to 25 gallons of water compared with around 40 gallons per wash for traditional top-load models.

Make sure you look for the Energy Star label, which is good advice when you’re looking for any new appliance. The Energy Star–certified clothes washers use about 25 percent less energy and 45 percent less water than regular washers, according to Energy Star.

Visit Consumer Reports to help find your new front-load washing machine.

Freshen All the Air

The indoor air quality in our homes has become worse over the years. This is partly because we are building them more airtight and because of the army of cleaning products we unleash into our homes. To freshen your indoor air, open your windows to let in that fresh spring air.

Then employ our final green gadget, the Kuro Cube, to purify, refresh and reduce odors in your home. This little dynamo is made without artificial preservatives, parabens, harsh chemicals, dyes, fragrance, silicone, dimethicone, phthalates, sulphates, petroleum, talc, bismuth oxychloride or nanoparticles, according to CarbonBeauty.com. It works best in smaller spaces like drawers, closets, the car or your refrigerator. It remains active for one year.

Now that your indoor air is clean, instead of using toxic chemicals to tackle the rest of the house, check out “6 Simple DIY Cleaning Solution Recipes.”

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Read More:
10 Unconventional Tips to Help Minimize Home Allergies
Infographic: Spring Cleaning in the Bathroom
Earth911’s Green Spring Cleaning Guide

About
Latest Posts

Wendy Gabriel

Wendy Gabriel is a freelance eco-writer based in California. Wendy’s work has been featured in numerous publications and websites, including the Chicago Sun-Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Fox Business News and Mashable.com. For nearly six years, she was a weekly contributor on a popular radio talk show in the Upper Midwest with a segment titled “Simple Tips for Green Living.”

Latest posts by Wendy Gabriel (see all)

5 Green Gadgets That Will Make Spring Cleaning a Breeze – March 31, 2017
50 Days In: How Trump Is Handling Eco Issues – March 13, 2017
Meet the 7-Year-Old Who Started a Recycling Company – February 13, 2017

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5 Green Gadgets That Will Make Spring Cleaning a Breeze

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"He Weighed 71 Pounds. That Was Like Somebody Starving."

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

I met Damien Coestly on my first day on the job as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, a private Louisiana prison then run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). I’d been sent to monitor the suicide watch cells in the segregation unit. I pulled my chair across from Coestly’s cell as he sat on the toilet, his body hidden under his tear-proof suicide smock. He told me to “get the fuck out of here” and threatened that if I didn’t he would “get up on top of this bed and jump straight onto my motherfucking neck.”

Read more: Reporter Shane Bauer’s four months as a private prison guard

When I was at Winn, inmates on suicide watch were kept in solitary confinement. They weren’t allowed to keep much more than a small amount of toilet paper, their suicide smocks, and suicide blankets. They had to sleep on a steel bunk, often without a mattress. They also received worse food than the rest of the prison population: A typical meal consisted of one “mystery meat” sandwich, one peanut butter sandwich, six carrot sticks, six celery sticks, and six apple slices. There were no mental health professionals stationed in the unit, just me and another guard watching over four inmates in their cells.

“This dumb-ass motherfucking CCA. This tops the charts in non-rehabilitation,” Coestly told me, leaning against the bars of his cell. “This Winnfield, man. Till you shut this mothafucker down, it ain’t go’ change.” He tried to hand me a Styrofoam cup through the food slot, asking if I would sneak in some coffee for him. At dinnertime, he demanded a vegetarian bag from the Special Operations Response Team (SORT), the SWAT-like tactical squad that was patrolling the unit. He didn’t get one, so he picked the meat out of his sandwich and ate the bread and carrot sticks. Afterwards, I watched him sleep, wrapped in his suicide smock like a cocoon.

After I quit my job at Winn in March 2015, a lawyer in Louisiana told me that a woman named Wendy Porter had read about me working at the prison and wanted to talk to me. Her son was Damien Coestly. Porter told me Damien had committed suicide six months after I’d seen him. He had just turned 33.

Johnny Coestly remembers the last time he saw his younger brother Damien. They were in a hotel room in a New Orleans suburb, laughing and joking as a hurricane raged outside. Damien, then 20 years old, was on the run. A few months earlier, three men had confronted him in a club. One was angry because Damien had been “messing” with his girlfriend. The man spit in his face. Damien shot all three, killing one.

Not long afterwards, Damien was arrested and sentenced to 30 years. He ended up in Winn. As an ex-felon, Johnny says he was never allowed to visit. He and Damien frequently talked on the phone, but the calls ended when Johnny got locked up for selling drugs. Then, on June 12, 2015, one year into his sentence, Johnny was suddenly told to pack his stuff and was put on a bus to Winn. He thought he was going to see his little brother for the first time in 13 years.

Johnny hadn’t yet finished the intake process at Winn when a guard took him into a room where the warden and the prison’s mental health director were waiting. They had bad news: Damien had attempted to kill himself in the segregation unit that afternoon, and had been sent to the hospital, unconscious. “It’s like my world had stop,” Johnny wrote me using the prison’s email system. Before the information could sink in, Johnny was put back on a bus and shipped to another prison across the state.

At first, Johnny refused to believe that Damien would try to take his own life. His brother had never said anything to him about depression or suicide. At Winn, however, Coestly’s fragile mental state was no secret. Prison records obtained from the Louisiana Department of Corrections by Anna Lellelid, the lawyer who currently represents his family, show that he went on suicide watch at least 17 times in the three and a half years before he died. One inmate wrote to me that Damien had told him “he was not going to do all his time. When the time came and he was at peace with God he was going to kill himself.” This inmate also said Coestly had expressed regret for killing the man who’d spit on him. “He said that he rather be in the same place that that guy was than do his time in prison.”

In records obtained by Lellelid, Winn’s part-time psychologist noted, “Inmate stated that he was feeling depressed and worried that he was going to kill himself, because he was hearing the voice of the person that he killed and that he was telling him to kill himself and join him.” On another occasion, a prison counselor wrote, “He says he’s done with CCA and his life.” CCA responded to one question about Coestly’s death for this article; it has yet to respond to more than 20 additional questions sent more than a month ago.

Earlier this year, I visited Wendy Porter at her home outside New Orleans. She was wearing a t-shirt that read “God is Good!” and a floppy purple cap to cover the scars from her recent brain surgery. When I’d initially contacted her, one of her most pressing concerns was how to pay the bill the hospital had sent her for Damien’s medical records. It was clear that she’d had a hard life. Her two remaining sons were in prison. Their fathers and Damien’s were either behind bars or dead.

“I would love to sue them for the anger they caused my son, the pain,” says Wendy Porter. James West

She was navigating her loss while reckoning with the fact that she’d missed a lot of her boys’ childhood because she’d been smoking crack. “When I would put the crack in a pipe, I would be looking in a mirror asking God to please help me,” she said as we talked in her living room. When Damien got locked up, she was serving a short prison term. Yet she was eager for me to know that she never stopped loving her kids. She quit using drugs and got back into their lives. Even when they were in prison, she would always send them what little she could scrape together.

After Damien died, the prison turned his belongings over to Porter. Everything he owned fit into a single box. When she eventually opened it, she found sugar packets and years of letters she had written him. There was a photo of him sitting in a prison yard in front of a row of books—biographies of Malcolm X and Che Guevara and titles on astronomy, astrology, and health. There was a grievance form in which Coestly claimed he’d mailed the gold caps from his teeth to his mom, but they went missing. (CCA turned down his complaint.) There was another in which he complained that the rehabilitative efforts at Winn were inadequate and that he’d been on a wait list for 12-step and mental health programs for two years. (It is not clear if CCA received or reviewed this complaint.) “Just because I have 20 years left in prison doesn’t mean that I’m nonexistent and that I don’t matter,” he wrote.

Mixed in with Coestly’s paperwork was a printout from CCA’s website on which he highlighted the phrase, “We constantly monitor the offender population for signs of declining mental health and suicide risk, working actively to assist a troubled offender in his or her time of need.” Yet mental health staffing at Winn was thin while I was there. It consisted of one part-time psychiatrist, one part-time psychologist, and one full-time social worker for more than 1,500 inmates. (CCA confirmed this, adding that “The staffing pattern for mental health professionals at Winn was approved by the Louisiana Department of Corrections.” However, DOC documents show that it had asked CCA to hire more mental health employees at Winn.) The prison’s single social worker told me most Louisiana prisons had at least three full time social workers. Her caseload, she said, included 450 inmates with mental health issues.

Coestly was about 21 when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Courtesy of Wendy Porter

In a 2014 grievance, Coestly claimed that while on suicide watch in Winn’s Cypress unit he was jolted awake by two guards who dragged him out of his bunk, cuffed him, made him stand naked in the hallway, and slammed him against the wall repeatedly. In another complaint, he wrote that he and other inmates were left on suicide watch with no guards to monitor them. He claimed that two inmates then came into the tier and threw milk cartons full of feces on the inmates in the suicide watch cells while the guards stood by, doing nothing to stop them. “Check the cameras ASAP because this incident is going to ruin Winnfield’s reputation with this criminal act,” he wrote. “I fear for my life back here in Cypress because there’s nothing but chaos back here.” (It is not clear if CCA received or reviewed these complaints.)

Coestly’s family believes his suicide could have been prevented. Courtesy of Wendy Porter

Among the records turned over to Porter was a sheaf of legal documents. Coestly had been studying law in prison. After bringing a case against Winn in state court over two pairs of shoes taken by guards, the Department of Corrections asked CCA to reimburse him $47.32. Was he preparing a more substantial case against the prison? According to Lellelid, Coestly had collected documents from lawsuits brought on behalf of inmates who had committed suicide in custody. He had filed at least one grievance claiming that guards were putting him on suicide watch, naked, without consulting the mental health staff. (DOC policy stated that mental health professionals should make suicide watch assignments whenever possible; in their absence, they were to be notified immediately to assess the inmate as soon as they could.) He had appealed to the Louisiana Department of Corrections to review his claim, a necessary step before an inmate can file a federal civil rights claim. The DOC denied his appeal.

Coestly didn’t just protest on paper. He frequently went on hunger strike. At times it was because the prison would not give him a vegetarian meal as he’d often requested. The prison didn’t offer vegetarian options, so he ate the regular meals without the meat. Other times, he stopped eating because he felt he was not receiving adequate mental health services. Once, the prison psychologist reported in Coestly’s medical records that Damien was on suicide watch and “upset because he felt that he was not getting the appropriate care from mental health.” He wrote that Coestly complained that claiming to be suicidal was the only way to get a meeting with the psychiatrist. “Inmate has a long history of playing games and trying to manipulate the system,” the psychologist wrote.

Winn’s assistant chief of security, whom I’ll call Miss Lawson since she asked not to be named, was one of the CCA employees assigned to investigate Coestly’s death. She told me that he had been on suicide watch for “a couple weeks at least” when a SORT officer decided to take him off watch and put him in a regular segregation cell without, she noted, the approval of mental health staff. (State policy says that “suicide watch may be discontinued or down-graded only by a mental health professional or physician.”) “Me and the social worker got on ’em bad about moving him,” Miss Lawson recalled.

Coestly was put in a cell with an elderly man who was severely mentally ill, Miss Lawson told me. Unlike inmates on suicide watch, prisoners in segregation were not supposed to be under constant watch. Guards were supposed to check on them every 30 minutes. An inmate who had been a few doors down from Coestly in seg later told me that he saw Damien taken out of his cell to make a phone call. Afterwards, the prisoner heard Coestly tell a SORT officer he was feeling suicidal. The officer said he would return to get Coestly, but never did. Coestly repeated several times that he was going to kill himself, the inmate recalled. Miss Lawson said that according to prison policy, that should have gotten him automatically placed on suicide watch.

Related: Watch former guards and a prisoner recall life in a private prison James West

On the afternoon of June 12, 2015, the man in the cell next to Coestly—I’ll call him Tony—pounded on the metal above his door. “Dude is hanging himself!” he shouted. SORT officers stormed down the tier with pepper spray in hand, shouting, “Who the fuck is beating?” (Tony likely had been in Cypress because of me. I’d caught him with synthetic marijuana and he wound up in seg.) Tony told me some details of that day through JPay, the prison’s monitored email system. He wrote that “CCA could of saved Damien’s life if only they would of listened to him when he told them he had some problems.” He asked me to pay him for the full story. When I declined, he refused to tell me more.

Miss Lawson told me Coestly had tied a sheet to the top of his cell’s bars, looped it around his neck, and jumped off the top bunk. When the SORT officers arrived, his cellmate, sedated by sleeping medication, was struggling to hold up Coestly so he could breathe. Coestly was still alive and taken to a hospital, where his mom saw him. “It was bad,” Porter recalled. “He had skin rolling off his ankles.” Coestly remained shackled even as he lay unresponsive, she said. “Why you got shackles on him? What you think—he going to break out and run?”

Coestly remained on life support for 19 days. Porter said that her son had once been a “thick something” who liked to work out. But when he died, “He was so little.” An autopsy found that he weighed 71 pounds, nearly 50 pounds less than he had weighed six months earlier.

An excerpt from Coestly’s death certificate

In their reports about the incident, Miss Lawson said, CCA’s SORT officers “covered up a lot of stuff they shouldn’t have.” She said that video from the prison’s cameras showed that it had been an hour and a half since they had done a security check on Coestly’s tier. “If they had been going up and down the tiers like they were supposed to, then it wouldn’t have happened,” she believes. No Winn employees were ever disciplined as a result of the investigation, she said.

Why Mother Jones sent a reporter into a private prison

I asked CCA spokesman Steven Owen about Coestly’s death. “You have your facts wrong in this case,” he wrote back. “The warden at Winn requested compassionate release for Mr. Coestly from the Louisiana Department of Corrections, which was granted. The inmate was hospitalized when he passed away.” Beyond noting that Damien did not actually die at Winn, he provided no further details. Lellelid confirmed that the DOC had granted Damien a compassionate release, but only as he lay in the hospital and “because he was brain dead.”

Coestly’s mom and brother hope to pursue a lawsuit against CCA for negligence in Damien’s death. Yet it is unlikely that the question of who is responsible for Coestly’s death will ever be decided in court. Louisiana law only allows a year for family members to file a wrongful-death lawsuit. And despite her recent involvement in her sons’ lives, Porter gave up custody of Damien when he was about five. Legally, her aunt, who became Coestly’s guardian, could have brought a case against CCA over his death. But she has advanced Alzheimer’s and does not understand that Damien is dead.

“I would love to sue them for the anger they caused my son, the pain,” Porter told me. “He suffered. He weighed 71 pounds. That was like somebody starving.” Her voice cracked. “I keep food in my house. I give people food!” she shouted, weeping. She paused and took a deep breath. “It’s all about a dollar. That’s what you is, a dollar sign to them. You know what my son said? He said it over the phone. He said, ‘When I get through with them, they’re going to shut this place down. It ain’t fit for an animal.'”

Additional research by Madison Pauly

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"He Weighed 71 Pounds. That Was Like Somebody Starving."

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