Hello, this is Everything Else, the Culture Podcast from The Financial Times.

My name is John Sonia. And I'm Grizalda-Marie Brown. And this week's episode is titled

How to Be a Better Version of Yourself. So we've made it almost to the middle of February,

and we'll be revealing whether we've stuck to our New Year's resolutions this year. We're going to be talking about whether there are any apps that can help us with any of them. Are there any apps that can make us more mindful or more efficient? And we've tested out one with varying results. Later on on the show, continuing with the theme of self-improvement, the FD's agony uncle, Sir David Tang,

will give us his romantic do's and don'ts for Valentine's Day.

Also, we speak to Victor Mallet, the FT's Asian News Editor on the phone, to find out how

his lunch with the FT interview went with the North Korean defector, Hyoncio Lee.

Three of the biggest resolutions people make are to spend more time on personal well-being,

to spend more time with family friends, and the big one losing weight.

But 66% of people who made new year's resolutions will have already broken them by now,

which doesn't really surprise me because whenever I have made them myself, I have inevitably broken them well before mid-February.

Yeah, there's this thing called the false hope syndrome, which social scientists talk about.

And basically, we all think that self-improvement is much easier than it actually is.

So we set these like incredibly high standards for ourselves and

these very unrealistic goals and then we're kind of surprised and disappointed when we don't achieve

them when actually, so you said losing weight was one of them.

Not my own personal.

Well, but losing weight is like a classic New Year's resolution.

But actually probably if that is your New Year's resolution, things like overeating or

comfort eating might really be tied to underlying emotional issues.

And false hope syndrome is all about the fact that those underlying issues are quite

difficult to tackle and you can't just come the 1st of January, just get rid of them and continue on your thin new life. Yeah, self-transformation is definitely not easy. So when I came across this app called Pavlock, it made me laugh quite a lot, actually. I haven't bought one, they're quite expensive. I just read it in some article and then went onto the website and got hooked on all the silly videos on there. So it's called Pavlock and it's this kind of watch and the advert says that 40% of our lives are spent in habit. Most of that time is wasted. It's not about trying harder but to replace bad habits with habits of excellence. And basically this watch when you don't stick to your New Year's resolution. So let's say you have an alarm set for 6am and it goes off.

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