Sofia BrizioSofia Brizo spends four hours a day on what she calls “disability admin”.

Experts share how shifting from self-focused goals to thinking about others can have a positive impact on the year ahead.My New Year’s resolutions have always had one thing in common: They’ve been all about me. Some years I’ve vowed to pick up my high school French again; some years I’ve sworn off impulse shopping; and some years (OK, every year) I’ve promised myself I’d go to bed earlier. The goal, though, has always been the same: to become a better, happier version of myself.But while there’s nothing wrong with self-improvement, experts say that focusing on our relationships with the people around us may go a long way to making us happier.“Our society has treated happiness as a highly individualistic pursuit — the idea being that it’s something that you make for yourself, that you get for yourself, and you do it all alone,” said Stephanie Harrison, founder of The New Happy, an online platform that uses art and science to change how we think about happiness, and author of “New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That’s Got It Wrong.”We tend to set our sights on self-focused goals, Ms. Harrison said, “almost plucking them out of thin air, thinking, ‘OK, this will be the thing that makes me happy.’” Instead, she suggested, pivot to “think about happiness as something we create together and for each other.”There is ample research — including one of the longest-running studies on human happiness — to show that our interpersonal relationships are crucial to our well-being, protecting against depression, bolstering our physical health and making our lives more meaningful. As you think about your goals for 2025, here are some ways to center your relationships with your friends, family and co-workers.Ask how (and whom) you can helpEmma Seppälä, a psychologist and research scientist with academic postings at Yale and Stanford, can summarize decades of happiness research in one sentence: “The happiest people, who also happen to live the longest and healthiest lives, are the people who live a life characterized by compassion, balanced with self-compassion.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

It may be a longstanding practice, but critics say routine weight measurements are driving some patients away from care.Until she was in her mid-30s, Xanthia Walker rarely went to the doctor, even when she needed care. She didn’t want to step on the scale.When she did go in — to treat sciatic nerve pain or get antibiotics — somehow the conversation always turned to her weight.“Even when I went in about migraines, the response was, ‘Well, if you lost weight that would probably go away,’” she recalled.That changed when Ms. Walker, 40, who lives in Phoenix, found a new physician. Dr. Natasha Bhuyan rejects what she calls the “weight-centric” model of medicine.Instead, she favors a “weight-inclusive” approach recognizing that people come in different shapes and sizes, and that the number on the scale does not necessarily predict health status.“When a person comes in, the first thing we do is not check their weight,” said Dr. Bhuyan, who is the vice president of in-office care and national medical director at One Medical, a primary care practice owned by Amazon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Twenty big cats – including a Bengal tiger and four cougars – have died of bird flu over the past several weeks at an animal sanctuary in the state of Washington.

More than half of the cats at the sanctuary in Shelton, Wash., died of the virus over the past several weeks.Twenty big cats, including a half-Bengal tiger and four cougars, died between late November and mid-December at a sanctuary in Washington State after becoming infected with bird flu, according to the facility’s director.“We’ve never had anything like it; they usually die basically of old age,” said Mark Mathews, the founder and director of the Wild Felid Advocacy Center in Shelton, Wash. “Not something like this, it’s a pretty wicked virus.”Three other cats had recovered from the virus, and one remained in critical condition on Tuesday, he said.The sanctuary said in a statement on Friday that the facility was under quarantine and would be closed until further notice while the habitats were sanitized.The virus began to present itself in November within the cougar population, with several cats developing pneumonialike symptoms. Within days, other species began to show signs of illness.On Nov. 23, the first cat, a cougar, died, and several others began to become increasingly ill in the following days. An African serval was the last cat to die, on Dec. 13. Some of the cats shared a common wall between their habitats, but did not directly interact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

PA MediaA recruitment drive for Scotland’s first ever Patient Safety Commissioner has failed for a second time.

Two NHS hospital trusts in London are using AI technology to see if they can spot type 2 diabetes in patients up to a decade in advance of the condition occuring.

As Mel Robbins tells it, the concept for her new self-help book, “The Let Them Theory,” came to her on the night of her son Oakley’s junior prom. Overcome by the realization that her youngest child would soon be leaving her, Robbins coped by micromanaging the scene. She pressured Oakley to give his date a corsage. Fretted about the weather. Worried that the teenagers hadn’t made a dinner reservation.Fed up, her daughter Kendall finally snapped: “Mom, if Oakley and his friends want to go to a taco bar for pre-prom, LET THEM,” Robbins writes in the book. If they get hungry? Let them! Soaked? Let them! Let them, let them, let them.This mantra of radical acceptance was instantly soothing to Robbins, who — by dint of her iron will and innate confidence — has emerged as one of social media’s go-to motivational influencers (a term she loathes, incidentally). Robbins began repeating it whenever she felt stressed about other people’s thoughts or actions. In May 2023, her minute-long video about the term took off on social media; some of her followers even got “let them” tattoos.“Let them” is not the first time Robbins, 56, has spun a catch phrase into content gold. She shot to fame more than a decade ago with her “five-second rule,” the idea that whenever you feel an impulse to act on a goal — whether something small, like getting out of bed when the alarm goes off, or big, like finally giving notice at work — you simply count down: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, then go! Do it. (The TEDx talk in which Robbins debuted that particular hack has been watched more than 33 million times, and she turned it into her first best seller.)“There is an obsession with being smart, I think, in the thought leadership space,” Robbins said when we met in November at the loftlike headquarters of her media production company in Boston’s seaport district. “And I would rather be useful.”If Robbins looks familiar, with her bright blond hair and signature dark-rimmed glasses, the algorithm may have sent you one of her pithy takes on life’s problems — like how to stop trying to “fix” your parents, or her frequently memed exhortation against spending money on stupid … stuff. Maybe you saw a recent video of her — clad in a sports bra and hot pink hair rollers — weeping about her recent sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, who declared “The Let Them Theory” one of the best self-help books she has ever read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

NHS website information on drinking while breastfeeding saw the highest increase in visits at Christmas last year, new figures show.

There is no one factor that causes autism — or explains its growing prevalence. Researchers are seeking explanations for the surge. Here are some possibilities.When President-elect Donald J. Trump mused in a recent television interview about whether vaccines cause autism — a theory that has been discredited by dozens of scientific studies — autism researchers across the country collectively sighed in frustration.But during the interview, on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Mr. Trump made one passing comment with which they could agree: “I mean, something is going on,” he said, referring to skyrocketing rates of autism. “I think somebody has to find out.”What is going on? Autism diagnoses are undeniably on the rise in the United States — about 1 in 36 children have one, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collected from 11 states, compared with 1 in 150 children in 2000 — and researchers have not yet arrived at a clear explanation. They attribute most of the surge to increased awareness of the disorder and changes in how it is classified by medical professionals. But scientists say there are other factors, genetic and environmental, that could be playing a role too.Autism spectrum disorder, as it is officially called, is inherently wide-ranging, marked by a blend of social and communication issues, repetitive behaviors and thinking patterns that vary in severity. A mildly autistic child could simply struggle with social cues, while a child with a severe case could be nonverbal. There is no blood test or brain scan to determine who has autism, just a clinician’s observations.Because there is no singular cause of autism, scientists say there is therefore no singular driver behind the rise in cases.But at the heart of the question is an important distinction: Are more people exhibiting the traits of autism, or are more people with such traits now being identified? It seems to be both, but researchers really aren’t sure of the math.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.