A High-Return Life Guide

A front-seat passenger with a seat belt on has about half the chance of being killed in a crash. In the front seat of a light truck the fall is 60%. In the United States in 2022, half of the people who died in a vehicle and whose belt use could be determined were not wearing one.

A motorcycle rider with a helmet and a fastened strap has about 40% lower risk of dying in a crash. Head injuries are about 70% lower. The strap has to be tight. A helmet hanging loose on the head does not count.

A working smoke alarm cuts the chance of dying in a home fire by about 60%. In 40% of fires people are asleep when the fire starts, and smell alone will not wake them. If you burn coal or gas indoors in winter, add a carbon monoxide alarm. In 2018 about 11,500 people in China died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and 70% of those deaths in the three winter months happened at home.

A compliant hose costs a few tens of yuan. Replacing it at the end of its life is a duty of the user written into the Regulations on the Administration of Urban Gas. Repiping the gas yourself or taking out the gas meter is forbidden by the same regulations. Those regulations also say a gas company cannot require you to buy its designated products and services. A salesman at your door saying the hose "must be replaced" can be refused outright.

In 2025 alone there were 828 mushroom poisonings nationwide, 2165 people affected and 13 deaths. That year 34 species of mushroom not previously recorded as poisonous were identified. A silver needle does not detect poison, a mushroom that insects have eaten is not safe, and only brightly coloured mushrooms are poisonous. None of these claims holds.

The Ministry of Emergency Management's Regulations on Fire Safety Management of High-Rise Civil Buildings forbid taking an electric bike into a corridor or a lift, and forbid charging it at home. Failing to correct this brings a fine of 500 to 1000 yuan on an individual and 2000 to 10000 yuan on a business. The fine is the smaller problem. The larger one is that this fire burns along your only escape route.

For every 10 mmHg that blood pressure falls, the chance of a major cardiovascular event falls by about a fifth. Stroke falls 27%, heart failure 28%, and the chance of death 13%. Among people aged 35 to 75 in China, 44.7% have high blood pressure and only 7.2% have it properly controlled.

Drawing one tube of blood for a few tens of yuan can find prediabetes while you have no symptoms at all. The official United States screening advice is this: people aged 35 to 70 who are overweight or obese should be tested. If the result is normal, test again every three years. In the United States overweight starts at a body mass index of 25, and the line comes down to 23 for people of Asian descent; the Chinese standard counts 24 as overweight.

Every 1% higher average speed raises the chance of killing someone in a collision by about 4%. For alcohol there is no safe line where a little is fine. Risk starts to climb when the alcohol concentration in the blood is still low.

An infant under one year old in a car seat has about 70% lower risk of fatal injury in a crash. A child aged 1 to 4 has about half the risk. Holding the child in your arms gives no such protection, and in a hard stop you cannot hold on either.

A window limiter costs a few tens of yuan. New York City fits window guards free of charge in high-risk housing and sends someone to explain them. In one borough, reported child falls dropped by half over three years. New York then passed a law requiring landlords to fit guards in homes where children live. A window screen opens with one push. It does not count as protection.

A child in a life jacket who falls in the water has about half the chance of drowning. Drowning is still the leading cause of death for Chinese children aged 1 to 14. The rural drowning mortality rate is about twice the urban rate.

Balance training such as tai chi two or three times a week cuts falls among older people by about 23%. The number of people who have a fall drops 15%. Non-slip surfaces and grab bars at home cut falls by another two tenths. Falls are the leading cause of injury death among Chinese people over 65. More than half of them happen in the person's own home.

One test costs a few tens of yuan. In the Qidong trial that followed people for 30 years, people vaccinated at birth were 84% less likely to get primary liver cancer later. 72% fewer of them carried the hepatitis B virus. An adult who tests negative for antibodies gets three more doses, within half a year, for a hundred or two hundred yuan.

Once tetanus develops, about 1 in 10 people dies of it. Deep wounds and wounds with soil in them carry the highest risk. A dirty wound with 5 years or more since the last shot needs one booster. Same-day treatment costs a few tens of yuan. Do not wait until the wound swells.

In Swedish data from 1,670,000 women, women vaccinated before age 17 were about one eighth as likely to get invasive cervical cancer later. Those vaccinated between 17 and 30 were about half as likely. So the earlier the better.

Official US screening advice recommends a mammogram every two years for women aged 40 to 74. For women over 75, and for extra ultrasound or MRI on dense breasts, the official conclusion is that the evidence is not enough. When a checkup package tries to charge you for those, you can decline.

In a trial in rural India, women tested for HPV only once in their lives had about half the risk of dying of cervical cancer. They were about half as likely to be found with late-stage cervical cancer. One test costs a hundred or two hundred yuan, and a negative result holds for 5 years.

A faecal occult blood test costing a few tens of yuan every year or two lowers the risk of dying of colorectal cancer by about 16%. Among people who complete at least one round, the drop is 25%. Among people invited to have one colonoscopy, colorectal cancer over the following ten years went from 1.20% to 0.98%.

In a trial of flu vaccination after a heart attack, deaths within a year fell from 4.9% to 2.9%. People with cardiovascular disease and older adults can get one shot each autumn for 50 to 150 yuan.

In a phase three trial, this vaccine blocked 97% of shingles. The figure is about the same in every age group. The drawback is that the two shots cost three to four thousand yuan and you pay them yourself. That money buys a 97% drop in the chance of shingles.

Among 84,500 older people in a trial, the 13-valent pneumococcal vaccine blocked about 46% of the pneumonia caused by the types it covers. It blocked 75% of the most dangerous invasive infections. It showed no effect on pneumonia from all causes, so do not expect it to cover every case of pneumonia.

In a trial in Linqu, Shandong that followed people for 22 years, people whose Helicobacter pylori was eradicated had about half the chance of stomach cancer later. Their chance of dying from stomach cancer was about 40% lower. The test costs a hundred or two hundred yuan. The eradication course takes two weeks.

Heavy smokers who meet the criteria get a low-dose CT every year. Death from lung cancer is 20% lower than with a chest X-ray alone. Overall death is 6.7% lower. The price is the follow-up scan after a suspicious finding, and the worry in between.

Evidence keeps building for taking lethal things out of reach. Restricting access to painkillers cut suicides involving painkillers by 43%. Barriers at places where people often jump from buildings cut them by 86%. That is why you keep no sleeping pills and no pesticides at home. When you cannot get past something, call 12356 first. It works nationwide and is open at least 18 hours a day.

A fire extinguisher, a fire blanket, an escape respirator and a first aid kit are all on the emergency ministry's list of 11 items for the home. The set costs a few hundred yuan and you buy it once. In the studies with home safety visits, injuries fell by about a quarter.

Among people over 60, one episode of visible blood in the urine means about a 2.8% chance of bladder cancer being found. Between 40 and 59 it is about 1.2%. That figure is not high, but it is high enough that you must go and get it checked once. Go even if the bleeding is gone the next day.

Men with erectile dysfunction later have about 40% more cardiovascular disease than other men, and about 60% more heart attacks. The younger the man, the bigger the gap. This problem often shows up before chest pain does. So get your blood pressure, glucose and lipids checked first. Do not buy drugs to push it down on your own.

Controlling the risk factors for cardiovascular disease improves erectile function itself. On a questionnaire score, the average gain is 2 to 3 points. The questionnaire has 25 points in total, and 22 or more counts as normal.

Using a condom for the whole of sex each time cuts the chance of passing HIV between men and women by more than 70%. "Most of the time" works about as badly as not using one at all. It also blocks syphilis, gonorrhoea and the like.

An HIV test at the CDC costs nothing. Without your own consent, no unit and no individual may disclose your name, your address, your work unit or your medical history. A positive result is not a death sentence. People who keep taking the medicine and get the virus down to an undetectable level do not pass it on to their sexual partners. That study followed more than 700 couples and more than 70,000 condomless sex acts, and transmission between partners was zero.

Among people who have attempted suicide, close to half say no more than 10 minutes passed from the thought appearing to the act. Those few minutes are what you have to get through. Three in four had some contact with someone near them during that time and did not speak up. Among people admitted to hospital after self-harm, about 2% died by suicide after 1 year, and about 7% after 9 years or more. The large majority did not later die by suicide.

Paraquat has no antidote, and more than 40% of the people who drink it cannot be saved. It inflames the lungs and hardens them slowly, and the kidneys and the liver are damaged as well. Among the people rescued after coal gas poisoning, close to half have a worse brain than before at six weeks, and a quarter of them still do even with hyperbaric oxygen.

Among people who fall from a height and are admitted to a trauma ICU, only 5.5% die, but the injuries are severe and the treatment is long. Close to half are hurt in more than three places at once, a little over a third go on a ventilator, and the longest stay in the ICU is 132 days. Half of the falls were from no more than 3 metres. Among the badly injured, fewer than six in ten later go back to work.

Among regular donors who went through layer on layer of screening before donating and had somebody check them afterwards, 31 people per 10,000 had reached end-stage kidney disease 15 years later. Among people just as healthy who did not donate, it was 4 per 10,000. People who sold a kidney had no screening and no follow-up. Six years later 86% said their health was worse, and three in four were still in debt.

Radiation has no smell, no colour and no temperature, and most radioactive sources are a piece of ordinary metal, so "it looks all right" is not a test. The chance of an ordinary person running into one is very low, fewer than 1 accident a year per 10,000 sources. Once you do run into one there is no way back. In 1987 in Brazil someone cut up a radiotherapy machine from a disused clinic as scrap, and 4 people died in the end.

Among people who have gone to hospital about a gambling problem, death by suicide is 15 times that of their peers and overall death 1.8 times. Depression is the signal that tells you in advance who will die by suicide. So if the gambling has gone as far as borrowing to carry on and your mood stays low, call 12356 first.

A person who has not been infected takes an antiviral medicine in advance. That is called preexposure prophylaxis. People who take it on time cut their risk of infection by more than 70%. People who take it now and then get almost nothing out of it. It is a prescription drug: the hospital has to check your body first and then prescribe it, and you go back for regular check-ups afterwards.

Women over 65, and women past menopause who have osteoporosis risk factors, should have one bone density test. Assess the risk first and give the drug to the high-risk women, and hip fractures fall by about 17%. Worked out per head, among every 1000 women tested about 5 fewer have a hip fracture. All-cause mortality showed no change.

People already diagnosed with osteoporosis, or people who have broken a bone in a slight fall, who take the drug as the doctor plans have about half fewer hip fractures, and more than half fewer spinal fractures. Among older people who start a yearly infusion after surgery for a hip fracture, about 35% fewer break a bone again over two years. Calcium supplements alone cannot replace these drugs.

The official line in China is that an adult can go skating only once the ice is 15 cm thick. The floor in the United States and Canada is 10 cm, and that counts only newly formed clear ice. White ice is only half as strong, so the thickness has to be doubled. On the same sheet of ice, the place here may be a foot thick and a few steps away only an inch or two, so you have to measure as you walk.

Smokers live on average more than ten years less than non-smokers. Quitting before 40 wipes out about nine tenths of the death risk that going on smoking carries. The earlier you quit, the more you get back.

About 600,000 people a year die worldwide from breathing other people's smoke, and close to 30% of them are children. Long-term exposure to second-hand smoke raises the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke by around 30%. What you take in at home does more harm than what you take in outside.

Most people cannot quit on willpower alone. People who take varenicline succeed at more than twice the rate of people who take a placebo. People who use a substitute such as a nicotine patch or chewing gum succeed about 50% more often than people on no drug at all. Using a patch and chewing gum together adds another 20% or so.

Many people plan to cut a few cigarettes a day first and taper down to zero. But by the sixth month, 22% of the people who set a date and stopped in one go had not smoked again, against only 15.5% of those who tapered. So set a date and stop in one go on that day.

The medicine and having someone check in with you regularly are two separate things, and together they work best. People who take the medicine and also have a dedicated person following them up succeed at close to twice the rate of people who hear only one brief piece of advice. Telephone support counts too: a cessation line that calls you back without being asked raises the success rate by another 20% to 30%.

People who switch from cigarettes to nicotine e-cigarettes succeed about 60% more often than people who use nicotine patches, and that finding is reliable. But e-cigarettes are not harmless, and there is still no long-term safety data. For people who do not smoke, they bring no benefit at all.

People who drink more than two bottles of sweet drinks a day have about 20% higher death rates in the same period than people who hardly drink them. One to two bottles a day is about 10% higher. Switching to sugar-free did not show a benefit either: people who drink more than two cups of artificially sweetened drinks a day are instead about a quarter higher.

People who chew betel quid have about 20% higher death rates in the same period than people who do not. The risk of diabetes and metabolic syndrome is nearly 50% higher. The risk of oral cancer and oesophageal cancer has to be counted separately.

For people who have had a stroke, or who are over 60 and have high blood pressure, replacing the salt at home with low-sodium salt lowers the chance of dying within five years by about 12% and the chance of stroke by about 14%.

People who use floss or interdental brushes every day have about 10% lower death rates in the same period. Older people who have lost all their teeth have about 90% higher death rates. People left with fewer than 20 teeth are about double.

People who walk about 7800 steps a day have about a 45% lower chance of dying in the same period than people who walk only 3500. Counted by time it comes out the same: 150–300 minutes of brisk walking a week is about 30% lower than doing no exercise. Past a certain amount it stops falling any further; over 60, 6000–8000 steps is enough. Either way of counting it, hitting one of the two is enough.

For every 10 mmHg that blood pressure falls, the chance of dying falls about 13% and the chance of stroke falls about 27%. For every unit that statins take off LDL cholesterol, the chance of dying falls about 10%. People who take their medicine on schedule have a death rate 30% to 45% lower than people who often miss doses.

People who get less than 7 hours of sleep over the long term have about a 10% higher chance of dying in the same period. The more chaotic the routine, the higher the risk. The most regular sleepers have a death rate 20% to nearly 50% lower than the least regular. That is, whether the routine is regular tells you more about the risk of death than how long you sleep.

People who regularly play tennis, badminton or table tennis have about half the death rate in the same period as people who do not, and cardiovascular death is about 56% lower. Swimmers are about 28% lower. Running and football showed no difference in this dataset.

People who do no exercise at all still have a death rate about 40% lower in the same period than people who do none at all, as long as they have three one- or two-minute bursts of effort a day. Cardiovascular death is nearly half lower. Effort here means things like taking the stairs and hurrying to get somewhere.

People who do 30–60 minutes of strength training a week have a death rate 10% to 20% lower in the same period than people who do none. Doing more does not make it better. Strength work and aerobic work together work best.

The people who sit longest have a death rate in the same period 2.6 times that of the people who sit least. Sitting for a long unbroken stretch carries a separate risk on top of that. But as long as you get 60–75 minutes of moderate activity a day, most of the extra risk from sitting is cancelled out.

People who eat the most ham, bacon and sausage have a death rate about 20% higher in the same period than people who eat the least. Every extra daily serving of processed meat adds 20% to the figure.

Once you are past 100 g of pure alcohol a week, the more you drink the earlier you die. 100 g of pure alcohol is about 2.5 L of beer. People drinking 100–200 g a week at 40 have about half a year less of life; those drinking 200–350 g have one or two years less; those past 350 g have four or five years less. Counted across overall health, the best value is not drinking.

Someone who drinks heavily every day and stops suddenly gets withdrawal. The mild form is shaking, sweating, palpitations and not being able to sleep; the severe form is seizures or delirium tremens, and that is an emergency that kills. Norway followed more than 30,000 people, and among those who had delirium tremens, 8% a year died afterwards. If you want to stop, go to hospital first and say how much you drink every day.

A doctor spends a few minutes looking at how much you drink, setting out the risk and setting you a goal, and a year later you drink 20 grams of pure alcohol a week less on average, about half a litre of beer. Talking for longer does not add more. For people who cannot stop, two drugs have been shown to work abroad: for every 12 people treated, about 1 more does not go back to drinking as much as before.

People who regularly eat nuts have about 20% lower death rates in the same period than people who do not. Eating them once a week already shows a difference, about 10%. Eating a handful a day shows the clearest difference of all.

Eating two more servings a week of processed meat or red meat raises the death rate in the same period by about 3%. Swapping the same number of servings for fish or poultry shows no rise. The effect in this section is small, which makes this an in-passing swap rather than something to fight over.

People who eat 90 g more whole grains a day have about 17% lower death rates in the same period. 90 g is about 3 servings. At about 200 g a day the figure is still falling.

People with a habit of drinking tea have about 15% lower death rates in the same period. Measured from 50, they live 1.26 years longer on average, and they spend 1.41 more years free of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

People who drink three to four cups of coffee a day have about 17% lower death rates in the same period than people who do not.

People who eat 200 g more fruit and vegetables a day have about 10% lower death rates in the same period. People who eat 5 servings a day have about 13% lower rates than people who eat only 2. Eating more than that does not lower it further.

People who eat the most ultra-processed food have about a 20% higher chance of dying in the same period than people who eat the least, and 50% higher cardiovascular mortality. But this evidence is graded as not very certain, so discount the figures.

People who cook with coal or firewood have about 10% higher death rates in the same period; people who burn coal and wood for heating are about 14% higher. People who have already switched to electricity or gas have a death rate 13%–33% lower than those still burning coal and wood.

Drinking tea that is very hot gives you 8 times the chance of oesophageal cancer that drinking warm tea does. Even at just "hot" it is 2 times. Drinking it less than two minutes after it is poured carries 5 times the risk of waiting more than four minutes.

Women who deliberately avoid the sun have a life expectancy 0.6 to 2.1 years shorter than the women who get the most sun. People who do not smoke but avoid the sun live about as long as the heaviest smokers in the group that gets the most sun.

The death rate is lowest in the BMI 20–25 band. At a BMI of 27.5–30 it is about 20% higher, at 30–35 about 45% higher, and at 35–40 close to double. East Asian people are more sensitive to excess weight, and every 5 points of BMI raises the risk about 40%.

People who eat chillies four or more times a week have about 23% lower death rates in the same period than people who rarely eat them, and cardiovascular death is about a third lower.

People who drink 2 or more servings of milk or yoghurt a day have about 17% lower death rates in the same period than people who do not.

Every extra half a whole egg a day raises the death rate in the same period by about 7%. Swap that half for egg white, fish, poultry or nuts and the death risk for each of those is lower instead. There is no need to give up eggs, only not to eat three or four a day.

People who bathe almost every day have a cardiovascular event risk about 28% lower than people who bathe fewer than twice a week, and brain haemorrhage about 46% lower.

People who nap for no more than an hour have no higher risk of death or chronic illness, and their minds are a little sharper. People who sleep past an hour have a coronary heart disease risk about 30% higher, and diabetes and obesity about 20% higher. So set an alarm and wake yourself at half an hour. If you genuinely need one or two hours of napping to get through the day, that is a signal to have your body checked.

People who did not make up their sleep the next night after a short night have a death risk about 15% higher than people with a regular routine, and those who cut their sleep a lot and did not make it up are about 42% higher. People who did make it up show no rise in risk. So after a night up late, go to bed early the next night.

People on night shifts have about 13% more cardiovascular disease than people on other shifts, and 27% more cardiovascular death. And it grows with the years: every 5 years of night shifts adds about another 7% of cardiovascular disease. So count this account by years, and move early if you can. As for night shifts causing cancer, the evidence is much weaker than the story that goes round.

Peanuts that go damp and mouldy grow aflatoxin, which is a proven carcinogen and does most of its damage to the liver. After Guangzhou brought small workshops under control, the share of residents who often eat home-pressed oil with abnormal liver function fell by about 35%. In Guangxi, pregnant women who ate home-pressed peanut oil had a risk about nine tenths higher of having a baby with a low birth weight, and about four fifths higher of giving birth early.

Cutting back on saturated fats such as lard and butter and switching to vegetable oil cuts heart disease, stroke and events like them by about 17%, but shows no change in overall death risk. There is no evidence that soybean oil, corn oil and rapeseed oil differ from each other. Eating more flaxseed oil showed no drop in heart disease risk either.

Chinese women who do not smoke and who never or rarely use the cooker hood when cooking have about twice the risk of lung cancer of women who always use it. Women who have lived in a home with a poorly ventilated kitchen have a risk about 50% higher as well, and this is clearest in households that burn coal.

When the phone buzzes, your score on an attention task drops even if you neither look at it nor touch it. The drop is about the same as when you actually answer a call or send a text. There is a second case: the phone is simply lying on the desk, you resist looking at it, and the thinking capacity left to you still goes down. The more dependent you are on your phone, the larger the drop.

In the fifth with the most irregular daily routine, the body clock runs about 2.5 hours later than in the fifth with the most regular one. That is the same as living in a time zone shift for years. The more regular the routine, the better the grades.

Two weeks of 6 hours of sleep a night puts your brain's performance at the level of going two days and two nights without closing your eyes. The trouble is that you cannot feel it. Your own sleepiness score rises for the first few days and then stops rising: people sleeping 6 hours score exactly as sleepy as people sleeping 4 hours. So 「6 hours is enough for me」 is itself a symptom of not getting enough sleep.

A large cup of coffee (400 mg) six hours before bed cuts measured sleep that night by more than an hour. A self-written sleep diary shows no difference at all. An ordinary cup of coffee (107 mg) has to be finished more than 8.8 hours before bed if it is not to disturb sleep. If you go to bed at eleven, the line falls at two in the afternoon.

The same people were compared over two weeks. In the week when email was limited to 3 checks a day, daily stress was clearly lower, while the number of emails sent and received was the same. Without a limit, people checked email 15.5 times a day on average.

An interruption averaging 2.8 seconds doubles the chance of an error in the operations that follow. An interruption of 4.4 seconds triples it. Field observation also found that it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the interrupted task, with two other tasks inserted in between. People who are interrupted work faster, but report more stress, more frustration and more effort.

Every time you switch tasks you react more slowly and make more mistakes. People who habitually keep several screens open at once have not trained any skill at doing several things at the same time. They do worse on task-switching tests instead.

Reading a light-emitting screen before bed means falling asleep about 10 minutes later than reading paper. Melatonin is suppressed by 55%. The body clock the next day is pushed back by more than 1.5 hours, so the next morning is sleepier and takes longer to become fully awake.

In 2025 people in China slept an average of 6.97 hours at night and fell asleep at 0:10 on average. People who use a phone or tablet before bed are more than twice as likely to get too little sleep, and 2.7 times as likely to be sleepy during the day. The figures are about the same when the device is merely present in the bedroom and not used. So the simplest method is to keep the phone out of the bedroom.

When you are rested you learn quickly to avoid the high-risk options. After two nights without sleep you pick the high-risk one time after time instead, and the older you are the clearer that becomes. Nobody has measured how much a few hours of lost sleep matters, but push important decisions until after you have slept.

A 10-minute nap lifts you on the spot, and the effect holds for two and a half hours. 5 minutes is basically useless. With 20 minutes you have to wait half an hour before it works. After 30 minutes you wake up groggy first, and for that stretch your performance is worse than if you had not slept at all.

When background noise rises from 39 decibels to 51 decibels, fewer words are remembered, people get more tired, and they want to work less. During a break, watching nature footage with sound restores energy better than listening to office noise.

Records from British armaments factories during the First World War show that within 49 hours a week, output rises in proportion to hours worked. Past 49 hours, each extra hour adds less and less. A week of 70 hours produces almost the same as 56 hours, and the extra 14 hours are wasted.

Replaying the same bad thing in your head does not produce an answer. It worsens depression, fixes negative thoughts more firmly in place, makes problems harder to solve and harder to act on, and wears out the people near you who are willing to listen. When you notice you are going round in circles, go and do something with your hands.

In a twin study followed for 20 years, each step up in pessimism came with about 13% higher mortality over the same period, and about 20% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. In the other direction, a high optimism score brought no matching benefit. What needs dealing with is pessimism, not "not being positive enough".

One person who drains you does more damage, and does it more reliably, than one supportive person brings benefit. So subtract before you add.

Explaining what just happened from a different angle, or taking the other person's point of view, both bring the emotion down for real, and the second works better. Suppressing it without showing anything does not work. People who punish the offender also ruminate on it for longer afterwards; people who do not retaliate move on faster. People overestimate in advance how good revenge will feel.

For depression, brisk walking and jogging work best, and the harder the exercise the larger the effect; the details are in item 6 in section 22 (when your mood is bad, walk or run). Light works very well on seasonal depression, and also helps depression that is not tied to a season. Online self-help courses based on cognitive behavioural therapy do work, and they work better with someone guiding you when the symptoms are more severe. When you cannot see a way out, call 12356 first.

Police, doctors and bank clerks all work to the rules of their post, and they are held to account by paperwork, deadlines and supervision. Whether the person is friendly has almost nothing to do with whether your case gets done, or how many days it takes. So take the receipt, write down the deadlines and appeal through the proper channel. Do not try to argue it out until the other person agrees with you.

People who habitually compare themselves online with people who are doing better tend to be in a worse mood and to have lower self-esteem. People who turned Facebook off for four weeks had a small rise in well-being, but their knowledge of current affairs fell as well. People who limited three social platforms to 10 minutes a day each had lower loneliness and lower depression three weeks later.

Walk into a room of people wearing an embarrassing T-shirt, and the wearer thinks nearly half of them can recognise who is printed on it. In fact fewer than a quarter can. In a T-shirt the wearer considers decent, the estimated number is six times the real one. People also tend to underestimate how much the other person likes them after a conversation. So when you think everybody remembers you embarrassing yourself, halving it is still too high.

People who always feel that "the people around me expect me to be perfect and will reject me if I fall short" are more likely to have suicidal thoughts. The link between "I expect myself to be perfect" and suicidal thoughts is much weaker, about a third of the first. After subtracting the thoughts people already had, the first feeling is still related to a later increase in thoughts, though the size is small.

Hitting a punching bag, smashing things and going for a run raise the body's arousal, and overall they do not take the anger away. Slow breathing, mindfulness and meditation calm the body down, and they clearly push anger and the urge to hit somebody down.

Writing a bad thing down brings a benefit on average, and it is a small one. The pooled conclusions are inconsistent, and two of the pooled analyses found no effect. It costs almost nothing, so it is worth trying. If the emotional problem is serious, do not use it instead of seeing a doctor.

Rewrite "I am going to do this thing" as "on Tuesday, when I sit down at my desk at 8 in the morning, I write the introduction first". Pooling 94 tests, people who write it that way achieve their goals markedly more often, a medium to large effect. You only change how one sentence is worded. It costs no money and takes no effort.

Before you start, write down one sentence: by this date, if I have not hit this mark, I stop. Pooling several studies, this wording really does help people withdraw from something that was never going to work. What you save is all the time you would otherwise have gone on putting in.

Money and time already spent make people keener to carry on. Pooling 98 sets of data, the tendency is reliably there. So when you judge whether to continue, count only how much more you have to put in and how much you can still get back. Leave out what you have already spent.

Students estimated 33.9 days to finish their thesis and actually took 55.5 days, and only 29.7% finished within their own estimate. A second group was asked to recall how long the last comparable job had taken before estimating, and the share finishing on time rose from 29.3% to 60.0%.

In meetings where an agenda went out beforehand, participants were more likely to think the meeting was useful. In the experiment, meetings held sitting down ran 34% longer than those held standing, and the decisions the two formats produced were no different in quality.

The more meetings you have in a day, the more tired you are and the more work you feel you have on your hands. Cut one meeting and the time you save is the full length of that meeting, with nothing deducted.

When people estimate how long something will take, they do not automatically break the task up and count the pieces. Listing the sub-tasks first and estimating afterwards stops the estimate coming out too short. Once it is broken up, every small step can be started at once, and it is less easy to put off.

When someone else sets the deadline, 80.6% of students finish before it. When the deadline is their own estimate, only 38.7% finish on time. When something gets finished is decided almost entirely by the deadline rather than by your own estimate. So for anything with no deadline, set one yourself and honour it.

Procrastination has little to do with laziness and little to do with personality. What tells you most about whether a person will put something off is how unpleasant the task itself is, how much they believe they can do it, and how easily they are pulled away by what is in front of them. So what helps is making the task less unpleasant and making the first step smaller, not telling yourself off and then forcing yourself through it.

The further away something is, the less of it you take. Put the same snack further away and the amount eaten falls noticeably, a medium-sized effect. Offer fewer options and noticeably fewer people take them. These methods do not rely on you resisting in the moment; a few minutes of setting up is enough.

If you want to force yourself to deliver, you can take a bonus for delivering, or you can put up a deposit that is refunded only if you deliver, plus a bonus. Among people willing to take part in either, those who put up a deposit delivered 13 percentage points more often. But only 13.7% were willing to put up a deposit, against 90% willing to take the bonus, so a deposit only works for people willing to stake money.

"You can build a habit in 21 days" has no basis behind it. A study following people for 12 weeks worked out that an action becomes something you do without thinking in as little as 18 days, and in 254 days in the slow cases. Two or three weeks without it becoming easier is normal. Missing a day in between does not reset your progress.

Procrastination bad enough to be painful can be treated. Work through the cognitive-behavioural self-help material for ten weeks. Doing it with somebody guiding you and doing it entirely on your own both beat doing nothing by a clear margin. Whether somebody guides you or not makes no measurable difference, so working through it on your own works too.

People in China spend 1 hour 17 minutes a day on housework on average. Among the people who actually did some that day, it was 1 hour 59 minutes. People who spend money to buy time report higher life satisfaction. The same amount of money spent on buying time makes people happier in the moment than the same amount spent on buying things.

People in China spend 5 hours 37 minutes a day online on average. Among those who did go online that day it was 6 hours 3 minutes. In 2018 the same calculation gave only 2 hours 42 minutes. This is the largest figure in this section. Cut one hour a day and a year gives you 365 hours back.

People over 15 in the United States watch 2.6 hours of television a day, which takes half of all their leisure time. People in China watch 1 hour 40 minutes a day on average, and people aged 75 to 84 watch 3 hours 16 minutes. If you switch the information you need to fixed times, what you save is that whole block.

Most people who have used Word for years still click the toolbar icons. In an experiment comparing groups, shortcuts were faster than both menus and icons. Learning this once is a one-off cost, and after that every single operation each day pays it back. The longer you do the same kind of work, the more it pays back.

The longer your commute, the worse you feel your life is going. That loss is not made up in salary or housing. Cutting 30 minutes off each one-way journey gives you 5 hours a week.

What you save is the subscriptions you stopped using long ago and still pay for. Going through the automatic-deduction lists in Alipay, WeChat, Apple and Android takes under 20 minutes. By law a merchant must warn you clearly before taking the money, and must give you a way to cancel at any time that is easy to find and easy to click.

These groups of people usually get money back: anyone who worked only a few months of the year, anyone who changed jobs during the year, and anyone who left out deductions for children's education, a home loan, rent, or supporting an elderly relative. It takes a bit over ten minutes on your phone. If your annual comprehensive income is under 120,000 yuan, or the tax you owe is under 400 yuan, you can skip it.

The provident fund is not frozen unless you buy a home. The new rules list nine situations you can withdraw for, and paying rent, renovating the home you live in, and paying building management fees for the home you live in are all among them. Once you file, the provident fund centre must tell you within 3 days whether it approves the withdrawal.

The plan you are on is often tens of yuan a month dearer than the plans on sale now. Tens of yuan a month is several hundred yuan a year thrown away. By law a carrier with no valid reason may not refuse to let you port your number, may not drag its feet and leave it undone, and may not set a separate tariff just for people who port. If they stall, complain.

By law, the share of sales that lotto and number games set aside as prizes is at least 50%, and for Double Colour Ball it is 51%. That means that for every 1 yuan you put in, you get 0.51 yuan back on average over the long run, a steady loss of 49%. Nationwide lottery sales in 2024 were 623.486 billion yuan, of which 161.031 billion yuan went straight into the public welfare fund and never counted as prizes.

The regulator's own words: a return above 6% should make you ask questions, above 8% is dangerous, and above 10% you should expect to lose your whole principal. Regulated investment products are no longer allowed to promise that the principal is safe or that you will earn. Money lost in illegal fundraising is borne by you alone under the rules, and nobody covers you if it goes wrong.

The minimum payment is not a discount. It is a loan that charges interest every day, which works out at around 18% a year. The moment you use it the interest-free period ends, and interest runs on the unpaid principal from that day to the last. When you look at an interest rate, only the annualised figure counts. The People's Bank of China already requires card issuers to display the annualised rate prominently and forbids showing only a daily rate.

Players in China spend about 480 yuan a year each on games, and almost none of it comes back. The law only lets a parent get a refund for money a minor spent without the parent's consent; adults have no such rule. The cheapest defence is to set it up in advance: turn off password-free payment, set a per-payment and daily limit, and unbind the payment method.

Money a child over eight spends, if the amount is plainly out of proportion to the child's age and ability to understand, and the parent neither agrees to it nor accepts the bill afterwards, is an invalid transaction, and you can demand the money back. A child under eight cannot in any case decide to spend money alone. If the parent says nothing at all, the law treats that as refusing to approve the transaction.

The six kinds of scam work differently, but the last step is always the same: get the child to use a parent's phone to transfer money or to read out a verification code. So one sentence is enough: anyone who tells you to touch your parent's phone or to read out a code is a fraudster. Add one more: "if you get scammed, tell me first and I will not shout at you". Money can only come back if the child is willing to say so that day.

An extended warranty usually sells for 10% to 50% of the original price, and the seller's margin on one is more than ten times what it makes on ordinary goods; that gap is the money you pay extra. For main parts such as the motor in a washing machine or a refrigerator, the state already requires a 3-year warranty. When an extended warranty is very cheap, divide the price of the warranty by the cost of one repair: the result is how likely a breakdown at least once in those years has to be before the warranty pays for itself.

The second batch of centrally procured drugs cut prices by 53% on average, and the deepest cut was 93%. By April 2026 there had been 11 batches, covering 490 drugs. The active ingredient is the same, so asking one extra question when you are prescribed saves you a large sum.

One binding lets the money in your employee medical insurance personal account pay for medical care and medicine for your spouse, your parents and your children. Without the binding, that money can only be used by you, and it sits in the account untouched.

Beijing's first-tier water price works out at 0.005 yuan a litre. Bottled water at 1 yuan for 500 millilitres works out at 2 yuan a litre. The two differ by a factor of 400. Tap water follows a mandatory national standard, and boiling it is enough in normal times. If the water supply has a genuine problem and the water smells or runs cloudy, boiling longer will not fix it: stop drinking it and report it.

The American households that traded most often earned 11.4% a year, while the market as a whole returned 17.9% over the same period; the gap is almost all transaction costs. In China's boom and crash of 2014 to 2015, the 85% of households with the smallest accounts traded far too often. They earned 250 billion yuan less than households that simply held on, about three tenths of the money they started with.

If you borrow to buy shares and the price falls through a line, and you cannot top up, you are forced to sell. A loss on the account becomes a real loss there and then, and you do not even get the chance to wait for it to come back. The regulator says a client who has held an account for less than half a year, or whose average daily assets over the last 20 trading days are below 500,000 yuan, cannot open a margin account. That threshold by itself says it is not built for ordinary people.

The shares that actively managed funds hold between them are already close to the whole market. But the extra management fee they charge comes straight out of what reaches you. If you compare fund performance by reshuffling the returns again and again to strip out luck, very few funds earn back the fee they charge through the extra return they produce.

A fee one percentage point higher a year leaves you about 18% less after 20 years and about 26% less after 30. Among funds of the same kind, the lowest fee is the only thing about this you can be certain of in advance.

If several things do not rise and fall in perfect lockstep, spreading your money leaves the average return unchanged and makes the account swing less. Put the other way round, if everything is in one share, one platform or one property, then when it goes wrong everything about you goes wrong.

For every yuan you put in, the tax you save is your own rate band minus 3%. With the full 12000 yuan in a year, someone at 10% saves 840 yuan, at 20% 2040 yuan, at 30% 3240 yuan. Someone who owes no income tax saves nothing at all and pays 3% on withdrawal, a net loss. You cannot get the money out until you retire.

In the three years of American data, members who chose a contract costing more than 70 dollars a month went only 4.3 times a month on average, which works out at more than 17 dollars a visit. A card for 10 visits cost 10 dollars a visit. These people paid about 600 dollars more over the length of their membership. Unless you already have over a year of steady attendance on record, paying per visit or buying a short term is cheaper.

When a merchant takes your money in advance, it must sign a written contract with you and set out how a refund works. When a merchant runs into serious trouble it must stop taking money, and it must tell you in advance if it is closing or moving. At that point you can demand that it carries on providing the goods or service, or that it refunds the balance you have not spent. A merchant that breaks these rules is fined.

What you save is the things you no longer want the next day. Anything bought online can be returned without giving a reason within seven days of receiving it. A few kinds cannot: items made to your specification, fresh goods and things that spoil easily, unsealed digital goods, and newspapers and magazines.

People judge whether something is expensive by the first number they see, and later adjustments do not go far enough to correct it. So "was 999, now 499" systematically makes you overstate how cheap it is. By law, the only thing a discount may be measured against is the lowest price the same shop actually sold at in the seven days before the promotion. The crossed-out price does not necessarily reflect a real sale.

The insurer does not guarantee the dividend and return part of your money. The policy document has to state in bold that future policy dividends are non-guaranteed benefits. The extra premium you pay for a return policy is money handed to the insurer to hold for you, with no guaranteed return and no easy way to take it out.

When you are at fault, compulsory insurance pays at most three things: 180,000 yuan for death and disability, 18,000 yuan for medical expenses, and 2,000 yuan for property damage. They are counted separately and cannot be moved between one another. The bill for injuring someone easily goes past these limits, and the excess comes out of your own household budget, so buy enough commercial third-party cover.

Put 3 to 6 months of living costs somewhere you can withdraw from at any time. Then when you lose your job or fall ill you do not have to borrow money at 18% a year, and you do not have to sell your investments at a loss. Money in a bank is covered by deposit insurance, which pays up to 500,000 yuan per bank.

Repaying a mortgage early is a certain gain of your mortgage rate. So there is only one question to ask: is the after-tax return you can get steadily over the long run higher than your mortgage rate? If it is, do not rush to repay; if it is not, or you cannot tell, then repay. With equal principal and interest, interest takes the larger share in the early years, so the earlier you repay the more you save. The "early repayment calculation" in your bank's app gives you the figure directly.

If a merchant deceives you, they pay three times the price, and where the price is under 500 yuan the compensation is counted as 500 yuan. A platform that knows a seller is infringing and does nothing has to pay alongside them. A deposit may be at most 20% of the contract value; if you break the contract the deposit is not returned, and if the seller breaks it you get it back double. Fake orders and fake positive reviews in a livestream room make the operator liable, and killing the newcomer with big data is expressly forbidden.

The most common dead end when something bought in a livestream room goes wrong is that you cannot find out who to sue. At that point you can require the platform to give you the details of the livestream room operator and the person selling, and the relevant business records. The platform has to provide them.

If the food you bought is past its date or has gone off, the goods themselves, the packaging and the receipt are your evidence, so do not rush to throw them out. You can claim ten times the price or three times the loss, and where that is under 1,000 yuan it is counted as 1,000 yuan. Whether you approach the seller or the manufacturer is your choice, and whichever one you approach must pay first without passing you on.

In 2024 the national spot check covered 25,250 batches of products, and 14.3% failed. Online channels were worse: 7297 batches were checked and 23.5% failed, against 15.1% in physical shops. Before buying anything large, spend a few minutes looking up the spot-check notice and then check whether the 3C certificate is genuine. Where an energy efficiency label is required, it must be there.

The price of this kind of thing already includes a slice of consumption tax: 20% on a watch of 10,000 yuan or more, 5% on gold, silver and platinum jewellery and on diamonds, 10% on other jewellery and jade, with value-added tax counted separately. You do not get that tax back if you sell it on. If you genuinely like it, buy it as consumption and do not count it as saving.

Certificates can be forged, so what you need to check is the laboratory that issued the report. An inspection institution that issues reports to the public must be accredited, and the report must carry the CMA mark. The issuing authority publishes the list of institutions on its website, so you can check whether this one is on it. In an official case that was handled, the "national inspection certificate" supplied with the goods had been made by the seller's own contact.

The merchant must display the drawing rules, the drawing probabilities and the number of limited-edition items where you can see them, may not rig the result from the back office, and may not set an empty box. On the guaranteed minimum, on money spent and on a cap on the number of draws, the document only encourages merchants to provide one. For a blind box bought online, once the merchant has explained it and you have confirmed it, you cannot use the seven-day no-questions return after breaking the seal.

The law only requires an ingredient list on prepacked food; bulk food is not required to have one. A bulk counter only has to state the name, the production date, the shelf life and who produced it. So "no additives listed" does not mean "none added", only that the law did not require it to be written. If you care, buy the prepacked version, with the ingredient list and the names of the additives printed on it.

People's instinct is to sell what has gone up and to hold what has gone down. In seven years of records from 10,000 American accounts, shares that had risen were sold at a rate more than half as high again as those that had fallen. The same people were also more eager to add to shares that were down. Yet the losing shares they held on to did 3.4 percentage points worse over the following year, on average, than the ones they sold.

Overseas brokers such as Tiger, Futu and Longbridge are no longer allowed to open accounts for people in the mainland from May 2026. For accounts already open, within two years you may only sell and transfer the money out; you may no longer buy. The foreign exchange quota may not be used to buy overseas shares either, and anyone who breaks the rules loses the quota for that year and the 2 years after. If you want overseas assets, go through a QDII fund or Stock Connect.

Not all of the premium you pay comes back to you. Part of it pays the insurer's costs and profit. So what is worth buying is a loss that is rare and that the household could not pay for if it happened: a serious illness, a car accident injuring somebody, the wage-earner in the household dying. Leave the small losses that savings can stand to the emergency fund.

Term life insurance covers a fixed number of years, and if the person dies in that time the household receives a sum of money. It is meant for the family that lives on your income, such as when a mortgage is still outstanding or the children are still young. If nobody depends on you, you do not need it. A child earns nothing, and the law also limits how much can be paid out on a death policy for a child.

Every personal insurance policy of more than one year has a cooling-off period. For a policy bought at a bank it is 15 days from the day you receive the policy, and cancelling in that period costs at most 10 yuan in handling charges. Cancel after the cooling-off period and you only get back what the policy says is refundable, which is usually less than you paid. When the insurer rings to ask whether you understood, do not say you did if you did not.

A bank is allowed to sell insurance on your behalf, but not to call it a deposit. The front cover of an insurance contract must print 「保险合同」and the name of the insurance company in large type, and must not carry the words 「存款」「储蓄」. If it is an insurance company on the cover, the money is not a deposit, and cancelling after the cooling-off period means a loss. People over 65 buying at a bank may in principle only buy products whose return is certain.

Most of the "full refund of your premium, no fee if it fails" services online are illegal agent policy cancellation. They take 30% to 50% of the money returned to you, and they want your identity card, your bank card and your verification codes. Once the policy is cancelled, the cover is gone as well. If you think you were misled, go to the insurer's customer service first; if you cannot settle it, call 12378. The whole thing is free.

If no beneficiary is named, or the beneficiary has died first, the sum insured counts as the estate and has to be used to pay the dead person's debts first. If the beneficiary is written as "wife, [name]" and you later divorce, at the time it counts as though nothing was named. The people in your family need to know the policy exists: for life insurance you have 5 years from learning of the death to claim, and 2 years for other insurance.

14,000 male doctors took multivitamins for eleven years. Major cardiovascular events and deaths were just as common as in those who did not. Pooling 9 trials with more than 50,000 people shows no effect on mortality either. Not buying saves you two hundred to seven hundred yuan a year. This does not cover people who come up genuinely deficient in a nutrient, or pregnant women taking folic acid.

Two large trials enrolled 26,000 people and 15,000 people with diabetes. Among those taking 1 gram of fish oil a day, major cardiovascular events and deaths were just as common as in those who did not. "Eating fish is good for you" does not mean "fish oil capsules are good for you". Not buying saves you four hundred to a thousand yuan a year.

Among people who were not deficient in vitamin D, five years of supplements made no difference to how many developed cancer, cardiovascular disease or died. People who come up genuinely deficient, people with osteoporosis and people who get no sun are not covered here; they supplement as the doctor says.

This one is not merely useless. Pooling 78 trials with close to 300,000 people, people taking antioxidant supplements had a slightly higher mortality rate. In two large trials that recruited smokers specifically, beta carotene raised the rate of lung cancer by 18% to 28% and death by 8% to 17%. Smokers and people exposed to asbestos should be especially careful.

Among people with osteoarthritis of the knee given a placebo for 24 weeks, six in ten also said the pain eased. Taking glucosamine or chondroitin adds only four or five percentage points on top of that, small enough to be chance. Seven hundred to eighteen hundred yuan a year buys you, in effect, the placebo response of those six in ten.

Taking vitamin C every day will basically not make you catch fewer colds, and starting once the cold has begun works only sometimes. Taking it every day shortens a cold by about 8%, which is about half a day less of feeling unwell; whether that is worth three or five hundred yuan a year is for you to work out. Marathon runners and soldiers marching in cold regions are the exception: among them, taking it halves the number who catch a cold.

Among people with no symptoms, the most common result is a scare. More than four in five people who have a whole-body CT have at least one "abnormality" found, and nearly four in ten are called back for further checks, but most of those are benign. Women screened for ovarian cancer markers actually died of ovarian cancer slightly more often, and some had an operation they did not need because of a scare.

Overweight people doing the same diet and exercise plan lost 3.5 kg over two years while wearing a fitness band, and those not wearing one lost 5.9 kg. If you want to lose weight, spending money on a device does not help. The exercise itself is what works.

There is no strong evidence that organic food is more nutritious. Only 3 studies have looked at how people's health turned out after eating it, and none found a difference. Organically grown produce does test positive for pesticide residues about 30 percentage points less often, but a positive test is not the same as exceeding the limit. Eating more fruit and vegetables does help, and whether they are organic makes no difference to that.

The common ingredients — multivitamins, fish oil, vitamin D — have each been checked one by one in the first six items of this section, and none of them showed a benefit. The sentence 「保健食品不是药物，不能代替药物治疗疾病」on the pack is one the authority in charge of health foods requires to be printed. This money is usually spent on buying something for your parents and carrying it to their door. The thought behind it is not the problem; the choice of product is.

Pooling 45 trials in healthy adults, probiotics do not change the bacteria in the gut for long; they go back to where they were when you stop, and blood lipids do not improve either. Specific situations such as diarrhoea caused by antibiotics have their own evidence and are not covered here.

In the trial of 3018 people, those who took cold showers asked for fewer sick days off, 29% fewer by number, but the total number of days off was the same as everyone else's, so they were not less ill. A 2025 pooling of 11 trials found that immediately after cold water the markers of inflammation in the body actually rose briefly, and the immune markers did not change. Take cold showers if you enjoy them, but do not treat it as an investment in your health.

The detox industry is large, but very little clinical evidence supports it, and nobody has properly tested the detox diets sold on the market. When people looked at whether dietary acid load, alkaline water and cancer are related, only 1 study met the standard, and it showed no association.

People have gone looking for the source of "eight glasses a day" and found not one study supporting it. Food and other drinks already carry a great deal of water, so there is no need to drink that much. Drink when you are thirsty and look at the colour of your urine; that is enough. People working in the heat, people exercising hard, people who have had kidney stones, and older people who no longer feel thirsty should drink on purpose.

There is a classic classroom experiment in which the "personal personality analysis" the students received was in fact the same for everyone, and most of them thought it was accurate. That is why fortune telling seems accurate. An astrologer picks correctly about as often as chance. The cost is not only a few tens of yuan: a fortune-telling gang in Xixian, Henan collected incense money and "support packages" of up to 3888 yuan, and the main offender was sentenced to eleven years.

Blue-light filtering lenses do not work. Not buying them saves you the several hundred to several thousand yuan. Compared with ordinary lenses, people wearing them are neither less tired nor able to see more sharply, and no evidence has been found that they protect the back of the eye. Eye strain and dryness from looking at a screen do settle. What really damages the eye is welding arc light, ultraviolet light and laser light, and an acute attack of glaucoma.

The claim that donating blood detoxifies, lowers cholesterol and prevents heart attacks does not hold up. People who keep giving blood were already healthier to begin with; take that layer out and the fall in mortality from one extra donation a year shrinks from nearly a fifth to 7.5%. In the trials that actually separated people into groups, there was no difference in deaths. In the other direction, donating too often really does make people weak and sensitive to the cold, and the reason is iron deficiency.

People who go for a general health check regularly have the same mortality as people who do not, and they die of cardiovascular disease and cancer just as often. Doing the few screenings with evidence behind them, by age and sex, is enough. Over 35 you can have your blood pressure taken free once a year; over 65 you get one free health check a year.

The American College of Rheumatology recommends that people whose uric acid is above the limit but who have never had an attack of gout and have no gouty tophus should not start urate-lowering drugs. You have to treat 24 people for 3 years to prevent one attack. The hope that it protects the kidney has also fallen through: kidney function fell just as fast in the people taking the drug as in those taking a placebo. Treat it after the first real attack.

Of the people who have stones in the gallbladder and have never felt pain, about 80% stayed without symptoms over nearly nine years. Leave the stones alone and the chance of an emergency such as cholecystitis or pancreatitis each year is about one in a thousand to three in a thousand. Removing the gallbladder is not risk-free either: about 1.5% of people have the bile duct injured. So the European and British guidelines both say that if there are no symptoms, do not operate yet.

Men with calcium oxalate stones are often told to eat less calcium, and the trial result is the other way round. Men with recurrent stones who ate calcium normally while cutting back on animal protein and salt had only half as many recurrences over five years as those on a low calcium diet. The British guideline also says not to restrict calcium.

There is no checkable evidence that wearing one changes your luck, brings in money or nurtures people. It works the same way fortune telling seems accurate: the description is vague enough that you fit yourself into it. When a merchant goes on to claim the goods treat disease, that is false advertising, and in 2026 livestream rooms were punished for it. Buying them as decoration is fine.

The more a person values money and material things, the less happy they say they are, but the association is weak and it does not show what leads to what. Other research has found that spending money on an experience makes people happier than spending it on things. So when you feel low, spending on going out or on a meal with someone is more likely to help than filling a shopping basket.

Comparing people with the same income, the more a neighbour earns, the lower that person reports their own sense of well-being. This only happens with neighbours who have the same education as you and whom you see often. So the extra money you spend to move into a place where everybody is better off than you buys yourself a move down a notch. But when your own income rises, you do feel better off: the absolute level still counts.

The popular line is that once you spend self-control on something, it is easier to give in next, so you should save your willpower. 23 laboratories and 2141 people redid this experiment with the same protocol, and the result is very close to zero. Stop explaining yourself with "I ran out of willpower today", and stop paying for courses that teach you how to save up willpower.

The popular line is that skipping breakfast makes you overeat at lunch and dinner, so that you eat more over the day. The trials do not show that: people who skip breakfast ate a couple of hundred fewer calories a day and weighed slightly less. Compared with simply eating less, 16:8 made no difference in weight over a year. People who never eat breakfast do have about 17% more cardiovascular disease, but no difference in all-cause mortality.

No study says masturbation harms the body. A large American study found the opposite: men who ejaculated more often had about a fifth less prostate cancer. A British study found that men with a higher frequency in their twenties and thirties had higher risk, so neither can be used as a reason to exercise your body. Many people who think they are "addicted to pornography" feel that way more because the activity is at war with their own morality.

The expert panel of the American Psychological Association, having read the studies, said that this kind of conversion cannot change sexual orientation and may do harm. In one American survey, people who had been through conversion had nearly ninety per cent more suicidal ideation. In China a psychiatric hospital forcibly admitted a man in the name of "sexual preference disorder", and the court found it an infringement and awarded him 5000 yuan.

If your employer and you have paid in for a full year, and you did not resign of your own accord, you can get the money once you have completed unemployment registration. 1 year to under 5 years, at most 12 months. 5 to under 10 years, at most 18 months. 10 years or more, at most 24 months. While you are receiving it, unemployment insurance pays your medical insurance for employees.

Neither route costs money. First call 12333 or go to the labour inspection office at the human resources and social security bureau and make a complaint. It has to finish the investigation within 60 working days of opening the case, and it can order the company to pay by a deadline; if the company still does not pay, it has to pay 50% to 100% on top. If that does not work, apply for labour arbitration, which finishes within 45 days. But "case closed" does not mean "the money has arrived": if the company has no assets and the owner has run off, you may win and still get nothing.

Claiming wages, claiming support payments for parents, claiming social insurance or means-tested income support, and losses from having done a brave and selfless act can all get free legal aid. Call 12348, or go to the local legal aid centre. You no longer have to go back to your home town to get a certificate of economic hardship; stating your situation truthfully yourself is enough. Where the death penalty may be imposed, and defendants who are blind, deaf, mute or minors, are assigned a lawyer as of right.

A rescue station provides food and a bed, takes you to hospital if you are ill, and helps you contact your family. If you cannot afford to get home it issues a ticket. The stay is generally no more than 10 days. Coming and going are both voluntary; it is not a detention centre and it pays out no cash. The ticket is issued to your registered place of residence or your place of residence, so work out where you are going back to before you set off.

Government bodies such as employment service centres and human resources markets introduce jobs, give vocational guidance, answer policy questions and register you for employment and unemployment, and none of it costs anything. The law also states in writing that they may not make money out of these services. Registration and publication of information at a day labour market are free as well. Do unemployment registration while you are there, because you need it both to receive unemployment insurance benefits and to be recognised as a person with difficulty finding work.

If something sudden happens at home, such as a fire, a car crash or a family member falling suddenly seriously ill, and basic living costs are crushed for a time, you can apply to the township government or the sub-district office for temporary assistance. You do not have to be on means-tested income support already. More often than not it is a single payment, and the amount differs a great deal from place to place.

Divide the whole family's income by the number of people; if the result is below the local means-tested income support line and the family's property is also within the rules, you can apply. At the end of 2024, the urban line averaged 798.1 yuan per person per month nationwide and the rural line 593.9 yuan. What is paid is the difference between the line and what each member of the household has per month. If you own a house, a car and savings, or your children can support you, the application may be turned down.

A disabled person in a household on means-tested income support can receive a living allowance. A disabled person whose level is graded one or two and who needs long-term care can receive a care allowance. Both can be received at the same time. Each province sets the standard and the differences are large, so ask the sub-district office. Take the second-generation disability certificate and go once to the sub-district office or the township.

You pay from 400 yuan a year, and the government adds around 700 yuan a year per head. People in extreme difficulty are fully funded and people on means-tested income support are funded a set amount. Letting it lapse has a price: if you did not enrol during the annual window, or did not pay in consecutive years, there is a 3-month period after you pay in during which medical costs are not reimbursed, and each further year of non-payment adds one more month in principle.

The order is fixed. Before being admitted to hospital in another province, file the registration in the National Healthcare Security Administration WeChat account and settle directly on discharge, so you do not have to pay the whole amount up front. If you still cannot afford it after reimbursement, apply to the township or the sub-district office for medical assistance. While you are employed you have a medical period of 3 to 24 months, depending on how long you have worked, and the company cannot dismiss you during it. Do not touch online loans or private high-interest borrowing.

For a replacement, the card is issued within 60 days of the day you hand in the form. If you need it urgently, apply on the spot for a temporary identity card, which is issued within 3 days and is valid for 3 months. Without an identity card you cannot get a job, book accommodation, open an account or receive a subsidy; it is the precondition for every bit of paperwork.

Once you are recognised, if you pay your own social insurance you can get a subsidy, in principle no more than two thirds of what you actually paid, for at most 3 years. If you are taken on by an employer, or placed in a public-interest post, the employer's share of social insurance is subsidised as well. The wage for a public-interest post is set by reference to the local minimum wage. These posts do not pay much, but they come with social insurance, which makes them good for a transition. The social insurance subsidy is mostly paid after the fact, so you have to put the money up first.

You do not have to pay for the training yourself. Attending training and obtaining the required certificate gives a vocational training subsidy, and the same person can receive it at most 3 times. College graduates who have not found work within two years of leaving, and unemployed young people aged 16 to 24, can take part in a work placement and receive a basic living allowance during it. Check the "vocational training subsidy catalogue" on the local human resources bureau website first, and do not pay to join a course of your own accord.

People who have had job search counselling were 2.67 times as likely to find work as people who had not. The parts that do the work are these: learning specific job search skills, explaining yourself clearly, setting a definite goal, going out and asking, and asking people for help. Asking people for help, in practice, means asking an acquaintance to refer you inside.

An employer may not withhold your identity card, may not take a deposit, and may not take money under another name. If an agency does not find you a job, it must refund the agency fee. Training loans where you pay the training fee before starting work, and pyramid schemes that pay by recruiting heads, are both scams named by the authorities. Interest above 4 times the one-year LPR is not supported by the courts, but the principal still has to be repaid.

You have to meet three conditions at once: you have no housing locally, or your housing is below the floor area standard; your income and property are below the standard; and if you are a migrant worker you must also have stable employment locally for the required number of years. The waiting period is published locally. This is slow water that cannot quench a present thirst, but joining the queue costs nothing, and the earlier you register the earlier your turn comes.

In the national per-capita spending of 2025, food came to 29.3% and housing to 21.7%; the two together are over half, so cutting them is the most effective. On the author's experience, daily lets and hourly rooms work out dearer over a month than a shared room, and cooking for yourself is cheaper than takeaway. When you are looking for work, ask whether food and housing are included; a post that includes them takes those two big items off the table.

The pension is counted by cumulative years, not consecutive years. A gap does not reset it, and a cumulative 15 years by the retirement age lets you draw it monthly. If you have paid medical insurance for employees for the required number of years, you do not pay again after retirement; the number of years differs by place, so call 12393 and ask where you are insured. What really is affected is eligibility for things that require continuous contributions, such as buying a home, settling household registration and points.

A person released after serving a sentence may not be discriminated against in employment, education or social insurance, and the government helps with resettlement where life is difficult. Where the person was under 18 at the time of the offence and was sentenced to 5 years or less, the record is sealed and does not have to be reported when joining the army or looking for work. Being on the defaulter list lasts 2 years, and once the money is paid the court should remove the name within 3 working days. An adult's criminal record is not sealed and must be reported truthfully when joining the army or taking a job.

This kind of insurance makes up what you still have to pay yourself after medical insurance has reimbursed, and the earnings you lose while you are off work. Before you buy, look for the four words 「保证续保」, meaning the renewal is guaranteed: without those four words the policy may be withdrawn from sale or repriced next year. You have to disclose your health condition truthfully; if you hide it, the claim will be refused. Take out basic medical insurance first, and consider this only afterwards.

The waiting areas at airports and railway stations will see you through the night, and they have toilets and power sockets. But no official data says it is safe. Keep your belongings on your body, do not take food or drink offered by strangers, and do not go to secluded corners. Do not sleep under bridges, by rivers or on building sites at night. A rescue station provides food and a bed free; go there first.

An unlicensed workshop or shop that owes wages can still be complained about to labour inspection and taken to labour arbitration, and the owner personally can be pursued. Where a foreman subcontracted work on a construction site and does not pay, the main contractor or the building owner pays. Only private work for a household or an individual, such as working as a nanny, is not a labour dispute, and that has to go to court to be sued.

If you drive away, the accident counts as entirely your fault by default. Your driving licence is revoked and you can never sit the driving test again. There is a more practical layer on top of that: commercial vehicle damage cover and third-party liability cover pay nothing at all for fleeing the scene, so a claim of several hundred thousand yuan comes out of your own pocket. Staying to help the injured and call the police takes an hour or two at the most.

The short period right after the money leaves your account is the only window you get. During that period the police can stop the payment urgently and freeze the funds quickly, and the bank must comply. Once the money has been passed on and scattered, it is basically unrecoverable. So call 110 or 96110 first, and do not start looking into it yourself. When 96110 rings you, a police officer is trying to stop you from being scammed. Answer it.

If anyone asks you to transfer money, share your screen, install an unfamiliar app, open a link, or read out a verification code, hang up first and then call back on the official number to check. The seven commonest categories are task-based rebates, fake investment and wealth management, online loans, impersonating customer service, impersonating the courts, the procuratorate or the police, pig-butchering romance scams, and sex-bait task scams. All of them start by getting you to transfer money. Recognising one before it happens costs far less than chasing the money afterwards.

Seeing a face and hearing a voice do not count as verification. As soon as money is involved, hang up first, then call back on an old number from your own contacts, or ask someone who knows you both. If the other person says the 「信号不好」「在开会」 and refuses to do a live video call, treat it as a scam straight away.

The first time you are called in for questioning you can already have a lawyer. Once the lawyer asks to see you, the detention centre must arrange it within 48 hours at the latest, and the conversation is not monitored. Questions that have nothing to do with this case, you may decline to answer.

A voluntary surrender can cut the sentence by up to 40%, and where the circumstances are minor the punishment can be remitted altogether. If you only tell the truth after they have come for you, that still cuts the sentence by up to 20%. Running away and refusing to admit anything gets you neither. Hiding for a few years so the case goes stale does not work either: once a case has been opened, the time you spend in hiding does not count towards the limitation period.

Drive after drinking and your licence is taken away for 6 months and you are fined one or two thousand yuan. A second offence brings detention and revocation. Drunk driving revokes the licence straight away, bars you from taking the test again for 5 years, and is pursued as the crime of dangerous driving, which leaves you with a criminal record. That record affects political review and some jobs. Insurance does not cover it either: if you drive after drinking, car insurance pays nothing. 「Just moving it a short way」 counts as driving.

Renting out, lending or selling your bank card, phone card or payment account to somebody else is illegal in itself. The fine is 1 to 10 times the illegal gains, with a maximum of 200,000 yuan where there are no gains at all, up to 15 days of detention in serious cases, an entry in your credit record and limits on what your account can do. If you know the other person is going to commit a crime and still help them receive and pass on money, that is the crime of assisting information network criminal activity, and it carries up to 3 years.

You may check your own credit report twice a year online for free, and it takes about ten minutes. Use the website of the People's Bank of China Credit Reference Center, or your mobile banking app. Do not use a third-party 「查征信」 app, because those apps are collecting your information. A bad record is kept for 5 years from the day the matter ends, and once that is past it has to be deleted. If you dispute it you can raise the dispute, and you must get a written reply within 20 days.

Hitting somebody brings 5 to 10 days of detention and a fine of five hundred to a thousand yuan. Hitting in a group, hitting an elderly person, a pregnant woman, a child or a person with a disability, and hitting repeatedly, brings 10 to 15 days of detention and a fine of one or two thousand yuan. Causing a minor injury is a criminal case carrying up to 3 years, and a serious injury carries 3 to 10 years. Two people hitting each other is not self-defence, and whoever swings first almost always loses out. Backing off to somewhere with people around you and calling the police works better than hitting back.

While the other person is infringing on you or on somebody else, hitting out to stop them and injuring them carries no criminal liability. If they are committing homicide, murder, robbery, rape, kidnapping or another violent crime that seriously endangers personal safety, killing or injuring them is still not excessive. But you may only hit the person who is attacking you right now, and when he stops you stop. Even if the final finding is in your favour, you may be opened a case on first and locked up for a few days.

Go by the legal route and the worst outcome is that the money does not come back. Take revenge and the money still does not come back, and on top of that you pay with your own life. The case in Wuxi: a student whose surname is Xu failed to get his diploma and was unhappy with his internship allowance, went at people with a knife, killing 8 and injuring 17; he was sentenced to death and the sentence has been carried out. Unpaid wages go to a complaint and arbitration, and in 2024 that route recovered 8.65 billion yuan for 654,000 people nationwide.

Driving into a crowd and attacking in a public place are convicted as endangering public security by dangerous means. Not one person hurt is still three years at the least. If somebody dies, it is ten years or more, life imprisonment, or the death penalty. The Zhuhai case: Fan Weiqiu was dissatisfied with the division of property on his divorce, drove into the crowd exercising at the sports centre, killed 35 and injured 43, was sentenced to death, and the sentence has been carried out.

The window between a thought of this kind arriving and your doing something about it is very short. Of 82 people who had attempted suicide, 47.6% said that no more than 10 minutes passed between the first thought and the attempt. So what is needed is not to "think it through", but first to put one step between the steering wheel, the knife, the gas valve, the rope and yourself, and get through those ten minutes. Then call 12356.

When a member of the family says 「nobody is going to have a good time」 or 「I am taking the children with me」, an immediate family member can take them straight to hospital, and the hospital may not refuse to diagnose them. Where hands have already been laid on, or where something is plainly about to happen, admission to hospital does not need the person's own consent. If you cannot tell an angry remark from a real intention, call 12356 and ask, or report it to the police so an officer comes. Covering for them does not help them.

Publicly abusing somebody or fabricating rumours to defame them carries up to 5 days of detention or a fine of up to 1000 yuan, and where the circumstances are relatively serious, 5 to 10 days of detention. Serious cases amount to the crime of insult or the crime of defamation, which carries 3 years or less. Reposting does not excuse you. The other way round, when you are the one being piled on, in principle you have to sue for insult and defamation yourself, so the screenshots, the screen recordings and the links have to be kept by you.

Once you have signed, it counts. 「I did not read it clearly」 and 「I thought it was something else」 do not hold up in court. So spend a few more minutes reading it from beginning to end, ask on the spot about anything you do not understand, and take a photograph to keep. Do not sign for other people, do not sign a blank sheet, and write the purpose on a photocopy of your identity card. An electronic signature and a face-recognition confirmation count as signing in the same way.

An IOU has to state everything: lender, borrower, amount, interest rate, term, method of repayment, and both sides must sign. Send the money by transfer and do not hand over cash, because a complete document is what makes a lawsuit possible. Before you guarantee somebody, check whether the document says 「连带」. Under a general guarantee you wait your turn: the creditor has to sue the borrower first and fail to collect, and only then does it come to you. If you have signed a joint and several guarantee, the creditor can come straight to you.

The statute of limitations in a civil case is 3 years, running from the day you knew your rights had been infringed. Once it has passed the court will not act of its own accord, and all the other side has to do is say 「too late」 in court: the money is still there, it just cannot be recovered. One demand message that leaves a trace is enough to restart the 3 years. Labour disputes have their own rules, and the arbitration limitation period is 1 year.

Putting your flat into a company's name and transferring your money to a relative is exactly what the crime of refusing to enforce describes, and it carries 3 years or less, or 3 to 7 years where the circumstances are especially serious. Relatives and companies who help hide the money or do the transfer are treated as accomplices, and the money is still recovered. Refusing to report, or reporting falsely, carries up to 100,000 yuan on an individual and up to 15 days of detention. Genuinely having no money is not this crime.

First work out whether you have been placed under a consumption restriction or put on the judgment defaulter list, because these are two different things. There are only six circumstances in which a person goes on the judgment defaulter list, and the period is 2 years. In seven circumstances, such as where performance has been completed, the court shall remove the entry within 3 working days. The restriction bars nine kinds of consumption, and a seat on a G-series high-speed train counts. What living or running the business requires can be applied for one item at a time.

Start with the platform. A platform holds a deposit and has rules for penalties, so it deals with it fastest. Then report it to the police: being scammed of more than 3000 yuan is enough to meet the threshold for opening a case for fraud, and where the criminal standard is not met it is dealt with administratively, with 5 to 10 days of detention. If you intend to sue, a dispute over an online purchase can be sued in the court where the goods were received, small amounts go through small claims, the case is concluded within 2 months, and it can be opened online.

Once the money has been handed over, in principle you cannot get it back. A gift can only be withdrawn freely before it has passed into the other person's name. Once the registration is complete, it can only be set aside in three circumstances: the other person seriously injures you or an immediate family member of yours, they should be supporting you and do not, or they fail to perform an obligation they agreed to. So before a large transfer, work out whether it is a loan or a gift.