What Keeps Us Going

By the end of the year, many of us feel exhausted by the news.So we asked the staff members of Times Opinion to share how they escaped it all this year.

These are the habits we started, the ones we quit, the culture that brought comfort and the internet memes that made us laugh so hard that we momentarily achieved a state of Zen.This is what we’ll carry with us as we turn the page to 2025.We’re highlighting a few in today’s newsletter.

Read the rest here.Phone a friendMy oldest friend and I do synchronized viewing of each new episode of the show “Shrinking” (which follows a rogue therapist and his patients) and text commentary and our fave quotes back and forth.We definitely want our own Derek.

(IYKYK.) —Michelle Cottle, writerNight-night at the museumIf my mind is too busy to sleep at night, I turn on the Met’s YouTube art lectures — the longer the better.The videos’ tone is soothing, and the content helps me connect with something beautiful and interesting from another time or place.

Once my mind is immersed in, say, Greek vase paintings, I’m out like a light.—Jessia Ma, deputy editor of designYou are getting very sleepyI have learned to relax the tiny muscles around my eyes.

I visualize the muscles and gently tell them to let go, one by one.They do! And then I feel a deep calm.

It’s a great way to go back to sleep at night.—Peter Coy, writerWake and bakeThis year, as ever, I found distraction and refuge in the stalwart comforts of “The Great British Baking Show.” It won’t be lost on future cultural historians that a decade of unceasing global tumult coincided with the sturdy popularity of a TV series about a bunch of collegial normies in a tent in the English countryside, seemingly far from society, being nice to one another and baking pies.

—Adam Sternbergh, culture editorWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify acces...