Supplements, superfoods, and health hacks are advertised constantly to those looking to live a long, healthy life, but focusing on just those quick solutions is not very effective, according to leading longevity researcher Dan Buettner.

On a recent episode of “Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris,” Buettner, who popularized the world’s Blue Zones, spoke about how attempting to achieve good health through extreme measures can be counterproductive.

In “five corners of the world,” blue zones are living on average eight years longer than Americans, Buettner said. Yet, “none of them are tracking their steps, or taking superfoods, or running down to Costa Rica for stem cells.”

There’s something that people in Blue Zones do that most Americans don’t, and probably should, he noted.

“They don’t try to live longer. They don’t proactively pursue health or longevity, which I think is the most important insight that is so under-acknowledged,” Buettner said during the podcast episode.

“Trying to pursue health, whether it’s through diets or exercise programs,” Buettner said, “they’re great business models but they’re horrible at delivering any meaningful outcomes.”

Instead, residents of blue zones prioritize improving their personal relationships and developing a sense of community, he said.

“In blue zones, people live a long time not because they pursue health. It’s because it ensues,” Buettner said. “They live in an environment wherein their micro unconscious decisions are slightly better all day long, as a result of their surroundings.” And this includes who they surround themselves with.

Maintaining positive connections with people who engage in healthy activities like walking daily or having plant-based meals with loved ones is something Buettner highly recommends for longevity.

“If they want to live longer, lose weight, get more exercise, eat better,” Buettner said, “they’ll get a far better return on their effort, time and money by shaping their environment than they ever will by buying a gadget or thinking they’re going to change their behavior for long enough to make any difference.”

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Prices for everyday items continue to rise across the country, but in some places it’s worse than in others — especially for residents in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Although the national year-over-year inflation rate has dropped to 3%, it has hovered around 5% in Dallas-Fort Worth in 2024, according to a new WalletHub report.

That’s second only to Honolulu among a selection of 23 major U.S. metro areas, and higher than other cities known for a relatively high cost of living, including New York City and Los Angeles. Inflation in Dallas-Fort Worth has also risen steadily by 1% over the past two months — making it the nation’s worst city for inflation, according to the study.

The relatively high inflation rate can be attributed to a “significant housing shortage, along with restrictive government policies that limit new construction,” which has caused housing prices in Dallas-Fort Worth to soar, says WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe.

Other factors include “substantial increases in energy prices″ including electric bills and persistent inflation in key areas like medical care and transportation services. Rising medical care costs have been linked to hospital consolidation in recent years, while transportation costs are largely related to the effects of urban sprawl, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Aside from Dallas-Fort Worth, Honolulu is the only other city in the study with year-over-year inflation that’s 5% or higher.

Below are WalletHub’s rankings of metro areas with the worst inflation, from worst to best. The rankings are based on an index that’s weighted equally between year-over-year inflation and inflation over the past two months as of June 2024. 

• Two-month change: 1.00%
• One-year change: 5.00%

• Two-month change: 0.70%
• One-year change: 5.20%

• Two-month change: 1.10%
• One-year change: 4.20%

• Two-month change: 1.00%
• One-year change: 3.40%

• Two-month change: 0.60%
• One-year change: 4.00%

• Two-month change: 0.60%
• One-year change: 4.00%

• Two-month change: 0.80%
• One-year change: 3.40%

• Two-month change: 0.80%
• One-year change: 3.30%

• Two-month change: 0.40%
• One-year change: 3.80%

• Two-month change: 0.50%
• One-year change: 3.20%

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Sarah and Jamie McCauley are landlords, YouTubers, Walmart pallet flippers, eBay resellers and Amazon product reviewers — and those are just their active streams of income.

The McCauleys make their money by researching what makes side hustles profitable, testing them and teaching others how to do the same on YouTube. The Grand Rapids, Michigan-based couple earned nearly $140,000 from eight streams of income last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

They’re particularly good at two types of gigs, they say: anything involving real estate and their YouTube channel itself, where they share their side hustle exploits with at least 146,000 subscribers.

“If you’re looking to just make some extra money on the side, maybe pay off a credit card debt or pay for a vacation, I think that is doable for nearly everybody,” says Jamie.

DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to earning passive income online

The McCauleys are part of a side hustle revolution, a growing number of Americans who supplement income with multiple jobs. More U.S adults — about 39%, according to Bankrate — have side hustles today than ever before, whether out of necessity, precaution or a desire to increase their earning power.

Ease of starting is at an all-time high: Platforms like Amazon, Airbnb and Fiverr offer instant access to paying customers. But with competition also rising, it’s hard to build a side hustle that regularly brings in revenue.

Make It spoke with a selection of Americans with successful side hustles to learn how they built their businesses, and used them to fund a wide variety of financial goals. Every respondent highlighted four common traits that helped drive their success:

No matter what you sell, you need people willing to buy it. Jenny Woo says her side hustle is successful for a simple reason: She researches her audiences intensely, and tailors her products specifically to them.

Woo is an adjunct lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, a freelance business consultant and the teacher of an online course about emotional intelligence. Her one-woman side hustle, called Mind Brain Emotion, sells 12 different emotional intelligence-themed card games.

It brought in $1.71 million on Amazon last year, according to documents reviewed by Make It.

Woo’s first deck of cards, “52 Essential Conversations,” was tailored toward parents who — like her — wanted to connect with their kids and build their emotional intelligence skills. She joined parenting Facebook groups and observed users’ posting, commenting and liking habits, she says.

After selling $10,000 worth of the game in a 2018 Kickstarter campaign, Woo kept researching. She conducted a survey of her consumers, and learned that “overwhelmed” teachers looking to support children’s social and emotional development made up a significant portion of her audience, she says.

Her second deck, “52 Essential Relationship Skills,” was built for those teachers. It didn’t sell as well as her first deck, but it taught Woo that she could broaden, and combine, her audiences.

Woo applied that lesson to her third game, “52 Coping Skills.” She started with her own experiences working with college students during the Covid-19 pandemic and combined it with her continued research on teachers and parents, she says.

It’s now Mind Brain Emotion’s top-selling game, says Woo.

Woo sells on Amazon, which has a broad reach, to collectively rope in Mind Brain Emotion’s hyper-specific audiences. Tim Riegel’s products have a more singular customer base, so he sells on Etsy, a marketplace known largely for homemade and handmade goods.

Riegel, a full-time general manager at a sheltered workshop, makes firepits from recycled tank ends in Lamar, Missouri, and sells them under the name Mozark Fire Pits. His average product weighs 225 pounds, and sells for $950.

Mozark Fire Pits brought in approximately $202,000 on Etsy last year, according to documents reviewed by Make It. Riegel maintains a 40% profit margin, he says.

Riegel chose Etsy over platforms like Amazon, Wayfair and Overstock because it felt more user-friendly, and a better fit for his personalized products, he says. He also sells on Facebook Marketplace, which costs him more in advertising — but less in shipping costs for customers within a 200-mile radius, he adds.

That kind of platform analysis is valuable, no matter what kind of side hustle you run.

If you sell a service, instead of a good, you might consider platforms like Fiverr and Upwork — popular among photo editors, marketing writers and voiceover artists — or Taskrabbit, known for labor-intensive side hustles like cleaning or repair work.

Or, opt out of those platforms entirely. If your gig is something that many other people also do, try finding marketplaces with more narrow niches like Contently, Skyword or ServiceScape, recommends side hustle expert Kathy Kristof.

“One of the problems I see with a lot of freelancers is that they go to the best-known online platforms … and those platforms are so saturated with people who have been there for, often, decades,” says Kristof, whose blog SideHusl has reviewed more than 500 different side gigs.

No matter your platform, you’ll need to stand out. A good listing can help: clear and concise, written for your intended audience, free of typos, with high-quality graphics and some search engine optimization (SEO).

Becky Powell, a kindergarten teacher based in Beaverton, Oregon, has a side hustle selling worksheets for other educators on an online platform called Teachers Pay Teachers. Many of her worksheets focus on her personal specialty, teaching children sight-reading skills.

Her side hustle didn’t take off until she embraced SEO. When she uploaded her first worksheets, she titled them, “Creating sight words with pattern blocks.” Sales slowly trickled in.

Her husband Jerome, who has a business background, suggested a simpler title, like “Hands-on sight words.” The sight-reading worksheets quickly became her bestselling products, Powell says.

Powell’s store brought in $125,500 in 2022 revenue, according to documents reviewed by Make It. Her husband also sells worksheets on the platform, and they’ve used their combined earnings to fund vacations and pay down their mortgage and student loans, Powell says.

“You have to have passion and knowledge,” she says. “You also have to have a business sense [and understand] SEO.”

Once you gain enough customers, work to turn your sales into positive reviews, so you appear higher in platforms’ search results, Kristof advises. Customer service, prompt shipping and quality control can usually earn you a good online reputation.

The McCauleys have a rule for their ever-changing collection of side hustles: “You either have to be one of the first to get there, or your approach has to be very unique and different to be successful,” Sarah says.

But being first or unique doesn’t guarantee long-term success. In 2020, the couple was early to a side hustle trend: pallet flipping. At local warehouses, they’d buy pallets of returned goods from Amazon, Walmart or Target. They’d unbox the pallets, discover their contents and resell the items for a hopeful profit.

From December 2020 to December 2022, the McCauleys made about $19,500 in pallet-flipping profits, they estimate. Their most popular unboxing YouTube video got 5.4 million viewers, translating to an additional $30,000 in advertising revenue, says Jamie.

Last year, more Americans hopped on the pallet-flipping trend. Pallet prices rose, resale values dropped and a slew of unboxing videos diluted the McCauleys’ viewership. “The pallets became not really worth our time … from the standpoint of time over money,” says Sarah.

Four years ago, the McCauleys would’ve simply moved onto their next side hustle. Now, they’re feeling the strain of constantly building new gigs from scratch, and starting to reorganize their income streams into a smaller number of longer-term projects.

Instead of flipping their current home renovation project in Northern Michigan for a profit, for example — something they’ve done multiple times — they’ll keep it as their own vacation house and part-time Airbnb rental, they say.

“We always knew [side hustling] was going to have an expiration date,” says Jamie. “It’s a young person’s game, to always be looking for what’s next.”

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Of all the things I fear — spiders, needles, rejection — regrets take the cake. I have a deep-rooted fear of getting to the end and feeling woefully disappointed — not so much by the life I lived but by the life I didn’t live.

In many ways, I have my mother to thank for waking me up and helping me course-correct. She died at 58 with a litany of regrets. After losing her, I was gripped by the fear of dying with my own laundry list of “if onlys.” 

I committed to live a regret-free life or die trying. Now I’m hell-bent on helping us all make the most of our time while we’re lucky enough to be above ground. I want us to live regret-free lives we can feel proud of. 

That’s why I left my job as a corporate executive to become a “stop squandering your life” speaker and coach. It’s why, while I was in the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology program, I wrote a 101-page thesis about “reflecting on mortality to inspire vitality and meaning in life.” And it’s why I recently published my book, “You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End With No Regrets.”

As terrifying as regrets are, they can be useful, because they can motivate us to change our behavior and improve our lives. That is, they can help us after we simmer in the uncomfortable awareness of what could have been if we’d only made a way better decision.

We tend to value regret more than any of the negative emotions out there, studies show, because we understand its value and power.

There are two main categories of regrets you want to pay attention to:

1. Regrets of commission: These include things we did that we wish we hadn’t done. We tend to be able to rationalize regrets of commission through the softening of time.
2. Regrets of omission: These include the paths we didn’t take, the things we wish we’d done that we never did. Regrets of omission tend to haunt us. 

Also known as hot regrets, regrets of commission tend to feel intense at first. They’re often stupid things we do that make us burn in the short run with shame, guilt, or remorse, and then cool off over time.

Here’s a true-crime sampler from my clients and workshop attendees: 

• “Being mean to Kandy on the schoolyard in sixth grade” 
• “Having an affair” 
• “Telling that client what I really thought of them” 
• “Getting a DUI” 
• “Leaving my vintage baseball card collection at home for my mother to later throw out” 
• “Giving Tom the finger after quitting in a huff” 
• “Eating three-day-old sushi” 

Also known as wistful regrets, regrets of omission can torment us until the end of time. 

Real-life client examples include: 

• “Not backpacking across Europe after college” 
• “Not running that marathon”
• “Not finishing law school” 
• “Not fixing my relationship with my brother” 
• “Not writing that children’s book”
• “Not ordering desserts just for myself; I wish I’d had more pieces of cake all to myself” 
• “Not telling my first crush I loved him”

Regrets of omission plague us mostly because these are paths not taken. They shine a glaring spotlight on the chasm between our actual selves and the person we’ve imagined as our ideal self, one that could make our dreams come true.

Anticipating our regrets before they come to fruition — or what I call our “pre-grets” — gives us a chance to live a life that feels right. 

In my book, I share several exercises, assessments, and tips designed to help you identify your pre-grets and figure out how to use them to your advantage. Here’s one way to start: 

• Get comfy in bed. Yes, for real — recline your body and take a deep breath. Imagine you’re lying on your deathbed. You’re not in pain. You feel lucid and at peace. You’re near the end and reflecting back on your life. Start to zero in on your regrets of omission — not the things you did do but rather the things you didn’t do. 
• Make a list of what comes up for you.
• Circle the entries that make your heart beat fast, or make it ache or skip a beat. Any heart-related reaction is a good indication that this one matters. 
• Pay close attention to the pre-grets that want to hide on the page because they’re fragile and afraid to be exposed. Perhaps you feel fear of failure or rejection or ridicule. That’s a sign that it’s important to protect and be kind to those dreams.
• Start brainstorming ways to take even one step forward. Better yet, write one down right now. 

An unflinching awareness of your pre-grets can change the trajectory of your life.

That’s because we don’t have to continue down the paths we’re on and resign ourselves to regrets of omission. We don’t have to merely imagine the paths not taken.

We can go down entirely different paths if we choose. We just have to recognize what matters deeply to us and take action.

Jodi Wellman is a former corporate executive turned executive coach. She has a master’s in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is an instructor in the master’s program and a trainer in the world-renowned Penn Resilience Program. She runs her own business, Four Thousand Mondays, and is the author of ”You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End With No Regrets.”

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Excerpt adapted from ”You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End With No Regrets″ by Jodi Wellman. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission of Voracious, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

These days, we could do with all the mental strength we can muster. 

Mental strength is the ability to productively regulate your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, even in the face of adversity. And adversity is in no short supply. If you want to overcome more challenges, achieve more success, experience more happiness and less stress — it takes mental strength. 

After spending decades studying mental strength and interviewing and surveying thousands of people for my recent book, “The Mentally Strong Leader,″ I have good news. The mentally strongest people tend to share certain habits we can learn from. There are patterns I’ve noticed when it comes to what they say (and don’t say) and what they do.

If you always do these eight things, you’re already mentally stronger than most. If you don’t — yet! — you can look to this list as a mini-playbook that will help you level up your mental strength.  

That adage about how you should “leave your emotions at the door” just doesn’t work. If you’ve tried it, you know it’s not that simple.

That said, while mentally strong people are aware of emotions triggered inside, they don’t let those emotions instantly flow through into words or actions. 

They catch their emotions, consider if they’re helpful to express, then decide how to respond. In other words, regarding unhelpful emotions, they catch it, check it, and change it (using the the 3 Cs of cognitive behavioral therapy).

We all contend with doubt. Even the most confident people I’ve interviewed experience doubt. 

Confidence, then, is your ability to manage your relationship with the doubt you’ll inevitably experience. 

The mentally strong have found the right middle ground between overconfident and paralyzed by fear of failure. They acknowledge doubt, but let it sit quietly in the background so they can focus on how they will accomplish something, not if they can accomplish it in the first place.  

Imagine a friend, clearly upset and in need of empathy, was telling you about a relationship they just ended. After listening, would you say: 

“How could you let this relationship fail? It’s all your fault, you jerk!” 

I doubt it. Instead, you might say:

“I appreciate what you’re going through and how much it must hurt. Try not to be so hard on yourself.”

You should take this more compassionate tone with yourself, too. 

When we face setbacks, we often try to go it alone, forgetting that one of the most important things mentally strong people do is to seek perspective and support. 

Know what your “resilience needs” are, and then draw on them. For example, when I experience setbacks, I call a sibling to laugh about it. My resilience need is to tackle challenges with humor, and I know my brothers or sister will recognize the comedy in the situation and make me feel better.

Others might need someone who will just listen, be a shoulder to cry on, or become an advisor. 

Whatever your resilience needs are, identify who in your network can help you in that way, and then call on them at the right moments. Resilience is a team sport.

Mentally strong people don’t get worn down as much by the daily grind. 

Whether or not they realize it, they engage in a combination of gratitude and mindfulness — a practice I call grindfulness. It means being present and mindful enough in daily life to notice the details and show gratitude for the positive aspects of whatever grind you find yourself in. 

For example, say you’re having a tough morning at work. You’re answering a string of emails that came in overnight, and you’re frustrated. But you stop to marvel at the fact that you can type a few words, hit a button, and within seconds, your thoughts are transmitted to someone halfway across the world. Amazing. 

Your appreciation for this mundane detail lifts your spirits just a little, helping your mood. That’s grindfulness. 

Mentally strong people recognize when to let go of preconceived notions. They know when to drop points of view and ideas that are no longer relevant or useful to them. They identify and ditch bad habits that prevent them from moving forward productively. They regularly challenge their assumptions. 

In short, they know they sometimes need to unlearn in order to learn. 

Start by identifying and exchanging your limiting beliefs. What unhelpful stories do you tell yourself that have become ingrained? What unwarranted labels are you applying? 

For instance, you might label yourself as less talented than your peers and tell yourself: “I’m not good enough to get promoted.” Replace those limiting beliefs with empowering beliefs like, “I have all the skills needed to get promoted.”

It takes mental strength to consistently be supportive of others, especially in the face of negativity, when others are doing the easy thing and jumping on the “Complain Train.” 

Even better than generic encouragement or positivity is informed encouragement, which is when you give praise or positive reinforcement that is specific in nature. Doing so shows you took the time and care to indicate exactly what deserves praise and why, making your words feel more authentic and meaningful.

In times of change, you can act like change is something bad that causes pain and requires unwanted effort — like it’s something happening to you. 

Mentally strong people, on the other hand, see change as something positive, a jumping off point that can improve personal and professional fortunes — like it’s something that happens for you. 

You can choose to see change as a personal software upgrade, a catalyst for growth, and another opportunity to exercise your mental strength muscles.  

Scott Mautz is a popular speaker, trainer, and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He’s a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses. He is the author of ”The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors.” Follow him on LinkedIn.

Want to stop worrying about money? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course Achieve Financial Wellness: Be Happier, Wealthier & More Financially Secure. We’ll teach you the psychology of money, how to manage your stress and create healthy habits, and simple ways to boost your savings, get out of debt and invest for the future. Start today and use code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off through Sept. 2, 2024.