Gone are the days of fad diets and restriction. Social media users are leaving those trends behind for a new approach: intuitive eating.

Intuitive eating “focuses on trusting your hunger cues. You decide what to eat and how much based on that,” says Jinan Banna, registered dietitian and professor of nutrition at the University of Hawaii.

“It really rejects diet culture. It avoids judgments around food, and it puts the focus on trusting your body.”

This more mindful way of thinking about food is resonating with folks online, particularly on TikTok. Under the hashtag ”#intuitiveeating”, there are more than 200,000 posts on the platform of users discussing how their relationships with food changed for the better when they stopped tracking macronutrients and just started eating when they were hungry.

Though the trend has grown in popularity recently, it’s something that Taylor Swift seems to have been practicing 15 years ago.

“During the week, I try to eat healthily, so that means salads, yogurt, and sandwiches. No sugary drinks. I try to keep it lighter,” Swift told WebMD in 2010.

“But it’s nothing too regimented or crazy. I don’t like to create too many rules where I don’t need them. We know what’s good for us, thanks to common sense.”

Swift allowed herself to eat her “comfort foods” like ice cream, cookies and burgers on weekends, and get her favorite drinks from Starbucks like spiced pumpkin lattes.

“I’m never cutting out what I love,” she said.

Banna confirms that Swift’s approach to eating in 2010 aligns with intuitive eating. And it’s a practice that she recommends.

“We should not have an extremely rigid approach to eating. It is a fact that all foods can fit in moderation,” she says.

“Having a very rigid mindset is not helpful and can potentially create some problems when it comes to body image and when it comes to relationships with food.”

Research shows that intuitive eating is associated with better psychological health, a lower risk of disordered eating behaviors, a lower frequency of overeating and a better chance of stabilizing weight.

When a person shifts to intuitive eating, it may feel difficult to give themselves permission to eat all foods, Banna says. Sometimes this can cause people to eat beyond being full once they regain access to foods they stopped allowing themselves to eat, she notes.

It’s important to distinguish the difference between actual hunger and emotional hunger or eating out of boredom. There are clear differences between them, depending on the symptoms.

“If you are physically hungry, you might feel tired, irritable, or find that your stomach is rumbling. You will likely be satisfied by any type of food,” Banna says.

“But if you are experiencing emotional hunger, your stomach may be quiet. You might be craving something specific, and it might be in response to seeing an advertisement for food or feeling stressed. You might feel guilty about eating in that case.”

Keep in mind that “it is a good idea to accept the idea that you can consume all foods in moderation, and there are no good and bad foods absolutely,” she says.

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Tori Dunlap, the author and entrepreneur behind Her First $100k, has attributed renting to helping her build her business and achieve multimillionaire status. 

“One of the best financial decisions I ever made was not buying property,” she told CNBC Make It in 2024.

Though she could have feasibly afforded to buy property earlier and almost did buy a condo outside of Seattle when she was 22, renting made more sense for her lifestyle. She was traveling often for work and the home she almost bought would have required her to spend roughly three hours a day commuting in and out of the city. At 27, she put all her belongings into storage and spent the year traveling the world, something that would have been much more difficult had she owned a home at the time.

“Every time I would even try to consider being a homeowner going through the process, I didn’t have the bandwidth,” she says. ”[It] just wasn’t the right time. I thought, ‘OK, there’s a bunch of stuff that I have to do for the business.’”

But that changed recently as the 31-year-old bought her first home in the summer of 2025.

From a financial perspective, Dunlap had been able to buy a home for some time. She had $100,000 saved by the time she turned 25 and had a multimillion dollar net worth by age 27, she says. But continuing to rent allowed her to keep building her business and enjoying traveling for long stretches without worrying about having to make a mortgage payment on top of a short-term rental stay, she says.

Earlier this year, though, the owner of her most recent rental listed the property for sale — a situation Dunlap had dealt with during a previous lease. Faced with the decision of finding another rental or taking the plunge into ownership, her broader life circumstances led her to the latter.

“I was frankly sick of having somebody else decide where I was going to live every single year, and I didn’t like that lack of stability,” she said on a recent episode of her podcast. She had been in a relationship for nearly three years and her business was going well. That security shifted her thinking: “I want to be able to make a decision of when I leave, when I stay, and what I want my life to look like,” she said.

“And that’s when I went, ‘OK, I think it’s time. I think it’s time to buy a house.’”

The home Dunlap chose was less a financial decision than an emotional one. She wasn’t trying to find the property that would provide the best return on investment or be the most affordable option, but rather the one that felt like home, an example of her broader philosophy on how people should view financial decisions and wealth-building.

“I want personal finance and money to be a tool,” she says. “You don’t want it to be the thing that makes or breaks a decision for you … don’t buy the house if you can’t see yourself there, if it doesn’t feel like someplace that actually feels like home. It doesn’t matter how good of an investment it is.”

Still, she used her financial expertise to be strategic about how she bought her home.

Dunlap planned to buy a home in cash, but when she found the house she wanted, it was a bit above the price she wanted to pay, she says. However, she “was in the financial position to not just go over my budget, but to actually think differently about how I was going to afford this house at all,” she said on the podcast.

In the end, she made a “game-time decision” to get a mortgage on her house and put about 60% down, she says. The house needed plumbing repairs for which she was initially quoted around $50,000. Though she found a contractor to do the work for considerably less, the instance provided a good example of why it’s smart for new homeowners especially to keep some cash reserves.

“For the first time in five years, I’m now a multimillionaire with debt,” she says. “I think that surprises a lot of people, that debt can be used as leverage and as an asset, because I don’t want to tie up the cash I don’t have to tie up … I wanted to think about protecting my cash and using debt in the smart way.”

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When you dream about being happier in the future, you’re probably imagining yourself being content with what you have. Maybe you picture a new house or a luxurious lifestyle. But what you’re really imagining is being satisfied with those things. You’re not just picturing wealth, you’re picturing contentment.

That’s the feeling we’re all chasing. But often, when reality doesn’t live up to expectations, it’s because the moment we get something new, we immediately start wanting whatever comes next.

While researching and writing my book, “The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Happier Life,” I gained some fascinating insights into why chasing more often leads to less happiness.

The French writer Marcel Proust once told the story of a young man who was obsessed with the lives of the rich and powerful. Proust then told the young man to spend his time focusing on the artist Jean Siméon Chardin.

Chardin painted scenes of everyday life — food, animals, nature. The point was to appreciate objects that he already had in front of him. To learn to appreciate the life he had rather than to dwell on the dream life he didn’t. “When you walk around a kitchen, you will say to yourself, this is interesting, this is grand, this is beautiful like a Chardin,” Proust wrote.

The lesson is to appreciate what’s in front of you rather than dwelling on what you don’t have. What a wonderful analogy for money, too.

The happiest people I know are the most content. Not necessarily the richest, the healthiest, the most beautiful, or the most successful. Just whoever gets to a point of saying, “I’m satisfied with what I have and who I am.”

Some of these people spend a lot of money and live incredibly materialistic lives. But I often think about my grandmother-in-law, who spent three decades in retirement with very little money, living off a meager Social Security check and nothing else. She was technically on the verge of poverty. But she was perfectly content in her small garden and reading books from the library.

She had little, but wanted even less. And she was one of the happiest people you could have ever met.

For most people, there’s a hierarchy of spending that goes something like this:

• If you don’t want something and don’t have it, you don’t think about it.
• If you want something and have it, you might feel OK.
• If you want something and don’t have it, you might feel motivated.
• If you want something and can’t have it, you drive yourself absolutely mad.

The sooner you can look around and say, “This is enough” (regardless of your income or lifestyle), the sooner you’ll realize you’ve been rich all along.

I’ve met half a dozen billionaires in my life — not a single one was as happy as my grandmother-in-law. It was easy to see why: Her low expectations gave her a sense of contentment, which in turn became an enormous source of psychological wealth that some of the richest people in the world lack.

Psychological wealth is such an important concept, and with money it comes from proper expectations.

The person who has everything but wants even more feels poorer than the person who has little but wants nothing else. How could it be any different?

That’s not a plea to live like a monk. You can have a huge house, an expensive car, take incredible vacations — and be content with all of it, appreciating it and desiring nothing more. That can be an amazing life.

The key is realizing that happiness is the state when nothing is missing, regardless of the lifestyle you’re living.

Morgan Housel is the author of the new book, ”The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life,” and the New York Times bestsellers ”The Psychology of Money″ and ”Same As Ever.” He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and winner of the New York Times Sidney Award. MarketWatch named him one of the 50 most influential people in markets. He’s a partner at The Collaborative Fund and is the host of The Morgan Housel Podcast.

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*This is an adapted excerpt from ”The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life,” by Morgan Housel, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Morgan Housel, 2025.

Florence Poirel was earning about $390,000 a year in Zurich, Switzerland, as a senior program manager at Google when she decided to walk away in 2024.

The now-37-year-old wasn’t unhappy with her job. “By the time I left Google, I was absolutely not in a position of burnout,” she tells CNBC Make It. “The team was pleasant. The work was pleasant enough as well.”

What pushed her instead was clarity. “I realized how much quality time with the people I love is the most important,” she says.

That included her partner, Jan, a fellow Googler who is 17 years her senior. After meeting him in 2017, she realized she had to rethink traditional retirement. “I could not just wait for retirement to enjoy my time with him because he would be much older at that time,” she says.

Poirel had always been a diligent saver, but the realization inspired her to start following the FIRE movement — short for “financial independence, retire early” — which emphasizes saving and investing aggressively to leave the workforce early.

“That’s when it hit me that I didn’t need to keep on climbing that ladder. I had reached the point when it was just enough — and I was happy and free to do something else,” she says.

By January 2024, she had saved up about $1.5 million, and in April of that year, she and Jan quit their jobs. Poirel calls her break a “mini-retirement” — setting aside enough cash to cover 18 months — although she has no firm plans for when, or if, she’ll return to full-time work.

“I’m not particularly antsy about going back to employment,” she says. “I thought that would be by now, but I really enjoy the daily life that we’ve created in this mini retirement.”

Poirel’s willingness to make big changes isn’t new. In 2013, she was in a marketing job in Belgium she didn’t like. On the way home after a long week, she told a colleague she felt unfulfilled, and he replied with the French phrase “qui ne tente rien n’a rien” — he who risks nothing has nothing.

The words stayed with her throughout that weekend. Poirel says she realized she needed the “courage to do something different” to be happy.

The following Monday, she quit. She decided to move to Dublin, Ireland — a tech hub in Europe — with no job and no connections. Soon after arriving, she landed a contract role at Google earning about $60,000, working in content safety and moderation, which began her career at the company.

Poirel’s risk paid off. She spent more than a decade at Google, rising steadily through new teams and promotions. In 2017, she transferred from Dublin to Zurich, where she moved into project management and eventually senior leadership roles, raising her salary to $390,000 by 2024.

Once Poirel had reached her goal of $1.5 million in savings in January 2024, it was just a matter of deciding when to make the leap. For someone who describes herself as “risk-averse” when it comes to money, it wasn’t easy to walk away from her high-paying job.

“Saying no to this kind of income can be daunting, for sure,” Poirel says.

But she hasn’t looked back. In mini-retirement, she spends her days swimming in Lake Zurich, providing career coaching for women and traveling abroad with Jan. “I thought I would get bored very easily. But now, it’s been a year and a half and I still haven’t [had] a time of boredom,” she says.

While she might return to work, it will be on her terms, whether that’s working part-time or only doing what she finds fulfilling. Either way, she feels fortunate that she saved enough money to make that choice.

“Life is too short and life is beautiful and it’s too sad to spend most of that time spending it at work when we can spend it in beautiful nature with friends, family, loved ones, and doing things that make us truly happy,” she says.

All amounts are in U.S. dollars, converted from Swiss francs at the OANDA exchange rate of 1 CHF to 1.22 USD on May 31, 2025.

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There is an entire generation navigating a world that has always been illuminated by the glow of laptops, tablets, and smartphones, living every hour with nearly 24/7 access to a universe of more data and content than past eras could have ever dreamed of amassing.

By age 2, close to half, 40% of children have their own tablet, according to a 2025 report by nonprofit Common Sense Media. By ages 13 to 18, 88% to 95% of teens have their own smartphones, according to a different report by the nonprofit.

In recent years the amount of screen time at school has increased as students and teachers transition to digital learning. For example, Chromebooks are used by 50 million students and teachers per day, according to Google.

In his bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” social psychologist and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business Jonathan Haidt links the coinciding rise of youth depression and anxiety with the rise of childhoods rife with screens.

“All these devices are designed to keep kids scrolling for hours and hours,” he told CNBC Make It at the Fast Company Innovation Festival last month. “The average screen time is eight to 10 hours, not including school.”

And Haidt believes that’s to the detriment of kids’ wellbeing. “We have to roll that back if we want any hope for them to grow up healthy,” he says.

Here is how Haidt recommends parents navigate the chaotic ecosystem of screens and apps in the home.

First, Haidt says his most important rule about kids’ screen use in the home is no devices of any kind in the bedroom.

“The really bad stuff happens when a child has their own touch screen device in a bedroom,” he says. They can end up spending hours on social media sites and other platforms without guardrails or supervision. They can end up seeing damaging content.

“God knows how many children saw the video with the blood spurting out of [Charlie Kirk’s] neck within hours, within hours of it happening,” he says. “We have no way to stop this at present, so we have to change the technological environment.”

Another one of Haidt’s most steadfast parenting rules is that kids should not get a smart phone before high school. A global study of 27,969 18-to-24-year-olds by nonprofit Sapien Labs found that mental wellbeing improved the older the age of first ownership of a smartphone or tablet.

But Haidt does offer up some flexibility, with the understanding that a completely device-free childhood is impossible in this day and age. So, as far as other screens go, “you can have a TV set in the living room,” he says.

“You can have a computer in the kitchen or the living room. They can use Google, they can watch some videos on YouTube.” But only on these shared devices, and in shared spaces, he notes.

When it comes to personal devices, whether it be a Chromebook for school or a smartphone when they get one in high school, parents should have a designated place for them, Haidt says.

He suggests a box for devices and clearly communicating its purpose to your kids and teens. “They live on the kitchen counter. If you need it, you check it out,” he says.

Kids can then use the device for a limited amount of time then put it back.

“My goal is not to keep kids away from computers or technology,” he says. Just to ensure they use it in a way that doesn’t harm their mental health.

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