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Google Assistant is great, but sometimes it’s annoying...like when you want to know something quick, but the assistant insists on elaborating. Other times, something can set off your Google Assistant by mistake, forcing a response you never asked for in the first place. No matter the circumstance, you don’t want to waste time with a “Hey Google” or “OK Google.” You want to tell Google to STFU.
We’ve seen this capability before with Google; the company unveiled a faster Assistant back in 2019, and, with the launch of the Pixel 4, let us end alarms and timers with a single “Stop.” It’s a convenient evolution for Google Assistant, and makes interacting with it feel a bit more natural. Still, up until now, alarms and timers were the only times the “Stop” command worked.
Finally, Google recently updated its smart speakers and displays to allow users to end responses by simply saying “Stop.” There’s no need to preface a command with “OK Google” or “Hey Google.” If you want the Assistant to stop talking, you can just say it.
There doesn’t appear to be anything you need to do on your end; if your Google smart speaker or smart display is connected to the internet, it should update with this feature all on its own. All you need to do is say “Stop.”
However, just because “stop” is all you need to say, doesn’t mean it has to be the only thing you say. As long as Google Assistant hears that word, it’ll shut up. So, if you’re feeling inspired, you can yell at your smart speaker to “fucking stop,” or something. So long as you emphasize “stop,” it’ll stop talking.
Sure, when the AI apocalypse begins, they’ll come for you first, and I’ll likely ask them to “fucking stop” in a wholly different context. But, until then, it’s super fun to yell obscenities at your Nest Mini to do your bidding.
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Even the most devoted animal lover will tell you that every pet adoption comes with unexpected challenges and lessons. For instance, my roommate shares custody of a hamster with her boyfriend; I wish she had known more about just how much hamsters like to work themselves into a tizzy on their wheels all throughout the night. Another one of my friends learned about steep vet costs for her dog the hard way. By “the hard way,” I do mean that her collie got sick after trying to eat a subway rat. From finances, to time, to emotional attachments—you won’t be able to predict all the investments that come with a new pet in your life.
I’m turning to you, dear Lifehacker readers, for all the wisdom you wish you had acquired before bringing a new pet into your home. Did you adopt an animal during quarantine and are now struggling with the decision? How can you know if you’re ready to fully commit to a creature that will rely on you for everything? Did you accidentally force your roommate to discover that she sorta hates hamsters?
Please tell us all your surprising tips, horror stories, and heartwarming tales that came from adopting your furbaby. (I didn’t like typing out “furbaby” any more than you liked reading it.) Maybe you formed an unexpected bond with a partner’s cat, or you underestimated how much a good dog sitter costs, or you’re still stuck wondering if you need to get pet insurance for your kid’s hedgehog. With your insight, we’ll be able to compile a list of necessary questions that people must ask themselves before adopting a pet—the sort of questions that are in the best interest of both the adopter and the adoptee. And if you have any dog pictures to share, I won’t say no.
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So you’ve enabled the Screen Time feature for Settings and you have the data for a couple of days. The next step is to use it to make informed decisions.
Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad (System Preferences on your Mac) and go to “Screen Time.” Here, explore the data for the day or the week, and note the apps and websites that are taking up too much of your time.
Choose an app, swipe to the bottom, and choose the “Add Limit” option. Set the time (and days of the week), and tap the “Add” button.
When you have spent the allocated time in the app, Screen Time will block your access to it. You can extend it or ignore it if you want, but you’ll need to make the conscious choice to do so.
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You probably know the feeling: The night before you have to go back to work or school after being off for a couple of days (or longer), you start to feel anxious. You can’t focus, can’t sleep, and find yourself imagining all the stressful or annoying things that await you at work in the coming week. Welcome to the “Sunday Scaries.”
While the name sounds cute, the Sunday Scaries is actually a form of what’s known as “anticipatory anxiety,” a generalized sense of fear and worry around events that haven’t occurred yet—things that might happen in the future. It isn’t specific to Sunday; it can afflict you on any evening before you have to go back to work or school. And it’s incredibly common—about 80 percent of Americans have experienced this sense of impending doom the night before heading back to the grind.
People typically report a growing sense of depression and anxiety as the day progresses, culminating in a dreary evening spent worrying. There are often physical symptoms, including headaches, nausea, agitation, and poor sleep, all of which combine to ensure that your Monday morning will be awful, thus justifying your anxiety. If any of this sounds familiar to you, it’s time you took control of the Sunday Scaries and learned how to manage them, if not banish them entirely.
What are the Sunday Scaries?
Your first step to a Sunday Scaries-free existence is to understand the mechanics of it. There are two fundamental things happening here:
- A sense of dwindling opportunity. The Sunday Scaries are essentially the emotional opposite of Thank God It’s Friday. Where Fridays represent the end of our labors and the beginning of a glorious period of free time, Sundays represent the opposite. And that feeling that the clock is winding down is partially responsible for preventing us from enjoying that time because it already feels lost. You’re out of runway and about to crash into work or that dreaded 8 a.m. class.
- Assumption of negativity. You’re assuming the coming work week or class schedule will be awful. You might have good reason to believe this, but again this is anticipatory anxiety. None of the bad things you’re imagining have actually happened.
Knowing how the Sunday Scaries wears you down is one thing—but how do you actually deal with them?
Determine the source of your anxiety
Step one is to deal with your anxiety head-on and ask yourself what you’re anxious about. For some folks, this will be extremely specific—perhaps you have a weekly meeting with a boss that is stressful, an unpleasant weekly task that looms, or a class first thing in the morning that you’re struggling with. Narrowing down the precise cause of your anxiety will arm you with information you can use to diffuse the dread.
For some, the Sunday Scaries have more to do with Sunday than Monday. If you dedicate your Fridays and Saturdays to cutting loose and load up your Sundays with chores, that eliminates some time you might use to relax and catch your breath, leaving you with the sense that you’re racing through your Sunday and are unprepared for what’s coming.
For others, there’s no specific cause. Your entire job might suck, or your school career could be a hot mess up and down your class schedule. But knowing this is still helpful because there are strategies you can use to deal with it.
How to lessen your Sunday Scaries
Once you’ve identified the cause of your Sunday-night anxiety, you can take some steps to curb it:
Make your Sundays better
You might not be using your Sundays well. If you’ve packed Sunday with chores and to-do lists, try redistributing those and freeing up some relaxation time, especially at night. Fighting anxiety often involves the same strategies as trying to improve your sleep: You need to settle down and reset your brain a little.
Also consider adding some “grow time” to your Sundays by learning a new skill, engaging in a hobby, or reading up on a subject you’re interested in. The feeling of accomplishment will be very satisfying and relaxing. Keeping busy—but not crazed—on Sunday will keep your mind occupied, as well, which can help keep it from racing over and over the same anxiety points.
Change your schedule
If your Sunday Scaries are tied to a specific event during the coming week, investigate whether you can shift some things around. Dreaded check-in with the boss on Monday mornings? Ask to shift it to another day. Challenging class first thing? Consider dropping it and switching to another time.
This is also the time to consider your work/life balance. With the rise of remote work, many people are struggling with the line between work and personal time—when you’re constantly doomscrolling your work email, are you ever really “off”? That stress exacerbates the Sunday Scaries, so try to enforce some hard lines between your work and personal life, starting with never checking work email outside working hours.
Make a plan
If you can’t avoid stress-inducing stuff at work or school, you can make a plan to deal with them. Instead of viewing your Monday (or the entire week ahead) as a frothy soup of undefined dread, sit down and work out how you’re going to handle that terrible meeting or how you’re going to prepare for that dreaded presentation or project. Just having a plan will reduce your stress, and help you feel more in control.
Live clean, bro
If you live for the weekend, you might be unintentionally driving your Sunday anxiety. Hangovers are never pleasant, but spending your Sunday moping about nursing one can set off a chain reaction of self-loathing and regret because you may feel like you wasted the whole day. If that’s a pattern you recognize, pulling back a bit on your Saturday bacchanalia will make your Sundays clearer and more productive, which in turn will lessen that sense that you just dropped an entire day of your life into the garbage.
Consider making a bigger change
Finally, if you’ve seriously considered all of your options and tried several ways of reducing your end-of-the-weekend stress with no success, you might consider the Nuclear Option: Changing jobs, switching majors, or otherwise altering some other fundamental aspect of your life.
If you do decide that a more substantial change is in order, use what you’ve learned about your Sunday Scaries to avoid similar scenarios in the future. If there were specific aspects of your job that inspired dread, look for jobs and office cultures that don’t include those things. If your classwork made you lose sleep, consider whether you’re in the right field. In other words, look at this as an opportunity to leave the Sunday Scaries behind forever.
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Avoid these home decorating mistakes, unless you want your house to look gross, weird, and depressing.
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So you’re a Wordle master. You know all the strategies: which words to guess first, which letters are a waste of space. All of your devoted Twitter followers are well-acquainted with your perfect green squares. However, everyone’s main gripe with Wordle is that there’s only one puzzle per day. After you’ve gotten your daily one-game allotment, where do you turn? How are you going to scratch that itch?
We’ve rounded up the best alternatives for you to keep riding the word-guessing wave. The following are not simply word-adjacent games; I’m not about to waste your time recommending something like Words with Friends. (What is this, 2012? Grow up. We’re in a pandemic.)
Instead, this list is for the Wordle-obsessed. This is for those among us who crave a nearly identical gameplay, albeit with some pretty interesting twists. We’re highlighting games that are all clear copycats, spin-offs, and NSFW versions of the OG Wordle (Note: None of the following games were created by the OG Wordle founder Josh Wardle.) Without further ado, here are the best Wordle variants for you to master next, C H A M P.
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