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Stay, eat, and buy local. Forgo the international chains and book your stay in a locally owned hotel or B&B or an Airbnb Tap into the knowledge of guides and drivers with deep roots in the community.

  Stay, eat, and buy local. Forgo the international chains and book your stay in a locally owned hotel or B&B or an Airbnb Tap into the knowledge of guides and drivers with deep roots in the community.  Sample regional delicacies in a restaurant where you’re the only foreigner in sight. Cherish the skill of the indigenous weaver who crafted the embroidered poncho you just purchased. Insider tip: Look into the possibility of house sitting for a local family. In exchange for keeping an eye on their home and probably caring for a pet, you’ll have free accommodations and maybe even the use of a vehicle. Don’t overschedule. Forget about bouncing from attraction to attraction snapping photos all day every day in a greatest-hits frenzy. With slow travel you purposely leave gaps in your itinerary to be spontaneous, perhaps by planning one activity and leaving the rest of the day to freely explore. Or by resisting the urge to “stay on schedule” and leaving ...

How to use the 5 stages of change to break your bad habits, from the author of 'The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control'

  If you resolved to form a new habit — or break a bad one — this year, it's likely you've already abandoned the task.  And it makes sense: habit-forming is hard and every time you slip up it feels like a personal failure.  You're also setting yourself up for failure, says Katherine Morgan Schafler, a psychotherapist and author of "The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control ."  "Most people operate under the dysfunctional assumption that change is a one-step process that is achieved by stopping something or starting something," she writes in her book.While this framing makes it easier to enact change in the short term, it also makes sustaining change harder in the long term.