2025 Family Matters Conference 

Eli Susman, Ph.D., has spent fifteen years chasing a deceptively simple question: How do we care for ourselves when life won’t slow down?

That question has taken him from monasteries across the globe to research labs at Harvard and UC Berkeley—and now into classrooms, clinics, lecture halls, podcasts, and dinner tables around the world.

Because even when we know what helps—yoga, meditation, deep breathing—real life doesn’t always leave us the space to access it. Distractions pile up. Plans fall through. Even when we manage to carve out time for a practice, the calm it brings rarely sticks. We meditate, we go outside, we breathe deeply—and it helps. But then a text pings, the toddler melts down, the meeting runs long, and the calm slips right through our fingers. And beneath all of this is a harder truth: most well-being tools focus on what to do, but don’t show us how to make them last. This is where Eli’s work comes in.

He calls it micropractice—a science-backed approach to calm, connection, and joy in 30 seconds or less.

These aren’t hacks or silver bullets. They’re small, repeatable habits: a slow exhale before you answer, a hand on your heart after a hard moment, a kind wish silently offered—that help people reset even on the busiest days. They live between appointments, in classrooms, alongside parenting, caregiving, commuting, and grief. Eli’s research shows that tiny moments, stacked over time, can quietly ripple into real change—and that consistency, not duration, is often the missing link.

During his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, Eli coined the term micropractice and led the first peer-reviewed studies on these bite-size tools. In one study, students practiced a 20-second self-compassion exercise he developed; another group practiced a neutral control. Those who practiced the self-compassion exercise each day showed remarkable improvements in self-compassion, stress, and emotional well-being—on par with what’s often observed in interventions that require far more time.

The response was immediate. Within months of publication, Eli’s work had been featured in over 100 outlets across 17+ languages—including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, BBC, ABC, CBS, Forbes, Psychology Today, Mindful, 10% Happier, Hidden Brain on NPR, and The Science of Happiness podcast—and became one of the most downloaded articles in its journal that year. Greater Good Magazine recognized it among the Top 10 Insights from the “Science of a Meaningful Life” (2024), an annual list selected from nominations by hundreds of researchers worldwide.

Yet for Eli, the heart of this work has never been the headlines. It lives in the moments it touches: a parent pausing to breathe before responding to a child, a student grounding themselves before an exam, a clinician finding steadiness between clients, a teacher resetting the energy of a classroom in three breaths. These are the real places where micropractice belongs—woven into the actual rhythms of everyday life.

Eli’s upcoming book, Micropractice (Avery | Penguin Random House, Fall 2026), distills time-honored wisdom and cutting-edge science into practical tools that can be used anytime, anywhere. Drawn from his own research, the book also addresses what most resources don’t: how to turn well-being practices into habits that actually stick in daily life. Not with pressure, grit, or guilt—but with evidence-based tools he’s shown can keep micropractice habits alive for at least six months.