It’s our favorite time of the month — rounding up surprising and useful tricks, tips and life hacks from Life Kit episodes.

This month’s selection includes advice about kids and social media, how to minimize jet lag and high-fiber diets.

To decide whether you’re ready to be friends with your ex, ask yourself if you’re in a healthy place. If you’re reaching out to your ex because you still desire them and are hoping to get back together, “wait until those feelings subside,” says psychologist Marisa Franco. You’ll know you’ve reached an appropriate level of emotional distance when you want your ex to be happy regardless of whether or not their life includes you, says Franco.

To form memories that you’ll keep, make them as multi-sensory and detailed as possible. “Plenty of evidence suggests that memory is better the more detail is available to us,” says Monica Thieu, a researcher in human cognition and a four-time Jeopardy! contestant. “So any time you have an opportunity to learn something in a richer way, do it.” What Thieu means is, incorporate as many different senses, emotions and mediums into your memory as you can. Immerse yourself in that subject.

Are you being made to feel guilty about something that’s not your fault? Clinical psychologist Han Ren offers a script of what you can say to the person making you feel this way: “You are entitled to your emotions, but it’s not my fault. I love you, but I love me too.”

Not sure if you’re north, south, east or west from home? Pick a few landmarks in town to help orient yourself. The ideal landmark is large and far away, like a big sign, a highway, a tall building or a bridge “so it can serve as a better cue to orientation,” says Mary Hegarty, a cognitive psychologist at the Spatial Thinking Lab at University of California, Santa Barbara.

When posting about your kids on social media, follow a “holiday card-or-less” rule of thumb. “They should be updates you’d be comfortable with anyone, from your great aunt to your boss, seeing. Information that’s not going to embarrass anybody and isn’t particularly private,” says Leah Plunkett, a faculty member at Harvard Law School who specializes in children, family law and technology.

If a loved one asks to borrow money from you, don’t ask for that money back. If you have the funds and want to help out, give it to them as a gift instead, says personal finance columnist Michelle Singletary. That way, you don’t have to worry about the borrower paying you back or what to do if they don’t.

A fun and cheap way to have fun this summer? Swap houses with a friend or family member. Perhaps you know someone who lives in a different neighborhood or city you’ve wanted to visit. “You can get a feel of what they like. If they have a pool, you can take a dip or check out their DVD collection,” says personal finance writer Nicole Dow. “That’s a low-cost alternative to taking a full-fledged vacation.”

If you’re going on a big, international trip, load up on sleep before you travel. To mitigate the effects of jet lag, a little preparation goes a long way, says Jade Wu, a behavioral sleep medicine psychologist and researcher at Duke University. Take supplemental naps ahead of your journey, but don’t force it if you’re not sleepy. The goal is to get as much rest as possible so that when you’re in a period of less sleep, you’ll feel a little more alert.

As you add more fiber to your diet, make sure to drink plenty of water. It can help the fiber move through your system and keep it from hardening, which can lead to more gas and constipation.

This story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.

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Hi! I’m Deborah Vankin and I’m a wellness writer for the L.A. Times. We just finished putting together a massive guide to fantastic hikes in Los Angeles. While testing out the trails this spring, I went on about 10 solo hikes in a row. Lately, I’m craving company. How about joining me?

To celebrate the publication of our hiking guide, I’m inviting 30 L.A. Times subscribers to join me on the trail Saturday, June 8 at 9 a.m. We’ll head to the Lower Arroyo Seco Trail, an easy 3.2-mile walk in Pasadena. The trailhead starts at San Pascual Stables and journeys along the concrete river basin, with a few short trails that veer off from the main path. The hike also passes under two architecturally grand bridges, the 1922 San Rafael Bridge and the 1914 La Loma Bridge. It’s quite peaceful.

I can’t overstate the benefits of moving your body, outdoors, in nature. Like all exercise, it’s good for heart health, muscle conditioning and balance, not to mention mental health and overall mood. Hiking is my happy place — one that I’d like to share with you.

I’ll start and end the hike with a few gentle but essential stretches and give some history of the area along the way. I’ll also share my hiking experiences, gear recommendations and other tips — and I’d love to hear yours! The event will take about two hours, walking at a leisurely pace and with time built in for rest stops. It will be open to the first 30 subscribers who sign up, and it’s free to join. Attendees must be 18 years or older.

The Lower Arroyo Seco Trail is a dirt-and-gravel path that’s mostly flat and in relatively good condition. But there are rocky and uneven portions. Bring sturdy shoes with good traction, a hat, sunscreen and plenty of water. On-leash dogs are more than welcome.

Park in the lot adjacent to the baseball fields off of San Pascual Avenue, or on the street if you find a spot, and walk to the San Pascual Stables parking lot. We’ll meet at the trailhead by the lot. It’s well marked. Attendees will be required to sign a waiver prior to attending. Grab a spot on eventbrite.com.

Hope to see you on the trail!

We’re living through days of powerful, often violent religious feeling — stories that might have felt like old dead history now take on a stinging new relevance.

That’s the case with Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, the ferocious true story of a young Jewish boy forcibly taken from his parents by emissaries of the Pope in 1858. It was made by Marco Bellocchio, the great Italian filmmaker who first burst on the scene 59 years ago with his scorched-earth debut Fists in the Pocket.

Now 84 but still far from mellow, Bellocchio takes us back to the 19th century to tell a historical horror story steeped in Roman Catholic antisemitism.

The action begins in 1850s Bologna, which was then under the rule of the unpopular and highly conservative Pope Pius IX. The just-born Edgardo is the sixth son of a Jewish Bolognese family, whose housemaid, unbeknownst to them, baptizes the baby to save his soul.

When the Church’s inquisitor in Bolgona learns of this baptism six years later, he declares Edgardo a Christian. And because it’s illegal for non-Christians to raise a Christian child, he grabs the 6-year-old boy away from his agonized parents and ships him to Rome. There, as he yearns for his mother, Edgardo’s put into a boarding school for the children of converted Jews, where he’s surrounded by images of the crucifixion.

Naturally Edgardo’s parents are shattered and do everything they can to get him back — even waging a huge international PR campaign. Going to Rome, they make heartrending appeals to stony-faced priests who say they understand their sadness but can do nothing to alleviate it. After all, they are helping the boy become a proper Christian.

To avoid seeming politically weak, Pius IX refuses the world’s calls for Edgardo’s freedom. In fact, he doubles down on the kidnapping, personally guiding the boy’s Catholic education and having him baptized a second time.

Although Kidnapped is a straightforward historical drama about religious oppression, Edgardo’s tale is filled with startling twists and turns, especially when, in 1860, nationalist rioters overthrow Pius IX’s rule in Bologna. With new people in charge, the Bologna inquisitor is arrested for the kidnapping and we see how Edgardo has fallen through one of the trap doors of history. Had he simply been born a few years later, he wouldn’t have been taken from his Jewish home and forcibly made a Christian.

Even as the rebels go after the pope, we keep worrying about Edgardo’s fate in Rome. What happens to a young Jewish boy who’s cut off from his family and trained not just to be a good Catholic but to become a priest? What core of the original Edgardo remains? Who does he become as he moves into manhood? The answers are unsettling.

Now, at moments Kidnapped feels old-fashioned. Yet Bellocchio never falls into boring costume drama realism. Working in a painterly style, he pushes things toward the operatic — laying on surging music and endowing Edgardo with innocent good looks that border on the angelic. Actor Paolo Pierobon plays Pope Pius as a kind of opera buffa figure, hammy in a Marlon Brando sort of way — at once silly and creepy and sinister. In one of the film’s best scenes, Edgardo has a hallucinatory encounter with a crucifix that directly answers the falsehood that the Jews killed Christ.

Like me, Bellocchio was raised a Roman Catholic and is clearly appalled by the Church’s cruelty to the Mortara family and to all Jews, whom they treated as inferiors who must literally kiss the pope’s feet for decent treatment. He wants us to be appalled and angry, too.

Yet what gives the movie its timely resonance is not merely its depiction of antisemitism but what it shows about the dangerous politics of religious belief. Although religion officially deals in timeless universal truths, Kidnapped reminds us that these timeless universals are always bound up with historical questions of power. And where there’s power, there will be abuse.