Mental health

Mental health

The holiday season can stir up a complex blend of excitement and dread, especially for people in eating disorder recovery. Food-centered gatherings, shifting routines, unsolicited comments about bodies, and long-standing family dynamics can activate anxiety even when your recovery feels steady. Being anxious does not mean you are failing. It means you are human. Recovery is hard work on an ordinary day. It takes effort, attention, and support even when life is calm.

Let's start with a confession: I've never been fully authentic for a single day in my life. Neither have you. I don't mean this as an accusation. I see it as fact. The relentless cultural message telling us to "be ourselves" might be the cruelest advice we've ever collectively accepted. It promises liberation but brings anxiety. Because here's what nobody mentions when they sell you authenticity as the path to enlightenment: being your full, unfiltered self would make you unemployable, unfriendable

I would say the thing that I don't think we did well at Meta is actually anticipating the risks that our products would create in society," Simo told Wired. "At OpenAI, these risks are very real.

For many challenged by struggles and mental health issues, days may feel oddly distant from any sense of well-being, as languishing, depression, sadness, or falling back into unhealthy addictive propensities begin to emerge. These thoughts may even encourage maladaptive behaviors or the temptation to roll back into unhealthy habits, relinquishing control to "feeling processes" that have hijacked logic. People may express these moments in terms of feeling "off" or "not fully present."

In my last post, we explored why you may be too tired to parent the way you want-to the knowledge-capacity gap that leaves even well-informed parents unable to use the tools they know when they're depleted. We talked about how chronic stress limits access to the parts of your brain responsible for self-control and empathy. Today, I'm sharing seven practical steps that actually help when you're too exhausted to parent the way you want.

The trend involves men calling their male friends to wish them goodnight, often capturing their surprised, confused, or awkward reactions. These interactions break traditional masculine communication norms, which typically discourage emotional expression between male friends. The humor often masks a deeper psychological need for connection that has been suppressed by conventional masculine ideals. Here is some context as the trend emerges within a broader acknowledgment of increasing male social isolation.

You open Instagram to grab a trending audio for a reel. Just one quick thing. Two hours later, you're still scrolling. You haven't created anything. You haven't even saved the audio you meant to find. And now it's 10 p.m., and you're mentally exhausted - and a little sad, tbh - from consuming content instead of making it. (Seriously, why is Instagram's search function on the Explore page?) Oh, wait, that was me. Hi. 👋

Like clockwork, 5 p.m. on a Sunday, flashes of unread emails and notifications for tomorrow's upcoming meetings start. Your shoulders tense, your stomach knots. You have a case of the Sunday scaries. This unsettling feeling is a form of anticipatory anxiety that creeps in as the weekend draws to a close and Monday looms with the responsibilities of the week ahead.

My sister and I went on a joint diet. She stopped and I didn't. I'm 18. And I'm dragged from school to the hospital. And I'm made to look at myself. [MUSIC PLAYING] I weigh 56 pounds. Do you find you're too skinny? Yes, I am too skinny. But what does it matter? I had turned my body into a project, a revolt against nature Mother nature, my mother. A revolt against womanhood, adulthood. My biggest enemy? Time.

But you know what memory I don't have? My mother eating. She cooked. She served. She made sure everyone had seconds and thirds. She cleaned. She packed plates for folks to take home to their loved ones. She stood in that kitchen for hours (sometimes, days), making magic happen for anyone that she could. But I cannot recall a single moment when she sat down with a full plate of her own, enjoying the meal she had poured herself into.

Simon and I couldn't be more different. When we met, I was 38, he was 54, and his unabashed zest for life broke through my complicated caution. I knew I was in love when, after a lazy summer evening together, I lay on the stone beside a Trafalgar Square fountain and felt joy seep through my skin. I moved in with him, his rural 15th-century cottage becoming our home, workplace (me in medicine, he in shipping), and where I discovered previously unknown contentment.

When Charlie Service came home from Vietnam, he tried to leave the war behind. "In Vietnam, it was definitely combat," he said. "And there was a lot of things in there that we did that we shouldn't do, or things that I don't even talk about today." The retired Army veteran earned three Purple Hearts for his service. But medals didn't ease the invisible wounds he carried - flashbacks, anger and sleepless nights that would last decades.

More than two decades of research-from Harvard professor Amy Edmondson's pioneering studies to Google's landmark Project Aristotle-have found that the strongest predictor of high-performing teams isn't talent or strategy, but psychological safety. As Edmondson defines, it's "a shared belief held by team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." It's what gives people the confidence to speak up, take creative risks, and learn from failure-and it's foundational to innovation.

When I rather nervously shared a personal post about dealing with brain fog at work on the social network LinkedIn last week, I had no idea that it would have such an enormous impact. It's been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Women have stopped me on the street to talk to me about it. I've been overwhelmed by hundreds of messages from people sharing support and their own experiences of it. Usually I cover technology news. But given the response, it felt important to talk about this as well.

Sleep has become a public culture priority. The sleep industry now exceeds $68 billion. Nearly half of adults report insomnia symptoms at some point. Chronic insomnia means difficulty falling or staying asleep at least three nights per week for at least three months, with daytime consequences and/or significant distress. About 1 in 3 Americans uses a wearable device to track sleep, suggesting the public truly values sleep.

It's two years since Isiah found himself on the roof of a south London shopping centre, about to jump. I was very done, he says of that night in November 2023. It felt there was no other route or option. First, I did a walk around everywhere important to me: primary school, secondary, college. Then he headed to Lewisham shopping centre. I remember my head was telling me: You're probably better off doing this.' He was exhausted by his paranoia,

Depression, that is, "major" or "clinical" depression, is so prevalent that many mental-health authorities call it "the common cold of mental illness." Depression has a host of known risk factors: female gender, family history, distorted thinking patterns, medication side effects, adverse life events ( divorce, financial reverses, the death of loved ones), and chronic illnesses (diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's diseases, and hormonal disorders).

Normally, a person goes about their life, making meaning of everything that happens to them, slotting it into a world that makes sense. Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk explains that a traumatic event short circuits this process. Trauma overwhelms a person, rendering them unable, in the moment, to integrate the event into their lives. In the context of spirituality, trauma is a hand grenade, exploding two of spirituality's primary functions: to help a person make meaning and feel at home in the universe.

Young man's parents say he was in the midst of mental health crisis at time of incident - and is now in legal limbo

It shows up in songs, films, ads, social-media posts-but it says more about Americans' idealization of youth than it does about what it actually feels like to be young today. The 2024 World Happiness Report found that when American adults were asked to rate the extent to which they were living their "best possible life," those over 60 answered the most positively, followed by 45-to-59-year-olds. People younger than 30 trailed behind.

We are listening to more than music. In addition to music, SiriusXM, a satellite radio company, provides sports talk, news, talk shows, and podcasts. As of 2024, SiriusXM boasted 150 million listeners. As of 2025, 4,509,765 podcasts have been registered around the world, with Apple alone hosting 2,800,138. In the United States, over 200 million people have listened to a podcast at least once, and 158 million consume podcasts on a monthly basis.

As the season of gratitude approaches, most of us begin to think about the people, opportunities, and experiences that enrich our lives. These matter deeply. But in my work exploring the rewilding of the human mind, I've found that one of the greatest sources of support in our lives is something we rarely acknowledge-because it's all around us, all the time.

While the holiday season is supposed to be a time of joy, connection, and lots of filling up on delicious holiday dishes, for many people, the pleasures fall short of their hopes. For some people, Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations inspire stress, the pressure to live up to family expectations, and overeating to feed one's emotional pain, along with psychological and/or physical isolation. Parents juggle restless kids in unfamiliar settings, hosts fret over creating "perfect" gatherings, and privacy can be hard to come by.

Emerson's lawyers said he had an unusual reaction to psilocybin, the active ingredient in the drug. He was left feeling detached from reality for several days, a condition known as Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder. Emerson "believed he was either trapped in a dream or already dead," his lawyers wrote in a sentencing memo filed Wednesday. They add that he didn't believe Flight 2059 was real, but he boarded because he believed it would help him wake up and see his family again.

Carl Rogers is known for developing client-centered therapy, the essence of which can be summed up in the idea that it is the client and not the therapist who knows best and what directions to go in. But the idea that the client can be trusted to find their own direction is at odds with most psychology and psychiatry interventions, and is what made Rogers' approach to therapy so radical, not only at the time of his writing in the 1950s, but even today.

"I think this topic, especially as a male, can often get pushed aside, can get brushed under the rug as not for men," Hollins explained. "Not for tough guys, not for I guess our gender, sex, whatever you want to call it. "But it happens more than people want to admit it happens, whether it's older men, younger men, successful men, poor men, rich men ... it happens to all men and it gets pushed under the rug too much."

One of the things I'm also passing on is, there's only so many hours in a day,