Mental health

Mental health

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Growing up intellectually gifted in a household in which no one shares your cognitive intensity creates a kind of loneliness that cannot easily be named. It is more than being smart. You are just being who you naturally are, but, inevitably, you are out of sync with the world around you. One of the sad realities of being neurodivergent and out of sync with others in the family is that you inevitably feel oppressed or humiliated.

His parents filed a lawsuit against the jail staff who had been responsible for his care. His father is working to pass Theris' Law, legislation that would empower people to put family members into emergency treatment. And Coats' father and uncle in recent months created a nonprofit, Brothers Against Drug Deaths, to advocate for mental health and addiction support particularly within Black and other underserved communities.

GEORGE BONANNO: The big question, really, when I think about trauma is how do most people respond to the things that we think of as traumas? I tend to use the word potential trauma or potentially traumatic event. And that's because events are not traumatic, they're potentially traumatic, but how do most people respond? We know that some people get PTSD, but what do most people, how do most people react?

In his new book, Notes on Being a Man, Galloway states bluntly: "There's no such thing as 'toxic masculinity...there's cruelty, criminality, bullying, predation, and abuse of power. If you're guilty of any of these things, or conflate being a man with coarseness and savagery, you're not masculine; you're anti-masculine." As a man and a therapist who treats mostly men, this resonates with me and what I've heard from my clients.

It was a gray winter afternoon early in my career when my client-let's call him Dan-stormed into my office, visibly angry. "I lost my f-ing job again because I told my boss the project sucked," he said. Dan was relatively new to therapy and known for reacting impulsively in social and work settings, often to his own detriment. My instinct kicked in: help him see what he could have done differently.