Mindfulness
fromPsychology Today
1 hour agoThe Quiet War on Your Happiness, and How to Win It
A quiet war on happiness is fought through distractions that pull attention away from the present moment.
Axel Rudakubana, wearing a green hoodie and armed with a kitchen knife, ambushed a class of girls aged between six and 11 during a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, resulting in three fatalities and multiple injuries.
On February 1, 2026, a man associated with Ivaylo Kalushev received a message from him: 'Goodbye, friend, we are very tired and have no more strength.' The next day, police found the bodies of three middle-aged men at Kalushev's burnt lodge in western Bulgaria.
Leyton's mother stated, 'None of the boys in that school accepted him. They told him they would never accept him for the way he spoke. He was a sassy speaker, more feminine - not the 'hard boy' type. This wasn't going on for just a little while.'
If the application of behavioral techniques does not produce large enough effects for practical value, then the application has failed. Practical value is whatever you define as meaningful for your child's life.
Isabelle Valdez, 15, and Lois Lippert, 14, were accused of plotting to murder a classmate, with Valdez admitting to planning to use a knife found in her backpack. In an apology, she expressed feelings of being 'disgusting, cruel, and useless,' indicating deep-seated issues.
New data has shown that one in six children that died by suicide in England between April 2019 and March 2025 were part of the LGBTQ+ community. Out of the 647 children that died by suicide during that time period, 107 were LGBTQ+ and 46 were transgender. The figures were obtained by QueerAF via a Freedom of Information request to the National Child Mortality Database.
'At the start... it was toxic,' Ciara Regan (28) says of the online pro-anorexia community of which she was a member. 'Let's do this illness together' and 'Let's be the best anorexic that you can be' were examples of the type of encouragement members would give each other. 'There are all these tips and tricks,' she says.
The number of suicides per 100,000 young people ages 10 to 24 declined by nearly 12 percent, from 11 to 9.7, between 2021 and 2024. The decrease was driven largely by reductions among young men, whose suicide levels fell by nearly 15 percent, while suicides among young women declined by about 2 percent.
Being a target of negative experiences by one's peers has consistently been related to decreased self-worth, poor engagement in school, and worse grades among children and adolescents. One of the most consistent of these consequences is depressive symptoms. Put simply, kids' mental health is strongly impacted by being picked on by their classmates at school. Our recently published study examined data from over 100,000 Brazilian adolescents to disentangle how pernicious the effect of being victimized was on reports of symptoms of depression.