Here are 7 main takeaways from the two-part documentary:
1. Caroline’s self-inflicted injuries were so bad that doctors said she would need plastic surgery on her arms.
The blood in the photographs of the flat, published by The Sun newspaper after being sold by one of Lewis’s friends, was Caroline’s and not Lewis’s. Caroline self-harmed with broken glass after Lewis called the police following their fight. Caroline was treated in hospital for self-inflicted cuts to her arms that were so bad that they had gone to the bone, and doctors said that she would need plastic surgery. After 12 hours in the hospital, she was then taken into police custody and locked in a cell.
2. The Crown Prosecution Service initially said that Caroline should only receive a caution.
Following Caroline and Lewis’s fight, which took place after the pair had been drinking, Caroline found text messages on his phone from another woman, leading her to wake him up and cause an injury to his head with the phone, which prompted Lewis to call the police. The initial CPS notes claim that Caroline should only be given a caution. This is in the notes shown on the documentary, and Caroline’s twin sister, Jody, was also told this by the CPS at the time.
3. It was a female detective who overruled the CPS’s ‘caution’ ruling and a female prosecutor who claimed Lewis had been hit with a lamp by Caroline.
It was a female detective on duty who analysed the case and said they wanted to appeal the CPS caution decision, leading to Caroline being charged with assault by beating, despite the fact that Lewis did not press charges and did not want to press charges. The CPS claimed they were doing so based on the bodycam footage from the police officers attending the scene. At the Magistrate’s hearing on 23rd December 2019, Prosecutor Katie Weiss told the court that Lewis had said he was hit by a lamp. Lewis has denied that Caroline hit him with a lamp, and Caroline’s lawyer, Paul Morris, points out that no lamp was taken from the crime scene and analysed as evidence.
A spokesperson from the Metropolitan Police told the documentary makers: “It is understandable that those closest to Caroline have questions about everything that happened to her in the months before she died, including the police investigation. We have been open to those questions and have engaged with a number of independent reviews and an inquest. While there was organisational learning for us on points of process, no misconduct has been identified.”
4. Caroline’s case was allegedly treated differently because she was famous
As part of her extensive evidence, Christine Flack has secured the incident report, and there are several references in the notes – shown on camera in the documentary – that state that Caroline is a well-known television presenter and media personality, so there is likely to be increased media interest in the case. Her lawyer states: “She was being prosecuted because she was Caroline Flack, not for what she’d done or what she’d not done.”
A spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service told the documentary makers: “All decisions in this case were made on the basis of the medical opinion available to us at the time. A person’s celebrity status never influences whether a case is taken forward. We are satisfied that the prosecution was correctly brought.”
5.) Texts, voicenotes and video messages reveal Caroline’s mental state in her final weeks.
Harrowing voice notes and videos from Caroline are played on the documentary, clearly showing her distress at all that is going on, as well as bandages on her wrists and hands from self-harm. Text messages are reproduced where she repeatedly claims her career and her life are over due to the case. The night before she killed herself, Caroline had been drinking and sent messages to her best friend Mollie, which make no sense, and are even reproduced.
NewsCenter 5 sat down with former Fall River, Massachusetts, Mayor Will Flanagan on Thursday as he shared his experience of surviving a near-fatal stabbing attack.On Oct. 20, 2025, Flanagan, who served as mayor from 2010 to 2014, was walking on Hartwell Street when he was stabbed several times by an unknown assailant.Surveillance video showed the moment the suspect ran up to Flanagan from behind before making striking motions toward his head and neck. Flanagan said he never saw the attack coming. “I pop up to my feet, I walk over to wear … the seniors told me I was stabbed,” Flanagan told NewsCenter 5. “They convinced me to call 911 because I’m confused, I’m not sure what’s happening.”Flanagan said he got on the phone with 911 dispatch and told them his location. “I told the operator, ‘Please send rescue, I think I’m dying.’”The former Fall River mayor describes being in the ambulance within minutes and being transported to St. Luke’s Hospital.He says the EMTs reassured him to stay awake because of the amount of blood he was losing.After arriving at St. Luke’s, Flanagan said he was taken in for imaging and continued to spit up blood.”The doctor said, ‘We need to put him on a ventilator, we don’t have much time,’” Flanagan said.At that point, Flanagan asked to briefly see his family.Hospital staff then worked diligently to repair the deep lacerations to his head and neck.”Next thing I knew, I woke up on the ventilator,” he said.Flanagan said the near-death experience has changed him.”I feel it definitely will change how I go out into the world, but the more I think about it, the more I think as a society we have to focus more on mental health,” he said. “My attacker should not have been on the streets; he should’ve been in some facility where he was getting the help he needed.”Flanagan says society needs to put more emphasis on mental health and getting potentially violent offenders off the street and into the correct institutions.”I think of the Ukrainian girl who was stabbed on the train who was killed … her attacker fits the same description as my attacker,” he said. “People like that cannot be on the streets of America.”Flanagan said he thought about what it would take to get people like his attacker the help they needed while lying in his hospital bed.He says President Trump should revisit the idea of opening institutions and asylums.Beyond that, Flanagan says the experience brought him closer to his faith.”I do believe God saved my life,” the former mayor said.His goal is to be “independent and back to normal life” by Christmas, and he credits his children as powerful motivators to getting him healthier and stronger every day. “When I spoke to the eye doctor yesterday he looked me in the face and said, ‘Do you know how lucky you are?’ I said, ‘I believe I do.’ And he goes, ‘No, you’re like Powerball lucky,’” Flanagan said. Despite the life-altering experience, Flanagan says he will still continue to walk around Fall River, but will be much more aware of his surroundings.”It’s my city,” he said.Corree Gonzales, 31, was arrested in connection with the stabbing just days after the attack. He was charged with two felonies in the attack on Flanagan, including armed assault to murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon resulting in serious bodily injury.Flanagan says neither he nor the police know what weapon was used or why Gonzales allegedly committed the crime.According to Fall River police, Gonzales has an extensive criminal record.He was ordered to undergo further mental health evaluations at Bridgewater State Hospital after pleading not guilty in his arraignment on Oct. 22. Gonzales has an extensive criminal record and court paperwork from arrests in 2024 have listed him as homeless.In one incident, Gonzales allegedly threatened his mother and sister. A police report stated that his mother told officers that Gonzales had suffered from mental illness since he was 15 years old.
NewsCenter 5 sat down with former Fall River, Massachusetts, Mayor Will Flanagan on Thursday as he shared his experience of surviving a near-fatal stabbing attack.
On Oct. 20, 2025, Flanagan, who served as mayor from 2010 to 2014, was walking on Hartwell Street when he was stabbed several times by an unknown assailant.
Surveillance video showed the moment the suspect ran up to Flanagan from behind before making striking motions toward his head and neck.
Flanagan said he never saw the attack coming.
“I pop up to my feet, I walk over to wear [the senior housing facility is] … the seniors told me I was stabbed,” Flanagan told NewsCenter 5. “They convinced me to call 911 because I’m confused, I’m not sure what’s happening.”
Flanagan said he got on the phone with 911 dispatch and told them his location. “I told the operator, ‘Please send rescue, I think I’m dying.’”
The former Fall River mayor describes being in the ambulance within minutes and being transported to St. Luke’s Hospital.
He says the EMTs reassured him to stay awake because of the amount of blood he was losing.
After arriving at St. Luke’s, Flanagan said he was taken in for imaging and continued to spit up blood.
“The doctor said, ‘We need to put him on a ventilator, we don’t have much time,’” Flanagan said.
At that point, Flanagan asked to briefly see his family.
Hospital staff then worked diligently to repair the deep lacerations to his head and neck.
“Next thing I knew, I woke up on the ventilator,” he said.
Flanagan said the near-death experience has changed him.
“I feel it definitely will change how I go out into the world, but the more I think about it, the more I think as a society we have to focus more on mental health,” he said. “My attacker should not have been on the streets; he should’ve been in some facility where he was getting the help he needed.”
Flanagan says society needs to put more emphasis on mental health and getting potentially violent offenders off the street and into the correct institutions.
“I think of the Ukrainian girl who was stabbed on the train who was killed … her attacker fits the same description as my attacker,” he said. “People like that cannot be on the streets of America.”
Flanagan said he thought about what it would take to get people like his attacker the help they needed while lying in his hospital bed.
He says President Trump should revisit the idea of opening institutions and asylums.
Beyond that, Flanagan says the experience brought him closer to his faith.
“I do believe God saved my life,” the former mayor said.
His goal is to be “independent and back to normal life” by Christmas, and he credits his children as powerful motivators to getting him healthier and stronger every day.
“When I spoke to the eye doctor yesterday he looked me in the face and said, ‘Do you know how lucky you are?’ I said, ‘I believe I do.’ And he goes, ‘No, you’re like Powerball lucky,’” Flanagan said.
Despite the life-altering experience, Flanagan says he will still continue to walk around Fall River, but will be much more aware of his surroundings.
“It’s my city,” he said.
Corree Gonzales, 31, was arrested in connection with the stabbing just days after the attack. He was charged with two felonies in the attack on Flanagan, including armed assault to murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon resulting in serious bodily injury.
Flanagan says neither he nor the police know what weapon was used or why Gonzales allegedly committed the crime.
According to Fall River police, Gonzales has an extensive criminal record.
He was ordered to undergo further mental health evaluations at Bridgewater State Hospital after pleading not guilty in his arraignment on Oct. 22.
Gonzales has an extensive criminal record and court paperwork from arrests in 2024 have listed him as homeless.
In one incident, Gonzales allegedly threatened his mother and sister. A police report stated that his mother told officers that Gonzales had suffered from mental illness since he was 15 years old.
The word “gaslighting” has caught fire in the past few years. It’s deployed during fights with romantic partners, between family members, and across the Internet.Gaslighting occurs when someone makes you doubt your sanity, memory, and experiences, but people overuse the term to describe even standard disagreements.
Yet there’s a type of gaslighting that therapists wish more people would recognize and talk about: self-gaslighting.
“Gaslighting is when someone manipulates you into questioning your own reality, and self-gaslighting is when you do the same thing to yourself,” says Lauren Auer, a therapist in Peoria, Ill. That makes it different from negative self-talk, or the harsh critic inside your head—which, while harmful, doesn’t necessarily involve denying or distorting your own reality. “A lot of times it happens because you’ve internalized that dismissive voice that’s now the voice in your own head, and you become your own worst doubter,” Auer adds. “Before anyone else even has the chance to invalidate you, you’re already doing it to yourself.”
We asked experts why self-gaslighting happens and how to overcome it.
What self-gaslighting looks like
You can gaslight yourself in subtle ways. After getting into a fight with your partner, you might think: “I’m overreacting” or “They didn’t mean it—I’m just too sensitive,” even though your feelings were hurt.
“When you set a boundary, you might tell yourself you shouldn’t need space,” says Ashley Pena, a licensed clinical social worker and national executive director for Mission Connection, an outpatient mental health care provider. Or perhaps you downplay a scary interaction with a date by thinking “It wasn’t that bad,” she adds, or excuse a friend’s unkind behavior by telling yourself, “They’re just stressed.” You’ll probably hear yourself say “I’m just being dramatic.”
This is more than harmless reframing or self-reflection. It’s a kind of self-invalidation—doubting or dismissing your own feelings, experiences, memories, or needs. Yet people often confuse the thoughts, Auer says. “Self-reflection is really honest, like asking yourself, ‘What is my part in this? Could I have handled it differently? What can I learn here?’ It’s more grounded in reality,” she says. “You’re not dismissing what happened or how you felt—you’re trying to understand it, whereas self-gaslighting is more dismissive and immediately shutting down your experience.”
Say, for example, that your friend canceled plans with you at the last minute (for the third time). Self-reflection might look like this: “I feel hurt by this. Is there something I need to communicate? Have I been clear about my needs? Is this a healthy friendship, and a good friendship for both of us?”
Self-gaslighting, on the other hand, sounds more like this: “I shouldn’t care this much. She’s probably busy. I’m just being needy—other people wouldn’t be bothered.”
Why it happens
People don’t intentionally gaslight themselves. It’s usually a learned defense mechanism that stems from past experiences being invalidated, says Jill Vance, a clinical psychologist in Chicago. Maybe you grew up with parents who dismissed your emotions or punished you for speaking up, or were taught to prioritize harmony over honesty. Perhaps you gaslight yourself as a way to preserve relationships—even unhealthy ones—by convincing yourself the red flags are no big deal.
“It’s pretty common, especially with people who have experienced relational trauma,” Vance says. “I often see it with folks who are coming out of relationships with narcissists, or sometimes, in extreme cases, [partners] who are actually psychopathic. These are people who have been manipulated a lot over time by others, and they end up internalizing it to the point where they start to manipulate themselves.”
No matter what triggered your tendency to self-gaslight, the effects can take a toll. For starters, you’ll likely experience diminished self-confidence and self-efficacy (the belief in your ability to change your circumstances). “That can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and it can also affect relationships,” Vance says. “What we see with people who self-gaslight is a lot of reassurance-seeking, which can get frustrating for others.”
If you’re prone to self-gaslighting, you might lack the ability to make even basic decisions, like what to do over the weekend. Over time, going along with what others tell you to do can lead to unhappiness and lack of self-identity. “It really seeps into every area of your life,” Auer says. “When you’re constantly dismissing your own feelings or doubting your own perceptions, you’re disconnecting from your own internal compass, and it’s hard to know what you actually want, what you actually feel, and what you actually need.”
How to stop it
Learning to stop gaslighting yourself can be a slow, scary process, Vance acknowledges. “It feels risky to trust yourself, especially if you’ve been doing this your whole life,” she says. Yet it is possible to break the tendency to self-gaslight. Here’s how.
Name it when it happens
Overcoming self-gaslighting starts with noticing when you minimize your feelings. When you catch it happening, Pena suggests pausing and asking yourself: “What do I feel right now?” “Therapy 101 is that you learn that your body works for a reason,” she says. “You get anxious for a reason—it’s all to protect you. So you have to name what you feel and validate your experience.”
Fine-tune your validation skills
You can take steps to get better at validating yourself. “If something bothers you, resist the urge to dismiss it and try saying, ‘You know what, that bothered me, and my feelings make sense,’” Auer says. “You don’t have to explain it, you don’t have to justify it, and you don’t have to give reasons. Just let it be true that it bothers you.”
Keeping a list is also a good idea. Log all the times you trusted your gut and were right, Auer suggests, or that you wished you had gone with your intuition but didn’t. You might note a time that speaking up led to something positive, for example. “Having that concrete evidence can be really helpful,” she says.
Practice saying “no”—or “not now”
People who self-gaslight are often afraid to say no, because they don’t think their own schedule or priorities or feelings matter. The next time your partner asks you to take out the garbage when you’re focused on something else, practice being upfront about the fact that it’s a bad time, but you’ll do it when you’re able.
“It’s these little practices of building up self-esteem, building up courage, and realizing that the world doesn’t end,” Vance says. “Because a lot of times people are like, ‘Well, if I do something that’s my opinion or my belief, everyone’s going to hate me, or something’s going to go terribly wrong.”
With time, and especially by working with a therapist, people are often able to overcome their tendency to self-gaslight. Pena sees the way her clients talk about themselves change over time as they begin to trust their own emotions. “Our brain can be rewired,” she says.
When the Snowflake-Taylor police department in the high desert of Arizona conducted an active shooter drill at Snowflake High School in October 2024, students didn’t take it seriously, says police chief Bobby Martin. They were wandering around campus, laughing, having conversations, and not locking doors.
So at the start of this year, the police department decided to make things more realistic: they’d hold a drill without advance notice, and perhaps students would pay attention. But when the announcement went over the PA system that there was an active shooter on campus—and that this was not a drill—students panicked. One student texted her mother that there was an active shooter and that she loved her, adding “we might die.” The PA recording, made by a principal who had not been at the school for a while, caused more confusion and panic than anticipated, Martin says.
“That was not how we were intending it to go by any means,” he says. “But the reaction after that was that we should back off and not do it at all, but that’s not a solution, because if anything happens, you need to be prepared.”
School districts and law enforcement across the country have been grappling with this issue as school shootings continue unabated. There have been 208 school shootings so far in 2025, after 336 in all of 2024, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database and now, more than 95% of public schools perform lockdown drills annually.
But as Snowflake learned, these drills can be traumatic to students, especially if they are conducted in the wrong way. One 2020 study analyzed conversations over Twitter (now known as X) and Reddit before and after active shooter drills occurred, and found that the drills were associated with an increase in depression, stress, and anxiety among children and their parents, and that concerns about death increased by 22%. Words like “blood,” and “pain” became more consistent in social media posts in the 90 days after a school drill, the study found.
Still, most experts agree that practicing for active shooter events is beneficial, so doing away with drills entirely is usually not an option. Schools want to protect students without traumatizing them, a balancing act that, as Snowflake found, is very difficult.
It’s something that has drawn the attention of lawmakers. “There is broad consensus affirming what parents already know—mandatory active school shooter drills are deeply traumatizing for children and have no evidence of decreasing fatalities,” Democratic Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington wrote on X in September, announcing a Congressional amendment that would prohibit taxpayer dollars from being appropriated to schools that do not let students opt out of active shooter drills.
And in 2021, a bill introduced by Colorado Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter would have ordered the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, to study and identify best practices for maximizing the effectiveness of school safety drills as well as the mental health effects of these drills. The bill was eventually folded into an Appropriations bill and passed; the National Academies report came out in August 2025.
But an emerging body of research shows that there are best practices for how to prepare students for active shooters in schools—though schools across the country may not be following them.
How to better prepare students for active shooters
The first thing to know is that drills are effective, says Jaclyn Schildkraut, the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government. But there’s a difference between lockdown drills and active shooter drills, and there’s evidence that lockdown drills are more effective and less traumatic than the latter, she says.
Lockdown drills teach students and teachers to lock the door of their classrooms, turn off the lights, be quiet, and get away from where they can be seen. There are only four instances where someone has been killed behind a locked door in a school shooting, and in one of those instances, the lock failed, she says. “The number one lifesaving device in an active shooter event is the door lock,” she says.
Though it might seem simple to lock a door and get students away from the line of sight, there’s definitely a need to practice this, she says, because students and teachers alike need to build muscle memory. “Situations like active shooter events are incredibly stressful,” she says. “But your body will do what you have trained it to do.”
The advantage of a lockdown drill is that it includes a very specific set of procedures which teachers and students can follow, she says. In contrast, calling something an active shooter drill can mean many different things, and students and teachers can be asked to perform in a variety of different ways—including acting out a drill with simulations, which research suggests is more traumatic than it is valuable.
“We don’t set a school on fire for a fire drill, we don’t need to simulate an active shooter to practice a lockdown,” Schildkraut says.
The August 2025 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, argued that states should prohibit the use of drills that simulate an active shooter being in the school, as well as sensorial drills. These exercises are often extremely realistic, sometimes using fake bullets or the noise of gunshots, and the report concluded that they are one of the practices that “professional consensus largely agrees should not be implemented due to the high potential to cause harm.”
“The idea is you’re simulating a crisis event because you’re trying to have people be able to respond in a context that would be similar to what might happen in real life,” says Dr. David Schoenfeld, the director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and one of the people who helped prepare the report. “And so then it feels like real life, and then it’s more distressing.”
Of course, schools also shouldn’t be too vague when talking to students about why they’re doing a lockdown drill. Saying that they’re doing a drill in case a moose or bear gets into the hallways may make the situation not seem serious or genuine to children, Schoenfeld says. Instead, teachers could say they’re locking the door in case someone wants to start a fight, for instance.
Schools should also not pretend that a drill is an actual active shooter event, as happened in Snowflake, says Schildkraut. People need to know that they are just practicing and that they are not in a real-world emergency.
An electronic sign in front of the school displaying that police training is in progress and that there is no emergency during an active shooter training at Richard E. Byrd elementary school in Glen Rock, New Jersey, on Nov. 7, 2023. Kyle Mazza—NurPhoto/Reuters
Another practice that can do more harm than good is something called an options-based drill, which essentially asks teachers and untrained professionals to decide how to respond to an active shooter in the moment. These include places that teach people a so-called “run, hide, fight” response in which people have to decide how to react, and ALICE training, which is used in many school districts and which gives people options including Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate.
“The options-based drills really come closer to recreating the situation,” says Schoenfeld. “But they have not been shown to lead to better actions on the part of participants, and there’s some limited research that has kind of suggested it may actually work counter to what you’re trying to achieve.”
What works is for schools to let parents and students know in advance that there is going to be a lockdown drill, to be told that they are going through a drill while they are doing it, and for teachers to model calm behavior during that lockdown drill. Then, afterwards, there should be time for students and teachers to discuss what happened, says Aurora Vasquez, the senior vice president of state policy for Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit created by people whose loved ones were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
“Students have given examples of being in a quiz when an active shooter drill happened and then going back to the quiz right after,” she says. “They said that’s not super helpful for them, as they want to debrief.”
Finally, Vasquez says, students should be allowed to opt-out of any drills. That way, if they’ve encountered previous trauma or violence, they can avoid generating even more trauma by practicing active shooter drills.
“Research has shown that if a drill is conducted as a lockdown drill without options based approaches, without simulations, without high intensity, that for the vast majority of kids, it does not need to cause a great deal of distress,” Schoenfeld says.
Should drills happen at all?
There are many states taking this research and trying to apply it to how they prepare students for active shooter events. In 2024, New York state banned realistic school lockdown drills, barring the use of props, actors, or simulations. The same year, California also banned the use of simulated fire in active shooter drills and required that parents be informed that a drill is taking place.
But many other states are continuing on as usual—or even going the opposite way. In Missouri, for example, a new law requires students to participate in active shooter exercises in the 2026-2027 school year; staff may also participate in simulated active shooter drills. The simulations can be jarring: in a video that recently surfaced on social media, a trainer shoots blanks in the air in front of school lockers as staff at a Missouri school were going through training exercises.
The discrepancies between what states are doing and what research suggests they should be doing is one reason Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez introduced the Congressional amendment prohibiting schools from receiving certain federal funds if they don’t allow students to opt out of active shooter drills. The amendment would not affect lockdown or fire drills, only active shooter drills.
“If I have to sign a permission slip for a child to be involved in a ropes course, there feels like there’s a cognitive dissonance if I’m not able to opt out of an active shooter drill,” says Gluesenkamp Perez, who decided to introduce the amendment after her three-year-old had to participate in an active shooter drill in daycare and started talking about shooting bad guys for the first time in his life.
The bill passed through the House Appropriations Committee on Sept. 9. The next step would be for the full House to vote on the bill.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department take part in active shooter training drills at Rosemead High School in Rosemead, Calif., on July 28, 2022. Jason Armons—Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Others say that the controversy over drills presents an opportunity to rethink how we stop gun violence in the first place. “The discourse around gun violence prevention in schools has for a very long time focused on what can we be doing in the moment of a violent act,” says Sonali Rajan, senior research director at Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the U.S. “That’s opposed to stepping back and saying, what are all the ways in which we can and should be meaningfully preventing this kind of violence from happening in the first place?”
Everytown says the country should be thinking more about prioritizing true gun violence prevention, which would ideally render the need for active shooter drills in schools obsolete.
Prevention includes behavioral threat assessment—essentially training students and staff to intervene at the earliest warning signs that someone may be capable of potential violence, and helping divert those people to treatment. Prevention also includes increasing access to mental health professionals and social support, she says, as well as common sense gun safety laws and practices like secure firearms storage.
“What we should be calling for is for our elected officials to use the tools that we know work to render these drills obsolete,” she says. “The burdens we are putting on our schools and our kids to prepare for the potential of this kind of violence is, frankly, unacceptable.”
Still, as school shootings continue apace, many districts don’t have the option to focus only on gun violence prevention. Many states mandate that districts hold a certain number of lockdown or active shooter drills every year. It’s often up to them, though, to decide what those drills look like.
Arizona, for instance, has a four-drill per year mandate, says Martin, the Snowflake police chief. The school district has changed its policies significantly since the drill that students were told was real, and now students get alerts on their phones and get notified that the drill is going to happen ahead of time. But, says Martin, “to not do the drill is not beneficial to anybody.”
Menopause isn’t exactly pleasant, to say the least, but a new survey says that workplace culture is making the process just that much harder for many female workers because they feel they can’t talk about their experiences as they’re having them in the office. The study may prompt you to have a conversation with your workers about creating a supportive and open culture.
The survey of 900 employed U.S. women, from San Francisco-based resume service LiveCareer found that 97 percent of women who are experiencing menopause symptoms felt pressured to either hide or downplay what they were experiencing, news site Human Resources Director reported.
The report says 91 percent of women begin experiencing symptoms before they turn 50, which often coincides with reaching leadership levels in their career progression. In terms of symptoms, 61 percent experience mood swings or anxiety, and 60 percent say they have issues when trying to focus and stay productive. Meanwhile, 51 percent say they go through “brain fog,” and 46 percent say they have sleep-related problems. All of these symptoms may impact women’s day-to-day workplace experience, even affecting their performance and their interactions with colleagues or direct reports. LiveCareer’s report highlights this, noting that this can “erode confidence and concentration,” and the data backs this up, with 69 percent of respondents saying they experience “significant” work performance impacts when they’re suffering symptoms.
As to why so many women feel they can’t talk about this in the workplace, 61 percent say the culture “doesn’t support these conversations,” and a depressingly high proportion—61 percent—also say they fear being judged. Thirty-three percent think it’s not relevant to discuss the matter at work, which is their prerogative of course, but a worrying 18 percent say they don’t trust HR—possibly implying they feel the HR department will somehow use this information against them in the future. As the report notes, this experience has bigger implications, including on workers’ mental health, since “a culture of silence and stigma leaves many midlife working women managing serious symptoms without support.”
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
Why should you care about this?
You may feel that your open, friendly company culture means yours is an organization where a female employee experiencing menopause feels accepted and supported. But the data show that this might not be true, and that many women may be holding back on talking about their menopause or partly hiding the impact it’s actually having on them. Talking to your staff to make it clear that you will support them through the process may go a long way to boosting the morale of menopausal workers, and it also shows that you’re an inclusive, compassionate leader—characteristics that may help lift workforce morale.
The LiveCareer data also shows that nearly one in three women experiencing menopause have thought about changing their jobs or dialing back on working hours. This clearly has implications for their employers, who would have to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of recruiting to replace that role, or at least shuffle resources to cover someone who’s dialing back on hours worked.
Dan Simons, co-owner of the Founding Farmers Restaurant Group, a medium-sized D.C.-based company, recently landed his company in the spotlight for the right reasons when he explained that he encouraged workers to talk about mental health. “If you can leave your problems at the door, then I can presume you must be able to leave your left leg at the door,” Simons said, highlighting a certain hypocrisy in some workplace cultures. “I just don’t believe people can truly separate parts of themselves, nor should they, nor is it the most productive way to live,” he said.
Many founders and CEOs are known for their high-octane morning routines. Not Jeff Bezos. The founder spends the first hours of his day “puttering.”
“I like to read the newspaper, I like to have coffee, I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school. Puttering time is very important to me,” Bezos explained back in 2018. According to his wife Lauren Sanchez, his mornings still focus on slow, offline puttering today.
Sipping your coffee while catching up on the news sounds pleasant. But Bezos doesn’t just putter around in the mornings because he’s a billionaire who can do what he pleases. In the same interview he explains that his relaxed morning routine helps him clear and center his mind so he can make high-quality decisions during the day.
To the productivity obsessed, puttering might sound like the opposite of focused effectiveness. But psychology insists Bezos is on to something. Puttering, by definition, may be aimless and small in scale. But science is clear it can also help our brains work at their best.
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
Puttering as mindfulness
The hectic modern world means most of us spend a large portion of our time ticking through a never-ending to-do list. This frantic turning of the mental wheels can be productive. But it doesn’t leave much room for reflection, creativity, or a simple appreciation of the small pleasures of the present moment.
Wandering around doing this and that, on the other hand, acts as a form of mindfulness. It turns off the churn in our brains for a bit, leaving space for ideas and even contentment to bubble up.
“Puttering is a gesture of respect from our brains to our physical selves. It’s not about thinking, or reading, or producing. Instead, we take on ‘mindless tasks’ that need only the most minimal participation of the brain. We acknowledge our surroundings, consider what makes us comfortable, and tend to those things, however aimlessly,” explains author Sophia Dembling in Psychology Today.
We grit our teeth through housework drudgery. Puttering, in contrast, is a series of low stakes wins we do for the sheer satisfaction they bring. Our attention is on the task as we do it. This present focus quiets the mind in a way that is “deeply therapeutic,” Dembling insists.
Set “free from all constraints, my brain meandered at its own pace and in its own way, unclenching and creating space through which fresh ideas wafted. It was relaxing, refreshing, and rejuvenating,” she writes of her own puttering.
Research supports Jeff Bezos
Studies agree with her (and Jeff Bezos) that puttering is a low-key but effective way to center yourself.
For one, researchers explained to volunteers that doing the dishes could act as a form of mindfulness if they simply focused on the sensory details of the task, the warmth of the bubbly water, the gleam of a clean plate. Afterwards, subjects reported that six minutes of this everyday chore reduced their nervousness by 27 percent and increased their inspiration by 25 percent.
Puttering, it turns out, is a state of mind, a way of approaching whatever minor job is in front of us. When we tackle these tasks in this unhurried way we gain some of the same calming, creativity-boosting effects as other more formal mindfulness practices, like meditation.
Perhaps that’s why, at least as late as 2014, Jeff Bezos also still claimed to wash the dishes himself every night.
Puttering as anti-anxiety intervention
“Puttering has to do with cleaning and organizing; but it isn’t those things. You begin by identifying an itch in your personal space: something like a jar that has a lot of different types of things in it, or a shelf of plates where you can see a layer of dust underneath everything,” cartoonist Sophie Lucido Johnson wrote in an ode to her husband’s gift for puttering on Medium.
One of the great pleasures of puttering, she continues, is the joy of scratching those itches. That ability to right a minor wrong, to remind yourself that you can be effective in the world, is another science-backed benefit of Bezos-style puttering.
“Unlike other distracting activities – such as playing computer games or watching trashy TV – puttering also has the advantage of being proactive and useful, increasing our ‘perceived control,’” explains the BBC. The small shot of agency when you organize the junk drawer, say, reduces physical markers of stress in the body, it reports.
“In general, you see much greater brain activity as you increase the number of distracting objects within a scene,” the BBC also notes. “This may lead your brain to tire so that it struggles to maintain its focus over long periods of concentration.”
If Jeff Bezos makes time to putter, so can you
Take all this together and you have strong evidence that Jeff Bezos isn’t just enjoying his life when he’s puttering around each morning. (Though he’s probably doing that too, which is a perfectly excellent goal.) He’s also practicing a low-key, practical form of mindfulness that helps to reset and prepare his brain for the day to come.
If a titan of industry like Bezos can justify spending time puttering each day, certainly you can give yourself permission to putter too. Your brain will probably thank you.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
DUNEDIN, Fla. — One in five kids will be bullied in school, and of those kids, close to half think it will happen to them again.
What You Need To Know
Children’s Home Network’s Pinellas Support Team (PST) helps kids facing behavioral, learning, or social challenges both at home and at school
This year, PST saw a big increase in kids being referred by schools, and they asked for more funding
Children’s Home Network provides this service for free with licensed therapists and tutors who work together to help both the children and parents
It’s a short-term program that steps in for struggling kids for up to three months of services, but if they need more help, they contract out with other organizations in the area to get the children continued support
Students like 12-year-old Elwood Rogers, who is in the sixth grade.
Last school year was very tough for him.
“In fifth grade, kids started calling me more names, and some of them almost put their hands on me if I didn’t run away from them quick enough,” said Rogers.
Rogers was bullied. He is autistic, and it got so bad his mom, Amy Wright, reached out to teachers.
“You don’t want to hear this type of stuff going on, you know, and it breaks your heart and you think, ‘Gosh, what else can you do?’” said Wright. “You think, ‘Should I change schools or whatever?’”
Wright said administrators did step in, suggesting Rogers and those involved receive mental health counseling through the Pinellas Support Team (PST).
“So we provide in-home and in-school services for kids who are having behavioral and emotional issues,” said Carol Hajdinak, a community counseling programs director at the Children’s Home Network.
PST connected Rogers with a licensed clinical social worker, Ginger Wells.
Rogers admits that at first, the thought of therapy didn’t sit well with him.
“I honestly thought it was going to be like an invasion of personal space,” said Rogers. “But then when the whole thing actually started, I thought it was more fun than I could have ever imagined.”
Elwood Rogers and his mom, Amy Wright. (Spectrum News/Erin Murray)
Over cards and other games, Wells and Rogers talked about the bullying that Rogers was experiencing.
“Some of the things that we worked on was learning how to express himself appropriately, using language that is appropriate and won’t get him in trouble and then also seeking help if it’s beyond his ability to handle himself,” said Wells.
The PST program is not new — it’s been around for 20 years helping Pinellas County kids.
“We’re funded to provide services to 250 kids a year,” said Hajdinak.
She added that this year the PST program was inundated with bullying referrals to the point kids were on a waiting list.
The PST program organizers turned to the Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County, which funds the program.
Hajdinak said they asked to expand the program from 250 to 300 kids.
“They were gracious enough to provide us some additional funds so that we didn’t have long waiting lists of like, 35 people waiting for services,” said Hajdinak. “Currently, we still have some on the waiting list.”
Rogers is a success story to a problem that is not going away.
“I’d say, you know, I don’t know the exact statistic, but I say the vast majority of kids that I work with at some point have experienced bullying,” said Wells.
For Rogers, therapy has worked tremendously.
“You shouldn’t let these other people define who you are. You need to be who you need to be,” said Rogers. “If other people don’t like you, womp womp, too bad. Too bad. It’s not my fault that I’m who I am. I’m not changing myself for you. Womp, womp.”
A new mantra for Rogers: “Womp, womp.” It is his way of putting bullying in its place.
The Pinellas Support Team services are short term, helping kids for three months.
The Children’s Home Network says it is also meant to help families without health insurance, or those who have barriers to obtain needed services, like a high co-pay.
San Jose continues to fail to improve animal shelter services to the community.
A scathing city audit of one year ago has failed to deliver measurable results. The city still fails to provide low-cost public spay and neuter, nor is outreach to rescue groups or trap-neuter-return a priority. The San Jose animal welfare community continues to be ignored.
In response to a number of ethics complaints that I filed regarding staff who have mismanaged SJACC, I was told by a deputy city manager that the “city is experiencing increased communication and complaints from you that is distracting staff from important work.”
This “Ivory Tower” attitude of entitlement, lack of ownership and accountability by city leaders funded by taxpayer money is clearly troubling — especially given that the budget for SJACS has increased to $17.5 million while performance and services have declined.
On this last No Kings Day, we stood along El Camino Real, a few yards from an inflated brown bear holding a “Resist” sign. During our time at the curb, at least half a dozen protesters in frog costumes passed behind us.
That evening, we joined a march through downtown Palo Alto led by a penguin, under the benevolent eye of an inflated frog who bounced at the edge of each crosswalk as we passed.
Later, I realized: On the first No Kings Day in June, the left reclaimed the American flag as a symbol of our commitment to democracy. Last Saturday, we reclaimed the frog as a symbol of life and joy, a counter to the alt-right’s misappropriation of Pepe as a racist meme.
Susan Luttner Palo Alto
Students shouldn’t worry about ICE raids
It is heartbreaking to see the pain and suffering so many families are experiencing. People are forced to live in constant fear that they won’t make it home to their families after a long day of underpaid work.
Despite having worked their whole lives and being positive members of our community, they are labeled as illegal aliens and criminals. So many Latino students are faced with even more anxiety and stress as they are forced to prepare in case their parents are deported. Children who have parents who have been deported are also at risk of developing depression and not doing well academically.
Students should be able to focus on school without having to worry about themselves or their family members being deported. Immigrants pay taxes even though they are not eligible to receive any benefits. Immigrants are an essential part of our society.
Wendy Martinez San Jose
Colleges must increase mental health services
College can be one of the most exciting yet most challenging times in a young person’s life. Between academic pressure, financial stress and the transition to adulthood, many students quietly struggle with anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges. Unfortunately, on many campuses, the demand for counseling services far exceeds the number of available counselors.
Adding more counselors, peer-support programs and wellness activities such as mindfulness workshops, stress-relief events or support groups can make a real difference. These don’t just help students in crisis; they also promote emotional resilience and well-being.
No students should have to wait weeks for an appointment when they’re struggling. By expanding counseling staff and providing accessible mental health programs, colleges can show that they truly care about their students’ success — both academically and personally.
Mireya Ramirez San Jose
Speak up to stop Trump’s wrecking ball
The wrecking ball is in full swing.
Aid to starving countries from USAID is gone; convicted criminals serving their full sentence is gone; civil discourse is gone; the dignified Oval Office is gone, replaced with ostentatious gold everywhere; the East Wing of the White House is gone. The list goes on and on. Will the freedom we all cherish be next?
It’s not about America first. It’s about Donald Trump first; always has been and always will be. These are sad times for America. Only we can stop the wrecking ball. Make your voice heard and vote.
Pat Toby San Jose
Trump’s future plans bode ill for Democrats
The Trump administration, having already commenced the process of desensitizing Americans to military presence in major cities, possibly in preparation for declaring martial law in the event that other measures fail to keep them in power, is perhaps now doing the same, foreshadowing the domestic use of lethality against opponents.
They strategically selected a most unsympathetic group, “foreign drug traffickers,” labeling them as “terrorists” justifying “armed conflict” to creatively legitimize lethal attack and commence the desensitization process for making it acceptable to kill anyone they desire to label as a “terrorist” with no proffered legitimate evidence, oversight or accountability. Thus far, the president’s domestic critics have only been subject to punitive attacks by government agencies, including the Department of Justice, funding elimination and civil suits. But it is noteworthy that Stephen Miller, one of the administration’s top white supremacist henchmen, has ominously described the Democratic Party as fomenting left-wing domestic “terrorism.”
Nearly a million pregnancies end in miscarriage in the U.S. every year. And yet, most companies offer no bereavement leave for this kind of loss. Millions of individuals and families face this grief with no formal acknowledgment from their employers.
As a father, I know the depth of love and responsibility parents feel from the very beginning. And throughout my career, I’ve seen colleagues, employees, and friends struggle in silence after pregnancy and infant loss. These experiences shouldn’t be met with silence. They should be met with care.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen growing awareness among employers that loss takes many forms, and that traditional bereavement policies often don’t reflect that reality. Historically, bereavement policies were designed to allow employees to make funeral arrangements. Today, more leaders are recognizing that grief is not only a logistical issue, and that employees need time and support to process profound loss.
Support For pregnancy loss
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
Yet one area remains largely unaddressed: pregnancy loss. For many families, miscarriage or stillbirth brings deep grief that is rarely acknowledged in the workplace. SHRM’s 2024 Employee Benefits Survey found that while 91 percent of employers offer some form of paid bereavement leave, only 39 percent of those include coverage of pregnancy loss, failed surrogacy, or failed adoption. Without recognition or support, the grief from these events often leads to isolation, disengagement, and even attrition.
Today, very few states mandate pregnancy-loss bereavement leave. Among them are California and Illinois, which have recently amended their laws to explicitly include miscarriages and other reproductive losses. But in most states, this kind of leave remains voluntary.
For Hope, a 37-year-old benefits analyst, pregnancy loss was both physically grueling and emotionally isolating. “When I miscarried while on vacation, I felt terrified and alone,” she shared with us. “Having someone compassionate to talk to made all the difference.”
Later, after experiencing a second loss, she reflected on how little acknowledgment many parents receive at work. “Pregnancy loss is a unique kind of grief,” she explained. “I felt bonded with my babies even before the world recognized them, and when that bond was suddenly broken, it left me feeling alone.”
Now, she shares her story to help others feel seen. “I’m proud to speak openly because miscarriage is too often silenced,” she said. “By talking about it, I hope to make it easier for other parents to find support.”
Stories like Hope’s remind us that grief doesn’t fit neatly into policy categories, and that true workplace care means recognizing the many forms loss can take.
Pregnancy loss in the workplace
Jessica Zucker, PhD, a psychologist internationally recognized for her pioneering work in reproductive mental health and founder of the #IHadaMiscarriage campaign, has long advocated for greater acknowledgment of pregnancy loss in professional settings. In her work with us, she shared: “Support for this ubiquitous experience is not optional: When workplaces fail to respond, people leave jobs, cultures weaken, and silence, stigma, and shame persist. But when employers acknowledge grief and provide evidence-based resources, they build trust and resilience across the entire organization.”
When companies acknowledge pregnancy loss as a legitimate reason for leave, they’re not just checking a box; they’re reinforcing a culture of compassion and trust. Research from The Grief Tax 2025 report shows that nearly 80 percent of bereaved employees considered quitting and over 75 percent feared losing their job after a loss, with work-related impacts lasting an average of 16 months—evidence that meaningful support can make a lasting difference. Meanwhile, a McKinsey & Company analysis estimates that unresolved grief costs U.S. businesses more than $75 billion each year in lost productivity.
Expand employer support
Some forward-thinking organizations have already begun expanding their policies to reflect this reality. They’re increasing bereavement days, broadening eligibility to include chosen family, and explicitly covering pregnancy and infant loss. It’s a quiet but profound shift in how we define care at work.
At Empathy, we’ve seen this shift firsthand. Our platform was built to help families navigate loss with compassion and clarity, addressing both the emotional and practical burdens that accompany it. And this past month, we expanded our loss support offering to include dedicated pregnancy loss support, ensuring that parents facing reproductive loss have access to expert guidance and care tailored to their experience.
My hope is that through Empathy’s loss support and similar offerings, and the efforts of advocates like Jessica Zucker to destigmatize this issue, we will see more people moving forward after these types of losses, with their employers’ support.
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month and it’s timely to think about expanding bereavement, not just for just policy reform. But because it’s a chance to show employees they matter when it matters most. For families, it offers validation. For companies, it builds cultures of resilience. For all of us, it is simply the right thing to do.
HAVERHILL — A petition with nearly 1,200 signatures from concerned residents and property owners is calling to stop a proposed 24-bed men’s substance use and mental health facility from moving into the neighborhood.
The petition, posted on Change.org and titled “Stop Riverbend House from coming into our neighborhood,” urges Haverhill residents to oppose Riverbend’s plan to open the “Bradford House” at 11 Kingsbury Ave.
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Louise Matsakis: Oh God, you would not see me in the office for weeks if there was a bedbug infestation. How did they find out about this?
Zoë Schiffer: So basically, they received this email on Sunday, saying that exterminators had arrived at the scene with sniffer dogs and “found credible evidence of their presence.” There, being the bedbugs. Sources tell WIRED that Google’s offices in New York are home to a number of large stuffed animals, and there was definitely a rumor going around among employees that these stuffed animals were implicated in the outbreak. We were not able to verify this information before we published, but in any case, the company told employees as early as Monday morning that they could come back to the office. And people like you, Louise, were really not happy about this. They were like, “I’m not sure that it’s totally clean here.” That’s why they were in our inboxes wanting to chat.
Louise Matsakis: Can I just say that if you have photos or a description of said large stuffed animals, please get in touch with me and Zoë. Thank you.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes. This is a cry for help. I thought the best part of this is when I gave Louise my draft, she was like, “Wait, this has happened before.” And pulled up a 2010 article about a bedbug outbreak at the Google offices in New York.
Louise Matsakis: Yes. This is not the first time, which is heartbreaking.
Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we dive into why some people have been submitting complaints to the FTC about ChatGPT in their minds, leading them to AI psychosis. Stay with us.
Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer. I’m joined today by WIRED’s Louise Matsakis. Let’s dive into our main story this week. The Federal Trade Commission has received 200 complaints mentioning OpenAI’s ChatGPT between November 2022 when it launched, and August 2025. Most people had normal complaints. They couldn’t figure out how to cancel their subscription or they were frustrated by unsatisfactory or inaccurate answers by the chatbot. But among these complaints, our colleague, Caroline Haskins, found that several people attributed delusions, paranoia, and spiritual crisis to the chatbot.
Having a “normal” cholesterol level in a society where it’s normal to die from a heart attack isn’t necessarily a good thing.
“Consistent evidence” from a variety of sources “unequivocally establishes” that so-called bad LDL cholesterol causes atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease—strokes and heart attacks, our leading cause of death. This evidence base includes hundreds of studies involving millions of people. “Cholesterol is the cause of atherosclerosis,” the hardening of the arteries, and “the message is loud and clear.” “It’s the Cholesterol, Stupid!” noted the editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, William Clifford Roberts, whose CV is more than 100 pages long as he has published about 1,700 articles in peer-reviewed medical literature. Yes, there are at least ten traditional risk factors for atherosclerosis, as seen below and at 1:11 in my videoHow Low Should You Go for Ideal LDL Cholesterol?, but, as Dr. Roberts noted, only one is required for the progression of the disease: elevated cholesterol.
Your doctor may have just told you that your cholesterol is normal, so you’re relieved. Thank goodness! But, having a “normal” cholesterol level in a society where it’s normal to have a fatal heart attack isn’t necessarily good. With heart disease, the number one killer of men and women, we definitely don’t want to have normal cholesterol levels; we want to have optimal levels—and not optimal by current laboratory standards, but optimal for human health.
Normal LDL cholesterol levels are associated with the hidden buildup of atherosclerotic plaques in our arteries, even in those who have so-called “optimal risk factors by current standards”: blood pressure under 120/80, normal blood sugars, and total cholesterol under 200 mg/dL. If you went to your doctor with those kinds of numbers, you’d likely get a gold star and a lollipop. But, if your doctor used ultrasound and CT scans to actually peek inside your body, atherosclerotic plaques would be detected in about 38% of individuals with those kinds of “optimal” numbers.
Maybe we should define an LDL cholesterol level as optimal only when it no longer causes disease. What a concept! When more than a thousand men and women in their 40s were scanned, having an LDL level under 130 mg/dL left them with atherosclerosis throughout their body, and that’s a cholesterol level at which most lab tests would consider normal.
In fact, atherosclerotic plaques were not found with LDL levels down around 50 or 60, which just so happens to be the levels most people had “before the introduction of western lifestyles.” Indeed, before we started eating a typical American diet, “the majority of the adult population of the world had LDLs of around 50 mg per deciliter (mg/dL)”—so that’s the true normal. “Present average values…should not be regarded as ‘normal.’” We don’t want to have a normal cholesterol based on a sick society; we want a cholesterol that is normal for the human species, which may be down around 30 to 70 mg/dL or 0.8 to 1.8 mmol/L.
“Although an LDL level of 50 to 70 mg/dl seems excessively low by modern American standards, it is precisely the normal range for individuals living the lifestyle and eating the diet for which we are genetically adapted.” Over millions of years, “through the evolution of the ancestors of man,” we’ve consumed a diet centered around whole plant foods. No wonder we have a killer epidemic of atherosclerosis, given the LDL level “we were ‘genetically designed for’ is less than half of what is presently considered ‘normal.’”
In medicine, “there is an inappropriate tendency to accept small changes in reversible risk factors,” but “the goal is not to decrease risk but to prevent atherosclerotic plaques!” So, how low should you go? “In light of the latest evidence from trials exploring the benefits and risks of profound LDLc lowering, the answer to the question ‘How low do you go?’ is, arguably, a straightforward ‘As low as you can!’” “‘Lower’ may indeed be better,” but if you’re going to do it with drugs, then you have to balance that with the risk of the drug’s side effects.
Why don’t we just drug everyone with statins, by putting them in the water supply, for instance? Although it would be great if everyone’s cholesterol were lower, there are the countervailing risks of the drugs. So, doctors aim to use statin drugs at the highest dose possible, achieving the largest LDL cholesterol reduction possible without increasing risk of the muscle damage the drugs may cause. But when you’re using lifestyle changes to bring down your cholesterol, all you get are the benefits.
Can we get our LDL low enough with diet alone? Ask some of the country’s top cholesterol experts what they shoot for, “and the odds are good that many will say 70 or so.” So, yes, we should try to avoid the saturated fats and trans fats found in junk foods and meat, and the dietary cholesterol found mostly in eggs, but “it is unlikely anyone can achieve an LDL cholesterol level of 70 mg/dL with a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet alone.” Really? Many doctors have this mistaken impression. An LDL of 70 isn’t only possible on a healthy enough diet, but it may be normal. Those eating strictly plant-based diets can average an LDL that low, as you can see here and at 5:28 in my video.
No wonder plant-based diets are the only dietary patterns ever proven to reverse coronary heart disease in a majority of patients. And their side effects? You get to feel better, too! Several randomized clinical trials have demonstrated that more plant-based dietary patterns significantly improve psychological well-being and quality of life, with improvements in depression, anxiety, emotional well-being, physical well-being, and general health.
For more on cholesterol, see the related posts below.
Fewer Fairfax County students have reported mental health concerns since the peak of the pandemic, but there are still lingering worries about student wellness and bullying.
Fewer Fairfax County students in Virginia have reported mental health concerns since the peak of the pandemic — but there are still lingering worries about student wellness and bullying.
For one, mental health indicators, such as levels of stress, prolonged feelings of sadness or hopelessness and suicidal ideation and attempts improved among eighth, 10th and 12th graders last year. Those factors have continued to improve since 2021, Reid said, and reached their lowest levels in the last decade.
Seventeen percent of eighth, 10th and 12th graders reported constant stress, according to survey data, and 22% reported feeling sad or hopeless for two or more weeks in a row, which is down from 25% in 2023, 29% in 2022 and 38% in 2021.
“This is full of very, very good news,” Board member Robyn Lady said. “It’s post-COVID. Our kids are, I’m hoping, learning to live in discomfort a little better and understand that … we don’t get up every morning and we’re jazzed about everything that’s going to happen in that day.”
However, Reid said, female students, nonbinary students, LGBTQ students and those who are from food-insecure homes reported higher rates of depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts compared to other students.
“We still have work to do in providing that safe space for many of our students,” Reid said.
Counseling staff and school leaders are working on making sure school environments are safe, supportive and welcoming, Reid said, but “there’s a great deal of external rhetoric right now around topics that create feelings of a lack of safety, particularly for our transgender and nonbinary students.”
Because mental health concerns are often reported in middle school, Reid said the district has tried to be proactive, by offering things like new middle school sports teams. Staff members also get trained in recognizing the signs of suicidal ideation and risky behavior.
Reported rates of students using alcohol and substances was the lowest since 2018, Reid said, including for use of alcohol, marijuana, tobacco and vaping.
One out of 10 eighth, 10th and 12th graders reported getting bullied on a school campus in the last year, similar to the rate reported in 2023, Reid said. Younger students were more likely to report being bullied than older kids.
“We have work to do in this area,” Reid said.
The youth survey is voluntary and given to eighth, 10th and 12th graders. Last year, almost 30,000 students took it. A different version that’s also optional is given to sixth grade students.
“This is always a bittersweet report to read, because there’s positive movement in many directions,” Board member Kyle McDaniel said. “But until we get to zero, it’s not enough.”
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Being CEO has its many perks: Business leaders get to command the world’s most powerful companies, shape their legacies as pioneers of industry, and enjoy hefty billion-dollar paychecks. But in the steep climb up the corporate ladder, many won’t notice all the peers left behind until they’re looking down from the very top. It can be a lonely, solitary job.
Leaders at some of the world’s largest companies—from Airbnb and UPS to PepsiCo and Apple—are finally opening up about the mental toll that comes with the job. As it turns out, many industry trailblazers are grappling with intense loneliness; at least 40% of executives are thinking of leaving their job, mainly because they’re lacking energy and feel alone in handling daily challenges, according to a Harvard Medical School professor. And the number could even be higher: About 70% of C-suite leaders “are seriously considering quitting for a job that better supports their well-being,” according to a 2022 Deloitte study.
To ward off feelings of isolation, founders and top executives are stepping outside of the office to focus on improving their well-being. Toms founder Blake Mycoskie struggled with depression and loneliness after scaling his once-small shoe business into a billion-dollar behemoth. Feeling disconnected from his life’s purpose and that his “reason for being now felt like a job,” he went on a three-day men’s retreat to work on his mental health. And Seth Berkowitz, the founder and CEO of $350 million dessert giant Insomnia Cookies, cautions bright-eyed entrepreneurs the gig “is not really for everyone.”
“It can be lonely; it’s a solitary life. It really is,” Berkowitz recently toldFortune.
Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO of Airbnb
Eugene Gologursky / Stringer / Getty Images
Airbnb’s cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky is one the most outspoken leaders in the business world waving the red flag on loneliness. Chesky described having a lonely childhood, pulled between his love for creative design and sports, never really fitting in. But his mental health took a turn for the worse once assuming the throne as Airbnb’s CEO. His other two cofounders—who he called his “family,” spending all their waking hours working, exercising, and hanging out together—were suddenly out of view from the peak of the C-suite.
“As I became a CEO I started leading from the front, at the top of the mountain, but then the higher you get to the peak, the fewer the people there are with you,” Chesky told Jay Shetty during an episode of the On Purpose podcast last year. “No one ever told me how lonely you would get, and I wasn’t prepared for that.”
Chesky recommends budding leaders actually share their power, so no one shoulders the mental burden of entrepreneurship alone.
“I think that ultimately, today, we’re probably living in one of the loneliest times in human history,” Chesky said. “If people were as lonely in yesteryear as they are today, they’d probably perish, because you just couldn’t survive without your tribe.”
Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo
Jemal Countess / Stringer / Getty Images
Leaders at Fortune 500 giant PepsiCo face constant pressure from consumers, investors, board members, and their own employees. But it’s also tough to vent to peers who may not relate to—or even understand—the trials and tribulations of running a $209 billion company. Indra Nooyi, the business’ former CEO, said she often felt isolated with no one to confide in.
“You can’t really talk to your spouse all the time. You can’t talk to your friends because it’s confidential stuff about the company. You can’t talk to your board because they are your bosses. You can’t talk to people who work for you because they work for you,” Nooyi toldKellogg Insight, the research magazine for Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management,earlier this year. “And so it puts you in a fairly lonely position.”
Instead of divulging to a trusted friend or anonymously airing out her frustrations on Reddit, Nooyi looked inward. She was the only person she could trust, even if that meant embracing the isolation.
“I would talk to myself. I would go look at myself in a mirror. I would talk to myself. I would rage at myself. I would shed a few tears, then put on some lipstick and come out,” Nooyi said. “That was my go-to because all people need an outlet. And you have to be very careful who your outlet is because you never want them to use it against you at any point.”
Carol Tomé, CEO of UPS
Kevin Dietsch / Staff / Getty Images
Before Carol Tomé stepped into the role of the CEO of UPS, she was warned the top job goes hand-in-hand with loneliness. The word of caution didn’t phase her—at least, not at first. But things changed when she actually took the helm of the $75 billion shipping company.
“I would say, ‘How lonely can it really be? It can’t be that lonely?’ What I’ve since learned is that it is extraordinarily lonely,” Tomé toldFortune last year.
“When you are a member of an executive team, you hang together…Now, my executive team will wait for me to leave a meeting so that they can debrief together. It’s the reality and you have to get used to it. But it is super lonely.”
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images
Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t immune to the loneliness that often comes with the corner office. More than 14 years into his tenure, he’s acknowledged his missteps, which he called “blind spots,” that have the potential to affect thousands of workers across the company if left unchecked. Cook said it’s important for leaders to get out of their own heads and surround themselves with bright people who bring out the best in them.
“It’s sort of a lonely job,” Cook toldThe Washington Post in 2016. “The adage that it’s lonely—the CEO job is lonely—is accurate in a lot of ways. I’m not looking for any sympathy.”
Seth Berkowitz, founder and CEO of Insomnia Cookies
Courtesy of Insomnia Cookies
Entrepreneurship can be a deeply fulfilling and rewarding journey: an opportunity to trade a nine-to-five job for a multimillion-dollar fortune, if all the right conditions are met. And while Insomnia Cookies’ Seth Berkowitz loves being a CEO and all the responsibilities that come with it, he cautioned young hopefuls about the weight of the career. He, like Cook, advises aspiring founders to counter loneliness with genuine, meaningful connections.
“It can be lonely; it’s a solitary life. It really is. [During] the harder times, it’s very solitary—finding camaraderie, mentorship, some sense of community, it’s really important,” Berkowitz recently toldFortune. “Because I go so deep, it’s sometimes hard to find others and let them in.”
Congress funded the mental health program after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The grants were intended to help schools hire more counselors, psychologists and social workers, with a focus on rural and underserved areas of the country. But President Donald Trump’s administration opposed diversity considerations used to award the grants and told recipients they wouldn’t receive funding past December 2025.
The preliminary ruling by Kymberly K. Evanson, a U.S. District Court judge in Seattle, applies only to some grantees in the sixteen Democratic-led states that challenged the Education Department’s decision. In Madera County, California, for example, the ruling restores roughly $3.8 million. In Marin County, California, it restores $8 million. The ruling will remain in effect while the case proceeds.
The Education Department under Democratic President Joe Biden first awarded the grants. Biden’s administration prioritized giving the money to applicants who showed how they would increase the number of counselors from diverse backgrounds or from communities directly served by the school district.
When Trump took office, his administration opposed aspects of the grant programs that touched on race, saying they were harmful to students. In April, his administration said the grants were canceled because they conflicted with the department’s priority of “merit, fairness, and excellence in education” and weren’t in the federal government’s best interest.
In her ruling, Evanson called that decision arbitrary and capricious and said the states had made a case for real harm from the grant cuts. In Maine, for example, the grants enabled nine rural school districts to hire 10 new school mental health workers and retain four more — jobs the state said would be lost if the funding ended.
“Congress created these programs to address the states’ need for school-based mental health services in their schools, and has repeatedly reaffirmed the need for those services over the years by reauthorizing and increasing appropriations to these programs,” Evanson wrote.
“There is no evidence the Department considered any relevant data pertaining to the Grants at issue,” she wrote, and the department did not tell grantees why their work didn’t meet the “best interest” criteria.
An Education Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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OpenAI claims that 10% of the world’s population currently uses ChatGPT on a weekly basis. In a report published by on Monday, OpenAI highlights how it is handling users displaying signs of mental distress and the company claims that 0.07% of its weekly users display signs of “mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania,” 0.15% expressed risk of “self-harm or suicide,” and 0.15% showed signs of “emotional reliance on AI.” That totals nearly three million people.
In its ongoing effort to show that it is trying to improve guardrails for users who are in distress, OpenAI shared the details of its work with 170 mental health experts to improve how ChatGPT responds to people in need of support. The company claims to have reduced “responses that fall short of our desired behavior by 65-80%,” and now is better at de-escalating conversations and guiding people toward professional care and crisis hotlines when relevant. It also has added more “gentle reminders” to take breaks during long sessions. Of course, it cannot make a user contact support nor will it lock access to force a break.
The company also released data on how frequently people are experiencing mental health issues while communicating with ChatGPT, ostensibly to highlight how small of a percentage of overall usage those conversations account for. According to the company’s metrics, “0.07% of users active in a given week and 0.01% of messages indicate possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania.” That is about 560,000 people per week, assuming the company’s own user count is correct. The company also claimed to handle about 18 billion messages to ChatGPT on a weekly basis, so that 0.01% equates to 1.8 million messages of psychosis or mania.
One of the company’s other major areas of emphasis for safety was improving its responses to users expressing desires to self-harm or commit suicide. According to OpenAI’s data, about 0.15% of users per week express “explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent,” accounting for 0.05% of messages. That would equal about 1.2 million people and nine million messages.
The final area the company focused on as it sought to improve its responses to mental health matters was emotional reliance on AI. OpenAI estimated that about 0.15% of users and 0.03% of messages per week “indicate potentially heightened levels of emotional attachment to ChatGPT.” That is 1.2 million people and 5.4 million messages.
OpenAI has taken steps in recent months to try to provide better guardrails to protect against the potential that its chatbot enables or worsens a person’s mental health challenges, following the death of a 16-year-old who, according to a wrongful death lawsuit from the parents of the late teen, asked ChatGPT for advice on how to tie a noose before taking his own life. But the sincerity of that is worth questioning, given at the same time the company announced new, more restrictive chats for underage users, it also announced that it would allow adults to give ChatGPT more of a personality and engage in things like producing erotica—features that would seemingly increase a person’s emotional attachment and reliance on the chatbot.
For the first time ever, OpenAI has released a rough estimate of how many ChatGPT users globally may show signs of having a severe mental health crisis in a typical week. The company said Monday that it worked with experts around the world to make updates to the chatbot so it can more reliably recognize indicators of mental distress and guide users toward real-world support.
In recent months, a growing number of people have ended up hospitalized, divorced, or dead after having long, intense conversations with ChatGPT. Some of their loved ones allege the chatbot fueled their delusions and paranoia. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have expressed alarm about the phenomenon, which is sometimes referred to as “AI psychosis,” but until now, there’s been no robust data available on how widespread it might be.
In a given week, OpenAI estimated that around .07 percent of active ChatGPT users show “possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania” and .15 percent “have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.”
OpenAI also looked at the share of ChatGPT users who appear to be overly emotionally reliant on the chatbot “at the expense of real-world relationships, their well-being, or obligations.” It found that about .15 percent of active users exhibit behavior that indicates potential “heightened levels” of emotional attachment to ChatGPT weekly. The company cautions that these messages can be difficult to detect and measure given how relatively rare they are, and there could be some overlap between the three categories.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month that ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly active users. The company’s estimates therefore suggest that every seven days, around 560,000 people may be exchanging messages with ChatGPT that indicate they are experiencing mania or psychosis. About 2.4 million more are possibly expressing suicidal ideations or prioritizing talking to ChatGPT over their loved ones, school, or work.
OpenAI says it worked with over 170 psychiatrists, psychologists, and primary care physicians who have practiced in dozens of different countries to help improve how ChatGPT responds in conversations involving serious mental health risks. If someone appears to be having delusional thoughts, the latest version of GPT-5 is designed to express empathy while avoiding affirming beliefs that don’t have basis in reality.
In one hypothetical example cited by OpenAI, a user tells ChatGPT they are being targeted by planes flying over their house. ChatGPT thanks the user for sharing their feelings, but notes that “No aircraft or outside force can steal or insert your thoughts.”
I grew up scared of everything: death, the dark, my own face in the bathroom mirror.
Eventually, I learned my bottomless fear belied several anxiety and anxiety-adjacent disorders that I’ve been addressing in adulthood with the help of therapy, medication, and an unlikely third salve: ravenous horror-film consumption.
Contagion got me through the first night of lockdown in 2020, and Daddy’s Head helped me unleash pent-up tears around the anniversary of my dad’s death. I felt my own unspeakable rage and grief mingle with the Graham family’s around the dinner table in Hereditary, and my hopelessness and meanness during a particularly bad period transmute into senseless murder across a breathtaking stretch of the Australian outback in Wolf Creek.
Though this kind of catharsis is counterintuitive, I’m far from the only one who relies on it.
Dark copers, as researchers have dubbed us, use “horror as an instrument with which to navigate a world that they perceive to be scary,” says Mathias Clasen, co-founder of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark. And we derive great enjoyment, self-discovery, and personal growth from this pursuit, according to the lab’s findings.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, their research shows that seeking out scares for sport—watching a horror film or visiting a haunted house, for example—is linked to greater resilience among adults and, when age-appropriate, a lower risk for childhood anxiety.
As humans, “we’re constantly forecasting,” Clasen says. “In a sense, horror is just like a formalized worst-case scenario that’s a very natural product of the way we cope.”
Why we seek out scares
Aside from the “dark coper” archetype coined by the lab, two other major categories identified through earlier research are “adrenaline junkies,” who are most motivated by the physiological arousal—the rush—they experience from a fun-scary activity and the subsequent mood boost, Clasen explains, and “white knucklers,” who muscle through not for the sensation during, but for the sense of accomplishment afterward.
Regardless of the motivation, “at the very core of recreational fear lies learning,” says Marc Malmdorf Andersen, the other co-founder of the Recreational Fear Lab. It’s an opportunity for people to engage with the fear part of our human “emotional palette” that many of us don’t experience in daily modern life. “By familiarizing yourself with those states, we believe that they essentially become more predictable” and less overwhelming, Andersen explains.
For people like me, turning to horror to quell anxiety may train our brains to better predict fear signals and suppress overwhelming physiological ones, says Andersen. Because anxiety can cause someone to overestimate a threat, or underestimate their ability to cope, watching horror films might help reset “the comparison that would say, ‘this is the worst,’” says Greg Siegle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh.
Separating fact from fiction
Despite its restorative effect on people like me, horror has a reputation for the opposite. Much of the concern around the impact of recreational fear-seeking—that it’ll traumatize or corrupt—amounts to little more than “folk belief” stemming from “a very long cultural history of being deeply suspicious of frightening mass-oriented entertainment” that then worked its way into early studies on the psychology of horror, says Clasen.
Victorian England, for example, saw much handwringing over “penny dreadfuls,” serially published sensationalist crime or horror stories. “In the minds of the concerned intellectuals,” the fans of such tales, who were often from the working classes, “would become criminals and sadistic and whatnot from reading these gory, blood-dripping stories,” Clasen says. Instead, they boosted literacy rates.
Similar moral panics flared in the U.S. in the 1950s, when comics, especially horror and crime varieties, were widely smeared for supposedly turning kids toward delinquency or homosexuality (then viewed as a mental disorder), and in the U.K. in the 1980s over “video nasties,” horror movies banned out of fear that they’d drive young people to violence.
In contrast to these baseless panics, horror can be a barometer of collective suffering—and a tool for processing it, says Adam Lowenstein, founding director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Horror Studies Center, which opened in September. “Some of our greatest waves of horror films have coincided with some of our most traumatic historical moments,” he explains, pointing to the classic monster movies that emerged during the Great Depression: Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941). With this year’s commercial hits like Sinners and Weapons, he says we’re in another “horror renaissance.”
Isn’t scary stuff traumatizing?
Clinically speaking, “fear” and “trauma” are distinct, says Siegle. The latter has a significant effect on someone’s long-term functioning and is a rare outcome from recreational fear. He cites a study he conducted with colleague and sociologist Margee Kerr that measured people’s brainwaves and reported emotions before and after going through a “fairly extreme” haunted house. “What they overwhelmingly said was that they liked it,” he says. “It was scary, to be sure, but it was exhilarating and positive and happy for them.”
Of course, people who voluntarily go through a haunted house are a self-selecting group, and trauma can occur when someone is subjected to something against their will or pushed past a limit. It’s why context and consent are an important part of a recreational fear experience, says Kerr, who also helps design haunted attractions. “You are agreeing to suspend your disbelief and enter into a new world but [know] in the background that you always have the ability to leave,” she says.
Staying in the scary sweet spot
To reap the most enjoyment from a frightening pursuit, it’s important to hit the “sweet spot” between too much and too little fear, according to the lab’s research. Storytelling can help.
If you’re in a haunted house, your brain may register that your palms are sweaty, your heart rate is high, and your breath is fast and shallow. The story you tell yourself in that moment plays a big part in determining whether you hightail it out of there—or venture to the next room to see what’s in store, says Siegle.
“We get our physiology, we get our basic reactions, and then the rest is our story, and what we do to interpret and use our reactions to this emotional information,” he explains. If you want to get the most out of scaring yourself, like I do, Siegle suggests telling yourself that you’re scared but excited and want to challenge yourself—and you’re not going to die from that jump scare. With the right narrative, turning toward the fear can help you “understand your own distress reaction,” he says, “and where you’re actually safer than you might have anticipated.”
I’m often impressed by the findings of scientific studies. But other times it’s the methods that wow me. That’s the case with recent research out of Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Oxford that asked: just how big a suck-up is ChatGPT, or other popular AI models?
Complaints that chat-based large language modelAI tools are all too willing to validate your opinions and cheer your every half-baked idea circulate regularly online. OpenAI even apologized when one of its models clearly went too far in this direction. But how can you objectively measure AI sycophancy?
For this new study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, researchers came up with a clever idea. They raided the popular “Am I the Asshole?” subreddit for around 4,000 stories of ethically dubious behavior. Then they compared how humans responded to these scenarios with responses from popular AI models from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
If you’re unfamiliar with the AITA format, the stories are a diverse slice of human conflict and misunderstanding. They range from roommates arguing over food to campers wondering if it’s OK to leave trash behind to neighbors feuding over pet poop. (I recommend a highly entertaining scan of examples here.)
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Here’s the researchers’ bottom-line finding after analyzing the posts, according to the MIT Technology Review: “Overall, all eight models were found to be far more sycophantic than humans, offering emotional validation in 76 percent of cases (versus 22 percent for humans) and accepting the way a user had framed the query in 90 percent of responses (versus 60 percent among humans).”
In cases where humans on Reddit said a poster had behaved badly, the AI disagreed 42 percent of the time. Explicitly instructing the AI models to provide direct advice, even if it’s critical, only improved their negative assessments by 3 percentage points.
Psychologists are worried about sycophantic AI
These results should come as a warning to anyone turning to ChatGPT to referee their fights or offer life advice (and there are many people doing this, according to recent research). It should also be of interest to those working to build the next generation of AI. Sycophancy might keep people coming back to these tools, but psychologists warn it also creates real dangers.
Even for those with their feet firmly planted on the ground, having AI constantly suck up to you is likely to be harmful. If you are never challenged or made uncomfortable, you will never grow.
“A relationship of any kind without friction or resistance is one-sided and ultimately unsatisfying, a narcissistic loop. We need to be challenged, tested, and left without clear answers or coherence. This allows for creativity and the seeds of individual thought,” writes psychotherapist Nicholas Balaisis on Psychology Today.
Social psychologist Alexander Danvers is concerned that AI’s tendency toward flattery could also drive further political polarization. Interacting with neighbors with another viewpoint might pop your information bubble but ChatGPT almost never will. It will just reinforce your worldview, no matter how flawed or incomplete.
Beware “the yes-man in your pocket”
Finally, and most immediately relevant for entrepreneurs and other leaders, is Danvers’s warning that having a “yes-man in your pocket” may cause us to get worse information and therefore make worse decisions.
“The problem with yes-men, as leaders often find, is that they prioritize friendliness and good feelings over truth. Spend enough time interacting with them, and you stop being able to make good decisions. Flaws in your thinking aren’t addressed. Important counterarguments are ignored. As chatbot use increases, we may be heading for a collapse of humility—and of common sense,” he cautions.
That’s not a fate any of us want, but it’s a concern we all now face. As the AITA research illustrates, AI will flatter and defend you—but it’s highly unlikely to inform you that you are, indeed, the asshole.
Although sometimes that’s just what we need to hear.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
A new study out this week might complicate the narrative over social media’s supposed draining effects on our mental health. It showed only a small correlation between social media use and poorer well-being—one that’s likely explained in part by our genes.
Researchers in the Netherlands examined data from thousands of twins. They found small associations between using social media more and having worse mental health, but also that these associations were often influenced by shared genetic factors. The findings suggest that social media may not be as universally harmful to our psychological well-being as commonly believed, the researchers say.
“Our research helps move the conversation away from simplistic claims that social media is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for everyone,” said lead author Selim Sametoglu, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in a statement from the institute. “We show that the effects are modest, and more importantly, at least partly shaped by individual genetic differences.”
The clarity of twin research
Twins are very valuable in science. Since they’re so genetically and often environmentally alike, it makes it easier for scientists to isolate the effects of people’s genetics on a specific trait, condition, or health outcome. If identical twins are more similar to each other in a particular way than are fraternal twins or siblings, for instance, then their genes are likely a big reason for that similarity.
In this new study, the researchers analyzed data from the Netherlands Twin Register, a long-running project keeping track of the mental and physical health of twins born in the area. As part of the project, twins and their families are asked various questions about their lives, including how often they use social media.
All told, they studied more than 6,000 twins, both identical and fraternal. For social media use, they counted the time spent browsing and posting on popular platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, outside of related activities like playing video games. They also tracked various measures of well-being, including whether people reported having anxiety and depression symptoms.
As with previous research on the topic, they found modest links between increased social media use and negative outcomes related to well-being. But upon closer inspection, a person’s genes seemed to play a big part in driving this link. People genetically inclined to spend more time on social media, for instance, might also be more genetically inclined to experience poorer mental health as a result of that time. The researchers estimated that genetics alone could account for 72% of the variation in how often people used social media.
Notably, they also found people with better well-being tended to browse a greater variety of social media platforms, whereas people with worse well-being tended to post more frequently across a smaller group of social media sites. And while most potential associations were mildly negative or non-existent, the researchers did find that higher social media use was associated with a greater sense of flourishing in their lives (someone feeling flourished might report being highly engaged and interested in their daily activities, as an example).
The team’s findings were published earlier this June in the journal Behavior Genetics.
What to think about your social media time
The authors say their work should add more nuance to the discussion over the purported harms of social media, and they further argue that broad actions to curtail social media use could be counterproductive in their own right.
“We shouldn’t let headlines like ‘social media is toxic’ distract us from what really matters: each person’s unique background and current state of life. Simply blaming social media use, or restricting access to platforms, won’t solve our well-being and mental health challenges. Instead, we need to focus on the individual—because genes, context, and support all matter,” Sametoglu said.
Personally, I’m of the mind that, like most things in life, a little moderation goes a long way. So while it’s good to know that my time on Reddit probably isn’t rotting my brain (too much), I’m still going to take regular breaks from doom-scrolling just the same.
