Fresh Air

How the killing of Jordan Neely on the NYC subway divided America

Jordan Neely had felt abandoned for a very long time and had reason to feel that way. By his own account, Daniel Penney would claim that he felt abandoned in terms of law enforcement not being there, and in terms of all the systems that had allowed Jordan Neely to be in that subway car in that condition instead of all the other conditions that he might have been in had there been a better system of care.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Sleep researchers have found that when we lie awake at night, ruminating about our problems, we're not actually solving them. We're just rehearsing them. The very effort we put into trying to sleep — or trying to solve our problems — can backfire, keeping us alert and awake.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

When people sleep poorly, they often blame themselves, thinking they should simply be able to fall asleep or stay asleep. But insomnia is often driven by hyperarousal — a state in which the brain and body are on high alert, making it physiologically difficult to sleep.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Most people think that sleep problems are caused by our minds—by worry, anxiety, or stress. But researcher Colleen Carney has found that many chronic insomniacs actually have a 24-hour problem, not merely an overnight one. The real issue, she says, is what we do during the day to cope with our poor sleep.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Most people think of sleeplessness as a problem to be solved — a deficit to be corrected. But the anxiety we feel about not sleeping can itself become the thing that keeps us awake, transforming a single bad night into a chronic condition.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Most people, when they can't sleep, do the very things that make their insomnia worse. They lie in bed trying to sleep — which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Fresh Air

After losing her sons, Yiyun Li learned to ‘suffer better’

Li's teenage sons both died by suicide six years apart, Vincent in 2017 at age 16, and James in 2024 at age 19. Her Pulitzer-Prize winning 2025 memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow , chronicled the loss of her sons and her effort to go on.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We often imagine that feelings of unhappiness come from outside us — in our circumstances or the difficult people in our lives. But what if the forces that erode our happiness come from within?

Fresh Air

Sheryl Crow

I've been really open about my mental struggles. And thank God we're all talking about it now. And it's not swept under the rug. But yeah, it took me a really long time to sort of navigate how to not sink further into darkness when it hits, and how to know that it's not a forever thing, and to be able to sometimes be quiet or sometimes to write songs to it.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

Anyone who has struggled with depression knows that it feels terrible. But is there a point to that terrible feeling?

Book of the Day

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on why he’s the 'worst possible spokesperson' for his own book

Too many Americans have lost close personal friends, have lost family members to politics where they don't talk to each other anymore. And that number is exploding. And it's incredibly unhealthy. It's bad for our country. It's bad for our souls.

It's Been a Minute

Are you anxiously attached to attachment theory? | It's Been a Minute

Your videos are telling you who you are instead of you interacting with the content and kind of deciding. I think it can it can, as we've seen, really influence how people see themselves, how they see each other, and I ultimately think it can be really damaging to a lot of people.

Fresh Air

Best Of: Jason Segel / Lisa Kudrow

people were spending a lot of time week after week rehashing where things came from in their past. And in reality, what they really needed was some hope about what to do on Tuesday. It's like, I have to have this talk with my boss on Tuesday and I have all these feelings about it and you're spending week after week figuring out why you have feelings about authority figures, but Tuesday is coming.

Book of the Day

Journalist Jodi Kantor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks on how to find purpose

Any technology that is a substitute for in-real-life socialization is going to hurt your happiness. And so, in our efforts to solve every problem and distract ourselves from encroaching misery in our lives, enter the smartphone, which has made it possible for us to solve the problem of human boredom, which by the way eliminates the right hemisphere of the brain and helps us find meaning through mind wandering. We literally need to be bored.

TED

Why Depression Isn’t What You Think | Lisa Monteggia | TED

If you look at individuals with depression, many of them don't have decreased serotonin. They have normal levels. This idea that we had a measurable index of depression just because it was less serotonin, many people talked about, but it really wasn't true.

TED Radio Hour

The price of creativity

right now we find ourselves more people than ever creating. More demand for content than ever. Yet less support systems than ever. And there's this very acute pressure that every artist and creative person feels right now. Of like, I feel like I'm falling behind. I don't even know what to do.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

People who have high standards for themselves can be especially hard on themselves when they make mistakes. And they spiral into self-criticism, which doesn't help them improve. What helps people improve is thinking of themselves compassionately — the way you might think of a good friend who has made a mistake.

TED

How to Live with Your Biggest Regret | Gregg Ward | TED

You can regret something and hold yourself accountable for it, but that doesn't mean you have to punish yourself for the rest of your life. You could learn from your regrets. You could try to transform them or try to do something good with them.

TED Radio Hour

Addiction, motherhood and Jesus with writer Anne Lamott

I went to the library and I looked everywhere and talked to the research librarians for books about families coming through cancer, and it just wasn't there. This is 1977. You didn't say the word cancer.

Book of the Day

'The Friend' author Sigrid Nunez is out with a new collection of short stories

Weeks of bad nights later, her mind had lost its grip. She forgot many things, including what you're supposed to do when you're thirsty. I figured once they treated her for dehydration, the gibbering stranger in the hospital bed would turn back into my sane 70-year-old mother whose only real health problem was a little high blood pressure. But I never saw that woman again.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a sensation; it's also an emotion. And when you're in pain, your whole life can narrow down to that pain. It can make it harder to think, harder to connect with others, harder to find joy in activities that once brought pleasure.

It's Been a Minute

Homelessness is more common than you think.

I think about it as it's become like the scarlet H. They've taken those conditions and treated them as if it's a moral failure. They've then pinned that on anyone with a label homeless.

Idea Knock Down

How Algorithms Manipulate You (and How to Fight Back) | Idea Knock Down | TED

We're basically unleashing the most powerful predictive persuasive algorithms in the history of the world on brains that aren't fully developed yet. Yeah, there's been these like exponential rises in anxiety, depression. Um, you know, young women and girls have fallen off a cliff almost with the rise of social media.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences — that sense of oneness, of feeling connected to something larger than themselves — tend to have a thicker cortex in certain brain regions. And this is true even after you control for whether someone goes to church or synagogue or mosque, or whether they believe in God.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences tend to feel more connected to others, to feel like there's a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. And interestingly, they also tend to have better mental and physical health outcomes.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences also tend to be happier, have better mental health, and find more meaning in their lives. And this is true regardless of whether they belong to a formal religious tradition — even people who don't consider themselves religious seem to benefit from these kinds of experiences.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences also tend to be healthier and happier. They show lower rates of depression and anxiety, less substance abuse, and they even tend to live longer. And it's not just that healthy, happy people have more time to go to church or temple — the spiritual experiences themselves seem to be driving these positive outcomes.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences tend to be healthier and happier. They have lower rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. They even live longer.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences tend to be healthier and happier than those who do not. But psychologist Lisa Miller has found something even more surprising: the brains of spiritual people are actually structurally different from those who are not spiritual.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences also tend to have better mental health. They have lower rates of depression and anxiety. They're less likely to die by suicide. They're less likely to abuse substances. They show greater well-being and life satisfaction.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences also tend to report greater psychological well-being. They have higher life satisfaction, more positive emotions, and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. In some ways, this makes perfect sense — feeling connected to something larger than yourself, believing that the universe is fundamentally benevolent, these things might naturally make you happier.

Daily Stoic

How to Feel Everything Without Losing Control With Dr. Becky Kennedy

A lot of us were either raised to try to kick them out of the car, right? Like you're so annoying. my car would be a lot more peaceful if you were just out. But you can't kick feelings out of the car. It's just a biological impossibility. Or what happens cuz we either try so hard to do that and we fail is then the feelings in the back seat take over the driver's seat.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences are better able to cope with stress and trauma. They also report higher levels of well-being, greater generosity, and a stronger sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences tend to be healthier and happier. They report lower rates of depression and anxiety. They are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, less likely to be involved in domestic violence, and less likely to develop dementia in old age.

TED

What Sitting All Day Does to Your Brain and Body | Keith Diaz | TED

Over the course of sitting all day with no movement, people's mood plummets while their fatigue builds and builds. And that's because our muscles have a symbiotic relationship with our brains. They're in constant communication. Our biological need to contract muscle is more than just about physical health and metabolism. It's also foundational to mental and brain health.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have a lot of awe in their lives tend to feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. And when you feel like you're part of something larger than yourself, your own personal problems and worries seem smaller and more manageable.

TED Radio Hour

Are we using screens as a scapegoat for teen mental health?

The story that we're repeatedly told as parents and policymakers and people that are invested, that social media is universally harmful, that it is damaging brains, that is leading to an epidemic of mental health problems, that simply isn't supported by the data.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of emotional support as something we offer through words — by listening carefully, saying the right things, or sharing a person's burden. But researcher Michael Poulin has found that giving help to others, not receiving it, is what buffers people against the harmful effects of stress. In study after study, he found that people who helped others were less likely to die than those who didn't, even after accounting for their overall health.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of emotional support as something we offer through words — by listening carefully, saying the right things, or giving advice. But researchers have found that simply being in the presence of someone we care about can regulate our nervous system, slow our heart rate, and reduce our sense of pain, even when that person says nothing at all.

Book of the Day

R.F. Kuang says there’s 'quite a lot' of herself in 'Katabasis' protagonist Alice

Alice feels betrayed by her own mind for a lot of the book. Um when I started the novel, I did it, too. And the reason why the prose is kind of jarred and chaotic and it's crammed with references that feel like they're about to spill over and just explode, that's because that's what living in her mind is like and what living in my mind was like.

TED

Can Play Change the World? | Play@TED Full Event | TED, the LEGO Group and the LEGO Foundation

We are living through a play deprivation crisis. We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is — the spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder — from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now.

TED

Why You Should Be a Techno-Skeptic | Jonathan Haidt | TED

Which means that puberty is the worst possible time for a human being to be on social media. For our ultra-social species, that rewiring should be guided by huge amounts of social interaction in the real world, not by TikTok's algorithm.

Code Switch

DACA recipients are trapped in Trump's limbo

It's so hard to be living not only in constant limbo, but with this level of hyper-vigilance that no matter what you do, there are outside factors that can wreck your life with a blink of an eye.

TED Talks Daily

Why You Should Keep a List of What Makes You Laugh | Chris Duffy | TED

Humor is kind of the opposite of toxic positivity where you're like, there's a bright side to everything. Don't worry, every cloud has a silver lining. Like, sometimes that's just not true at all. And I think what I love about humor is that you can find something to laugh at without denying the overwhelming negativity or or violence or frustration or pain, right? You don't have to ignore that. You can laugh in that moment.

It's Been a Minute

You might be suffering from AI brain fry

There's something kind of comically tragic about the idea that these tools that were meant to lighten our loads seem to be doing the opposite for some.

Prof G Markets

The 35% Recession Warning Markets Are Ignoring | Prof G Markets

I realized I was walking around walking around sort of alone. It was either like I need to go deep in the pain and get drunk and get a lot more social or I need to go home.

Hidden Brain

Rethinking Depression

We tend to see depression as an illness to eliminate, evidence that something has gone wrong in the brain. But what if low mood serves a purpose?

It's Been a Minute

Is tech making us too obsessed with our bodies?

Having a lot of data about your health can, first of all, make you kind of obsess over that data. A lot of these companies give you numbers like you'll get a sleep score or you'll get like a readiness score or a strain score and it's like a game.

It's Been a Minute

Young women are struggling, too. Why can't we see it? | It's Been a Minute

Women have long been more likely than men to struggle with or being diagnosed with depression and anxiety... women's suffering, it's quiet because it's women have had to suffer quietly for a very long time.