Anecdotally, the sense I get talking to people in my little neck of the woods is that this year it doesn’t feel like the usual September Scaries. As one friend texted me, “It’s not the usual fall rush feeling, it’s something bigger.”

The world is shifting, people sense. Meanwhile, multiple people have mentioned that they feel like they can’t plan anything because the regular structures (get a degree, get a job, plan your life) don’t make sense anymore. They wonder: What do I have control over? Where is my agency?

And meanwhile, how do you make sure you don’t get stuck treading water in a less-than-optimal situation, because either a) there are no other options or b) you’d rather the devil you know, than the devil you don’t.

I feel lucky, in some ways, that I need change in my life. That I get itchy when things stop evolving and surprising me. Like that scene in Sex & the City when Carrie is trying on wedding dresses and she is struggling to take one off and then suddenly she feels trapped and nearly rips it off her body. Obviously the dress is a symbol of patriarchy and constricting institutions but yeah. That scene flashes in my mind pretty regularly. You need to take off the dress so you can breathe. (I’d rather not turn this post into a “here’s how Sex & the City explains modern life” diatribe because she did end up getting married—she just did it her way and not in a white dress. But whatever.)

My point: Lots of people are feeling weird right now. Organizations are trying to understand their purpose in the world…and that uncertainty trickles down to their employees. And then everyone feels ambiguous and rudderless and that’s when things get boggy, like a pond with stagnant water. Sometimes that water gets stinky.

I’d originally (actually, multiple times) promised to write up an analysis of writing on Substack for a year for this week’s post. And I think what I’ve written so far exemplifies my assessment:

Substack is a good place for me to have a direct line to you and writing forces me to clarify and assess my own thinking. I don’t love the social media elements of the platform or the fact that most of the people on my list just want to read me like a good old fashioned newsletter, rather than a blog. I haven’t turned on payments (and don’t plan to) but I get a kick every time someone volunteers to give me money nonetheless (I don’t take it). I never want to be an annoyance to a reader so the service journalism part of this experiment is crucial to me. That’s good enough for now.

Today, I think the value I can provide is simply showing some humanity and a reminder:

If you’re feeling “the overwhelm” (as the awesome writer and researcher Brigid Schulte calls it), observe your reaction. Does this sense of chaos make you hunker down and be more rigid and fearful? Bracing yourself is going to exhaust you (maybe make you clench your teeth.) Try to relax your muscles, breathe deeply, and notice the weirdly wonderful small moments in your day. Change is really hard but if you can let it in—even just by letting yourself think about it!—it can be really energizing.

And if you’re the opposite: coiled like a spring, ready to pounce at any moment just to make something–ANYTHING–happen? Remember that taking time in the “neutral zone” is important too. Relax your coiled body, stay loose for a bit, just be and assess what’s really going on before you make a move.

Thanks for joining me here. Really.

Manoush x

P.S. Also—I feel like a moron: I still can’t figure out how to unpin posts from my page. Somebody please just tell me?

After a minute and 17 seconds, the moon kept going and sunset proceeded as normal. Our celestial experience was followed up with a Ballearic feast of fish and white wine.

A few days later, I was back in Brooklyn and took the dog for a walk. This experience was also surreal.

As we slowly meandered around the block and chatted with neighbors, I heard numerous stories about real life being eclipsed by AI. Please allow me to attempt to earn the right to use this metaphor.

During this one walk I heard the following stories:

The chic couple down the street who’ve run an interior design firm for decades? They’ve had to let staff go this month because new projects have stopped coming in. Who needs them when clients can use AI to do renderings themselves? Their former employees are struggling to find other full-time jobs.

The sparky Millennial who I enjoy talking about books with? Sometimes she does marketing for authors…but the other day Instagram flagged her post as “AI generated.” Except she hadn’t generated it with AI. She was incredibly annoyed. Not a good look for someone who is working with writers wary of fake content.

And then there is the lovely woman about my age who watches TikTok and smokes on her stoop. She is, from what I can tell, being catfished by someone impersonating an Australian tattooed rock star. They have been “dating” for 18 months. Someday soon, she tells me, he’s coming to sweep her off her feet. I just hope she doesn’t wire “him” all of her savings while she waits.

As I shuffled home behind the dog, Brooklyn felt at least as surreal as Menorca had.

A profession that has created beauty and supported people for decades has compressed hours of skilled work into minutes and upended their business within months. A platform designed to identify artificial images can no longer reliably distinguish them from human-made ones. A woman can sustain an intimate relationship for a year and a half with someone whose identity may itself be a fabrication—and she does NOT want to believe otherwise.

Real, fake, delusional? Who can tell the difference? And it will not be over in 77 seconds. This is (sur)reality.

As someone who has been quite intrigued by AI, I found these stories pretty depressing. The incessant jackhammering and roadkill outside our window hasn’t helped.

Our block is dirty and loud and near a toxic canal…and yet, property prices are skyrocketing.

The moon lining up perfectly with the sun makes more sense than this.

At least we knew what was happening. We could see it! Scientists could explain why—and tell us when it would end! Afterwards, we went and ate fish and drank some delicious wine. (shakes head slowly)

Do you have an anecdote of how AI is affecting real life? Please get weird and surreal in the comments. I need company.

x Manoush

P.S. Sorry for the rather bleak dispatch. We’re taking the kid to college and it’s all rather disorienting :(

P.P.S. Next time, I promise: My Year of Substack. What’s the point of of writing a newsletter when everyone writes a newsletter? I have lots of data and thoughts. Some of them actually quite cheerful. So subscribe to this newsletter! Send it to a friend, si us plau!

Here are the top eight things that I hope writers, readers, people in health/tech, and journalists will find useful:

1. Thank goodness my book came out in the spring, not the fall.

Adult nonfiction is in a bad way. It was already struggling (down 9% in the first three months of 2026 compared to that period in 2025) when Body Electric arrived on May 5.

The slide has continued, with the self-help/how category hit hardest.

As Publishers Weekly reported on July 9:

Self-help had the biggest drop, with sales falling 24.3% due to the inevitable cooling of sales of Mel Robbins’ juggernaut The Let Them Theory; while the book remained the biggest nonfiction seller in the first half of the year, selling over 566,000 copies, that was down from the 1.76 million copies in sold in the first half of 2025.

Let Them has been carrying the entire category for awhile now. That is not sustainable and the industry is bracing themselves for even worse sales in the fall. So, as my editor pointed out, it was a good thing Body Electric came out in May, rather than September, as we’d originally planned.

What’s going on? Did people suddenly figure out how to live their best life? There are a couple theories floating around...

2. AI may be eating How-To Nonfiction’s lunch.

That’s the idea put forward by Tim Ferriss who famously broke out in 2009 with his mega bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek and who recently shared that his powerhouse back catalogue is on track to sell roughly 60% fewer copies this year compared to last year. As he writes:

The sales [of these five books] have been surprisingly durable… and predictable. These books have long been an annuity that I could count on. But alas! There’s trouble in paradise.

Tim speculates that the how-to category is particularly vulnerable because LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are vacuuming up and summarizing these books, as well as tailoring their advice to the user (formerly known as the reader.)

Who needs a book when you’ve got a chatbot?

The other theory out there…

3. Podcasts aren’t the powerhouse converters they once were.

A decade ago, I had to explain to many people what a podcast even was.

Today, it’s estimated 73% of Americans 12 and up have listened to or watched a podcast

And, until recently, one of the holy grails of marketing a book was going on podcasts. But, as my endlessly supportive editors tell me, this strategy has stopped panning out for many authors.

The hypothesis: Why would someone buy the book when they just dedicated an hour of their life to hearing all about it?

I did an estimated thirty (yes, 3-0) podcast appearances including Dan Harris’ 10% Happier, Laurie Santos’ The Happiness Lab, CNN’s Terms of Service, and so. many. more. I loved doing them, the hosts were amazing; they challenged me and we had a great time. I have no doubt we provided worthwhile information to the audience and made for an entertaining and thought-provoking listen.

But did these episodes sell books? Not so sure. Maybe they actually put too much Body Electric information out into the world?

At this point you’re probably wondering, “So how DID your book do, Manoush?” Thank you for asking. In the first week, Body Electric narrowly missed the bestseller list, which was very frustrating, but honestly, I’m just relieved that there was even a glimmer of hope that I’d make it in the first place.

Competition is fierce out there, despite declining sales! Publisher’s Lunch listed 67 non-fiction book releases for May (and those were just the “notable” ones).

I was very fortunate to get a bump from my appearance on NPR’s Morning Edition. But public radio’s biggest news program used to guarantee skyrocketing up the charts. Unfortunately that is no longer the case.

As of the end of June (the last time I got sales numbers), my book sales were hovering in the upper four figures and, apparently, that is respectable. I’m hopeful they crossed into five digits by the end of July. I’ll get those numbers soon. But meanwhile, I’m used to measuring my work by the hundreds of thousands (podcast users), so the numbers feel incredibly low to me…especially since the PR campaign felt so intense…

In addition to the dozens of podcasts and radio spots I did, I also did ten live events, a TED talk, and SO MUCH SOCIAL MEDIA. (Oh also, hi, I wrote this Substack for a year.)

I am so lucky to know so many people and have a platform. I recognize how nearly insurmountable selling any books at all is for most people. But also, I think my luckiness presents an interesting snapshot of the media landscape so let’s keep going…

4. TV Spots and op-eds…nope and nope. But you need to feed the LLMs.

TV appearances were a bust for me this time around. I booked none. ZERO! When Bored and Brilliant came out in 2017, I went on MSNBC, PBS, NY1, and, yes, Dr. Oz. And btw, when I toured for that book nearly a decade ago, exactly none of my podcast interviews involved video. This time, roughly 90% also recorded me on camera, either to upload to YouTube or use as clips on social.

Since podcasts are the new television, maybe these episodes count as TV appearances? After all, GenZers now say they “watch” podcasts.

Also back in 2017, when I wrote op-eds I usually heard from people who’d ping me with “oh I saw your piece in the XYZ!” Not this time. Not a peep. I’m not sure many people read them at all.

Nonetheless I’m very glad I spent time codifying my thoughts on how our AI habits will affect our health for The Guardian and how citizen science projects could be key to restoring public trust in medicine for STAT. I really respect both institutions.

On a more cynical note, LLMs feed themselves by scraping legit news outlets. So by writing for those outlets, I can help ensure chatbots spit out my real thinking on the topic, in addition to all the sweat I put into the book explaining the history and biology of living with screens.

Anticipating the machines has to be part of the strategy now. If people are going to ask a chatbot what I think before they ever read a word I wrote, I want something on the record for it to find.

Enough depressing news. Let’s turn to the glimmers of love.

5. Audiobooks are a bright spot.

Audiobook sales grew by 9% in 2025 but I was still surprised that the Body Electric audiobook has sold nearly as many copies as the hardcover, and more than three times as many as the e-book. Why did this happen?

It helped that Spotify selected Body Electric as one of their Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. I’ve also spent a large portion of my professional life speaking directly into people’s ears, so I suppose listeners may already know my voice and be willing to spend another eight hours with it.

But my favorite explanation is the most obvious one: People could listen while walking. The format let readers do the very thing the book was asking them to do—get off their screens and move. #winning

(I would also add that the TED Radio Hour episode on the Body Electric research and adjacent themes was the show’s most-listened-to episode in the past year. Check it out! How to Feel Alive in An Exhausting World.)

6. Why DO people buy a book? Because they want to escape. Or they like you.

Tradwives, aliens, and dark secrets are trending on the Amazon fiction charts. Regime Change (which is stranger than fiction), murder, and marriage gone wrong are carrying the non-fiction list right now.

So let’s talk about the people who actually did buy the book. What motivated them? Usually because they like my work. They want to support ME. I’m squirming right now. This reason is so nice it makes me uncomfortable lol.

At book signings, people talk about how much they miss my first podcast, Note to Self. They often say they’ve been following me ever since. Or they tell me I’m fun, relatable, and give good advice on Instagram. Or they saw my TED talk (usually the first one, not the more recent one.)

In other words, my body of work and consistently being on the media-scene/tech-beat YEARS before it became so fractured and crowded, laid the groundwork for any current success I have. And it leads me to the most important question and finding of all: Why did I bother writing a book? Why not just keeping making podcasts and writing here?

7. The intrinsic value of writing a book (or making anything at all) may not be sales.

This sounds sappy but hear me out: If you’re thinking about writing a book, jot down your reasons why (or for whom) you want to spend years slogging over something not that many people will likely read.

For my friend, memoirist James Robinson, it’s the parents who, like him, have lost a child and the physicians who have cared for sick kids. They regularly reach out to tell him how much his book meant to them. He loves getting these deeply personal emails. But none of us are free of the capitalist monster who lurks in the shadows. As he writes with vulnerability on his Substack:

The seduction of the crowd is not always easy to resist. But those one-on-one connections keep me grounded, reminding me what truly matters.

As for me, I’ve thought hard about this and my “why” is three-fold:

• I love packaging up information in a new and fresh way. The challenge exhilarates me.

• I like being relevant. Even if it’s not a mega-hit, a book still presents opportunities to join smart panels, make kooky videos, consider where your research may go from here, and discuss the topic you know and care so much about.

• And finally, yes, helping people. When someone tells you you changed their life, there IS NOTHING BETTER. Really. Nothing. Check out this recent note from someone who works in tech:

Do I hope that Body Electric breaks out and goes mega in the fall? You bet! In the long run, I want to make my publisher proud and, based on inbound inquiries, I think corporate sales might be the ticket. Body Electric is getting on the radar of companies that are terrified of workforce AI-induced burnout.

I also truly believe that the answer to all this nutty acceleration of the world is going back to biological basics: Putting yourself in what I call Goldilocks Mode—being discerning about when to use tech and when to put it away.

Maintaining our cognitive capacity and health depends on teaching ourselves and our kids how to calibrate our energy, mental and physical. I’m going to continue working on this, in whatever type of media people find most useful.

Anyhoo, it’s only been three months since my pub date and obviously, this is just my experience. Tell me about what you’re observing, as a reader OR a writer. I’d love to learn from you. Suggestions and questions welcome! Please put them in the comments or, if you don’t read this on the Substack platform (as I’m learning, many people don’t), please respond to this email.

I’m incredibly grateful to you, my newsletter reader, for all your support and encouragement on this journey. You can keep it going by forwarding this newsletter to a friend and getting them to subscribe! I’ve also learned need to have calls-to-action like this.

x Manoush

P.S. In a couple weeks, I’ll be back with essays on what happens to your brain when you go on vacation and why I’ve never turned on Substack payments (even though people tell me they want to give me money.)

She and her fellow Gen-Zers have discovered the 1990s.

They’ve brought back belly shirts, claw clips, wired headphones, and a hankering for a time without constant connectivity. Her fascination with the era before she was born reminded me of my own delight when, as a teen, I pulled my mom’s bellbottoms out of storage. They seemed like artifacts from the louche ‘70s—very different from my then buttoned-up sense of style…

But I’m ambivalent about nostalgia trends.

Sometimes the impulse is useful: I wrote a whole book called Bored and Brilliant nearly a decade ago because I thought we were losing an essential mode of thinking, with every idle moment filled by a screen. At the time, it felt slightly radical to ask my listeners and readers to purposefully get bored, stare out the car window, or take a walk with no destination in mind and no AirPods in their ears. (And, as I’ve noted, boredom is having another moment right now.)

We may be mistaking the 1990s for a policy—or a parenting—solution.

I’m increasingly frustrated by the wistfulness that hangs over so much of the conversation about children and technology: the fantasy that giving kids a nineties childhood, before smartphones and social media and AI complicated everything, will make them happier. I understand the longing but time-traveling won’t help teens build the skills they need for the inevitable future. (Besides, as an ethnically-ambiguous young woman in journalism back then, trust me: Not all of the nineties was great.)

One of the experts who brought me around to questioning the nostalgia approach is developmental psychologist Candice Odgers.

Candice researches adolescent mental health, particularly in relation to smartphones and social media. She’s also one of the few people publicly disagreeing with the conclusion that we’ve “lost” a generation to technology. That’s not a popular opinion, especially with Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation on the bestseller list for over two years now. (I’ve interviewed him too.)

I found Candice and her research to be nuanced, counter-intuitive, and ruthlessly scientific. So when I was invited to curate a session at TED2026 last April, I asked her to give a talk, which was just published online.

Her argument will probably surprise you and you should definitely watch the whole thing, but here’s the gist….

We’re aiming at the wrong target because social media is not the problem. According to Candice’s data—and many other researchers’—social media is not a major driver of teen mental health. As she puts it, it’s “one of the least influential factors in predicting teen mental health.”

Wait, you may be thinking. I thought this case was closed. Phones and social media are terrible for young people, period. Right? Ummm…no.

Following a review of the evidence, even the National Academies of Sciences concluded that the research linking social media to health shows only small effects and weak associations—and that, contrary to the cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.

Reality usually is. Sigh.

One thing that does have a bigger impact? Caregivers’ mental health turns. It’s one of the strongest predictors of child outcomes. And how are those caregivers doing? Not so hot. Candice notes that the rate of children losing a parent to overdose more than doubled between 2011 and 2021.

Part of the story behind teen anxiety and depression, in other words, isn’t the phone in the kid’s hand—it’s the adults around them coming apart.

No wonder so many of us think back fondly on the ‘90s. It was a time before 9/11, the 2008 crash, the opioid epidemic, Covid, the effects of climate change, and rather intense politics. And even despite the adults struggling around them, teens today are more highly educated than ever, and violence, drinking, and pregnancy are at historic lows. They’re also more likely to feel anxious but there are many reasons why.

So social media bans are not the plan we need to help kids. But that’s what we’re getting.

Countries including Australia, the U.K., and Brazil are moving to bar users under 16 from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest. In the U.S., the KIDS Act—the legal package built around the Kids Online Safety Act which would make the platforms responsible for age verification—passed the House this summer.

If you’d told me a decade ago that I’d take issue with these bans, I would have scoffed.

Now though, as the research has progressed and my own children have grown up, my thinking has evolved. It hasn’t evolved toward denying the harm (sextortion, cyberbullying, self-harm content, predatory recommendation systems are indeed awful). It’s evolved towards an understanding that banning kids from social media is a red herring that fails on numerous counts:

1. It’s the wrong instrument.
   Technology isn’t like cigarettes or seatbelts. Smoking will kill you; seatbelts save lives; those laws address direct, clear, one-directional harms. Social media isn’t that straightforward or all bad and using laws to age-gate treats without forcing the companies to clean up the toxicity on their platforms (and more) is a softball.
   

2. The mechanism is self-defeating.
   In a new paper in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, Candice and her co-authors argue (among many things) that youth bans like Australia’s are racing ahead of the evidence, while also telling kids to upload selfies to Meta and Google for age verification. Haven’t we spent years telling kids not to hand over their digital privacy? Isn’t the whole point that we don’t trust these companies with our kids?
   

3. There’s little sign it even works.
   France is the latest to pass a ban, but Australia has been the test case: Its government recently reported that more than 5 million under-16 accounts have been deactivated or restricted there. But an early BMJ analysis found little evidence the ban has curbed under-16 use at all. Three months in, more than 85% of under-16s surveyed were still on the platforms, many simply bypassing the checks or finding other workarounds. (As teens do.)
   

4. Bonus: No one yet knows the other unpredictable side-effects of kicking young people off these platforms. If more kids are pretending to be adults online, are they actually being exposed to more nasty stuff than before? For the kids who are obeying the law, are they also being kept from getting the online resources that they need?

Tech-advocacy groups like the EFF oppose the KIDS Act and want laws that make tech companies change what really counts—not performative measures politicians can crow about:

There is a better way to protect young people online. Instead of encouraging a complicated system of age checks, more monitoring, and more restrictions on access to information, Congress could finally pass a strong, comprehensive privacy law that benefits all users. A great place to start would be to ban behavioral advertising that tracks us across the web—again, for users of all ages.

Meanwhile, as we adults all yammer on about “saving the kids” from tech, we’re distracted from doing the hard work that we know improves young people’s mental health:

• expanding access to mental-health care, and health care generally

• hiring more counselors and teachers

• creating good jobs and more stability for the adults raising children

• giving teenagers safe places to gather, move, make things, and be around one another

All of this is not an easy message to fit into a TED talk.

“Phones destroyed a generation” is far easier to remember than “the evidence is mixed, direct harms are real, effects vary dramatically by child and context, and we need simultaneous investment in platform regulation, health care, schools, families, and public life.”

But I think the conversation Candice and I had on a recent TED Radio Hour did the debate justice. Take a listen. Her talk is getting traction elsewhere too: Tech journalists I respect, including Casey Newton and Taylor Lorenz, have covered her, and The Guardian ran a long profile that opens with this spicy line:

“The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes, would be to kick all adult men off the internet. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and the most likely to spread misinformation, she says.”

The writer goes on to say Candice is kind of joking…but kinda not. Either way, I’ll take spice over fear any day and I’m grateful for the takeaway:

Technology will be part of young people’s adult lives. Meanwhile, our kids are not screwed. Phew.

Candice doesn’t have all the answers but her funny and constructive approach gives me a lot of solace. Being a parent is hard enough without feeling like you’re failing every time your kid looks at a screen.

We could all use a little less shame and a lot more practical advice about what young people actually need to live a good life. That’s what I try to do in my book Body Electric. And it’s what Candice does when she shares her parenting advice:

CANDICE’S TOP TIP
Look at the actual child in front of you, rather than warily eyeing the phone in their hand.

Are they sleeping? Do they have friends? Are they learning, moving, laughing, doing things they care about? Is the phone displacing those things—or helping make some of them happen?

And crucially: Have you made it safe for them to tell you when something frightening happens online? Or would they keep it from you, afraid you’ll take the device away?

The majority of teens, she says, are actually managing just fine.

Thanks for going on this complex journey with me and sharing your thoughts,

x Manoush

P.S. If you happened to pour yourself a cup of coffee and turn on C-SPAN last Sunday you would have seen THIS conversation about Body Electric!

Rebecca also talks about cognitive offloading—our tendency to hand over our thinking to technology—and what this means for children whose brains are still developing.

Her new term for the cumulative effect is “cognitive stunting”:

“Cognitive development, like learning to ride a bike, cannot be outsourced. Children cannot learn to ride by having an AI chatbot outline the steps or by having someone else pedal for them. In the same way, they cannot learn to think if AI routinely suggests ideas, writes text, designs solutions, or solves problems on their behalf…The concern is straightforward: Overreliance on AI reduces children’s opportunities to engage in effortful thinking, thereby stunting their cognitive development.”

Obviously, we have no desire to stunt kids’ growth in any way! But also, not all AI tools are bad.

So how can we measure whether a tool is helping a child reach their full cognitive potential…or limiting them?

Right now, educational assessment often works in one of two ways: Standardized tests like the SAT compare a student’s performance with other students. Other tools, like MAP Growth, are designed to track how an individual student’s academic skills change over time.

Peggy Yin, director of Stanford HAI’s new Cognitive Security Task Force, is proposing a next step: a “Developmental Impact Assessment,” which would track a student’s cognitive growth against that student’s own baseline. Here’s how she put in on that Aspen Ideas panel:

“We now have new statistical tools and AI is a personalized interaction which means that you could really start measuring how well someone is doing compared to their own baselines and their own potential.”

On its face, Peggy’s idea is thrilling. Who wouldn’t want a better way to see how a child’s mind is developing—not just whether they got the right answer on Friday’s quiz?

But this is delicate territory. The history of intelligence testing is full of cautionary tales. Even the word “potential” makes me nervous. Who gets to define it? And can any test, no matter how personalized, really tell us what a child is capable of becoming?

For example, a 2025 review in Science looked across more than 34,000 adult top performers—Nobel laureates, elite musicians, athletes and chess players—and found that many of the people who reached the very highest levels were not superstars in childhood. As a late bloomer myself, I find that quite soothing.

So I bring you Peggy’s idea not because it’s ready for prime time, but because it captures the strange educational moment we’re in:

AI is changing quickly, the future of work is hard to predict, and kids are already using these tools in ways many adults barely understand. All this uncertainty makes me think we should spend less time trying to predict the next must-have skill and more time helping young people fall in love with learning itself.

Peggy talks about getting kids get to experience “hard fun,” a term from educator Seymour Papert: Work that is fun because it is hard, not despite being hard. (Like this newsletter :)

What observations are you making about your own thinking if and when you use AI? Tell me in the comments!

Next week: Why some critics of Big Tech think social media bans are NOT the solution for young people’s mental health struggles. Strange but true! Subscribe to the Manoush Minutes to make sure you get it.

Thanks for being here,

x Manoush

P.S. The steady drumbeat of the Body Electric book continues…it’s being translated into Czech…and Connie fox on goodreads says, “I found it to be informative, hopeful, inspiring and lighthearted. It has become my new favorite non fiction book of the year!” Thanks, Connie!

First, some context: Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to pinpoint when I—a fully-baked adult human—developed judgement, taste, and discernment.

Because today, as we swim in a world awash with information generated by AI, those are the skills I’m using the most. That graphic is slop. That sentence says absolutely nothing. That point is good. That one is dumb. How do I know? And why am I so sure?

It goes back to my twenties, when I was running around the world as a news producer for the BBC, getting the equivalent of a PhD in in teamwork, information synthesis, storytelling, and editing. Every single day I was forced to decide what information I’d gathered was relevant and useful—and what wasn’t—and how to organize it in a way that helped people make sense of the world.

Young people need to develop those capacities NOW. Knowledge and information are no longer a scarcity but good judgement is.

So how do we teach it, especially with internships and entry-level jobs on the decline?

I got two excellent answers at a session in Aspen called What’s Worth Learning?

Moderated by NBC’s truly lovely Kate Snow, it brought together Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution, Peggy Yin of Stanford’s Cognitive Security Task Force, and youth leader Odist Powell. None of them argued that AI should be banned from the classroom. Instead, they shared how they’re thinking about nurturing kids’ ability to grow into cognitively-nimble and capable grownups.

I’ll get into Peggy’s ambitious vision for measuring whether a kid is using AI in a positive way—one that develops their own human smarts—next week. (Subscribe to the Manoush Minutes to make sure you get it.) But now, let’s talk about Rebecca’s research…

The ‘4 Types’ of Students

Rebecca leads the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education and is the author, with Jenny Anderson, of The Disengaged Teen. She’s spent years doing research into why some kids flourish at school and others don’t. And most students, she says, fit into one of four buckets:

• Resisters: These are kids who “struggle silently with profound feelings of inadequacy or invisibility, which they communicate by ignoring homework, playing sick, skipping class, or acting out.”

• Passengers: These students coast, “consistently doing the bare minimum and complaining that classes are pointless. They need help connecting school to their skills, interests, or learning needs.”

• Achievers: These kids work hard and get good grades but “their self-worth can become tied to high performance. Their disengagement is invisible, fueling a fear of failure and putting them at risk for mental health challenges.”

• Explorers: The most rare, these kids are “driven by internal curiosity rather than just external expectations, they investigate the questions they care about and persist to achieve their goals.” They also do well academically.

Rebecca wants more schools to nudge kids to be Explorers, or at least spend more time in “Explorer Mode.”

Of course, many schools add exploration to their curricula with project-based learning or service learning. They get their students to apply what they learn to real-world problems, to go looking for answers. Rebeccas think educators on the whole needs to lean way harder into this approach.

And really, summer is the time for all of us to get into ‘Explorer Mode.’

The luckiest kids are already doing it. They’re trying a new sport, learning to build a coil ceramic pot, set up a tent, plant tomatoes, or sell lemonade to the neighbors. Online activities too! Maybe they’re learning a new game, building an app, or creating videos. The point is that they make a plan, fail, try again, and hopefully, end up somewhere interesting.

Their sense of wonder in the world, not a grade, keeps them going and they discover that the struggle (not a quick AI prompt) is part of the fun.

Does school need to be more like summer camp? Maybe!

But it’s not just kids: Whether you’re raising children, managing employees, or simply trying to navigate your own relationship with AI, we need to ask ourselves which parts of thinking are still worth doing ourselves? This is how we’ll stay resilient, curious, and keep setting the bar high for what we make and consume…rather than slide slowly into a cauldron of mediocre AI crud.

What kind of learner were you and what’s a capacity you’re determined to hold onto? Tell me in the comments. I’m thinking hard about this topic and want to know your thoughts.

Personally, I think I was a Resister in Math, a Passenger in Science, and an Explorer in English. Today, I’m determined to hold onto that spidey sense I get when I have an idea for a weird interactive project like Body Electric: convincing 20,000 people to take movement breaks throughout their day.

The official Body Electric study, by the way, was finally published last week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine! I wrote an op-ed for STAT about how projects like these could help rebuild public trust in science.

Thanks so much for being here. If you know someone who’d find my or Rebecca’s research helpful, please forward this newsletter to them.

x Manoush

P.S. Look at this! It’s my book next to DAVID BROOKS’!

Fast forward several decades to the advent of fiber optic internet connections and my dad is retired. Instead of just on the weekends, he now spends most evenings playing chess on his Mac (and, just as often, online backgammon) for hours. During the day, he also gardens and is member of the local senior center ping pong league. But once the sun sets, the nightly ritual begins: marathon sessions convening with anonymous players across the globe, as they strive to strategically outmaneuver each other online, buttocks affixed in various time zones.

To be sure: Chess is great for the mind. It requires concentration, memory, pattern recognition, strategy, humiliation, and even revenge! But all that sitting and staring at a screen is a problem.

A lot of us worry about our fathers. Take this reader who wrote me about her dad:

“He was always active until he left his intramural basketball league at age 55. These days, he’s about to turn 70 and he’s on the computer a lot. He says he feels stiff and has lots of aches and pains. His balance has gotten worse.”

We’re right to be concerned. Men in the U.S. die nearly five years earlier than women, visit doctors for preventive care at roughly half the rate, and succumb to cancer at a 36% higher mortality rate. But there is good news:

Researchers found that inactive people who trade just 30 minutes of sitting for 30 minutes of movement every day can lower their risk of a premature death by 17%.

And that doesn’t mean a half-hour workout. Or taking away dad’s iPad. Just tell him about movement breaks—walking for five minutes every few hours.

Just convincing your dad to get up between games, YouTube videos, and commenting on family Facebook posts, can have a HUGE effect.

The reader whose dad used to play B-ball is giving him the Body Electric book for Father’s Day. Obviously, I think that’s a great idea because a) it’s all about how our tech habits impact our health and the power of movement breaks. But also, b) there’s a section specifically for older adults and c) as that reader told me, “I think learning about movement breaks will empower him and feel doable.” Heck yeah! I can’t wait to hear what he thinks. My dad doesn’t love being told what to do but hopefully you’ll have better luck!

Meanwhile, happy Father’s Day to all the dads, granddads, uncles, mentors, and beloved men, whether they are suggestible or stubborn, who might be inspired to move just a little more when they hear that stat (17%!!).

What’s your strategy for cajoling the most reluctant member of your family to move a little more? We all need ideas.

Meanwhile, yes, the Body Electric book makes a great gift and supports this work.

Thank you for being here,
x Manoush

P.S. 136 people voted in last week’s reader poll with 86% signaling their approval of the “Goldilocks Mode” framework for tech. More coming soon. The poll remains open! Read and share your opinion!

G’s rep is not good. As a friend recently told me, “I have years of negative associations with that character. She’s never satisfied—just uses and tosses other people’s [bears’] shit around.”

Right! The moral of the story is that Goldilocks is a naughty grifter. But what if we told the story differently? What if we reframed the protagonist as our heroine? (I mean, what was she doing out in the wild all alone anyway? Where are her parents?)

Maybe she’s less the entitled interloper and more the intrepid adventurer in a menacing forest! Think of her that way and she comes across as a scrappy and discerning firecracker of a gal, who knows how to survive. And bravo to G for having high standards and choosing the seating/bedding/oatmeal that was “just right.”

New moral of the story: Goldilocks has moxie, curiosity, and an appreciation for moderation (not too hot/cold etc.) Bet on Goldilocks.

I’ve started thinking we all need to recast ourselves as this new kind of Goldilocks as we enter the scary dark forest of AI. (Stick with me. This will makes sense.)

As I’ve been traveling the country, talking to people about my book, Body Electric, the thing I say that seems to resonate most is my desire to find a middle way of living with technology. (As the book lays out, doing so, in part, requires understanding your body’s intelligence.)

Right now, the mainstream narrative give us two choices:

A) Go Luddite; get off your devices as much as possible, and live like it’s the ‘90s (an era that was not, for a young, not-blonde woman, particularly easy.)

B) Hand over all your personal information and thoughts to Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg (which one is Baby Bear?) because the transition to full Tech Overlord acquisition/destruction of civilization is inevitable.

But really, I want:

C) To be a fully-grown, thoughtful woman who makes her way in a digital world where she doesn’t allow herself to be shamed, overly nostalgic, or powerless.

I don’t need to be running an army of AI agents, nor do I want to Brick my phone.

I don’t think that technology has ruined a generation. Also? Waking up thinking that AI is the end of humanity isn’t helpful.

I want to use my tech in a way that is not too much or too little. Just right.

I’m calling this Goldilocks Mode. And I’m trying to switch it on in my brain (figuratively) every time I turn to my devices.

To be sure, I didn’t come up with the Goldilocks comparison: Designers, economists, doctors, and parents of overtired children have all used it to describe the elusive middle zone between too much and too little. But I think it could be particularly helpful for navigating this coming chapter of accelerating tech.

More about what this can look like next week but meanwhile, I need your feedback. What do you think of this framing?

Appreciate you,
Manoush

P.S. New Body Electric swag alert: we have kazoos. Why? See page 93!

I’d love to send a few to people willing to use them for an actual Body Electric move break — with your family, your office, your book club, your classroom, your unsuspecting friends. Hit reply and tell me where you’d deploy one.

And, separately: if you’ve read the book and it meant something to you, an honest rating or review on Amazon or BookShop or wherever you talk about books is enormously helpful. No kazoo strings attached.

The better coffee requires taking a longer route. Which is great! More steps! BUT—it also requires passing through a hectic crossing where everyone seems to be late and not entirely committed to stopping at the red light. Trucks regularly swipe parked cars as they make big turns, while small children scream and shout as they run into school, sometimes nearly trampling little Lottie. After running this urban gauntlet, we return home well caffeinated but also slightly frazzled.

The alternative route is not quite as long and more sedate. There’s no rushing to before the light turn red; the doggo gets plenty of time to sniff while I do neck rolls and calf stretches. The coffee shop we stop at along the way? It’s fine. Totally fine! But their brew doesn’t give me the “ahhhhhh. Cofffeeeeeeee” feeling, so I usually choose this path when I’m pressed for time.

Got up early? Not in a rush? Go the hectic route; get best coffee and the most steps. Hit snooze numerous times? Go the chiller, shorter way. Settle for the good-enough coffee. Get home quicker. I’d always assumed my morning decision was based on the coffee and step count.

But the other day, despite being in no rush, the dog pulled me towards the mediocre coffee shop and I didn’t put up a fight. We strolled down to the Gowanus canal…stopped for a large drip with oat milk…and then observed the Canadian goslings frolicking in the chunky water. We came home feeling relaxed and refreshed. Focused and ready for the morning ahead, even.

It wasn’t exactly a Japanese forest bath but clearly, even just a little bit of nature helped me kick off my day. (Maybe better than caffeine? Is that possibble???) This little moment reminded of something called “soft fascination” (which would be a great name for a band, no?).

The term comes from psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan who, in the seventies and eighties, researched the effects of nature on people’s psychology. They called their larger concept Attention Restoration Theory ART) and posited that time spent outdoors was key to restoring an exhausted mind because nature is interesting but not too interesting.

In the LA Times last year, environmental neuroscientist Marc Berman (his 2025 book is called Nature and the Mind) had a lovely explanation of why nature is ‘softly fascinating’:

“You don’t often hear people say, ‘Oh, I can’t look at that beautiful waterfall anymore. It’s just too interesting to look at. I’m too tired’ … When you look at that waterfall, it doesn’t capture all of your attentional resources. You can still mind-wander and think about other things while you’re looking at the waterfall. If you’re in Times Square, it’s also super interesting. It captures a lot of your attentional focus, but it does so in an all-consuming way. The kind of stimulation that gives you this restful, restorative experience has to be softly fascinating and not harshly fascinating.”

I love this distinction between harsh and soft fascination. What if we integrated more soft moments into our modern and harshly scheduled days? For some of us, even our breaks (meant to be relaxing!) have a sharp edge.

We close our laptops…but then scroll on our phones. Or, we go for a walk…but listen to a podcast as well. In my case, a morning jaunt with the dog turns into an opportunity to optimize for steps (and the best coffee) rather than calming surroundings. Just chill out, Lady!

I hereby give myself permission to take breaks that restore my attention by walking lazily along and looking at tree leaves. If you need permission to de-optimize your walk in some way, I grant it to you too.

I also invite you to join the latest New York Times ‘Well’ Challenge, which commences tomorrow. It’s called “Touch Grass” (nothing like older folks finally getting on the meme train!) and I’m featured (alongside neuroscientist Scott Berman) in a series of newsletters that include simple exercises to get you back in touch with yourself.

This approach is, of course, the core tenant of my new book, Body Electric. A world designed around screens and chairs shapes how we breathe, move, focus, recover, and think. But the antidotes don’t have to be grand.

If this newsletter is helping you think differently about your body, tech, or your morning walk, please consider buying Body Electric or sending it to someone whose “breaks” look suspiciously like more work.

Next week, a dispatch from my visit to Portland and Oregon Public Broadcasting. Here’s a quick preview…

Thanks for meandering with me,
x Manoush

P.S. I’ll be talking about the science of movement breaks with Columbia physiologist Keith Diaz at an NPR+ event on June 10 at 3pmET/Noon PST. Keith led the original research that helped launch the Body Electric project, and he is very good at explaining why tiny physical interruptions to our screen days can have such surprisingly big effects. When you become a public radio supporter, you’ll get an email invite. Come hang with us!

Her students followed along with the project, keeping her on task with her movement breaks, learning about data collection, debating the placebo effect, and discussing what makes a scientific claim credible.

The goal was to get these young people thinking about moving more, pique their curiosity about scientific inquiry, and also improve their ability to spot wellness misinformation. A triple threat!

Alas, three years later, I have an addendum for JaYoung and her students. While explaining the science behind my book, I compressed a complicated idea into a line that was catchy…but not precise.

Which means today’s media literacy lesson is about fixing mistakes. My mistake.

The situation

It goes back to my recent robust and fun conversation about screen time, sitting, and our health with Dan Harris for his 10% Happier podcast.

Dan, ever the journalist, pressed me on the central thesis of Body Electric: We have engineered movement out of modern life by building a world around screens, chairs, and frictionless convenience. And, to live well in the digital age, we have to rework movement into our day, for our physical and cognitive health.

We had a great discussion. We talked about how every day is a struggle to stick with healthy habits. Then his team published the episode and posted a clip on Instagram. This was my soundbite:

“If you work out in the morning and then sit for the rest of the day, it doesn’t make a damn difference. Your risk of chronic illness is the same as someone who doesn’t work out in the morning.”

Hmmm. Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple, an exercise scientist, called me out in the comments:

“This simply isn’t true. Sitting does not negate the positive effects of exercise.”

The correction

She’s right! Exercise matters. A lot! It’s great for your muscles, heart, brain, bones, blood sugar, mood, sleep, and long-term health. I do not want anyone walking away from that clip thinking, “Well, I guess my workout is useless.”

What I should have said is this:

Exercise protects you from many things. But it does not fully protect you from a day spent sitting still.

The fuller version

On the podcast, I got into why researchers like Keith Diaz at Columbia have been stressing for years that prolonged, uninterrupted sitting creates health problems, even for people who exercise—because when you sit for long stretches, especially after eating, your muscles are mostly inactive. And muscles do more than look good in tank tops or help you drag a suitcase up subway stairs:

When our muscles are stimulated they regulate blood sugar, lipids, and blood flow. They push oxygen up to the brain, and keep metabolic processes working throughout the day.

That means your body benefits from repeated muscle contractions, not just for 45 minutes at 7 a.m., but again and again, in small increments, across the day.

So, for optimal health, we need regular intervals of movement in addition to a workout routine.

One of the many studies I cite in the book found that people who sat for more than 10.6 hours a day had higher risks of heart failure and cardiovascular death. Break that down into those participants who didn’t exercise at all and those who met exercise guidelines? The exercisers had lower risks for specific outcomes, but sitting for long stretches put their health in jeopardy too.

Today’s takeaway

Keep exercising. If you regularly workout, your health and fitness are far better off than if you don't. But your workout doesn't cancel out a day spent sitting and staring at your screen.

The media literacy lesson

For JaYoung’s students:

The most memorable health claims are often sticky but that’s different than precisely accurate. Summing up an idea into something easy to clip and post can also make it easier to misinterpret.

So, if you come across an intriguing claim: Be sure to do more than just ask if it’s true or false.

Ask questions like:
What is this assertion missing?
What would make this more precise?
And what might lead someone to conclude something that isn’t accurate?

In this case, I’ll just reiterate:

Both exercise and sitting matter. Researchers are still figuring that out the nuances between how are bodies respond to sedentary lifestyles, workouts, and movement breaks. But the practical lesson is pretty simple:

Exercise when you can. Then get up again later.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this post.

Feeling vulnerable but resolute,

x Manoush

P.S. Last week I wrote (in glorious scientific detail) about a rat experiment and asked readers: What environmental hack helps you scurry around like a happy rat? The results are in: Over half of the 75 respondents said a reason to move (like a dog, garden, or kid) was the best prompt. I especially enjoyed Aimee in Nova Scotia’s hack to get herself moving:

“This year we have vowed to keep our bikes on the back of our jeep through the summer, so we can take advantage of any trails we come across on our spontaneous drives…

Side note: my spouse is from Alberta where they literally do not have rats. There was so much anti-rat propaganda when he was a kid. He would hate that I just compared him to a happy rat.“

No rats!? Got a favorite movement hack? Email me or leave it in the comments. I’m compiling a “Best Of.”

I was invited to be on a panel about technology, design and behavior moderated by Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed, a long-running podcast about addiction and recovery, alongside Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and repentant creator of the infinite scroll.

Eric kicked things off with the story of Rat Park, a scientific study done in late 1970s and early ‘80s by Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander. Alexander wanted to compare how rats in a typical lab cages behaved versus those living in a rat utopia that he constructed, full of toys, other rats, plenty of space to play, and lots of fresh air. He offered both sets of rats a morphine drip alongside their usual water drip. Rats living in utopia mostly ignored the morphine while yes, the sad and lonely rats who lived in lab cages quickly became addicted to the morphine.

Over the past several decades, the pop-science takeaway from this experiment can be summed down to: Maybe addiction isn’t just about the drug, it’s about the cage.

First, a caveat, because Rat Park is one of those studies that has been flattened into a perfect little parable about addiction. The methodology would not meet today’s research standards, and rats are not people (although people can be rats). Also, in the context of conference panel, I don’t think we can really compare morphine to technology, which is not considered “addictive” in the same clinical sense as substances like alcohol, tobacco, opioids, or stimulants. (In the DSM-5-TR, Internet Gaming Disorder is listed as a “condition for further study,” but compulsive use of social media, smartphones, or general internet are not classified as formal addictive disorders, at least here in the U.S. As of now, gambling disorder is the only behavioral addiction identified.)

Still, many people think of themselves as “addicted” to their screens. And I do think Rat Park is useful because it can force us to take a hard look at our human habitats. When does our environment make it easier for us to feel good?

On the face of it, our offices and homes are spacious and comfy, they’re climate-controlled, with fast Wi-Fi, snacks within arm’s reach, ergonomic chairs, and a magic box that delivers work, weather, friendship, deliveries, information, and shopping opportunities all the time. They seem like a utopia for humans.

But (cue the scary music) maybe…our human utopia isn’t a utopia at all? Maybe it’s actually….THE CAGE (cue the scream)????

Most people I know spend 8-10 hours a day typing away in an office cubicle or home office. Our tails and tired eyes twitch as we open tab, after tab, after tab…taking tiny sips from our coffee drip.

As readers of this newsletter know, the best way to manage these hours of sedentary screen time is by integrating movement breaks in your day. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and 20,000 people helped me explain exactly why in my new book.

Part of the strategy needs to include getting outside of our literal boxes. So, if we were to design Human Park, what would it look like?

With Memorial Day around the corner, I can feel my anticipation and excitement building like a rat who’s spied an abandoned pizza crust. I’ve decided to take inspiration from SUMMER…

I love taking the long way to the ice cream shop after dinner and slowly strolling home as the sun sets over the Gowanus Expressway. Or cutting the workday short because it’s just too nice outside! I’ll visit family in NJ, run around catching fireflies, swim whenever possible…all these moments add up to a lot of movement without calling it exercise. And I always feel so much better.

Until September.

Just like a healthcare worker named Bri who wrote to me about taking extra time off one summer to go to beach with the kids, bike ride, take long walks, and hike with the dog. Within a few weeks, she said, she was energetic and pain-free in a way she hadn’t been in years. “I had no idea the positive impacts it would have on my body,” she told me. Then she went back to work. Her sleep tanked, her muscles tightened like screws, and that joyous feeling evaporated.

We can’t live the summer vibe non-stop but how can we sprinkle it into our our regular lives all year round? What can we change about our environment to make it easier to integrate summer-like moments into our days that make us feel like a happy, joyous, frolicking rats? Take a sec to consider…

I’ll report back next week and share results and any weird misc tips.

Meanwhile, the Body Electric book is officially making it’s way in the world! If you’ve read it, I’d love your feedback. (It barely missed the best-seller list but never mind. ONWARD!)

Brigid Schulte (researcher and author of Over Work, Overwhelmed) calls it “a book that will make you want to move” but what do you think? Please do me the favor of rating and/or reviewing it on Amazon or Goodreads?

Hope you find a moment this week to giggle like a rat having its tummy tickled,

x Manoush

P.S. Haven’t got Body Electric yet? Buy it here. And thanks :)

I LOVE BOOKS

So, in celebration of being book-birthday twins, Laura and I have traded Q&As. You can read my answers to her questions about why you don’t need a digital detox to have a healthier relationship with your tech. And below, we discuss her very precise scheduling methodology…

Answers have been lightly edited for length.

MZ: Many people might hear “planning” or “scheduling” and think ugh. But you love planning. Why?

Laura Vanderkam: Everyone reading this is a productive, responsible person. You will do the things you have to do. Wise planning means you’ll get to do the things you want to do too — and have a lot more time for fun. So that is why I love planning out my schedule.

I recommend that every busy person build a weekly planning ritual into their lives. These days, I sit down on Thursdays with my calendar and a new page in my planner and I think. I make myself a 3-category priority list. What is most important to me professionally over the next week? How about in my relationships (with family and friends)? What about for me personally? I imagine a lot of us think about our professional to-dos, but creating a 3-category priority list is a game changer. It’s hard to make a 3-category list and leave one category blank. Our brains don’t work that way. We think we need to put something in all three categories, and that, right there, can nudge you to have a more balanced life with some time for fun.

My life is occasionally a circus, but I like to think of myself as the ringmaster managing these three rings. And in keeping with this metaphor, a circus is generally managed for delight. If I create an intricate plan for the week where everyone gets where they need to go, but there’s nothing I’m genuinely looking forward to, then I need to go back and work on the schedule again. I promise if you do this weekly planning, week after week, life will not only be more calm, you’ll make space for joy as well.

MZ: What’s your message to people who feel guilty about taking breaks? As much as I want people to enjoy taking movement breaks, old ideas around productivity die hard.

LV: Sometimes people claim not to take breaks during their work days, but if you look at a lot of knowledge workers, the truth is that almost everyone does take breaks — it’s that the breaks aren’t particularly intentional or helpful. You’re checking email and you get a breaking news alert and you go read that headline and then see another article that irks you and next thing you know you’re reading down to the 43rd comment. This was a break but it didn’t feel rejuvenating.

As part of writing Big Time I had about 200 people try planning in two intentional work breaks per day. I had them think up breaks that would be rejuvenating, and think about where these could go. Curiously, when people were planning ahead, and knew they needed to slot in two breaks each day, they tended to choose two different sorts of breaks (a walk in the morning plus calling a friend in the afternoon; sitting outside in the morning for 10 minutes plus reading a novel in the afternoon for 10 minutes), a practice that added some nice variety to these mini-vacations, and that would have been hard to do without thinking it through. After a week of this, more people agreed that their work breaks were boosting their energy levels and boosting their moods — in other words, their breaks were getting better at doing what breaks are supposed to do.

Where this comes into play with time management is that while time isn’t renewable, energy is. We have at least some agency over our energy levels, and by pro-actively planning in breaks, we can be more energized and thus get more done than if we’re dragging. When energy is high we can also enjoy our time more. I’ve started taking a 5 p.m. walk to reset my energy for the evening. It’s easy to feel like we just want to collapse on the couch at the end of the day, but I’d like to enjoy my evenings, so I don’t want to feel exhausted.

MZ. I love the idea that energy is renewable even if time isn’t. Ok, last question: You and I both write about two kinds of interruptions: the external kind and self interruptions. How do you suggest people deal with them?

LV: Any time something feels draining or difficult, it helps to get data. I’d suggest people try tracking their time for a few days and noting when they were pulled away from an intended task, and why. Sometimes when people do this they find that a lot of interruptions are self-initiated. You were working on something challenging, and decided to check email as a little break. Could it have waited 15 minutes for a natural stopping point? Probably — but email was more appealing than struggle in the moment.

We all do this, but recognizing it is helpful because while we can’t always stop other people from interrupting us, we can usually stop interrupting ourselves. I like to keep what I call a “later list” going when I’m doing focused work. If I think of something I need to do or go find, I write it on the list to do…later. I won’t forget it if it’s written down, but there’s no need to do it right that second.

As for the other interruptions, some structural solutions can help. Even if you need to be fairly accessible, you might try being unavailable for short periods of time, and then available again. We can get a lot done in 15-20 focused minutes, and it’s the rare thing that can’t wait 15 minutes for a response (who knows - you might be in the bathroom then, or presenting in a meeting, or driving somewhere). If you work closely with a team, you might all agree on which hours you’ll be fully accessible to each other, and when you can all put your heads down and do focused work. That won’t eliminate interruptions, but might minimize a lot of them.

MZ: Indeed! Breaks are part of how we make the work possible. Thanks, Laura!

And…one week after pub day: Thank YOU, dear reader.

I am seriously grateful to everyone who bought Body Electric, came to an event, posted about it, told a friend, listened to the audiobook, wrote me a note saying , “Fine, I’ll go take a walk!” or just sent me good vibes via ESP.

I think we’re onto something here.
Maybe we can’t reach a peace deal with Iran today, but we can get more people feeling better in their bodies and improving their mood and focus…add it all up and who knows what’s possible tomorrow?

Meanwhile, a small but hugely helpful favor: If you’ve read the book or listened to the audiobook, would you leave a rating or short review? This one cracked me up:

Amazon, Goodreads, Audible, Libro.fm, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, wherever you got it. Stars count! One word counts! “This made me dance” absolutely counts.

These early ratings really do help other people find the book.

Next week: the Rat Park experiment and what rodents can (and can’t) teach us about how we live with our technology.

x Manoush

P.S. I cajoled Daniel Tiger into taking a movement break with me at KQED fest in San Francisco on Saturday…

Lazy weekends did not exist around her. She was always heading to the vegetable garden to clip herbs. Inflating a boat to take my younger siblings rafting. And vacuuming. So. Much. Vacuuming.

Sit around by the pool? She’d rather set up a net in the backyard and crush us at badminton.

Some of all the movement wasn’t optional. Traditional gender roles meant she did most of the cooking, childcare, and housework on top of her nearly full-time job as a geriatric psychiatrist at the state mental health center.

On school breaks in elementary school, I’d tag along to her office and play Gin Rummy with the receptionist while her patients—most of them over fifty and dealing with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological diseases—checked in.

She spent decades helping people slow their cognitive decline and saw firsthand how genetics, lifestyle, and environment can help or further harm people’s health.

At 82, she’s retired but busier than ever. She swims most mornings (sometimes afternoons too), helps care for her two youngest grandchildren, walks multiple times a day, plays chamber music, is in an orchestra, sings in a choir, and enjoys her book club. And still bikes. We finally convinced her to wear a helmet a few years ago, though I think she prefers the wind in her hair. All this despite breaking her back in a fall from a ladder twenty-five years ago and sustaining a head injury in 2019, after slipping on rocks while entering an Italian lake.

She’s part cat, part geriatric psychiatrist, part unstoppable force.

It only took me three years interviewing scientists, running a global movement-break experiment with 20,000+ citizen scientists, and writing an entire book about how to age well in this screen-saturated world to realize that the healthy-aging role model I’d been searching for? It was right in front of me! Duh. Like a scene from a mother-daughter romcom.

Body Electric is out TODAY. I dedicated it to my mom, the woman whose vacuuming once made me roll my eyes, and now inspires me to always keep moving and keep my floors clean.

Be a role model for your parents or your kids. Live the Body Electric.

ORDER BODY ELECTRIC

And in case you forgot: Mother’s Day is on Sunday. This book is the perfect gift! Order it, then call your mom, and walk around the block while you catch up.

Thanks for being on this ride with me,

x Manoush

P.S. It’s not too late! Join us!

NYC: Tuesday, May 5
P&T Knitwear Books (click here for tickets)
Launch event for Body Electric, in conversation with Debbie Millman
(Live taping of Debbie’s Design Matters podcast)
Special appearance by Dr. Keith Diaz!

San Francisco: Monday, May 11
The Commonwealth Club (click here for tickets)
A conversation about Body Electric with Breakthru’s Melissa Painter, moderated by KQED’s Lesley McClurg

But before my session, I went to a lecture by tech philosopher Tobias Rees. Thankfully, his framing built back my confidence. Allow me to explain…

Tobias’ talk was about how AI isn’t alive but it’s also more than just an inert machine. There’s something new and different about these tools but we lack the vocabulary to describe them. Kind of like how people didn’t talk about “getting out into nature” until the mid-19th century and the Industrial Revolution. Before cities began spreading, people were immersed in nature all the time!

Or take the story David Foster Wallace told in a 2025 commencement speech at Kenyon College:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Something similar happened to me a decade ago when I started researching boredom. I would describe being bored to teens and they would look at me, blink, and say, “I’ve never had that feeling before.” They’d grown up with phones. There was never a need to be bored.

This is what’s happening with moving our bodies.

For most of human history, movement wasn’t a practice that we tracked or optimized or forgot to do. It was just… how life worked. You moved to get food, to get anywhere, to do your job, to exist. There was no version of the day that didn’t include MOVING your body.

Now we do email instead of the errand, order groceries instead of stop by the corner store, and relegate movement to an hour at the gym, if at all. The result is a low-level, hard-to-describe feeling that something is off. You get home and your kids want to play and you just... can’t. You assume it’s aging, or your personality, or failure to meditate. It’s not. Innovation = efficiency and because we’ve engineered movement out of our lives, we now need to be purposeful about integrating it back into our days.

A human state that was once ambient, now requires an explanation!

Friend, the folks in my Summit session got it. Especially because many of them are on the front lines of the “pivot” to AI. Numerous told me about pulling 16-hour days and managing half a dozen AI agents simultaneously. AI brain fry indeed. No wonder they feel the need to go out into the middle of the ocean and dance their butts off for three days straight.

For those of us who can’t do that (or prefer not to inject various dubious substances), I humbly offer Body Electric. The book is out this Tuesday. I’m trying to stay zen and remind myself why I felt compelled to write it: Because people are exhausted and need a little joy in their lives. Feeling better in your body lifts that shitty feeling and doesn’t require a crazy workout. It’s doable, spreadable, and definitely needed.

ORDER BODY ELECTRIC

Please support the mission to get us moving by ordering the book, which signals to the publisher that they should print enough copies so bookstores can stock them, and more people can read it and get moving. Or get their kids, parents, neighbors, and exhausted co-workers moving!

It’s good for your health, physically and mentally, and good for humanity. And, I’m not gonna lie, good for me too! All boats (ha) rise when you order Body Electric. Thank you.

x Manoush

Body Electric is a LIBRARY JOURNAL starred review:
““[W]ith warmth, humor, and scads of footnotes, Zomorodi deftly lays out practical ways for people of all ages and abilities to retool their routines to increase movement and break time…..Anyone looking to (literally and figuratively) unseat tech’s detrimental effects on their health will appreciate this well-researched, pragmatic title.”

So much for AI increasing productivity and job satisfaction!
We’ve long seen this paradox: new tools lead to a different kind of productivity, but don’t necessarily give the humans operating them new mental clarity. Consider the people who said that using new tech made them feel like they were “floating in space” or “lost behind the screen.”

No, those phrases weren’t from overstimulated desk jockeys hyped up on Zoom or Slack… they were uttered by Wall Street clerks using some of the first workplace desktop computers in the early 1980s to Harvard researcher Shoshana Zuboff. She’d been brought in by bank managers to help them understand why error rates and employee malaise were on the rise, despite these new machines, which were supposed to be making their jobs easier. You have to chuckle at her now-quaint description of the modern workplace: “An entire floor of people seated at their partitioned workstations, staring into the screens of desktop terminals,” she writes in her awesome 1988 book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power.

Nearly 40 years later, the BCG researchers quote a senior engineering manager describing a day in his life:

“I had one tool helping me weigh technical decisions, another spitting out drafts and summaries, and I kept bouncing between them, double-checking every little thing. But instead of moving faster, my brain just started to feel cluttered. Not physically tired, just… crowded. It was like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention. I caught myself rereading the same stuff, second-guessing way more than usual, and getting weirdly impatient. My thinking wasn’t broken, just noisy — like mental static. What finally snapped me out of it was realizing I was working harder to manage the tools than to actually solve the problem.”

If you read that and thought, phew, I’m so glad I don’t work in tech, don’t kid yourself. This is how the tools always disseminate: from the lab → tech companies → financial institutions → filtering down to the rest of us in media, education, law, healthcare, etc., etc. Maybe you’ve been playing around with these tools already and have also experienced the “fog” or “buzzing” feeling that BCG study participants described.

What’s the antidote? I found some solace in how a few of these workers coped: They stepped “away from their computer to ‘reset.’”

Just walk away, right? It sounds so easy. Hahaha.

Another fun article I came across was written by Berkeley researchers studying how AI is changing work habits at one tech company. Employees there described sending quick prompts to AI “during lunch, in meetings, or while waiting for a file to load.” In other words, if they had time to pause, they had time to prompt. As the researchers wrote:

“Because AI made beginning a task so easy — it reduced the friction of facing a blank page or unknown starting point — workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks.”

I observed a similar phenomenon (minus the AI) in myself when I first got an iPhone in 2010 and started filling every crack of time in my day—while waiting for the subway, standing in line for a coffee—with texting, the headlines, and Two Dots (no, I will not be linking to this game. You’re welcome.) It led me to my first book, which was all about the attention economy and the power of boredom.

Since then, I’ve realized all this break-filling doesn’t just have psychological and cognitive effects. This relationship with our technology is PHYSICAL (and not in a humanoid-robot kind of way.) Hours spent sitting, elbows locked, necks bent, eyes fixed on a glowing screen—and now, trying to make or find sense in AI-generated code or text—add up fast. My term for it? They make you feel like “crap.”

I refuse to sacrifice my health to the technology. But I can’t move to Walden Pond either. Breaks (real ones, spent moving, not just switching from your work computer to Instagram on your phone) are the easiest, most pragmatic answer I’ve found.

Well, I didn’t find them—Columbia researcher Keith Diaz did. And together, with the help of our 20,000 study participants, we showed that these little breaks can have outsized effects. You just need to be a little intentional and a tad rebellious.

Quietly walking for five minutes up and down your driveway may not solve the world’s problems (or even your own), but it will make you feel less foggy-headed and a tad more joyous. It’s the easiest way to debug yourself.

Body Electric (out 5/5! Less than 2 weeks!) is the full playbook: how thousands of people in our study actually fit movement breaks into jobs with back-to-back Zooms, caregiving schedules, chronic pain, and every kind of “but I can’t” you can imagine. It’s also the science of why such a small thing has such outsized effects on your focus, mood, and energy, so you stop feeling guilty every time you step away from your desk…

PRE-ORDER BODY ELECTRIC

I really hate beating the marketing drum, but I’m swallowing my pride and asking because of what study participants and I experienced and want to spread:

Understanding how our screens affect our biology and being part of a tribe that cares about its health (and not in a cold-plunge, tech-bro kind of way) has brought back my sorely-missed optimism. I want more people to get this opportunity.

Thank you so much for being here! Go look at some pretty pink flowers on a tree near you!

x Manoush

P.S. Reader Holly reviewed Body Electric on Goodreads and called it:
“Inspiring, transformative, life-changing…I think most importantly she’s not anti-tech and recognizes we can’t just go off-the-grid.”

P.PS. I’m doing two book events! Please come!

NYC: Tuesday, May 5: P&T Knitwear Books (click here for tickets)
Launch event for Body Electric, in conversation with Debbie Millman
(Live taping of Debbie’s Design Matters podcast)

San Francisco: Monday, May 11: The Commonwealth Club (click here for tickets)
A conversation about Body Electric with Breakthru’s Melissa Painter, moderated by KQED’s Lesley McClurg

Regular readers know we ended up doing a clinical trial with over 20,000 people and showing that, not only could people take these breaks, they loved how they made them feel.

Sometimes the simplest solution is the most revolutionary.

Yesterday, I watched Keith take the TED main stage in Vancouver in a session I hosted called “Back to Biological Basics.” And I know it sounds cheesy, but truly, my heart swelled. Getting science out of the lab and into people lives, across the globe? It’s a nerdy journalist’s dream come true.

The talk isn’t out yet but here are some takeaways:

Americans spend, on average, 187 full days of the year sitting. That’s not a typo. The health consequences of lives built around chairs and screens accumulate slowly and then all at once: increased blood sugar, weaker cardiovascular health, disrupted sleep, accelerated aging.

The fix is almost insultingly simple. A five-minute walk every thirty minutes reduced blood sugar spikes after eating by roughly 60 percent, comparable in effect to medication. You don’t need to take a spin class; your kid doesn’t need to join the hyper-competitive soccer team. Just move your body.

And you don’t even have to be perfect. In our global study of 20,000 people, most people managed only four or five breaks a day. And it still had a HUGE impact! Fatigue levels still dropped by 25%. Mood didn’t sink like a depressed stone! Even one minute of moving an hour has an effect. You can’t really fail at this.

This is the kind of journalism that sets me on fire: When information and experimentation move people to action (literally). The consequences of getting in touch with Keith continue to ripple outwards.

In three years, Keith’s work went from a line in my ear to testing feasibility with thousands of participants, to a global stage. And next? The Body Electric book, which goes deep on the physiology, how people integrated these breaks into their lives, and the neuroscience of why it restores energy and focus.

Please support this work and preorder it here:

PRE-ORDER BODY ELECTRIC

Get the full story into your hands…or the hands of someone who could use some help getting back in touch with what their body (and therefore, their mind) needs.
Then close the laptop and walk around the block. Keith's orders.

x Manoush
P.S. Check out this slide! Prep your mind before you take that next meeting!

Embedded in the ear cups were EEG sensors that could track the electrical activity in my brain. Me? Skeptical? You betcha! Traditionally, getting an EEG means having electrodes stuck directly to your scalp in a lab.

But there I was, after dinner at a neurotech conference (we were served brain-healthy salmon, of course), wearing perfectly normal-looking headphones and watching my brainwaves undulate across a laptop screen.

The creator showed me how the device could track my focus in real time: First, he asked me to concentrate on reading a sequence of numbers for a minute. Then, for the next minute, he told me to gaze out the window at nothing. On the screen, I could see the shift: spikes of activity while I read; gentler, flatter waves when I spaced out.

So what’s the actual point of these fancy headphones?

Here’s the problem, as Neurable explains on its website:

“Today’s high-pressure corporate landscape demands razor-sharp focus, unwavering attention, and exceptional resilience. Remote work environments and tightening budgets are demanding that your customers and staff do more than ever, but stress and burnout are major obstacles hindering employee productivity and well-being.”

Neurable’s solution? Headphones that ding workers when their focus is fading, nudging them to take a break before they hit a wall.

As I got the pitch, here’s what the brainwaves in my mind were saying: Seriously? I am literally about to put out a book on how we’ve lost touch with what our bodies need as we outsource our senses to technology.

“Do we really need more technology to help us get off our technology?” I asked gently.

His answer was legit: By the time most of us realize we need a break, it’s already too late. Our back already aches and that brain fog has rolled in. Like the old warning that by the time you recognize you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated.

But I still don’t want to buy these headphones. As I’ve learned doing research over the past three years, there are really good reasons to (manually) build back the ability to sense what our body and mind need.

It’s the core premise of my Body Electric book, out May 5 and way cheaper than these headphones!

PRE-ORDER BODY ELECTRIC

Throughout the book, I talk about interoception, a small but rapidly growing field of research into how we sense and interpret our body’s internal signals.

As neuroscientist Mark Andermann explains in Harvard Medicine Magazine:

“When something happens that makes you feel off, those are the moments when you shift your attention from the outside world to what’s going on inside.”

He calls understanding that process “one of the next frontiers” of interoception research.

I call outsourcing that awareness to yet another device “burrowing deeper” into the hole Silicon Valley dug for us: a life full of recurring subscriptions, boxes of obsolete chargers, and less patience for the ordinary limits of being human.

Maybe you read that genius essay by sociologist and New York Magazine writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton, who argues that we need to rebuild our tolerance for inconvenience—what she (and now everyone) calls “friction-maxxing.” Last week, I heard the term used in four (seriously, FOUR) separate conversations.

Friction-maxxing is kinda like interoception training: listening to your body long enough to notice what it is actually telling you.

Just to add some nuance to this diatribe, I don’t think all digital nudges are bad. I’ve been tracking my steps for over five years. And recently, I’ve been working on an app (shhhhh…more soon), based on requests from Body Electric study participants. Digital tools can be useful as on-ramps to better habits until, ideally, they’re no longer needed.

And look, I’m no Luddite. I can’t help but be genuinely intrigued by a future in which we can gather brain-related data and use it to coach ourselves. But before I succumb to utopian wishful thinking, I remember those classrooms in China a few years ago where students wore brain-monitoring headbands that tracked their attentiveness and gave realtime feedback to teachers. Scary stuff.

Collecting kids’ brainwaves is quite the privacy nightmare…but also, think of all the minutes of looking out the window and daydreaming that those kids lost out on! And honestly, just giving them more recess would probably have done the trick.

Whadya think? Would you buy these headphones? NO JUDGEMENT! Leave a comment or respond to this email.

I appreciate that you slowed down to read this,
x Manoush

P.S. I’m doing two public launch events and I would love to see you there! Bring friends or your burned-out co-worker!

NYC: Tuesday, May 5
P&T Knitwear Books (click here for tickets)
Launch event for Body Electric, in conversation with Debbie Millman
(Live taping of Debbie’s Design Matters podcast)

San Francisco: Monday, May 11
The Commonwealth Club (click here for tickets)
A conversation about Body Electric with Breakthru’s Melissa Painter, moderated by KQED’s Lesley McClurg

I contacted physiologist Keith Diaz, after reading about his lab’s findings: Regular movement breaks (specifically, 5 minutes of gentle movement, interspersed through the day) can be a game changer for physical and mental health. It seemed so simple! But was it too hard for people to actually do?

Would people take these movement breaks?

Our amazing teams at NPR and Columbia University Medical School ended up launching a podcast series and global clinical trial that more than 20,000 people joined.

And people did it! Their fatigue, focus, and mood improved. Despite all the interruptions, their productivity actually rose. And people liked taking the breaks. The final results (now in peer review) were remarkable.

But for me, the study was just the start.
I wanted to get into the nitty gritty: Why did some participants succeed beyond our wildest dreams? What were the steps they took to integrate movement into their busy lives? What kept them motivated? I decided to dig into the data and stories and look for patterns.

That analysis is at the core of the Body Electric book, coming May 5...

PRE-ORDER BODY ELECTRIC

There is so much to learn from how different kinds of people, at different stages of life, with different routines, responsibilities, and limitations found ways to live the Body Electric.

I also go deep into how our tech habits impact our vision, hearing, sleep, posture, breath, brain health and more.

We’re getting so good at removing friction from our lives, that we’re also removing the very things the human body needs to function well.

As AI promises to make everything move yet faster, this conversation feels more urgent than ever.

A big thank you, if you were a study participant: You’re part of figuring out how we can live better with our technology, without moving to Walden Pond.

First time hearing about Body Electric? Skeptical? Good! We should question everything! But here’s what I’ve heard from early readers:

• If you are sick and tired of feeling wired and tired, this book is for you.

• If you have chronic health issues and can’t figure out how to fit healthier habits into your life, this book is for you.

• If you need science-backed ways to have more energy and get your focus back without tossing your phone, this book is for you.

Body Electric is out May 5. The best and most helpful thing you can do right now is pre-order it…

Pre-order for Mother's + Father's Day!

Thank you a thousand times, as the Italians say, for thinking with me about how to stay human and healthy in a world increasingly designed for mathematical calculations done at hyperspeed.

Let’s get more people feeling better in their bodies,

x Manoush

P.S. If you’re not subscribed to this newsletter yet, join us! When you do, I’ll send you Your Move Break Mantra: a printable prompt you can stick next to your desk, fill in, and use as a analog defense against sedentary screen life…

Subscribe now

Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, calls Body Electric…

“A wonderfully inspiring and intensely practical exploration of how technology took us out of our bodies, and how we can learn to inhabit them again -- thereby transforming not only our physical health, but our creativity, productivity, relationships, and the state of our souls.”

It’s easy to be irritated by the smug Nordic countries that, once again, topped the list. I’m just kidding, of course. Kudos to you, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway! There’s a lot to be jealous of. Who wouldn’t be happy living in a country with economic stability, healthcare for all, and minimal political drama?

But, according to the report, sadness now lurks beneath that happy surface.
Younger generations in these regions are seeing a historic decline in happiness. For example, Norway recorded a drop of 0.670 points on a 10-point scale for those under 25, placing it among the countries with the largest declines in youth wellbeing globally.

You’ve got healthcare! So many bike lanes! What’s the problem?

This is where things get complicated. The focus of this year’s report was specifically on how happiness and wellbeing relate to internet and social media use.

For example, in chapter eight, St. Francis Xavier University researchers looked at how wellbeing and social connections fared in Europe, where 96-98% of 16-24 year-olds are on social media. The evidence, they say, suggests that the decline in these young people’s happiness could be a result of this increased use:

“Older adults increasingly benefit from stable trust levels, improved feelings of safety, stronger attachments to country, and perhaps more purposeful digital use. Younger adults, by contrast, face eroding social capital, shrinking offline social networks, and intensified comparison pressures within highly saturated digital environments…Ultimately, this chapter shows that the digital age is reshaping the social and emotional foundations of wellbeing in Europe.”

Clearly something has shifted, but is it only “the digital age” that’s reshaping young Europeans’ wellbeing? Or are higher rates of social media use—and young people’s candor on these platforms—a symptom or a byproduct of larger issues? Obviously, every country is different and measuring something like “happiness” is always a challenge. But perhaps social media also makes young people all too aware that society no longer offers them things their parents took for granted?

When a country has been riding high, there’s more to lose. Consider what’s changed in Norway specifically:

• Housing prices have made it nearly impossible for first-time buyers to enter the market. (sound familiar?)

• Rising rates of loneliness have been documented across 24 years of Norwegian adolescent research, rising in parallel with growing social inequality.

• Norwegian researchers (not affilliated with the report) describe the rise in youth unhappiness as a symptom of weakening communal bonds and a deepening crisis of the cooperative, prosocial ethos that’s long defined Norwegian society.

On his Substack, sociologist Mike Males points out that there could be many more reasons considering that, over the same years that young people’s unhappiness grew…

So did global authoritarianism, adult opiate abuse, slaughters of children, pandemic shutdowns, polar bears not finding ice, a myriad of causes for worry and unhappiness the report’s hundreds of pages ignore.

Despite social media bans rolling out in various countries, a fierce debate continues amongst researchers about what exactly we can blame these platforms for and what makes them easy scapegoats. I am fascinated by this conversation and glad we’re all talking about it, even if there are no easy fixes!

And either way, younger people are more willing to share their emotional vulnerabilities than older European generations (here’s looking at you, Mom): The report makes clear that they are asking for more security, community, and love.

How are you seeing generational differences playing out in your culture? Leave a comment or reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you.

Speaking of social connection, I was on that World Happiness panel alongside bestselling authors Gretchen Rubin and Jennifer Wallace. Afterward we grabbed lunch and they insisted I post a photo with my book. So here it is. They also told me to tell you: pre-order Body Electric (out 5/5!). 😊

Early reviews of Body Electric are trickling in…like this one on BookAnon:
”This is actually a book that is hitting pretty damn hard personally…very much recommended.”

Thanks for being here,

Manoush

What if we talked about ADHD in a similar way?

That’s the idea coming from a group of psychiatrists at the University of Toronto. Last year they published an editorial in The British Journal of Psychiatry proposing that ADHD may not be one thing, but two broad types:

Type I ADHD
The version most clinicians already recognize: a neurodevelopmental condition with genetic roots, often visible early in childhood, and often responsive to stimulant medication.

Type II ADHD
The condition develops later, shaped in part by an environment of constant digital stimulation. This is the more controversial idea.

I think this proposal speaks to what a lot of us are asking ourselves right now about our struggle to concentrate or focus:

How much of what I experience is being shaped, intensified, or even partly produced by my screen habits…or was I born this way? The researchers write in Psyche:

Picture someone who got through childhood without attention issues, only to develop them later, in their teens or 20s. They’re impulsive, scattered, easily pulled off track, but this isn’t how they’ve always been. What’s changed? Often, it’s their digital environment. Hours spent flipping between apps, scrolling through short reels, chasing social media likes or juggling screens might have disrupted their brain’s ability to regulate attention, prioritising rapid stimulation. Over time, this could have weakened their capacity for slower tasks, like reading a book, following a talk or even watching a slower movie.

They suggest ADHD may exist on a spectrum: Some cases are more strongly genetic, some more strongly shaped by environment, and many may be a mix of both. Digital overload may worsen symptoms in people who are already genetically vulnerable, and it may produce attention problems that resemble ADHD in people closer to the environmental end of the spectrum.

This would mean treatment shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all: Some people may benefit most from stimulants, while others may need behavioral changes, therapy, and/or a serious reduction in screen time.

Is there a need to give a name—or even a diagnosis—to the feeling many of us get from lives spent constantly typing, tapping, and swiping?

I’m not entirely sure. We know a diagnosis can be exacerbated by modern life. But also, not every modern problem is a diagnosable malady. On the one hand, you could argue we’re already overdiagnosing. But also, I can see how adding new terminology to the current definition of ADHD could create a more nuanced conversation about how behavior and biology work in tandem.

These are the kind of subjects I cover in my upcoming book: Body Electric is about how our tech habits are impacting our bodies and brains. When you pre-order it, you’ll be helping me get these thorny and important conversations going! (Yes, this is me trying to grab your attention. Necessary when publishing a book.)

What do you think about this idea of giving new language to this conversation about our fracturing attention spans? Please leave a comment or respond to the newsletter. It’s a delicate topic so please be respectful.

Thanks, as always, for lending me your focus,
x Manoush

P.S. Know someone who is trying to understand their (in)ability to concentrate? Forward this to them. Opening up a conversation (no judgement!) about tough topics can help someone who is trying to make sense of this intense world. (Oh wait, that’s all of us :)