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To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”

The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like

It was just that, step by step, the syllable lic, which to an Old English speaker meant “body,” came to mean, when uttered by people centuries later, “similar to”—and life went on.

Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly.

Like has become a part of compounds. Likewise began as like plus a word, wise, which was different from the one meaning “smart when either a child or getting old.”

Dictionaries tell us it’s pronounced “like-MINE-did,” but I, for one, say “LIKE- minded” and have heard many others do so

Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’”

What we are seeing in like’s transformations today are just the latest chapters in a story that began with an ancient word that was supposed to mean “body.”

Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse. After all, how often should a coherently minded person need to note that something is similar to something rather than just being that something?

The new like, then, is associated with hesitation.

So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population.

The problem with the hesitation analysis is that this was a thoroughly confident speaker.

It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.

Understandably so, of course—the meaning of like suggests that people are claiming that everything is “like” itself rather than itself.

The new like acknowledges unspoken objection while underlining one’s own point (the factuality). Like grandparents translates here as “There were, despite what you might think, actually grandparents.”

Then there is a second new like, which is closer to what people tend to think of all its new uses: it is indeed a hedge.

Then, the two likes I have mentioned must be distinguished from yet a third usage, the quotative like—as in “And she was like, ‘I didn’t even invite him.’

This is yet another way that like has become grammar. The meaning “similar to” is as natural a source here as it was for -ly: mimicking people’s utterances is talking similarly to, as in “like,” them.

Thus the modern American English speaker has mastered not just two, but actually three different new usages of like.

They have ditched their old makeup and shaving routines and are saving money, time and stress. Others have discovered that hiding their mouths affords them unexpected freedoms. Some restaurant servers and retail workers say they no longer feel obliged to fake-smile at customers, potentially lifting the burden of emotional labour.

“During a pandemic, we’re under severe stress, and whether you’re worrying about your appearance or you’re worried about someone harassing you or whistling at you, the masks can provide a respite from those things that can occupy our mind when we’re out in public. You have more freedom to be meditating or thinking about whatever you want.”

“Anonymity carries power,” adds Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and psychology professor at California State University, Los Angeles. “It can feel like trying on a different ‘role’ and the associated expectations of that role, perhaps freeing us of what can feel exhausting and insincere about smiling (especially when we aren't having a good day).”

“For introverts, it can feel great that you don’t have to talk to people you don’t know that well, but in the long run, when you get out of your comfort zone and challenge yourself… [you might form] a really fulfilling or positive relationship,”

Think back to the last time you failed or made an important mistake. Do you still blush with shame, and scold yourself for having been so stupid or selfish? Do you tend to feel alone in that failure, as if you were the only person to have erred? Or do you accept that error is a part of being human, and try to talk to yourself with care and tenderness?

“Most of us have a good friend in our lives, who is kind of unconditionally supportive,” says Kristin Neff, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who has pioneered this research. “Self-compassion is learning to be that same warm, supportive friend to yourself.”

In these exceptions, the needs of adults and children found recognition and accommodation. But many teens whose schools remain closed — which includes students at all public schools in San Francisco — were effectively told that they weren't allowed to see other human beings their age with whom they didn't already live.

The entire calculus behind the exceptions assumes a so-called typical teen experience — but it's disproportionately typical for teens who are white, middle- or upper-middle-class and male.

it is developmentally appropriate for teens to seek emotional support from romantic partners or friends, rather than caregivers.

It also doesn't take into account that friends can be a critical backstop for teens when fewer adult eyes are available as mandatory reporters.

Though the fear of missing out (or truly missing out) isn't a clinical diagnosis, we know that scrolling through social media feeds can leave teens both forlorn and anxious about where they fit in.

Still, the revision's monumental impact on teens seems to have been a happy coincidence — and teens' mental health cannot remain an afterthought.

Furthermore, policymakers should invest in teen mental health by subsidizing telehealth therapy and creating hotlines to manage short-of-crisis stress.

Our teens need the kind of forceful advocacy from adults that resulted in the reversal of playground closings in California.

Teens aren't cute little kids anymore, but they're just as vulnerable — and in this situation, arguably more so.

“The findings need to be replicated under clinical trial conditions, with larger numbers of participants and with robust blinding of subjects and outcome assessors.

induced improvements in working memory might come at the price of worsening of other areas of cognitive function.”

it could also have applications in treating disorders linked to poor working memory, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Yet the almost sing-songy declaration “I’m so OCD!” seems to be everywhere.

People with a common type of OCD can even have paralyzing anxiety over their own sexual orientation.

Since absolute certainty is rarely possible, almost no reassurance clears the yes, but hurdle, and that keeps the anxiety wheels spinning.

It’s common for people with OCD to believe that if they check the stove just once more, or Google just one more symptom of a disease they’re convinced they’ve got, then their mind will be clear.

“The brain is conditioned to alert us to anything that threatens our survival, but this system is malfunctioning in OCD,” says psychologist Steven Phillipson, clinical director of the Center for Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy in New York City. “That can result in a tsunami of emotional distress that keeps your attention absolutely focused.”

For the person with OCD, he explains, the brain is signaling what feels like a life and death risk, and it’s hard to put a price on survival.

“Performing the ritual just convinces it that the danger is real and that only perpetuates the cycle.”

“It’s the moment when a panic marries a concept,”

If you can live with the uncertainty those dangers can cause—even if they make you uncomfortable—you likely don’t have OCD, or at least not a very serious case of it. If the anxiety is so great it consumes your thoughts and disrupts your day, you may have a problem.

Medications, including certain antidepressants, are often a big part of the solution, but psychotherapy—especially cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—can be just as effective.

progress up the ladder of perceived danger

Consciously activating the more measured, analytical part of your brain is the key to controlling runaway fear and anxiety.

But it’s not so easy in an era when social media and cable news make us aware of every actual or potential disaster occurring anywhere in the world (and in a repeating loop). It’s even more difficult if you have lots of stress or instability at home or work.

“Our culture valorizes strength and power and showing fear is considered weakness,” said Leon Hoffman, co-director of the Pacella Research Center at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute in Manhattan. “But you are actually stronger if you can acknowledge fear.”

“The more you try to suppress fear, either by ignoring it or doing something else to displace it, the more you will actually experience it,” said Kristy Dalrymple, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Psychologists and neuroscientists are also finding that the amygdala is less apt to freak out if you are reminded that you are loved or could be loved. For example, seeing images of people with frightened expressions is usually a huge trigger for the amygdala, but that response is greatly diminished when subjects are first shown pictures of people being cared for or hugged.

"The science tells [us] when [we're] on the phone while driving, it is a high-risk activity -- very, very risky,"

Even hands-free phones appear to contribute to unsafe driving

These sorts of injuries, known as repetitive strain injuries or a repetitive motion disorders, are sometimes minor. But they can also lead to serious medical problems.

Our reliance on our cell phones may actually be "training" some of us to believe it is vibrating when it is not. In the case of cell phones, people are rewarded when they pick up their calls and read their incoming text messages, which causes them to pick up their cell phones more and more frequently.

The sores and blisters that some experience from too much texting and typing have earned monikers such as "BlackBerry thumb." And while the sore thumbs may seem like a new phenomenon, medical experts say there is a rational explanation for this modern-day nuisance.

What they found was that when children were on the cell phones, their attention to traffic -- the number of times a participant looked right or left -- went down 20 percent. The risk of getting hit by a car, or the number of close calls, went up 43 percent

According to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/noise/index.htm), about 12.5 percent of children and adolescents 6 and 19 years old and 17 percent of adults between 20 and 69 years of age have suffered permanent damage to their hearing from excessive exposure to noise. In total, this accounts for more than 30 million people.

Sounds louder than 85 decibels can damage hearing. Normal conversation is about 60 decibels, and stereo headphones out of our MP3-enabled devices often reach 100 decibels.

Establish a routineInstead of treating this experience like a vacation, Wright said, you should still get up and do all the things you normally would do during your former schedule. Or as many as you can.

"If you've got a relatively large living location [in which] you can move around to different rooms and mix up your space a little bit, you're probably a little bit better off."

"Unless you know you've been exposed or are infected, social distancing does not mean that you can't go outside," Wright said. "Going outside, getting fresh air, taking a walk -- those are all really important things to do."

"We also know that from research on things like quarantine and isolation, staying socially connected is really important," Wright said. "Obviously that can be challenging right now because the whole point is not to have face-to-face contact."

Perinatal Depression

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD):

Psychotic Depression:

Depression can occur along with other serious illnesses, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Depression can make these conditions worse and vice versa.

Depression affects different people in different ways.

Medications called antidepressants can work well to treat depression.

"This is a serious matter and we have to maintain our practices even as many people are relaxing restrictions and the economy is opening back up," Reed said in a phone interview.

Social distancing and masks "really work," she said.

Most states across the country can ease some restrictions safely, but projects spikes in areas that have broadly reopened early, according to the model put together by a team at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.

"While our models show that rising temperatures and humidity levels are having an impact on reducing the spread of Covid-19, those hot, humid days of summer are not going to eliminate the threat of virus resurgence," said PolicyLab's Dr. Gregory Tasian, senior scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.

Jefferson County, where Birmingham is located, had 1,453 confirmed cases as of Thursday, according to the state's health department data -- which is a jump of 35% from the 1,075 cases reported two weeks ago. The county has had 85 deaths attributed to Covid-19.

As of May 11, restaurants and bars were allowed to serve customers on site, gyms and athletic facilities, hair and nail salons and barber shops were allowed to open. Groups of any size are allowed, as long as the 6 feet distance guidance is followed.

Irrational stockpiling can also lead to price gouging, says Steven Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics. “If the price of a roll of toilet paper is tripled, that’s seen as a scarcer commodity to acquire, which can lead to anxiety,” he says.

Panic buying, Taylor says, is fuelled by anxiety, and a willingness to go to lengths to quell those fears: like queueing for hours or buying way more than you need. We’ve seen this before throughout history. Back in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed imminent, American families filled their basements with enough canned goods and bottled water to survive an atomic blast.

“But for many people, hand-washing seems to be too ordinary. This is a dramatic event, therefore a dramatic response is required, so that leads to people throwing money at things in hopes of protecting themselves.”

“Panic is a subjective, emotional state, and mostly what we can observe is the behaviour,” says Oppenheim. “Maybe someone reads articles or a couple of tweets about supply chain disruptions in China and mask shortages in Hong Kong, and then makes a very reasoned decision to stock up on masks just in case. All we can infer from the purchasing is the timing, so it could look panicky even if it's well thought through.”

We know that rumination (dwelling on personal problems) and social isolation are common features of depression. However, we don’t know whether these findings reflect differences in attention or thinking style. Does depression cause people to focus on themselves, or do people who focus on themselves get symptoms of depression?

Crucially, those who have previously had depressive symptoms are more likely to have them again. Therefore, their greater tendency for absolutist thinking, even when there are currently no symptoms of depression, is a sign that it may play a role in causing depressive episodes. The same effect is seen in use of pronouns, but not for negative emotion words.

From the outset, we predicted that those with depression will have a more black and white view of the world, and that this would manifest in their style of language.

Our lab recently conducted a big data text analysis of 64 different online mental health forums, examining over 6,400 members. “Absolutist words” – which convey absolute magnitudes or probabilities, such as “always”, “nothing” or “completely” – were found to be better markers for mental health forums than either pronouns or negative emotion words.

But as the World Health Organisation estimates that more than 300m people worldwide are now living with depression, an increase of more than 18% since 2005, having more tools available to spot the condition is certainly important to improve health and prevent tragic suicides such as those of Plath and Cobain.

The C.D.C. changed its tune in April, advising all Americans above the age of 2 to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Michael Basso, a senior health scientist at the agency who had been pushing internally to recommend masks, told me Ms. Tufekci’s public criticism of the agency was the “tipping point.”

Ms. Tufekci, a 40-something who speaks a mile a minute with a light Turkish accent, has none of the trappings of the celebrity academic or the professional pundit. But long before she became perhaps the only good amateur epidemiologist, she had quietly made a habit of being right on the big things.

In 2011, she went against the current to say the case for Twitter as a driver of broad social movements had been oversimplified. In 2012, she warned news media outlets that their coverage of school shootings could inspire more. In 2013, she argued that Facebook could fuel ethnic cleansing. In 2017, she warned that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm could be used as a tool of radicalization.

And when it came to the pandemic, she sounded the alarm early while also fighting to keep parks and beaches open.

“I’ve just been struck by how right she has been,” said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.

She told me she chalks up her habits of mind in part to a childhood she wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Mr. Goff was enthusing about the campaign’s ability to send different messages to individual voters based on the digital data it had gathered about them. Ms. Tufekci quickly objected to the practice, saying that microtargeting would more likely be used to sow division.

An international point of view she picked up while bouncing as a child between Turkey and Belgium and then working in the United States.

Knowledge that spans subject areas and academic disciplines, which she happened onto as a computer programmer who got into sociology.

A habit of complex, systems-based thinking, which led her to a tough critique in The Atlantic of America’s news media in the run-up to the pandemic

it began, she says, with growing up in an unhappy home in Istanbul. She said her alcoholic mother was liable to toss her into the street in the early hours of the morning. She found some solace in science fiction — Ursula K. Le Guin was a favorite — and in the optimistic, early internet.

Perhaps because of a kind of egalitarian nerd ideology that has served her well, she never sought to meet the rebels’ charismatic leader, known as Subcomandante Marcos.

“I have a thing that fame and charisma screws with your head,” she said. “I’ve made an enormous effort throughout my life to preserve my thinking.”

While many American thinkers were wide-eyed about the revolutionary potential of social media, she developed a more complex view, one she expressed when she found herself sitting to the left of Teddy Goff, the digital director for President Obama’s re-election campaign, at a South by Southwest panel in Austin in 2012

“A bunch of things came together, which I’m happy I survived,” she said, sitting outside a brick house she rents for $2,300 a month in Chapel Hill, N.C., where she is raising her 11-year-old son as a single parent. “But the way they came together was not super happy, when it was happening.”

“At a time when everybody was being stupidly optimistic about the potential of the internet, she didn’t buy the hype,” he told me. “She was very prescient in seeing that there would be a deeper rot to the role of data-driven politics in our world.”

Many tech journalists, entranced by the internet-fueled movements sweeping the globe, were slow to spot the ways they might fail, or how social media could be used against them. Ms. Tufekci, though, had “seen movement after movement falter because of a lack of organizational depth and experience, of tools or culture for collective decision making, and strategic, long-term action,” she wrote in her 2017 book, “Twitter and Tear Gas.”

One of the things that makes Ms. Tufekci stand out in this gloomy moment is her lack of irony or world-weariness. She is not a prophet of doom, having hung on to an early-internet optimism

Ms. Tufekci has taught epidemiology as a way to introduce her students to globalization and to make a point about human nature: Politicians and the news media often expect looting and crime when disaster strikes, as they did when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. But the reality on the ground has more to do with communal acts of generosity and kindness, she believes.

Her March column on masks was among the most influential The Times has published, although — or perhaps because —  it lacked the political edge that brings wide attention to an opinion piece.

“The real question is not whether Zuck is doing what I like or not,” she said. “The real question is why he’s getting to decide what hate speech is.”

She also suggested that we may get it wrong when we focus on individuals — on chief executives, on social media activists like her. The probable answer to a media environment that amplifies false reports and hate speech, she believes, is the return of functional governments, along with the birth of a new framework, however imperfect, that will hold the digital platforms responsible for what they host.

one of the leading modelers, Gabriela Gomes, suggested the entire area of research was being effectively blackballed out of fear it might encourage a relaxation of pandemic vigilance. “This is the very sad reason for the absence of more optimistic projections on the development of this pandemic in the scientific literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our analysis suggests that herd-immunity thresholds are being achieved despite strict social-distancing measures.”

Gomes suggested, herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” she told Hamblin. “It’s very striking.” Such findings, if they held up, would be very instructive, as Hamblin writes: “It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.”

But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City

overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.

But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.

we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one

you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.

Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.

Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S

he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take

Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.

If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.

At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.

The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing

These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response

The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute

According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes

the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.

Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).

Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.

even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases

In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.

there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.

That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me

The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology

Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding

Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.

he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”

the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses

“This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”

“This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.

The results from the phase 3 trial, involving almost 1,000 dying head and neck cancer patients, were early and not statistically significant but were still “clinically meaningful”, the ICR said, with some patients living months or years longer and suffering fewer side effects.

When the research nurses called to tell me that, after two months, the tumour in my throat had completely disappeared, it was an amazing moment,” said Ambrose. “While there was still disease in my lungs at that point, the effect was staggering.”

The second kind, autonomous motivation, is what we’re seeking. This is when you feel like you’re self-directed, whether you have a natural affinity for the task at hand, or you’re doing something because you understand why it’s worthwhile.

Ms. Winder, who teaches workshops on reconnecting to your sense of purpose, often has students free write about what makes them come alive.

Clinical psychologist Richard M. Ryan, one of two scientists who developed a well-known approach to understanding motivation called self-determination theory, encourages those seeking lasting motivation to take a deep dive into their values.

when you connect the things that are important to you to the things you need to do — even the drudgeries — you can feel more in control of your actions. What do you love about your work? What core value does it meet?

Looking forward to a reward isn’t the best for long-term motivation. But several studies suggest that pairing small, immediate rewards to a task improves both motivation and fun.

Social connections like this are critical to rekindling motivation,

suggested considering how your motivation is tied to the people around you, whether that’s your family or your basketball team.

Reaching out lifts others, too. “Letting someone know that you are thinking of them is enough to kick-start their motivation,” and reminds them that you care,

People also motivate each other through competition.

Students in competitive groups exercised much more often than those in supportive social networks,

New athletic adventures can be motivational gold, too. A 2020 study suggested that trying out novel activities can help you stick with exercise.

Treating ourselves with compassion works much more effectively than beating ourselves up,

“People think they’re going to shame themselves into action,” yet self-compassion helps people stay focused on their goals, reduces fear of failure and improves self-confidence, which can also improve motivation, she said.

Students who were encouraged to be compassionate toward themselves after the test studied longer and performed better on a follow-up test, compared to students given either simple self-esteem-boosting comments or no instruction.

“The key thing about self-compassion and motivation is that it allows you to learn from your failures,”

The parents in these cases are often completely bewildered by the accusations. They often remember a totally different childhood home and accuse their children of rewriting what happened.

a more individualistic culture has meant that the function of family has changed. Once it was seen as a bond of mutual duty and obligation, and now it is often seen as a launchpad for personal fulfillment. There’s more permission to cut off people who seem toxic in your life.

There’s a lot of real emotional abuse out there, but as Coleman put it in an essay in The Atlantic, “My recent research — and my clinical work over the past four decades — has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.”

Either way, there’s a lot of agony for all concerned. The children feel they have to live with the legacy of an abusive childhood. The parents feel rejected by the person they love most in the world, their own child, and they are powerless to do anything about it. There’s anger, grief and depression on all sides — painful holidays and birthdays — plus, the next generation often grows up without knowing their grandparents.

there seems to be a generational shift in what constitutes abuse. Practices that seemed like normal parenting to one generation are conceptualized as abusive, overbearing and traumatizing to another.

Becca Bland, founder of the British support and advocacy group Stand Alone, told the BBC: “Now I can put my needs first rather than trying to fix things beyond my control. But, yes, I’m angry I didn’t get the mother I wanted.”

A 2012 survey from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture found that almost three-quarters of parents of school-age kids said they eventually want to become their children’s best friend.

Some kids seem to think they need to cut off their parents just to have their own life. “My mom is really needy and I just don’t need that in my life,

In other cases, children may be blaming their parents for the fact that they are not succeeding as they had hoped — it’s Mom and Dad who screwed me up.

it feels like a piece of what seems to be the psychological unraveling of America

Terrible trends are everywhere. Major depression rates among youths aged 12 to 17 rose by almost 63 percent between 2013 and 2016. American suicide rates increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019. The percentage of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990,

Fifty-four percent of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well, according to a 2018 Ipsos survey.

political tribalism becomes a mechanism with which people can shore themselves up, vanquish shame, fight for righteousness and find a sense of belonging.

if we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

Facebook shut down the team in late 2019.

“We have a role to play, which is why we’ve built tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use our services,” she said in the statement. “Furthermore, we have a dedicated team working across our platforms to better understand these issues and ensure people are using our apps in ways that are meaningful to them.”

They wrote that they don’t consider the behavior to be a clinical addiction because it doesn’t affect the brain in the same way as gambling or substance abuse. In one document, they noted that “activities like shopping, sex and Facebook use, when repetitive and excessive, may cause problems for some people.”

In March 2020, several months after the well-being team was dissolved, researchers who had been on the team shared a slide deck internally with some of the findings and encouraged other teams to pick up the work.

The researchers estimated these issues affect about 12.5% of the flagship app’s more than 2.9 billion users, or more than 360 million people. About 10% of users in the U.S., one of Facebook’s most lucrative markets, exhibit this behavior

In the Philippines and in India, which is the company’s largest market, the employees put the figure higher, at around 25%.

“Why should we care?” the researchers wrote in the slide deck. “People perceive the impact. In a comparative study with competitors, people perceived lower well-being and higher problematic use on Facebook compared to any other service.

Facebook’s findings are consistent with what many external researchers have observed for years,

said Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine and dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas

His research group followed about a thousand people over six months in a nationally representative survey and found that the amount of social media that a person used was the No. 1 predictor of the variables they measured for who became depressed.

In late 2017, a Facebook executive and a researcher wrote a public blog post that outlined some of the issues with social-media addiction. According to the post, the company had found that while passive consumption of social media could make you feel worse, the opposite was true of more active social-media use.

Inside Facebook, the researchers registered concern about the direction of Facebook’s focus on certain metrics, including the number of times a person logs into the app, which the company calls a session. “One of the worries with using sessions as a north star is we want to be extra careful not to game them by creating bad experiences for vulnerable populations,” a researcher wrote, referring to elements designed to draw people back to Facebook frequently, such as push notifications.

Facebook then made a switch to more heavily weigh “meaningful social interactions” in its news feed as a way to combat passive consumption. One side effect of that change, as outlined in a previous Journal article in The Facebook Files, was that the company’s algorithms rewarded content that was angry or sensational, because those posts increased engagement from users.

Facebook said any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.

“Every second that I wasn’t occupied by something I had to do I was fooling around on my phone scrolling through Facebook,” Ms. Gandy said. “Facebook took over my brain.”

“Actively interacting with people—especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions—is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said.

The well-being team, according to people familiar with the matter, was reshuffled at least twice since late 2017 before it was disbanded, and could get only about half of the resources the team requested to do its work.

In 2018, Facebook’s researchers surveyed 20,000 U.S. users and paired their answers with data about their behavior on Facebook. The researchers found about 3% of these users said they experienced “serious problems” in their sleep, work or relationships related to their time on Facebook that they found difficult to change. Some of the researchers’ work was published in a 2019 paper.

According to that study, the researchers also said that a liberal interpretation of the results would be that 14% of respondents spent “a lot more time on Facebook than they want to,” although they didn’t label this group problematic users.

In 2019, the researchers had come to a new figure: What they called problematic use affects 12.5% of people on Facebook, they said. This survey used a broader definition for the issue, including users who reported negative results on key aspects of their life as well as feelings of guilt or a loss of control, according to the documents.

The researchers also asked Facebook users what aspects of Facebook triggered them most. The users said the app’s many notifications sucked them in. “Red dots are toxic on the home screen,” a male young adult in the U.S. told the researchers, referring to the symbol that alerts a user to new content.

One entrepreneur came up with his own solution to some of these issues. In 2016, software developer Louis Barclay manually unfollowed all the people, pages and groups he saw on Facebook in an attempt to be more deliberate about how he used technology. The process, which isn’t the same as unfriending, took him days, but he was happy with the result: an empty newsfeed that no longer sucked him in for hours. He could still visit the profile pages of everyone he wanted to connect with on Facebook, but their content would no longer appear in the never-ending scroll of posts.

Thinking other people might benefit from a similar experience on Facebook, he built a tool that would enable anyone to automate the process. He created it as a piece of add-on software called a browser extension that anyone could download. He called it Unfollow Everything and made it available on Chrome’s web store free of charge.

In July, Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, which the inventor earlier wrote about for Slate, saying his tool was a breach of its terms of service for automating user interactions. It also permanently disabled Mr. Barclay’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Mr. Barclay’s extension could pose risks if abused, and said Facebook offers its own unfollow tool that allows users to manually unfollow accounts.