Our newest paper, in JAMA Open - randomized high stress employees at UCSF to Headspace or control and Headspace worked to reduce stress! Useful: the effect seems to happen as long as you hit 5 mins per day. Great leadership from @aricprather.bsky.social jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Are you supposed to pronounce the analytic approach “Bay-zee-an” or “Bay-zhun” help
Some good news: California is banning insurance companies from abandoning people who just lost everything in LA. They issued a one-year moratorium on insurance cancellations in affected areas.
fortune.com/2025/01/10/c...
OMG relevant on so many levels!!!
Fit vs fat took a hit when it came out that its champion Steve Blair took Coke $ but glad to see we can trust the finding: BMI has no relation to mortality if you’re fit. Still kinda runs counter to me and @drhunger.bsky.social’s 2016 BMI =/= poor health paper but glad to see a BMI-busting paper.
In 2025 I’ll take the reins as president of the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine. I’m so proud to be the next of so many A+++ allstars that I admire to the ends of the earth. Here’s a piece we published on where we’ve come from and where we’re going as a Society tinyurl.com/SBSM2w
Oh thank god @klausetillman.bsky.social for sparing this post from total crickets 🤣
Interrupting regularly scheduled academia content to bring you a picture of the incredible cake from my pickleball-themed hatch day party, made by @cakecreationsbyme.bsky.social
Ohhhhh I’m not active on Goodreads. I just lurk and see what my sister is reading haha. *I* will look for you tho!
Agree! It is what made me pick up Wellness 🩷
Ok so we are book soulmates. I absolutely LOVED The Women, Midnight Library, and TT&T. And oh god All Fours. I will never be the same, in a good way and possibly bad way. This all means I must check out Hello Beautiful and Doppelgänger. I like to slip in NF every 5 or so books
The simulation is glitching!!! 🤣
Haha RIGHT? And oh wow. Did you know the book took place in Chicago or was it a coincidence??
So good! If you have any other book recs please share - I need a holiday by-the-fire read!
And if none of that is your jam, it also has entire wonderful, adorable chapters on the day to day glory of new love
I’m going to make everyone read the “Needy Users: A drama in seven algorithms” section of the book. It shows, step by step, how people fall for conspiracy theories and how parent-child rifts occur (are caused!!!!). I mean I thought I understood it before, vaguely, but now I REALLY get it!
This character runs an entire company that capitalizes on the placebo effect, giving people “medications” that she tells them will fix their marriages - and they do! So fun to think through how placebo effects could be used IRL
One of the characters does the marshmallow test on her child, which does NOT go the way she wants. But then she later reads work like Celeste Kidd’s reanalysis of that experiment that shows how it’s all socioeconomic status and feels better haha
I’ll be thinking about Wellness (my fave book in 2024) forever! Partly narcissistically bc it talks about real psychology studies (examples below), but also bc for the first time I concretely, vividly got how algorithms function to sew discord, and bc it TOTALLY gets parenthood lol nathanhill.net/
@aricprather.bsky.social’s book, The 7-Day Sleep Solution is also excellent. People come up to him in the street and hug him and stuff for changing their lives!
@mwkraus.bsky.social is always the most thoughtful person in the room when it comes to this stuff!
n = 231 Black men in a literature where there is next to no information on Black men and their eating disorder risk or protective factors!
Just published in International Journal of Eating Disorders-super proud of Adwoah Yeboah, an undergrad in our lab! And DiSH grad student Jordan Parker who mentored her like an absolute pro. Take-home - positivity re: Blackness is protective against eating disorder risk dx.doi.org/10.1002/eat....
A piece in @science.org about have babies in academia. I was so privileged at UCLA - colleagues that were thrilled for me when they heard; research-based daycare on campus and phone call whenever the baby was hungry so I could go breastfeed them. Every place, academic or not, should have this!
TIL, from the incredible Jack Bobo (our new Director of Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies) that someone dies of starvation every 4 seconds. In 2024!!! But also that this is the lowest starvation rate in history. My takeaway: Urgency+hope is how to stay motivated.
Just got an update on the planning for the Olympic Athletes’ Village for LA 2028 (which will be here at UCLA) and the room came alive when continuation of the #chocolatemuffins was discussed
Dr. Tené Lewis. STRESS SCIENCE PAPER AWARD EPISODE - HUMAN EMPIRICAL. Stress Beyond the Individual: The physiological cost of caring
🏆Congratulations to @tenelewis.bsky.social & team for winning the Stress Network's Stress Science Paper Award in Human Empirical! I spoke with Dr. Lewis about links between stress faced by loved ones (e.g., family, friends) & cardiovascular health.
Listen: www.stressmeasurement.org/podcast/epis...
No matter what, though, we should stop taking perfectly healthy people and trying to make them lose weight. That’s a side note in this paper that I succeeded in sneaking in
Cons: (1) there’s now a tool that can theoretically be used to eradicate an entire social group (higher weight folks) which is scary (HT to @drhunger.bsky.social for helping me see this point); (2) weight is further medicalized and stigmatized; (3) people think it’s the “easy way out” = more stigma
Pros: (1) helps health independent of weight; (2) creates weight loss (if that’s what you want; research shows that weight is a terrible health metric) more consistently than diet+exercise, so people who are told by their docs just to diet now have a solution that actually “works”