This just in: marriage might give you dementia.

Also, coffee causes heart disease (until it doesn’t), and walking your dog may reduce your risk of premature death—assuming the dog is not too stressful.

The latest viral headline comes from a study out of Florida State University, which claims that unmarried people—especially the divorced and never-married—may have a lower risk of developing dementia than their married peers.

The story quickly became catnip for algorithmic news cycles and commitment-wary Redditors. After all, nothing sells like the slow erosion of one of civilization’s most resilient social structures.

But what the study actually shows is far more complicated—and, paradoxically, far more validating of why marriage still matters, even if its benefits are misunderstood.

Instagram—our favorite dopamine dispenser disguised as a photo app—has rolled out a fresh batch of rules for teenagers.

And not just the usual “Don’t post nudes, kids” kind of thing. No, this is a full-scale lockdown wrapped in pastel UX and labeled “protection.”

On paper, it looks noble. Heroic, even.

Meta (née Facebook), now desperately rebranding as the cool digital stepdad) has introduced sweeping changes to safeguard its youngest, most vulnerable, and most monetizable users.

But like most things in modern tech: what begins as safety ends as surveillance. And what begins as protection often ends as a quiet war on autonomy—disguised as bedtime notifications.

Let’s unpack the velvet leash.

Money can’t buy happiness.

But it can buy a mattress, an ADHD coach, two therapy apps, a sound machine, and blackout curtains.

And still, you lie awake—remembering that thing you said in 2016. The one that no one else remembers but has somehow become your brain’s favorite midnight feature.

A new study in Emotion (Hudiyana et al., 2024) confirms what most adults sense but can’t articulate without crying: money helps in the long run, but how you feel about money determines how miserable or okay you are right now. It’s the split between income and financial satisfaction, and it maps directly onto how the mind handles time, memory, and meaning.

And no, this isn't just about income brackets and budgeting spreadsheets.

It’s about how your brain metabolizes the future—especially when it’s dark out and quiet and your prefrontal cortex has gone home for the day.

Turns out, nightmares aren’t the cause of your bad sleep—they’re the consequence of it.

That’s the grim little twist served up by a new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research, which used wearable EEG headbands to track what really happens when the body tries (and fails) to sleep peacefully in the 21st century.

Researchers found that when your night is a series of unfortunate awakenings—tossing, turning, checking the clock at 3:17 a.m. for no reason at all—you’re more likely to be rewarded the next night with a premium-grade nightmare.

And not just a weird dream about your 8th-grade math teacher—no, the real thing: terror, threat, emotional overload, and sometimes enough fear to jolt you awake.

But the nightmare itself? It doesn’t seem to poison the next night’s sleep. At least not directly. Nightmares, it seems, don’t cause insomnia.

Insomnia, on the other hand, might just be the slow-moving train that pulls your psyche into dream-hell the following night. It’s not a loop—it’s a sequence. And your brain is staging the horror film.

A new study has confirmed what people with ADHD already knew but couldn’t prove without a clipboard and a research team: their brains are less a filing cabinet and more a malfunctioning slideshow—spontaneous, irrelevant, and mostly uninvited.

Published in the British Journal of Psychology, the research shows that people with ADHD symptoms experience significantly more involuntary memories in daily life than those without—and these memories are often less fun than a bad high school reunion.

That’s right: not only do ADHD brains wander into the future (mind-wandering, daydreaming, overplanning your Nobel acceptance speech while microwaving coffee), they also get yanked backward.

Into cringe. Into regret. Into half-forgotten episodes of heartbreak, third-grade humiliation, and whatever you said in that email draft you never sent but still obsess over.

If the first half of the 20th century was about surviving fascism and fluoride, the 21st is about surviving the death of meaning.

Not death itself—no, we’ve got cryogenic startups for that—but the death of the idea that anything really matters when your data plan renews automatically.

Enter agnosticism: the only spiritual posture brave enough to say, “I’m not buying it, but I’m not mocking it either.”

A cognitive shrug dressed in tweed. A worldview perfectly calibrated for a civilization that can no longer distinguish between sacred truth and a productivity hack.

Let’s discuss Silicon Valley, and the Gospel of Never Die™

So your partner dumps you. Maybe they say “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Maybe they ghost you like they’re being paid by Casper.

Either way, welcome to one of humanity’s most universal and undignified experiences: the romantic breakup. And good news—science is finally catching up to your heartbreak.

In a recent study that reads like a behavioral autopsy report, Menelaos Apostolou and colleagues (2024) went fishing for patterns in the raw sewage of human emotion.

Published in Evolutionary Psychology, the research uncovers 13 distinct reactions to getting dumped, which conveniently cluster into three basic modes of suffering. You might call them:

1. The Disengaged Stoic (“Accept and forget”)

2. The Sad Blob (“Sadness and depression”)

3. The Cautionary Tale (“Physical and psychological aggression”)

   Let’s jump in!

When we think of “attachment issues,” we often picture someone clinging too tightly, sending paragraph-long texts, or spiraling when they don’t get a reply.

But avoidance? That’s the quieter epidemic. And in the United States—the land of self-made men, bootstraps, and rugged individualism—avoidant attachment might just be the emotional wallpaper.

How Common Is Avoidant Attachment in the U.S.?

Natalie and Shane Plummer, a married couple from Meridian, Idaho, have been together for 24 years. About 12 years ago, they made the decision to sleep in separate bedrooms — initially to improve their quality of sleep.

Natalie wanted relief from Shane’s snoring, and Shane, the tidier of the two, appreciated having his own space.

What they didn’t expect was that this arrangement would also enhance their sex life, increasing both the frequency and quality of their intimacy.

Instead of sharing a bed out of habit, they found that being apart at night made their time together feel more intentional and exciting, or so they claim in the New York Times.

But what really annoys me is that several New York couples therapist proclaimed extreme enthusiasm for this dubious practice, without completely discussing the science.

Shame on them.

When someone has been physically starved, reintroducing nourishment too quickly can be dangerous.

The same is true of emotional refeeding.

If you’ve been in a marriage or partnership marked by long-term low-intimacy functioning, diving straight into vulnerability, therapy marathons, or “spicing things up” can overwhelm the nervous system.

You need slow restoration, not a grand, dramatic reconciliation.

Emotional refeeding is a way of gently rebuilding co-regulation and connection in relationships where both people are carrying the silent inheritance of childhood neglect, attachment injury, or mutual avoidance.

Most couples in trouble don’t come in screaming.
They come in silent.

Their love isn’t loud. It’s tired. Their fights aren’t explosive. They’re low-stakes and unresolved. Their sex life isn’t dead, exactly—it’s more like quietly uninhabited.

And when they talk about their pain, it’s often framed through logistics:
“We don’t connect anymore.”
“I don’t feel close to them.”
“I’m not sure if we’re in love or just roommates.”

This isn’t codependency. It isn’t narcissistic abuse.
It’s mutual emotional undernourishment.

It’s what happens when two people who were raised on relational crumbs try to build a feast together—with no recipes, no language for hunger, and no shared permission to say, “I need more.”

You were probably praised for it growing up.“You’re so mature.”“You never ask for anything.”“You’re the easy one.”

And you believed them. You had to. Because asking for more wasn’t an option. And so, you became the emotionally independent one—not by choice, but by necessity.

Now, as an adult, you pride yourself on not needing much. You don’t burden anyone. You don’t cry in front of people. You handle your own problems, regulate your own feelings, and schedule your own therapy.

You call this strength. The world calls this admirable.But let’s tell the truth.

You call it independence because “neglected” sounds too raw.