?? Health Is the Ultimate ROI: On My Mind

The Kids Are Not Alright

“We have overprotected our children in the real world and underprotected them online.” That’s from Jonathan Haidt , a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, whose new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness , makes a powerful case that the “mass migration of childhood into the virtual world” is having devastating effects on children. We’re now in a world in which preteens spend five hours a day on screens and teenagers spend eight hours. And they are not thriving. Rates of depression and anxiety for American adolescents increased over 50% from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate for children 10 to 14 tripled from 2007 to 2021. Still, there’s hope — we just have to collectively decide that our children’s future is worth it. As Haidt says, “When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year.” As a starting point, Haidt proposes four norms that would better protect our children:

• No smartphones before high school
• No social media before 16
• Phone-free schools
• More independence, free play and responsibility in the real world

As Haidt writes, “We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.”

Solutions for Our Broken Healthcare System

“Unsustainable: Our Broken Healthcare System.” That was the topic of my panel at 美国斯坦福大学 ’s first Business, Government and Society Forum, where I was joined by Alice Walton , founder of the Heartland Whole Health Institute and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine; Dr. Lloyd Minor , Dean of Stanford’s School of Medicine; and moderator Michele Gelfand , professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

In the U.S. alone, healthcare spending has gone from 5% of GDP in 1960 to 17% in 2022. And 90% of that $4.1 trillion goes toward the treatment of chronic and mental health conditions. Outcomes are getting worse every year, with skyrocketing increases in diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases.?

This is like the period before we were all truly aware of the climate crisis. For healthcare, this is our Inconvenient Truth moment.?

“I believe healthcare will bankrupt our country and companies if we don’t look at financial incentives and how healthcare is structured in this country,” said Alice Walton. “The whole system is oriented to fixing you once you get unhealthy.” Part of that is because we define healthcare so narrowly, thinking of it only as medical treatment, but health is also what happens between doctor visits. As Dean Minor noted, “We have a fantastic sick care system in the U.S., which does a great job taking care of severely ill people who have access to that system.”?

Yet we do have a solution that we’re not using nearly widely enough: behavior change, which is a miracle drug — not just for preventing disease but for optimizing the management of disease. Our genes are responsible for less than 10% of health outcomes, medical care accounts for 10% to 20%, while our behaviors account for an estimated 36%. The science is clear that when we make even small improvements in our five foundational daily behaviors — sleep, food, movement, stress management and connection — dramatic improvements in our health follow.

Walton shared why her mission with her medical school and the Whole Health Institute is to take a whole human approach, incorporating tools like art and nature to support all aspects of well-being. “Eastern cultures are more connected in health and spirituality, but in Western medicine we’ve taken mental health and behavior out of the healthcare system and put them in their own closet,” she said. “We have to put mental health and behavior back in the middle of how we take care of people.”

Yes, behavior change is hard, but over the last seven years at Thrive we have proven that it is absolutely possible and sustainable when it’s done right. Working with leading behavior change scientists, Thrive Global has developed and tested strategies that have been extremely successful, including Microsteps — incremental, too-small-to-fail daily steps people can take to build healthier habits — storytelling and community. And we’ve created Thrive Reset, a 60-second tool based on the neuroscience that shows we’re able to course-correct from stress in as little as 60 seconds.

Healthcare is the ultimate inequity. As we all know, the burdens of our broken healthcare system are not being borne equally throughout our society. As Dean Minor noted, our zip code is a better predictor of our health than our genetic code.?

The power of behavior change is also not equitably distributed. We know that the 1% is already all in. We now need to make it a priority for the rest of the world. What makes me most optimistic is that with AI, we can democratize behavior change and through hyper-personalization make the healthier choice the path of least resistance and meet the scale of this crisis.?

At Thrive, we’re building AI health coaches that will be trained not only on the best peer-reviewed science, but also our biometric, lab and other medical data, and our unique preferences — which foods we love and don’t love, how and when we’re most likely to walk, move and stretch, and the most effective ways we can reduce stress.

We ended on an optimistic note: this is the time to go from our Inconvenient Truth moment to meaningful change, from awareness to action. We see it in Walton’s innovative new medical school and Whole Health Institute, in Dean Minor’s pioneering work on precision medicine and preventative health and in the growing Food is Medicine movement. The science is in. Health is the ultimate ROI.

BEFORE YOU GO

Secrets From The Book of Animal Secrets

What do we have to learn from pigeons? A lot — like how to help stave off cognitive decline. Appearing on “The Tonight Show,” Dr. David Agus talked about his book,?The Book of Animal Secrets ,?which explores the many things animals can teach us about stress, cancer, chronic diseases and how to thrive in the modern world.

AI Powers Bring May Flowers

If you love fresh cut flowers as much as I do, then this counts as a story about AI elevating humanity. Here we see the AI-powered robot Theo — named after a retired worker at the WAM Pennings farm in the Netherlands — inspecting tulip fields to spot diseased bulbs and prevent the spread of the vividly-named tulip-breaking virus (TBV). “The knowledge comes from tulip farmers,” said Erik de Jong of H2L Robotics, the robot’s maker. “So we use the knowledge of the tulip farmers, we combine it into an AI model.” A beautiful combination of data and wisdom.

Neologism of the Month

New words, terms or phrases that define our time

“Overhead tax,” from Cal Newport’s new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout . Something to avoid during this month’s tax season — and all seasons, really — “overhead tax” is the term Newport gives to the growing amount of emails, Slack messages and virtual meetings we have about work, but which aren’t actually work. “The result is an onslaught of ad hoc assignments, whipsawing across inboxes and chat channels, that culminates in a shared state of permanent overload,” writes Newport. “Before long, knowledge workers find themselves spending the bulk of their time talking about work instead of actually doing it.” We’ve all been paying this tax, and it’s definitely going up. For hybrid workers, Newport’s suggestion is to declare that remote days be devoted to nothing but actual work.

Note to Self

A beautiful reminder from the poet Derek Walcott on the importance of making time to connect with ourselves.

Moment of Wonder

The big solar news this week is about not being able to see the sun. But as the work of award-winning solar astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger shows, our sun is full of mysteries and wonder even when not being photobombed by the pushy moon. This shot of a recent solar flare shows a plasma column shooting out over 124,000 miles from the sun’s surface (over half the distance from Earth to the moon). It’s a sign the sun will soon enter the most active phase of its 11-year solar cycle known as the solar maximum, which sounds like a good action movie title. “To be able to see or photograph a little bit of the intimate life of a star is truly very exciting,” says Schaberger. If you’re going to be watching what poet Robert Herrick called the “glorious lamp of heaven” dim for a few moments, just remember to wear eclipse glasses or make your own pinhole camera.

Best,