Leadership's Role in Addressing Youth Mental Health Decline

We’re grateful to Arianna Huffington for highlighting findings from the Global Mind Health Report and to Thrive Global for amplifying this important conversation. One of the most striking insights from our 2025 data: The wealthier the country, the worse the mind health of its young adults. Across 1 million respondents globally, four consistent upstream drivers emerge: • Diminished family bonds • Diminished spirituality • Earlier smartphone exposure in childhood • Increased ultra processed food consumption These findings point toward structural and environmental forces shaping youth wellbeing long before clinical symptoms appear. Prevention requires upstream change. Read the full report here: https://lnkd.in/gn86cjEy #GlobalMindHealth #YouthWellbeing #PublicHealth #MentalHealth

"Imagine the shift: From products to outcomes. From transactions to ongoing wellbeing relationships. From consumption to conscious participation. Infrastructure designed not around what people buy, but around how people think, feel, recover, focus, connect, and thrive. Modern experiences that influence human wellbeing at scale." Yup, human flourishing is the next great frontier in technology. Going beyond the paradigm of products designed to "solve problems" to one where we use tech to elevate experiences, to one where we focus on eudaimonia as the central focus, to one where we go from a product paradigm into an ecosystem paradigm, looking at the user and their interactions with the product holistically. Lots of stuff to build here with what's becoming possible now, and super exciting to imagine the possibilities such an approach could create and unlock for millions! PS The next great set of problems will be harder to articulate than what's come before, but their impact on human wellbeing will be richer for it.

The Economist's cover this week asks whether AI could become conscious. One detail caught my attention as I was reading this morning: on a 14-part test for consciousness, no AI system yet scores as high as an octopus. Patrick Butlin and Robert Long, researchers at the nonprofit Eleos, built the test from several leading ideas about how consciousness works. They look for things like whether information comes together across a system, whether signals loop back and whether the system can pursue a goal. When other researchers applied the same test to animals and AI, octopuses scored below humans, mice, crows and chickens, but above every AI system. Another research group, Rethink Priorities, asks the same question in much more detail, using more than 200 signs drawn from ten theories of consciousness. Its starting estimate gives an LLM a 20% chance of being conscious, below a chicken and well below a human. Models from 2022 scored below that level. Newer ones have scored higher. That does not mean the models are becoming conscious. Much of the increase comes from abilities such as pursuing goals and acting on their own for longer stretches. Chatbots can now reason through tasks, call other software and create agents to work in parallel (as I often assign Claude to do for me while I sleep). Engineers at Frontier Labs added those abilities because they make AI more useful. They also happen to resemble some of the things researchers look for when studying consciousness. There is an important difference between behaving as though you have an inner life and actually having one. University of Edinburgh philosopher Shannon Vallor makes the point neatly: machines have monitored and reported their own condition for decades. Nobody concluded that her Kia was conscious :) Science may take years to answer the larger question. People are moving faster. Nearly one in five Americans aged 18 to 29 says they have had an ongoing personal friendship with a chatbot! And countries like China are already banning certain services along with growing public pressure in the United States and other countries on unintended real-world impacts of AI chats. That creates a more immediate question for companies. We already have rules about what employees can upload, which AI tools they can use and how their work should be checked. We have spent MUCH LESS time deciding how human these systems should seem, or what kinds of relationships with them we want to encourage / condone... Curious to hear from others...What would have to change in the research or in model capabilities before your company changed how it treats an AI system? More importantly, who should make that decision?

Amy Elizabeth Fox - you have voiced the most delicate of subjects with the nuance, depth, and compassion that you so gently bring to all those that are fortunate to experience you. Thank you. In the spirit of complementing your thoughts, I am sharing some learnings from the work of scientists in Sapien Labs that I have been privileged to work with in recent years. Unfortunately, we see a set of factors that has contributed to the phenomena you touch upon, underway at least for the past couple of decades, but likely longer. The harsh reality is that we are in the midst of a global decline in mind health, worse in every subsequent younger generation, with youth (our future workforce) reporting diminished capacity to function at rates that are 4-5 times higher than the oldest working generation. The recently released Global Mind Health in 2025 report which aggregates data from 1 million people worldwide reveals four factors that are leading to its decline in young people:  - Smartphones in childhood - Ultra-processed food consumption - Deteriorating family bonds; and - Diminishing spirituality As unlikely as it may sound, wealthier countries fare significantly worse. It appears that our definition of progress in the modern world has led us down a path that no longer serves the upcoming generations. We see from the data what we know to be true from timeless wisdom - nurturing stronger bonds with those around us, i.e. family, friends, community; consuming food that comes from Mother Nature; and intentionally cultivating love for others - are core to developing a more enduring humanity. This, in many ways, is the real responsibility of contemporary leaders, that you are influencing with your profoundly important work. For those that may be interested, here is a link to the report - https://lnkd.in/gic3aAGY

Most executives don’t need more productivity. They need better recovery. For years, leadership culture has rewarded intensity—longer hours, compressed schedules, relentless availability. It has often been mistaken for discipline. In reality, it frequently reflects chronic depletion masked as ambition. The strongest signal emerging across human performance, recovery, and longevity is this: sustained excellence depends less on how hard you can push, and more on how well you can recover. The leaders who will perform at the highest level over the next decade will not simply be those with the greatest drive. They will be those who can preserve clarity, regulate stress, protect energy, and maintain capacity over time. This is why healthspan is becoming a more meaningful metric than productivity alone. We are moving beyond generic wellness toward more precise, evidence-informed practices: higher-quality sleep, nervous system regulation, longitudinal health data, intentional movement, and recovery protocols that support resilience rather than react to burnout. The deeper issue is not that most professionals lack discipline. It is that many are operating in a state of persistent under-recovery. And no productivity framework, calendar optimization, or performance ritual can fully compensate for a system that is running below capacity. Peak living is not about extracting more from yourself. It is about building the physical, mental, and emotional foundation required to do meaningful work—and sustain it—for decades. What is one recovery practice that has improved the quality of your leadership or decision-making more than any productivity tactic? Relevant reading: https://lnkd.in/eK2X_KK7

"I have to make meaning of this moment because the other choice is collapsing." Sehreen Noor Ali's conversation with our CEO Vlada starts in a children's hospital, where her daughter's diagnosis forced her into meaning-making. Today, through Te Cura Labs, Sehreen helps senior leaders position themselves for what's next from a place of trust rather than override. 💛 🎧 Listen now on Heartful Wonders.

With a broader platform to stand on, there is more room than ever for misconceptions around neuroplastogen medicine to be circulating. Here are some of my favorite and the truth behind them - along with the resources. Myth: The medicine will fix me. Truth: The medicine opens the door. You still have to walk through it. The insights gained during an experience are invaluable. But they mean nothing without intention and integration. The real work comes after the ceremony ends. Research: Studies show the therapeutic relationship established before dosing sessions predicts outcomes as significantly as the drug effects themselves. Johns Hopkins and NYU protocols include multiple non-drug integration sessions because without them, relapse rates increase. Myth: I need to do this as soon as possible. Truth: Allow divine timing to approach you. Consuming information, history, and current knowledge around the medicine is the work. Low doses at a slow pace is expert-level guidance, not beginner caution. Invest your resources before extracting the benefits. Preparation is not delay. It's respect. Research: The concept of "set and setting" emerged in psychedelic research decades ago and remains foundational: extrapharmacological factors can matter as much as, if not more than, the substance itself. Myth: This is all new. We don't know the risks. Truth: These medicines have been used for thousands of years and studied for over 70. Indigenous cultures have worked with plant medicines ceremonially for millennia. Research: A comprehensive review examining classical psychedelics found no evidence of increased rates of mental health problems in the general population, and psychedelic use has been associated with reduced psychological distress and suicidality. Myth: Psychedelics mess up your brain networks. Truth: The popular narrative is that psychedelics cause your brain to "scramble". What actually happens is increased communication between parts of the brain that don't normally talk to each other. Research: A 2026 mega-analysis published in Nature Medicine pooled 11 datasets across five psych*de!ic drugs from research groups spanning three continents. Myth: These medicines are for everyone, especially those who need an ego check. Truth: Not everyone should work with these medicines. Ego dissolution is a sought-after experience and can be profound. But some conditions, like narcissism, can collaborate with the medicine to inflate the ego rather than dissolve it. Research: Psychedelics are contraindicated for individuals with a history or family history of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or other psychotic disorders, as they may cause onset or worsening of these conditions. The space is growing. So is the misinformation. If you're in this work, people are going to ask you questions. The best response is often another question.

Great post from Raya Khanin PhD, this is why we are advocating for systematic integration of mental states management in corporate workplaces.

CuesHub started as a stress tracking app. It's turning into something else. The core of it comes from close to 20 years of NIH and NSF-funded research: tracking Workload Heart Rate, the elevation caused by mental load rather than physical activity. Workload heart rate gets turned into a real-time tracking of calmness. We built it first for individuals. Anyone with an Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch, who wanted to check their own stress day to day and track its impact on their heart. But the more we talked to coaches (and in particular working with Brad Federman), the clearer it became that they had a problem we might be able to solve:  Coaching clients don’t always remember what happened since their last session.  It’s easy to forget the times in the week you felt stressed. And so as a coach, it can take a lot of digging to identify the stressors.  With Cueshub, those moments are much easier to see.  A few things the data surfaces that self-report never will: → Exact times stressful situations arise → The patterns in the week that cause stress (even when you were too busy to notice)  → How effective interventions are Here’s how it works: the coach looks for patterns in the data, identifies potential causes of stress. The coach gives a specific tactic that might work.   The following week, they review the CuesHub data together; and can evaluate how successful the intervention was. “Let’s review all the stressful meetings with your colleague and see how you coped”.  The coach can now look at the calendar and see precisely how their much workload heart rate was elevated at relevant times. This was the idea for the coach dashboard. Every client's data in one place, hourly detail on demand, and the ability to mark an intervention and see, plainly, whether it moved anything. If you're coaching people on composure and performance, and doing it on memory and self-report: try it with one client. See what shows up. https://lnkd.in/gjVF_4kQ

****The Inconvenient Optimization:  Why Fear Scales and Joy Doesn’t We didn’t neglect joy accidentally. We sidelined it because it doesn’t fit systems built for control. Suffering can be classified, treated, regulated. Joy can’t. So, we demoted it to the unserious. That misreads what joy is. Joy isn’t an emotion to be maximized; it’s a consequence of restraint. It appears when systems stop over-optimizing for fear. It requires slack, autonomy, and trust — precisely the variables efficiency-driven systems eliminate first. Highly optimized systems don’t tolerate surprise. And joy is, by definition, unexpected. When joy disappears, it’s tempting to blame individuals. But the failure is structural. The system didn’t break. It worked — just toward the wrong objective. Joy isn’t scalable because meaning isn’t.  And that’s not a flaw. It’s the signal. #JoyAsSignal #SystemsOverSentiment #FearVsFreedom #OptimizationKillsMeaning #AttentionIsScarce #PowerAndEmotion #EmergenceNotEngineering https://lnkd.in/gs_z6dfV