The Biggest Launch by Apple You Probably Missed

Welcome to my Weekly Thoughts Newsletter, where you'll find my take on the week's news stories, my favorite pieces on how we can thrive even in our stressful world, and some fun and inspiring extras.

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Courtesy of Thrive Global

Small Steps to Smarter Living: This week I wrote a piece for the New York Times section “Smarter Living” on how “small habits can lead to big changes.” I opened with what happened when I tried less-than-smart living. The phrase “woke up in a pool of my own blood” should give you a hint of how that went. But it gave me the chance to share my 10 favorite Microsteps, which are science-backed, too-small-to-fail changes we can incorporate into our daily lives right away. You can start the first one tonight: Pick a time at night when you turn off your devices — and gently escort them out of your bedroom.

It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone’s Grades Go Down: China has set new rules for underage video gamers, which include no playing after 10 p.m. and 90-minute limits on weekdays. China is one of the world’s largest markets for video games, with hundreds of millions of players creating a $33 billion industry. But the Chinese government blames gaming for academic declines, and a survey last year found that nearly one in five Chinese youth were addicted to gaming. It’s not just an issue in China — last year the World Health Organization recognized “gaming disorder” in its International Classification of Diseases. Gaming is just a very visible part of a larger problem. A survey by Tencent found that 84% of Chinese young people feel anxious if their phones can’t connect to the internet. Mandating rules that digital natives can easily circumvent may not be the solution, but I’m sure plenty of frustrated parents welcome it.

Like It Or Not: Instagram rolled out its new policy of hiding “like” counts for some users globally, following its experiment with the practice in seven countries. The move is based on the idea that, as Wired’s Adrienne So puts it, “when users tailor their content to whatever garners the most engagement (or outrage), the result is a radicalized environment that makes healthy, happy conversations almost impossible.” The problem is that, while you can’t see “like” counts on other people’s posts, you can still see them on your own. Studies show that social media use is connected to mental health problems, especially among teens. So will demetricizing “likes” make them, like, less bad? We’ll see.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Likes: That we live in chaotic, polarized times is perhaps the one thing we can all agree on. As Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell write in The Atlantic, the culprit isn’t the chaos-sower-in-chief in the White House, but social media. And the question they pose in this provocative piece is whether it’s undermining our democracy, and what we can do about it. “Citizens are now more connected to one another,” they write, “in ways that increase public performance and foster moral grandstanding, on platforms that have been designed to make outrage contagious, all while focusing people’s minds on immediate conflicts and untested ideas, untethered from traditions, knowledge, and values that previously exerted a stabilizing effect. This, we believe, is why many Americans — and citizens of many other countries, too — experience democracy as a place where everything is going haywire.” Read More on Thrive: Politics Is Making America Sick

 @ariannahuff / Instagram

On Bernard Tyson: I was shocked when I heard the tragic news this week that Kaiser Permanente CEO Bernard Tyson had died suddenly on Sunday. He was a visionary leader on health care, including on the need to stop siloing off the issue of mental health. As he often put it when talking about mental health, “we cut off the head from the body.” Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know him and see his passion and dedication up close. He was a true pioneer on redefining health care to include the whole human, and he will be greatly missed — but his spirit will challenge us to continue to build on his legacy. You can read my longer remembrance of him here.

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Courtesy of Apple

Why Apple’s New Health Studies Could Be Game-changing for All of Us 

On Thursday Apple announced the launch of three game-changing health care studies — the Apple Women’s Health Study, the Apple Heart and Movement Study and the Apple Hearing Study — that anybody with an iPhone and/or an Apple Watch can participate in. 

Last week I got a chance to talk with Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s VP of Health, and Professor Michelle Williams, Dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health, about what this could mean for the future of medicine, and women’s health in particular. “I’ve been a reproductive perinatal epidemiologist for 30 years, and this is a moment to really say women’s health matters,” says Williams. “We should engage women and inform women on all that can happen when we share data.” 

For decades, women have been underrepresented in medical research, which is why the women’s study is so groundbreaking. First, there’s the scale, with the goal being to get one million women, or, as Dr. Desai puts it, “citizen scientists,” to participate. Next is duration, with the study planned to last at least 10 years.  

The aim of all three studies is to use everyday data to expand our notion of health care. Right now, about 75% of our health care spending goes toward the treatment of chronic, stress-related conditions. When you include mental health, that goes up to 90%. The real-time data collected in these studies will allow us to go upstream, and, as Dr. Desai put it, be “more proactive and preventative.” 

And the millions of iPhones and Apple Watches in use create the potential for deep insights into our everyday behavior and how it connects to our health and well-being. In the case of the women’s study, that will mean gathering information about menstrual cycles to help medicine better understand women’s health issues like migraines, menopause, infertility and osteoporosis.

We don’t get sick in a vacuum. We’re shaped by the world around us. And, as Professor Williams told me, we now have the technology to understand how that world shapes our behavior and our well-being. “We can start to quantify subjectively and objectively how the environment, how the physical behaviors that we engage with, how we manage stress, to take the narrative way upstream,” she says. “This is the moment where we can demonstrate for everyone to see what we know statistically, that 80% of the factors that drive health and wellness are outside of the clinical medical space. And it’s in the environments where we work, live and play.” 

You can now participate — and help take us all upstream — by downloading Apple’s Research app, available in the App Store here. 

Read More on Thrive: Why Apple’s New Health Studies Are So Groundbreaking

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Before You Go

Op-ed of the Week: The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof argues for a “war on loneliness.” It’s not just a global epidemic, it’s a deadly one — with one study comparing it to the lethal risk of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Kristof’s model for fighting the war is Baroness Barran, the U.K.’s current Loneliness Minister, whose loneliness-fighting tactics include small grants to local gardening and birdwatching clubs, the installation of “friendly benches” meant to encourage conversation, keeping community spaces open and placing social workers in doctors’ offices to prescribe activities like art and singing classes. These tools sound great, but we also need to continue to look at why, when we’re more connected than ever, we’re increasingly disconnected in the ways that count. A great start will be former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, which comes out next spring. He’s been an outspoken voice on this issue for years. In any case, if we all join together for a war on loneliness, well, that’s half the battle.

Podcast of the Week: Creator and star of the CBC comedy series “Workin’ Moms,” Catherine Reitman, shares how, with the birth of her sons, she found a way to create a new identity as a working mother. It’s a powerful episode of our “Meditative Story” podcast. And as a working mother myself, I was reminded that when they take the baby out, they put the guilt in. Listen to her story here.

Neologism of the Week (new words, terms or phrases that define our time): “Twalking” — texting while walking. We’ve all done it. And it’s dangerous — as Brian Chen points out in The New York Times — with last year seeing the highest pedestrian death toll since 1990. Chen closes the piece with some good tips, like making your phone less accessible by carrying it in your bag and not your pocket (or your hand). And while you shouldn’t twalk, you should definitely never get behind the wheel and “twive.” It’s even deadlier than twalking!

Travel Trend of the Week: “Spartan Holidays,” which, according to Condé Nast Traveller’s list of 2020 travel trends, combine “digital detox with minimalist living.” They also note the increase of people using websites to book their unplugged vacations — e.g. using technology to get to a place without technology. It’s a good example of a bigger trend: the demand for technology that helps us manage our relationship with technology.

NASA / Washington Post

Moment of Wonder of the Week: We can always feed our sense of wonder by looking up at the sky, but we can also feed it by looking down from the sky, as illustrated by this amazing Washington Post piece using satellite imagery to take us on a fall foliage tour. If you missed the leaves this year, you can still get your autumn fix.