🎧 Sex, drugs, rock and roll and the study that says one of them might be redundant

A Finnish research team uncovers why music can feel chemically intense.

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll* get bundled together all the time but that turn of phrase might be redundant. As Erik Barnes reports, new research from Turku PET Centre and the University of Turku suggests music might literally qualify as a drug for your brain.

The team studied people listening to various playlists. When participants reported chills and goosebumps, the scans showed their natural opioid system kicking in, the same reward network that fires for things like good food and close connection. Hearts sped up. Pupils changed. Their bodies reacted as if something powerful was in the mix.

The team thinks this response could eventually reshape how we handle pain, mood, and even the inability to feel pleasure, but the real twist is how simple the “treatment” looks on the surface.

* - I’ve had to war with my editors and my grammar checker about where to put the commas in this double-and bit of wording.

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⏪ The mental glitch that keeps your worst moments on loop

We’ve found the psychological reason you keep rehashing that cringey conversation.

What is it with the way our minds are wired? Why do we have the same imaginary arguments over and over? Why does a song (or worse, just a few bars of a song) get stuck in our heads for days? And why can’t we stop replaying that conversation from last week?

In this story by Erik Barnes, mental health experts break down the psychology behind rumination; what it is, why it happens, and how to snap out of the loop when your brain won’t let something go. Those endless replays are your mind’s way of trying to fix a perceived mistake… but there are better ways to cope than losing sleep over what you should have said.

And what did we learn?

In Thursday’s edition of the Daily GOOD we explored the social rules we’re all supposed to follow and that so few of us do. I was curious how GOOD readers deal with forgetting someone’s name. 1 in 10 of you would never do such a thing, but nearly half would just try to get away with it forever.

• What kind of monster forgets someone's name? (11.1%)

• Ask a third time and live with the shame (22.2%)

• Give them the old "hey, you!" with confidence (20.0%)

• Quietly avoid saying their name... forever (46.7%)

😴 Don't think, just sleep: The Navy's brain-off bedtime trick

Fighter pilots fall asleep in 2 minutes. Can you?

Falling asleep in a war zone sounds impossible, but the U.S. Navy figured it out, and their method might just fix your 3 a.m. scrolling spiral.

Navy Pre-Flight School developed a four-step wind-down routine for fighter pilots who needed shut-eye in combat. Six weeks of practice, and 96% of them could knock out in 120 seconds flat. No blackout curtains. No melatonin. Just muscle relaxation, mental quiet, and one extremely chill canoe.

Yes, there’s a visualization involving floating on a lake. No, you don’t need to join the military to try it. If you’re reading this past bedtime, go ahead and click through. We’ll help you out!

On November 21, 1877, Thomas Edison took what had been, for all of human history, a fleeting thing and bottled it. Speech, voice, and music were ethereal until the phonograph was unveiled on this day 148 years ago. You’d hardly recognize the first model, and you’d have almost as hard a time recognizing anything recorded on it; the audio quality was terrible. But it was the first step in a series of technological revolutions (no pun intended) that led to our modern world, where recorded sound is taken entirely for granted.

By early December, he was cranking the device while reciting the now-mythic “Mary had a little lamb,” proving that sound itself could be bottled and uncorked at will. That simple nursery rhyme foreshadowed everything from voicemail and vinyl to podcasts and streaming, an early glimpse of a world where moments don’t just pass; they persist.

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