Health

Your phone isn't ruining your sleep, but your group chat might be

That night mode setting isn’t cutting it.

For years, the bedtime commandment has been simple: no screens after dark. But sleep researcher Brian N. Chin has spent his career studying what actually keeps us awake, and his findings suggest blue light has been taking the fall for a much sneakier culprit.

In a study of 830 young adults, Chin's team found that total screen time barely mattered. What wrecked people's sleep was how often they checked their feeds and how emotionally invested they got once they did. A heated comment thread, a friend's suspiciously perfect vacation photos, the nagging sense that something is happening without you: your brain treats all of it as unfinished business it must resolve before it will let you rest. It's the opposite of what happens in your head during meditation, and it's why you can put the phone down at 11 and still be staring at the ceiling at midnight.

The good news: Chin says you don't have to quit social media, delete your apps, or learn to love being bored. He's got a short list of evidence-backed tweaks that protect your sleep without exiling your phone to another zip code, and the whole thing starts with one deceptively simple question he wants you to ask mid-scroll.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we introduced you to Robbie the Robot, who is helping people with dementia.

Would GOOD readers welcome a robot into their homes for this sort of personal care? A clean third of you would cautiously give it a shot, but would handle the hugs yourself.

• Plug it in yesterday: The future can't come fast enough (17.0%)

• A cautious yes: Let the robot fetch water, I'll handle the hugs (33.0%)

• Charmed but nervous: Win me over, you lovable coat rack (22.0%)

• People need people: No machine is tucking me in (28.0%)

GOOD reader vlillichsyr was a little more cautious than the majority. “Having watched my mother adjust to daytime caregivers in the final years of her life (after living independently for decades) I know I would welcome a useful/reliable robot handling everyday tasks around the house if/when I needed assistance. My mother died at home at 94 yrs and the daily human caregivers were a mixed, though necessary, blessing for her…”

Well-being

In defense of lurkers, the internet's silent (and surprisingly healthy) majority

The quietest person in the comments may be the most put-together person in the room.

If you can't follow the advice of our previous story and just have to be on the socials before bed, spare a moment for the people who aren't showing up in your feed. Not the ones who left, the ones who never said anything in the first place. They're called "lurkers," a word that sounds like something you'd report to a neighborhood watch, but a mindfulness expert says these silent scrollers might actually be the healthy ones.

As Erik Barnes reports, psychology writer Lachlan Brown identified five traits that never-commenters tend to share, and none of them are "antisocial" or "secretly judging you." Instead, they point to people who treat the internet like a play they're watching rather than a stage they're performing on. They've often figured out how to curate a feed that doesn't bait them into arguments, and they're better at sitting with a feeling before broadcasting it.

The most interesting trait is the last one, and it has to do with where these people get their sense of self-worth. Hint: it's not from a notification. It might be the closest thing to a superpower you can have in 2026, and it pairs nicely with knowing what you don't know, which most of us are also bad at.

Health

The best thing you can do for a bored kid? Nothing.

Put down the activity calendar and back away slowly.

My son's last day of 8th grade was exactly one week ago, and already I feel a powerful urge to keep him entertained and stimulated and, well... not bored. But sometimes a story finds its way to you at exactly the right time, because it turns out boredom might be one of the most underrated tools in the parenting kit.

Professor Margaret Murray, who is writing a book on modern parenting, makes the case that our instinct to bulldoze boredom out of childhood is backfiring. Between packed schedules, achievement pressure, and the ever-present glow of screens, kids today rarely get the chance to sit in that uncomfortable nothing. And the nothing is where the imagination, self-direction, and big-questions thinking actually happen.

The catch? Boredom is genuinely unpleasant. In one famous study, adults chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts. So there's a method to easing kids into it, a starting dose (smaller than you'd think), and a payoff that compounds over time, for them and for the overwhelmed grown-ups raising them.

On June 10, 1943, a Hungarian newspaperman named László Bíró walked away with an Argentine patent for a gadget you almost certainly have within arm's reach right now: the ballpoint pen. Bíró was no chemist or engineer. He was a magazine editor (and part-time surrealist painter) who got fed up with fountain pens smearing wet ink across his pages. He noticed that the ink used to print newspapers dried fast and clean, and he wondered why he couldn't just write with the stuff.

The catch was that the thick ink would not flow through a fountain nib, so Bíró and his chemist brother György swapped the nib for a tiny rolling ball that grabbed ink and laid it down as it turned. After fleeing wartime Europe for Buenos Aires, they locked in the patent on this date. The design soon found an unlikely fan in the Royal Air Force, whose pilots loved that the pens didn't leak at high altitude the way fountain pens did.

Here is the kicker. Bíró sold the rights well before the ballpoint took over the planet, and it was a Frenchman, Marcel Bich, who turned the idea into the disposable BIC and a fortune. Bíró never got rich off the most-used writing tool in history, but he got something arguably better: in much of the world, a ballpoint is still just called a "biro."Do you have something GOOD to share?

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