One of the most popular editions of this newsletter over the years was one I wrote about an 8-minute hack to calm anxiety.
Basically, you listen to an audio track designed to trigger specific neurological reactions in your brain—and it works. At least, it worked for me!
I won’t rehash the whole story, since you can go back and read it if you missed it then, but the short version is that the song is the work of a British band that teamed up with a group of sound therapists. It’s called Weightlessness.
After the newsletter went out, I was happy to hear how many readers found it useful. It’s a pretty efficient way to restore calm and ease anxiety, right? Just eight minutes!
With that in mind, a friend reminded me of another hack: one that supposedly takes only 14 seconds. (That’s an oddly specific number of seconds, I grant you.)
Writing in the journal Nature, Rutgers University researchers say they found that spending exactly 14 seconds recounting happy memories after experiencing stressful stimuli could reduce negative emotions and anxiety.
This was a lab study; they first worked with participants to identify pleasant memories they could recall on demand and then created stressful situations by:
telling participants to plunge their arms into buckets of ice water for two minutes, and
adding to the stress by telling them that their reactions were being recorded on video the entire time.
Afterward, half the participants were cued to recall the happy memories (things like going on vacation); the other half were asked to recall neutral memories (things like packing for said vacation).
Then they measured the participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
As you might imagine (since I’m bringing up the study today), those who recalled happy memories were less affected by the stress of the ice water and the video recording than those who were prompted to recall neutral memories.
All of this makes sense to me, and while I haven’t tested it the way I tried (and was amazed by) the sound therapy hack, maybe we can all try it together. Basically, bank away a happy memory that can be your go-to for your next stressful experience, and let me know if it works.
The only thing that throws me off is the “14 seconds” part. They never actually explain how they came up with that number, as far as I can find, though it seems to have something to do with keeping individual trial-recall lengths below 60 seconds for some reason. But I think we can dedicate that much time and effort to science, regardless.
And if it doesn’t work, well, we still have the 8-minute hack.
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Other things worth knowing …
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NBC News: New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday that a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the criminal case against Sean “Diddy” Combs will lead the investigation into an alleged 2024 sexual assault at a Cornell University fraternity house. Former federal prosecutor Jacqueline Kelly, a Cornell graduate, was also the first chief of the civil rights unit in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Kelly is now a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, a firm that represented women who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sexual abuse.
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Semafor: How big money lost the 2026 midterms.
Business Insider: I grew up in a trailer and was embarrassed to use food stamps. Now I own a $13 million company. (This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Erika Sinner, founder of Directorie. It has been edited for length and clarity.)
The Guardian: Alligator strolls into North Carolina bagel shop: 3ft-long reptile was looking for a meal before animal protective services safely removed it from establishment.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash. Low Power Mode today, and if you knew that, I love you. See you in the comments!