Has your September felt intense too?! Back to school. Back to busy schedules. Sunsets creeping earlier. AI apocalypse headlines arriving daily. Some refer to the overwhelm of this season as the September Scaries — which feels turbocharged this year.
This one is a bit personal. It features my own TED Talk, all about NPR’s Body Electric project — a collaborative study with Columbia University looking at how screens affect our bodies, and how brief movement breaks can help us recharge. The study included more than 20,000 listeners and resulted in a book and a published scientific paper.
The rest of the episode pushes the topic even further, asking: why are we so drained when modern life is supposedly built for convenience? What’s actually happening inside our brains and bodies? My hope is that our reporting gives you insight into your fatigue, along with practical ways to feel truly alive again.
Want a quick place to start? Not sitting for more than two hours at a time has been a game changer for me. Getting up and moving for just five minutes — to walk the dog, vacuum, or dance — instantly resets my focus and lowers my shoulders. We saw this with the participants in our study, and it’s still amazing to me that such a simple (free!) intervention can have such a huge effect. Here’s to shaking off the scaries this September, one 5-minute break at a time.
💃🏻 Manoush
P.S.
You may have heard that I’ll be stepping down as the host of TED Radio Hour at the end of 2026, after seven extraordinary years. I’ll always feel like part of the public radio family, but I’m excited to see what comes next. Join me on Substack, where I publish a newsletter called Manoush Minutes. There’s a lot more for us to discover together.
The week’s best episodes
…to share with your friend who needs a break
📣 🗣️ Will AI translation tools make us stop learning languages?
This sociolinguist doesn’t think so. Today’s live translation tools might work in a pinch, but human speech communicates so much more — identity, irony, effort and shared culture (to name a few). On Life, Automated: what machines don’t (yet) capture, the resurgence of minority languages and why the "friction" of learning a language is good for us.
⌛ The Domino’s Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything
Did a pizza status page fundamentally change how we, as a society, wait?(??) Planet Money has a theory. When Domino’s launched its Pizza Tracker in 2008 customers could monitor their pie's progress from order to oven to delivery. Today… the model is everywhere you look.
👣 Wait, what happened to the Quantified Self movement?
Apple Watches, Oura Rings and Fitbits can all trace their lineage to a group of idealistic (read: obsessive) enthusiasts in Silicon Valley. They started a movement called “Quantified Self”, all about using tech to better understand your mind and body. KQED’s Close All Tabs looks at how the movement got swallowed up by corporate tech giants with products to sell.
Willem Dafoe has a complicated relationship with time. This was his response when Rachel Martin asked about it on Wild Card, lol.
@nprWildCard/YouTube
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