A new survey-based study suggests that the “unhappiness hump”—a widely documented rise in worry, stress, and depression with age that peaks in midlife and then declines—may have disappeared, perhaps due to declining mental health among younger people. David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on August 27, 2025.

Breathwork while listening to music may induce a blissful state in practitioners, accompanied by changes in blood flow to emotion-processing brain regions, according to a study published August 27, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Amy Amla Kartar from the Colasanti Lab in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, U.K., and colleagues. These changes occur even while the body’s stress response may be activated and are associated with reporting reduced negative emotions.

Insomnia patients taking cannabis-based medical products reported better quality sleep after up to 18 months of treatment, according to a study published August 27 in the open-access journal PLOS Mental Health by Arushika Aggarwal from Imperial College London, U.K., and colleagues.

A new study of young adults has strongly linked better sleep quality with better mental wellbeing, with fruit and vegetable consumption and physical activity also strongly associated with psychological wellbeing. Perhaps surprisingly, the findings also suggest that boosting fruit and vegetable intake could potentially help mitigate the effects on wellbeing of a poor night’s sleep. Dr. Jack Cooper, previously from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on August 27, 2025.

Humans could learn a thing or two from orangutans when it comes to maintaining a balanced, protein-filled diet.            Great apes native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia, orangutans are marvels of adaptation to the vagaries of food supply in the wild, according to an international team of researchers led by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick scientist. The critically endangered primates outshine modern humans in avoiding obesity through their balanced choices of food and exercise, the scientists found.                                                                                                                                                  The researchers reported their findings, based on 15 years of firsthand observations of wild orangutans in the jungles of Borneo, in Science Advances.