10 Tips To Keep Smartphones From Making Your Kids Tired, Fat, And Miserable
A new study serves as a sobering warning to parents to avoid giving smartphones to their kids until absolutely necessary.A new study serves as a sobering warning to parents to avoid giving smartphones to their kids until absolutely necessary.Psychology vs. scripture: What’s really behind depression?
Medication may be able to stabilize symptoms, but BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey and Dr. Greg Gifford believe the real healing when it comes to depression and hopelessness is in looking to God — not at ourselves.
“No one should hear this, watch this, listen to this, and think I’m saying depression doesn’t exist, because I’m not saying that. And no one should hear this, watch this, listen to this, and think I’m saying anxiety doesn’t exist, because I’m not saying that,” Gifford tells Stuckey.
“I’ve never said those things. What I’m saying is let’s start to uncover what’s going on in depression,” he continues, using physiological issues, vitamin deficiencies, and thyroid issues as examples that can have an effect on the mind.
Another example Gifford uses is some sort of cyst or growth on the brain that could be affecting mood regulation. However, physiological issues aren’t the only causes of depression or anxiety.
“So if I don’t have any known physiological problems, doctors can’t find anything, there’s nothing going on in the organ of my brain. Thyroid looks great. All my bloodwork comes back, and it looks nice. Then maybe, just maybe, I should be open to what’s happening in my mind,” he explains.
“What am I thinking about? What am I putting my hope in? Why? Why? Am I disappointed and so discouraged? Did something change in my life recently that was not physiological but was circumstantial and that’s what triggered this depression? Then you’re not talking about a biological problem at all. You’re actually talking about a spiritual problem,” he continues.
The solution, Gifford says, is taking “you back to the nature and the character of God and His promises.”
“We want to set you free that God is faithful. 2 Corinthians 1, He’s the God of all comfort. That His mercy is unending for you, that even in the low point, if someone’s watching this in bed, right, even in that low point, God draws people out of the mud and the muck and the mire and He sets them on a firm rock, which is Himself,” he says.
“That is the hope that people need. An antidepressant can’t touch that. We need to behold the glory of God, not behold the glory of our problems, not behold the glory of ourselves, not behold the glory of psychotropics,” he continues.
And while many people struggling with depression will turn to therapy over the Bible, the former often only makes it worse.
“One of the key features of depression is often just a constant dwelling on your own problems,” Stuckey says, pointing out that author Abigail Shrier made this point well in her book “Bad Therapy.”
“She says start class every day by asking your students how they feel, and you’re actually going to make them feel worse,” Gifford agrees. “And it’s like, Shrier’s not arguing for a biblical worldview, but there is something correct about that, which is a self-centered worldview makes me more miserable.”
Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Most Women Are On Crazy Pills, And It’s Bad For Everyone
An entire generation of women is lost amidst engineered anxiety, chasing hollow independence while forsaking the proven anchors of marriage, family, and selfless purpose.
Time for RFK Jr. to expose the dark truth about the pill
No drug is as sacrosanct in today’s sexually “liberated” culture as oral contraceptives. But the proliferation of the birth control pill since the 1960s has fostered a number of grave consequences for our society: hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.
None of this would surprise Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. In the early 20th century, she promoted contraception as the mechanism for female emancipation. “Birth control is the first important step a woman must take toward the goal of her freedom,” she wrote. “It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.”
Though the perceived benefits of birth control pills are loudly and publicly celebrated, their costs need to be fully exposed.
Feminist author Betty Friedan agreed, asserting that the pill gave women “the legal and constitutional right to decide whether or not or when to bear children” and established the basis for true equality with men.
Because oral contraception has been touted as a cornerstone of women’s equality and freedom, its health repercussions are rarely called into question. Even Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who regularly wades into controversy by calling for investigations into seed oils and food dyes, remains relatively silent on oral contraceptives.
This is to the detriment of women across the country. As Dr. Sarah Hill demonstrates in “This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: How the Pill Changes Everything,” birth control has had numerous repercussions on women, relationships, and society. She shows that women at the peak of their cycle feel sexier, more outgoing, and more confident with the natural increase in estrogen. And men find them more attractive at that time, too.
More than mere ‘birth control’
As Hill points out, birth control pills do more than just prevent pregnancy: They affect a woman’s hormones more generally — hormones that affect everything from her brain to her fingertips and her overall emotional, mental, and physical health. Many of the women Hill interviewed described feeling emotionally blunted, or as if they were moving through life in a fog, while on the pill.
A woman’s menstrual cycle is often known as the fifth vital sign, and a disruption signals a concern to be addressed, not to be masked.
Birth control is, in fact, “medicated menopause.” While it can be a difficult reality for many to face, studies show that women who no longer menstruate are not as attractive to men, which is why trying to find a mate in the latter years of life can be challenging. The drive to partner up and reproduce is diminished, making marriage less of a necessity and mere companionship more of the goal.
Studies comparing women who use contraception with those who do not reveal that the pill lowers libido, can lead to mood swings or depression, disrupts natural cycles, can cause infertility after discontinuation, interferes with the endocrine system, and can lead to bloating and a gain of nearly five pounds on average. Other studies have found that estrogen-containing pills raise the risk of venous thromboembolism and, to a smaller extent, strokes and heart attacks.
America lags behind
European countries have conducted many tests that demonstrate such effects. A nationwide Danish cohort study of over one million women found higher rates of first antidepressant use and first depression diagnosis among users of contraceptives than nonusers. Another large Danish study found that women who were currently or recently on hormonal contraception were more likely to attempt suicide or die by suicide than women who had never used it.
A Finnish study and a Swedish one produced similar results. A British database shows that the first couple of years of being on the pill brought an increased risk of depression and that women who began using the pill in their teens sometimes had a lasting higher risk.
Few, if any, comprehensive American studies have been conducted, even though about 15% of American women between 15 and 49 use oral contraceptives.
Environmental havoc
Potential problems are not limited to those who ingest the hormones. Synthetic estrogen, an endocrine-disrupting compound used in oral contraceptives, makes its way from America’s toilets to the water supply. Wastewater treatments can reduce, but never fully remove, such psychoactive drugs from drinking water.
U.S. regulators and scientists treat these as “contaminants of emerging concern.” The Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Geological Survey publish methods for measuring the prevalence of such hormones in wastewater and waters used for our drinking supply.
RELATED: Women’s infertility is Big Pharma’s cash cow
Male fish begin growing female genitals, and fish populations collapse in water containing the synthetic estrogen from birth control, according to some studies. As RFK Jr. has mentioned, boys are “swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals today, and many of those are endocrine disruptors.”
Though some studies show that typical concentrations of synthetic estrogen in drinking water pose negligible risks to women, perhaps the cumulative exposure to endocrine disruptors affects the sexual development of young males.
Long overdue accountability
RFK Jr. promised to “follow the law regarding access to birth control” during his confirmation process. That could include commissioning the National Institutes of Health to conduct “gold standard science” on oral contraception, as he has sworn to do for other food additives and pharmaceuticals, studies that many European countries have already done.
While calling for restrictions on birth control pills would likely cause a frenzy among many, informed consent is a paramount health priority. Though the perceived benefits of birth control pills are loudly and publicly celebrated (women, you too can have sex like a man!), their costs need to be fully exposed if we are going to restore human health and flourishing among both sexes.
Editor’s note: This article was published originally at the American Mind.
The false promise of sexual ‘liberation’
Sexual liberation has been packaged and sold as just that — “liberating” — despite BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey seeing it as having the opposite effect on women, especially younger women.
“Aren’t we more, especially young girls it seems, more depressed than ever, more anxious than ever, even more suicidal than ever? And there are a lot of different factors, I think, that play into that,” Stuckey asks author Louise Perry.
“Young women especially are berated on social media with ‘Just love yourself’ ... ‘Just discover yourself,’ ‘You are your own truth,’ ‘You’re enough for yourself,’ you would think that in an age where that kind of message is primary for women that we would be happier if that were the solution,” she continues.
While Perry agrees, she does believe there’s a resistance growing to the sex-positive, self-interested movement that’s taken over the youth.
“I think it’s a bit of a complicated picture, because you’ve got among Gen Z, for instance, you’ve got a combination of some members of Gen Z who are really into the sex positive stuff, and then you’ve also got some who are, I think, reacting against it, and there is a bit of a sexual counter-revolution brewing,” Perry says.
“For instance, there are a lot of young men who are reacting against porn and who are swearing off using porn at all. They generally are not doing so out of any kind of ethical motivation at all,” she continues.
Perry explains that one of the primary reasons appears to be that porn “is really destructive for the consumer” and “tends to have a really negative impact on your own mind” and “sexuality.”
“When something is bad for society, it tends to be bad for the individual and vice versa, and so to me, it just is another piece of evidence ... that the mind and the heart and the soul and the body are connected,” Stuckey agrees.
“It might be self-interested, but as you said, the consequences are good of that kind of self-control,” she adds.
Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Dave Landau shares gritty journey with Joe Rogan — from Zoloft struggles and addiction to comedy redemption
Today, Blaze Media’s own Dave Landau, known for his biting wit on “Normal World,” joined podcasting titan Joe Rogan on “The Joe Rogan Experience” to share the raw and unfiltered story of his addiction, recovery, and redemption.
The duo reflect on last week’s devastating school shooting in Minneapolis, where a transgender-identifying male opened fire during a Catholic school Mass, killing two children and injuring several others.
“Seven [school shootings] in a row have been trans, except one was nonbinary, which is just diet trans,” Rogan says.
“The problem is, some people get to a certain point in their life, and they have no friends and no community and no identity and no life, and they're not successful, and they feel like s**t, and then they have gender dysphoria on top of that, and then they're probably on a bunch of SSRIs,” he speculates, pointing to the undeniable “connection between mass shootings and psychiatric drugs.”
“Everyone knows [they’re connected], and it's just this dirty secret that no one talks about because all the media is paid off by the pharmaceutical drug companies, and nobody wants to make this correlation/connection because you also risk the wrath of all these people that are on them,” he adds.
Dave, who knows a thing or two about psychiatric drugs, shares that he’s currently in the throes of getting off Zoloft — one of the most common SSRIs on the market — after using it for 10 years. Even though he’s told his doctors that the medication is worsening his depression, they’ve insisted he stay on it.
But Dave, having detoxed from several substances over the years, is bent on getting clean.
“I took myself off of them for five days, and I felt good. And then I got really queasy and really nauseous, like my brain started kind of misfiring, so now I’m weaning it off a little more correctly as opposed to just going cold turkey,” he tells Rogan.
“I already feel better being on less, but I was told for the last 10 years that that’s what I should be on, and I think it's had a very negative effect [on] me.”
Rogan then inquires about what led Dave to start taking SSRIs in the first place.
Dave shares that his mother’s suicide was the catalyst that sent him to the psychiatrist. But even though his mother, who was bipolar, was on antidepressants when she killed herself, his doctor insisted that medication was the best option for him too.
But life had already been hard long before the tragic loss of his mother. When Dave was a child, his father, a Vietnam veteran, developed soft tissue sarcoma due to exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.
“The VA was great. They did nothing for our family. They denied both of my mom’s claims. My dad lost all of his money,” Dave says, noting that his father died when he was just 18 years old.
The trauma of Dave’s family’s struggles and a genetic predisposition toward mental health struggles drove him to self-medicate as a teen.
From recreational and prescription drugs to cigarettes and alcohol, Dave tells Rogan the wild stories of how he overcame a range of addictions, starting in high school. At one point, he was even institutionalized because his behavior was so erratic from drugs and drinking. He shares the darkly humorous story of being attacked by his roommate, who believed he was a werewolf.
“He’s jumping on top of me, and I grabbed a lamp to hit him with it, but it was f**king glued down because it’s a mental hospital. ... And he’s on top trying to bite me, and I’m, like, holding him back. And that’s when [hospital staff] came in. ... They hit him with the syringe,” he laughs.
When Dave was nearing high school graduation, an intuitive teacher saw the comedic potential behind his classroom disruptions and urged him to pursue comedy. With his parents’ support, Dave enrolled in Second City — a renowned improvisational comedy theater and training center in Detroit.
Comedy proved to be a sanctuary from his depression and the perfect way to make light of his hardships. “When I finally found that outlet, it was wonderful, dude,” he says.
Unfortunately, addiction followed him into the field, especially during his days as a road comic. “I’m going into these bars and nightclubs. I’m like, ‘Hey, do you have a phone jack I could use for a few minutes?’ ... I got this ankle monitor, and I got to plug it in somewhere to a phone jack so they can download to make sure I’m not drinking,” Dave recalls.
Salvation from substance abuse finally came in 2009. After 13 arrests, four DUIs, and the threat of prison looming, Dave decided he would get sober. It was a tough journey that involved using a breathalyzer to start his car and staying vigilant to avoid relapse. But eventually, he conquered his addictions.
Today, Dave, now 43, co-hosts Blaze Media’s comedy show “Normal World,” where he channels the wild tales of his past and his skepticism of Big Pharma into biting comedy that resonates with those who crave his unique blend of raw truth and dark humor. Dave’s book, “Party of One: A Fuzzy Memoir,” chronicles his journey from addiction to redemption. Living with his wife and young son, Dave finds stability in family and making wholesome memories.
To hear his full interview with Rogan — covering Detroit’s decline, organized crime, corporate job loss, and wildlife issues — check out the video below.
TikTok trauma queens are scaring off decent men for good
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know why men are done with marriage. They’re not “afraid of commitment.” They’re not “toxic.” And they’re certainly not “intimidated by strong women.” No, men have just finally figured out what the rest of us should’ve admitted years ago: It’s a terrible deal. Not for women — oh no, we’ve gamed it beautifully. For men.
And now, they know it.
Any man who walks away from marriage isn’t afraid of commitment. He’s just smart enough not to sign up for a state-sanctioned mugging disguised as romance.
According to research from the Marriage Foundation, between 70% to 80% of divorces are initiated by women. Among college-educated women, that number jumps to 90%. Translation: The more educated she is, the faster she realizes she can exit stage left with the house, the kids, the 401(k), and a monthly check. All she has to do is say, “I’m not happy,” and a judge will handle the rest.
And what a show it is! He loses his kids, his paycheck, and often his sanity, trying to keep up with court-mandated payments while living in a sad little apartment, granted visitation rights so limited he needs a calendar app and a court order just to see his own kids. Meanwhile, she’s posting #SingleMomStrong like the children are accessories she won in the divorce. How exactly is this empowering for anyone?
Women’s emotional garbage cans
It’s not just the divorce itself — it’s what leads up to it. Modern women have traded femininity for feral instinct, egged on by a culture that rewards emotional instability and calls it “empowerment.”
Think I’m exaggerating? Just spend five minutes on TikTok. You’ll find women screaming into their phones about “healing energy” and “divine feminine rage,” sipping boxed wine in a bathtub surrounded by crystals and court summonses. These women don’t want to love a man — they want to fix their daddy issues with a living, breathing human wallet.
They call it love, but what they really mean is trauma alchemy: “If you loved me, you’d fix me.” No, sweetie. You fix you. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll attract a man who doesn’t have to call his therapist after every date.
This epidemic of emotional dysfunction isn’t accidental. Many of these women were raised in homes where masculinity was vilified, fathers were absent, and mothers were so bitter they could curdle milk with a glance.
These girls were handed generational rage and told it was feminism. They didn’t heal; they weaponized their pain and waited for the first man dumb enough to step into range. And if he’s not dumb? He’s the enemy. Because how dare he not offer himself up as a sacrifice on the altar of her unprocessed trauma.
Courts eat men alive
Family courts, of course, are the handmaids of this dysfunction. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that less than 20% of custodial parents are fathers, despite all evidence that children need both parents. But try telling that to a judge who thinks “fatherhood” is a weekend hobby and “child support” is a government-backed extortion racket.
Many states rake in billions through Title IV-D incentives, meaning the more money the state extracts from fathers, the more it receives from the federal government. It’s not justice — it’s a racket. It's a taxpayer-funded kickback scheme that rewards broken families and punishes paternal love.
RELATED: Democrats can’t mock masculinity and expect men to vote for them
Worse, child support is often calculated not on what a man actually earns but on what the court believes he should earn. That’s called “imputed income” — and it’s how you turn a plumber into a felon because he couldn’t pay child support based on the fantasy that he’s a brain surgeon. If he misses a payment, he goes to jail. If she violates a custody order, she might get a warning. Maybe.
This isn’t equality. This is Turner v. Rogers in action. The Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that authorities can lock a man up for not paying child support without providing him a lawyer. Land of the free, indeed.
Here’s what’s wild: Women still don’t get it. Men aren’t angry at women — they’re done with them. Like this woman said, men are done negotiating with feral energy. They’re not trying to win an argument anymore. They’re exiting the game. Quietly. Permanently. And still, the same women who created the chaos stand around wondering, “Where did all the good men go?”
Honey, they’re over there — dodging alimony, living in peace, and thanking God they never married you.
‘Empowered’ women, depressed men
Here’s the kicker: We’re not even ashamed of it. We brag about it. We meme about it. Divorce glow-up. Trauma bonding. “Soft girl era.” Meanwhile, the men are just trying to stay out of court and off antidepressants. Feminism? Please. This is narcissism with a publicist.
Men want peace. They want loyalty, partnership, and respect. They want what their grandfathers had — a woman who had their back, not a woman who records their fights for social media clout.
But those women are rarer than ever. We’ve traded homemaking for hot-girl summer, traded character for chaos, and traded companionship for control. And then we expect men to marry us?
Newsflash: Men don’t marry liabilities.
We told them they weren’t necessary. We told them masculinity was toxic. We told them they owed us emotional labor, financial support, and full-time access to their phones. And when they refused, we called them weak. Now, they’re gone. And we still have the audacity to act confused.
Maybe it’s time we stop blaming men for not wanting us and start asking if we’re actually worth wanting. Until we clean up the emotional landmines, stop weaponizing the courts, and remember what being a woman actually means, we’re not a risk worth taking.
And any man who walks away from this mess isn’t afraid of commitment. He’s just smart enough not to sign up for a state-sanctioned mugging disguised as romance.
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