More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone-she's had an iPhone since she was 11-sounding as if she'd just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. "We go to the mall," she said. "Do your parents drop you off?," I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I'd enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. "No-I go with my family," she replied. "We'll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we're going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes."

In a classic research-based TEDx Talk, Dr. Lara Boyd describes how neuroplasticity gives you the power to shape the brain you want. Recorded at TEDxVancouver at Rogers Arena on November 14, 2015.

Our knowledge of the brain is evolving at a breathtaking pace, and Dr. Lara Boyd is positioned at the cutting edge of these discoveries. In 2006, she was recruited by the University of British Columbia to become the Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology and Motor Learning. Since that time she has established the Brain Behaviour Lab, recruited and trained over 40 graduate students, published more than 80 papers and been awarded over $5 million in funding.

Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.

Everyone would like that - it's easy to like that.

If I ask you, "What do you want out of life?" and you say something like, "I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like," it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't even mean anything.

Does the body remember our past hurts? And if so, where do they go?

Seemingly trivial childhood events, humiliations, disappointments, mistakes. Over the course of our lives, our bodies become impacted by emotional experiences we are supposed to know how to navigate. A natural response to these painful experiences is to avoid thinking about them. As life goes on the layers build up. A difficult break-up, infidelity, chronic workplace dynamics, illness or the death of a loved one. All leave traces in our bodies, and often the scarring inhibits our ability to sit with our thoughts. Yet too often, despite our avoidance, the energy is nonetheless at work in our bodies.

You can train your brain to think better. One of the best ways to do this is to expand the set of mental models you use to think. Let me explain what I mean by sharing a story about a world-class thinker.

I first discovered what a mental model was and how useful the right one could be while I was reading a story about Richard Feynman, the famous physicist. Feynman received his undergraduate degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from Princeton. During that time, he developed a reputation for waltzing into the math department and solving problems that the brilliant Ph.D. students couldn't solve.

When people asked how he did it, Feynman claimed that his secret weapon was not his intelligence, but rather a strategy he learned in high school. According to Feynman, his high school physics teacher asked him to stay after class one day and gave him a challenge.

"Feynman," the teacher said, "you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You're bored. So I'm going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that's in this book, you can talk again."

Most parents can remember the subtle mix of excitement and anxiety accompanying the choice of their baby's name - it will follow the child his or her entire life. But the effect could be even more significant. In research recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, our research team shows that the stereotype that a given society has of a first name can influence the way people look.

In eight studies, we found that participants shown ID-style photos of people they'd never met were able to recognise the first name of the depicted person well above the chance level. For example, let's say you live in North America and are shown a picture of a woman whose name is Emily (you aren't given this information). Below her image four possible first names are listed: Claire, Deborah, Emily and Melissa. Assuming that the first names are equally common in North America in/around the year that the person was born, study participants should pick the correct name approximately 25% of the time - in other words, by chance. What we found is that participants typically choose the depicted person's true first name 35% to 40% of the time. In other words, there is something about an Emily that...just looks like an Emily.

The other night, I did something that I am not proud of.

We have four teenagers, so dinnertime is never dull, but this particular evening it was full chaos. One of our kids had not eaten much. My husband, Mark, really wanted this particular kid to eat more, and so he offered a bribe/threat: You can't go hang out with your friends until you finish everything on your plate.

A power struggle unfolded, complete with sibling cheering sections. I tried to shut it all down using dramatic non-verbal cues. This was not what we agreed to do when a kid doesn't eat well, I screamed silently with my supercharged glares.

I was not successful. The picky eater ate what was required in order to go hang out in the neighborhood.

Although I was obviously right (ha ha)-because bribing kids can work in the short run, but research clearly demonstrates that it backfires in the long run-this article is actually about what I did next, and why I did it.

In many ways, our current society is set up to avoid as much pain as possible. Whether it is new technology, new medical or pharmaceutical advancements, or the self-help industry, everything is set up to make our lives easier, simpler, and more uniquely tailored to our every individual need. Even the names of products such as the iPhone and iPad nod to the symbiotic merger of products and people.

But the question remains, does all of this avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure really make us any happier or more resilient? Obviously, new technological and medical advancements have helped millions of people rise out of poverty or overcome disease, but overall our social levels of happiness haven't risen. Indeed, studies have shown that use of social media such as Facebook is correlated with depression and unhappiness. Other studies have shown that there is some increase in levels of happiness when individuals rise out of poverty, but material possessions beyond that don't make much of a difference.

Anyway, this avoidance of pain isn't just relegated to technology and consumerism but has also seeped into other areas of society such as education, team sports, and parenting. Such media outlets as the New York Times have bemoaned the rise of participation trophies for all kids, arguing that kids lose out on meaningful life lessons such as the value of competition and working hard for achievement, and are instead saddled with a growing sense of entitlement. The Atlantic has published such articles as "The Coddling of the American Mind," "The Overprotected Kid," and "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy," criticizing the safety bubble that our society has created around young people to seemingly protect them from even the slightest threat of pain. Indeed, in "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy," the author, Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist herself, states that many of her millennial clients "just generally felt a sense of emptiness or lack of purpose" and "their biggest complaint was they had nothing to complain about!" These were all folks with doting parents, no trauma whatsoever in their past, but still unable to create an adult life for themselves.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found there are three distinct varieties of smile - affiliation, dominance, reward - and people use different facial muscle combinations to forge them. The findings could help individuals influence the outcome of games and negotiations, and even assist facial reconstruction surgeons.

The team cracked the smile code by gathering participants to review thousands of computer-generated expressions created using random combinations of facial muscles, although each one included some action from the zygomaticus (the facial muscle below the cheekbone that pulls the corners of the mouth into a grin, oft dubbed the "smile muscle").

​Subjects were then asked for their perception of the smile - did it denote reward or dominance, was it affiliative, or was it not a smile at all?

Once sorted, the smiles were then shown to two further sets of observers, allowing the researchers to determine the muscular recipe behind each kind of grin.

"Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor

It is heartening to know that there are young children still reading books. While a growing majority of parents, who aren't, have been seduced into destroying their children's imaginations by placing them in front of screens, there are still holdouts who realize that if their children are ever to become free-thinking adults, they must grow up expanding their minds in the meditative space of beautiful literature on paper pages. Only there will they find the freedom to dream, to stop and close their eyes as they travel through unknown realms of wonder.