NashvilleHealth Biweekly Insights – Feb. 16, 2026

February 16, 2026

Dear NashvilleHealth Supporters and Network:

Prior insights were focused on collective capability and collaborative impact in leadership and work. In 2026 and beyond, the lack of an orientation towards collaborative work could short circuit your problem-solving ability as a leader. If your industry centers a future of human progress (as ours does through improved health and well-being), then it becomes important to center another capability, the ability to understand and communicate with young adults and youth entering adulthood and the workforce. There can be no future of health and well-being without understanding youth and young adults.

There are pressures they believe impact both their current situation and their future thriving. Even in a business context, the future of your current market-share is at risk without an understanding of this demographic. While this is a complex topic, all complex topics should be approached with learning and curiosity. This week’s insights are focused on the concerns of younger generations following us into adulthood and the workforce. Whatever your KPIs are, you will not be able to impact them much longer without being informed about young people. When it comes to the younger generations, sometimes it’s best to learn and not to teach. We are learning about this at NashvilleHealth, and we invite you to learn with us. This week’s insights are heavier on awareness than solutions, but ultimately there are no solutions that do not begin with awareness. 

Article: Connecting with others: How social connections improve the happiness of young adults

What: Back in April 2025, NashvilleHealth partnered with Blue Zones and Dr. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve to have him detail his research in the World Happiness Report. A startling trend was revealed, that youth in America are as unhappy as they’ve ever been. The normal happiness curve reflects a long-standing traditional dynamic, that humans normally report being happy as youth, become sadder in middle age, and happier again as seniors as a “U-shaped” curve. However, this normal curve no longer currently applies to youth in our country, leaving us guessing as to what new future this never seen before trajectory might create.

Why It Matters: It is hard to be both sad and optimistic. As reductive as that statement is, there is evidence that optimism is connected to improved mental health, improved physical health, and overall improved quality of life. We should work to understand all of the factors that are leading to unhappier youth, and we know that many of those factors are connected to the nonmedical determinants of health that NashvilleHealth works to engage.

Article: Meta, TikTok, YouTube to stand trial on youth addiction claims

What: This article centers a point of view that may create a precedent for future court cases – that social media is intentionally addictive to youth and young adults and may cause mental health harm. If you have paid attention to this subject, entities from states to social media giants themselves are wrestling with how best to be responsible and accountable to the exposures that social media leads to. While the true cost of early and persistent social media usage is still being studied, as an awareness exercise, it’s best that we all situate that it can have negative impacts on mental health, especially for those of us that have not known a world without it.

Why It Matters: It is incumbent upon us as leaders to accept that social media is a primary way of consuming and even researching information for young adults. As such, we have to develop the ability to communicate to youth and young adults about things that can help them, especially as a mitigating factor to its addictive properties. We are still learning ourselves how to communicate to this audience, but the burden to do so lies with us and not them. It is up to us at NashvilleHealth to find ways to uplift health and well-being on those platforms in a way that makes sense to younger adults and youth. We have to commit ourselves to learning how to do this.

Article:  The emotional toll of climate change is broad-ranging, especially for young people

What: In a 2024 Lancet study of people 16 to 25 years old, the majority of respondents were “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. We cannot ignore findings that show that the younger you are, the more concern you are likely to carry about climate change. As such, it is critical awareness to have to understand the concerns of those coming into the workforce and expanding their lives into society.

Why It Matters: Senator Frist has written and spoken extensively about climate health being inextricably tied to human health. It seems perhaps our youth are better and more in tune with this reality than we are. We should wake up to the reality that the health of our children, grandchildren, and those after will be more impacted by climate health than ours has been. That reality includes both mental health and physical health, which is why NashvilleHealth is in a learning phase around the concerns of our youth and young adults.

Sincerely,

~ Mark Yancy

NashvilleHealth CEO