#Theguardian - Why We #Sleep by Matthew Walker - Book Review

How more sleep can save your life

A neuroscientist has found a revolutionary way of being cleverer, more attractive, slimmer, happier, healthier and of warding off cancer – a good night’s shut-eye

 Nightmare … sleep is a panacea for a bewildering array of conditions. Photograph: Barbara Jovanovic/EyeEm

Awake at 4.30am the other morning, having been roused from sleep by my four-year-old son climbing into bed with my wife and me (a more or less nightly occurrence), I found myself sitting up and reading about the effects of insufficient sleep. It has been making me stupider, fatter, unhappier, poorer, sicker, worse at sex, as well as more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer’s and to die in a car crash. At the same time, my lack of sleep has been slowly but inexorably shrinking a) my chances of living into my mid 60s, b) my testicles.

Why We Sleep by the neuroscientist Matthew Walker – my ill-chosen small-hours reading material – is filled with startling information about the effects of suboptimal shut-eye levels. It’s not a book you should even be thinking about in bed, let alone reading. If it weren’t too unsettling to permit sleep in the first place, it would be the stuff of nightmares. The marginalia in my review copy, scrawled in the wavering hand of a man receiving dark intimations of his own terrible fate – “OMFG”; “This is extremely bad!” – might seem less appropriate to an affably written popular science book than to some kind of arcane Lovecraftian grimoire. 

If you're sleeping for less than seven hours a night you’re doing yourself a disservice as grave as that of smoking

Walker’s title is misleading – as he himself states in the early pages, it suggests that there might be only one reason why we sleep. In fact, he presents sleep as a panacea for a bewildering array of conditions that would otherwise cause the slow deterioration of body and mind. In one playful passage, he describes it as though he were marketing a new pharmaceutical:

Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory, makes you more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?

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Well, yes, I for one am keenly interested in this wonder drug; the problem, though, is getting your hands on the stuff. Being kneed in the spine by a four-year-old in the dead of night turns out to be the least of it; by the time I’d finished Walker’s book, the whole of modernity lay revealed to me as a vast, many tentacled conspiracy against sleep. One of the book’s real strengths is how clearly it elucidates the extent of the damage wrought by our collective ignorance of the importance and complexity of sleep’s role in our lives, and the difficulty encountered by many of us in getting any.

In terms of our natural sleeping tendencies, people can be divided into two broad groups, or “chronotypes”: morning larks and night owls. Each group operates along different circadian lines, and there is pretty much nothing owls can do to become larks – which is tough luck, because work and school scheduling overwhelmingly favour early risers. Owls are often forced, he writes, “to burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Greater ill health caused by a lack of sleep therefore befalls owls, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, heart attack and stroke.”

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 Forty winks under the fig trees at Sydney’s Observatory Hill. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

“The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep,” wrote EM Cioran, the patron saint of night owls whose weary visage kept floating into my mind as I read Why We Sleep. Walker’s worldview may not be as bleak as that of the Romanian essayist, but he does paint an intolerably grim portrait of a society in which an increasingly large proportion of us are getting a decreasing amount of sleep. What he calls our “cultural sleep norms” are under assault on multiple fronts:

Midnight is no longer ‘mid night’. For many of us, midnight is usually the time when we consider checking our email one last time – and we know what often happens in the protracted thereafter. Compounding the problem, we do not then sleep any longer into the morning hours to accommodate these later sleep-onset times. We cannot. Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.

Basically, if you’re regularly clocking in at under seven hours a night, you’re doing yourself a disservice as grave as that of regularly smoking or drinking to excess. And as someone who tends to chalk up six hours as a solid victory, and who feels – or at least felt before reading this book – that he can get by on five, I was especially disturbed by the revelation that sleep-deprived people often don’t recognise themselves as such.

That low level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognise how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health. A link between the former and the latter is rarely made in their mind.

What's the one change that's worked for you to tackle sleep problems?

 

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The book bears a sobering and vital message, too, about the centrality of sleep to the proper development of young minds. Early school starting times – particularly in the US, where, barbarically, almost half of public high schools start before 7.20am – are disastrous for the mental health of teenagers. There is serious evidence, Walker suggests, for viewing lack of sleep as a factor in the onset of depression and schizophrenia.

Despite the direness of his warning, Walker’s tone is mostly chipper and likable in the standard pop-sci style, and he is excellent at explaining complex neurological phenomena for a general readership. He does occasionally get bogged down in ill-advised wordplay (here he is on marine mammals and REM sleep, for example: “Seals in the ocean will sample but a soupçon of the stuff”). There is also a deeply weird passage that attempts, via “The Sound of Silence”, to explain sleep’s benefits to memory, but which really only demonstrates how badly a paragraph can fall victim to what I assume are the reprint restrictions on Simon and Garfunkel lyrics. “Perhaps you know the song and lyrics,” beseeches Walker. “Simon and Garfunkel describe meeting their old friend, darkness (sleep). They speak of relaying the day’s events to the sleeping brain at night in the form of a vision, softly creeping – a gentle information upload, if you will.”

But I suppose it’s churlish to take issue with the prose of a person who is trying to save you from an existence of exhaustion and misery, terminating in early death – a bit like grumbling about insufficient legroom in a life raft. Because that’s what this book is. It’s probably a little too soon to tell you that Why We Sleep saved my life, but I can tell you that it’s been an eye-opener.

• Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine is published by Granta. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (Allen Lane, £20). To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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Here are some more reasons why #liberal #arts matter

 

Lately, in the heated call for greater STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education at every level, the traditional liberal arts have been needlessly, indeed recklessly, portrayed as the villain. And STEM fields have been (falsely) portrayed as the very opposite of the liberal arts.

The detractors of the liberal arts (who usually mean, by liberal arts, “humanities”) tend to argue that STEM-based education trains for careers while non-STEM training does not; they are often suspicious of the liberal political agenda of some disciplines. And they deem the content of a liberal arts education to be no longer relevant. The author of a recent article simply titled, “The Liberal Arts are Dead; Long Live STEM conveyed this sentiment when he said, "Science is better for society than the arts.” 

I see this misunderstanding even at my own institution, as a humanist who oversees pre-major advising and thus engages with students and faculty (and parents) from all over the university. The idea that STEM is something separate and different than the liberal arts is damaging to both the sciences and their sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. 

Pro-STEM attitudes assume that the liberal arts are quaint, impractical, often elitist, and always self-indulgent, while STEM fields are practical, technical, and represent at once “the future” and “proper earning potential.”

STEM is part of liberal arts

First, let’s be clear: This is a false and misleading dichotomy. STEM disciplines are a part of the liberal arts. Math and science are liberal arts.

In the ancient and medieval world, when the liberal arts as we know them began to take shape, they comprised grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (the last three we would count as STEM disciplines today; and music, dealing mostly with numerical relationships through sound, was really more akin to what we would today call physics). 

Advocates of STEM are missing the point. The value of a liberal arts education is not in the content that is taught, but rather in the mode of teaching and in the intellectual skills that are gained by learning how to think systematically and rigorously. 

These intellectual skills include how to assess assumptions; develop strategies from problem solving; test ideas against evidence; use reason to grapple with information to come to new conclusions; and develop courses of action to pursue those conclusions. 

Isn’t STEM part of liberal arts? Brookhaven National Laboratory, CC BY-NC-ND

 

 

Yes, some disciplines might prepare for certain types of problem solving (how do I get a computer to integrate information from two different consumer data platforms in the most elegant fashion?) more strongly than others (what do I recommend to investors based upon my French-language research of markets in Madagascar?).
And some areas of knowledge might be more useful than others in certain industries.

But in all cases, the point of the liberal arts approach is to learn how to think, not simply what to know – especially since information itself is now so easily acquired through Google and the smartphone. If anything, content is too abundant for any single individual to master. What is much more important is knowing what on Earth to do with the glut of information available in most situations.
And here is where the liberal arts training comes in.

A liberal arts education (STEM-based or otherwise) is not just about learning content, but about knowing how to sort through ambiguity; work with inexact or incomplete information, evaluate contexts and advance a conclusion or course of action. 

In other words, it is not about learning the prescription to achieve a textbook result. It is about having the intellectual capacity to attack those issues for which there is yet no metaphorical text or answer.

Is liberal arts the choice of the elite?

 

Now, let us take up the elephant in the room. Many people would argue an engineering degree balanced with some English courses might be a nice idea. 

But for a student to major in English or studio art is sheer craziness. What does one do with a studio art degree except become a starving artist? What does one do with an English degree except wait tables? 

Those who make such arguments usually conflate “liberal arts” with “humanities,” those disciplines that do not have an obvious “end career goal” or a “remuneration outcome” at the other side of the college degree. 

When detractors hear educators like me say that “the liberal arts” are valuable, they understand us to mean that they fulfill something in the core of our souls. That is, that the humanities are personally and intellectually valuable, but not remuneratively so.
They hear us acknowledge that the humanities are decidedly not practical, and are thus are the purview of the elite and privileged who can afford to indulge in them. But, of course, the idea that the only remunerative professions out there are in science and technology is silly.

Whole industries do in fact exist that are not based on STEM premises: media, consulting, fashion, finance, publishing, education, government and other forms of public service are just a few. 

And even those reputedly “tech” industries that STEM advocates see as our future (IT, health, energy) require all sorts of nontechnical employees to get their companies to work.
Further, basic communication, speaking and writing skills are absolute must-haves of anyone who is going to climb the ladder in any high-tech industry.

What defines success

 

That said, the so-called “practical” major (and I reject the designation) might have a more obvious, path to the entry level job of a solid career. This is only because the major has an apparently known professional pathway.

But that does not guarantee success in that field.
In fact, those other disciplines that detractors of the liberal arts (read: humanities) assume are dead ends could well be fantastic springboards to amazing professional lives. 

They are not a guarantee of one – and neither is a STEM degree. But they give those students who have committed seriously to the study of excelling within their college discipline (be it classics, anthropology, or theoretical physics) the capacity and the ability to achieve one.

 

Liberal education teaches students how to think critically. roanokecollege, CC BY

Some people talk about this as critical thinking; some as the ability to think outside of the box; some as “transferability” – the ability to carry critical intellectual skills from one challenge or industry to another.

In my view, done right, liberal education makes one smarter and more able to be successful and innovative on the path one embarks on. And although we can all point to exceptions (would that Bill Gates had graduated from college!), for the most part, it is those who know how to think nimbly, creatively and responsibly that end up building extraordinary careers.

Why we need a liberal arts education

Let us return to my earlier point about STEM disciplines. 

We should not only accept that they are part of a liberal arts education, but we must understand that teaching them within a liberal arts framework makes the financial investment of learning them of greater value.

Peter Robbie, an engineering professor at Dartmouth College who teaches human centered design, explains why liberal education is so critical to engineering training. He said in an email to me that:

creative design process of engineering provides the means for complex, multidisciplinary problem-solving. We need to educate leaders who can solve the ‘wicked problems’ facing society (like obesity, climate change, and inequality). These are multifactorial problems that can’t be solved within a single domain but will need liberally-educated, expansive thinkers who are comfortable in many fields.

As we know, an engineer who has basic cultural competency skills (honed, for instance, through cultural studies) will be an attractive asset for an American engineering firm trying to branch out in China. 

Likewise, a doctor who knows how to listen to patients will be a better primary care doctor than one who only knows the memorizable facts from medical school. This is one reason that medical schools have recently changed the requirements of application to encourage coursework in sociology and psychology.
It is the ability to use these skills honed by different types of thinking in various contexts that allows people to build beyond their particular ken. 

And that is what a liberal arts education – science, technology, humanities and social sciences – trains. It prepares students for rich, creative, meaningful and, yes, remunerative, careers.

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Writing #Tips: The 4 Stages Of #Writing A Book From First Draft To Publication

 In this fast-moving world, it's too easy to think that speed is the answer to writing a book or building a career as an author. But creativity doesn't work like that for everyone, and the joy of writing is in the journey, not the destination.

  

 

by Joanna Penn

 

 In today's article, Ginger Moran goes through the four stages of writing: Conceive, Create, Craft, and Connect. 

 

For many of us, creativity and self-expression are fundamental to who we are — we’ve been listening to and telling stories from way back.

And we aren’t the only ones who see story as essential. Freud saw it as central to human experience and used story as the means of healing wounded psyches.

Jung saw it as a way of dipping into the collective unconscious, the stream of experience that underlies all of history and humanity. And the Bible itself tells us that in the beginning was the word.
So, if creativity is so fundamental to our being, what makes it so hard sometimes to write what we see in our minds?

Sometimes life gets in the way. And sometimes we get in our own way by not understanding that there are stages to the process, which, like any other natural stages, cannot be hurried or one put before the other.

I understand both ways of slowing down the process. I was a writer with a PhD in creative writing and national publications and awards, a professor of creative writing, and a mother of two young boys, when my life changed utterly. I got divorced and my elderly father came to live with me when he was diagnosed with cancer. 

My full-time work turned into quadruple time.

It was a hectic period, full of the kind of details and exhaustion that take over your brain, and I pretty much couldn’t remember what writing was, never mind do any of it

I took refuge in some old tricks I’d learned about writing even the smallest amount on a daily basis and began to pile up the pages again.

And I also learned about the way writing works, in an organic process that resembles the stages of butterfly development. I base the way I think about this now in a model that the author and life coach Martha Beck originated. In the cycle of change model she describes, people go through predictable stages of change much like a butterfly does.

With her permission, I’ve applied these stages to writing a book.
Our natural tendency when writing is to push when we should be resting and to resist the difficulty when the process calls for discipline.

Stage 1: Conceive

In the first stage of writing a book, which I call “Conceive,” you are aware that there is an idea for a book, maybe, somewhere in your head.

You aren’t sure—there are just glimpses of it from time to time. Sometimes you think you’ll just go on with your life, and ignore this pesky idea, and sometimes you are just gripped with the idea that you have to capture the thoughts, bits of dialogue, the world that is developing in your head.

You emerge from those times as if you’d been on a journey.
Like the caterpillar, you have climbed into the chrysalis and begun the long process of disappearing into your book. And, like the caterpillar, you don’t want to look too closely at the process.
Because, if your idea is actually like a caterpillar, it has melted down into something unrecognizable. It seems impossible that this thing that is unrecognizable could be a beautiful butterfly or a book.

What is important at this stage is not to disturb the process, to let it be a mess.

The mantra I suggest for this first stage is, “I don’t know what is going on with this book. And that’s okay.”

This isn’t the time to think about publication, or how good it is or isn’t, or platform. Don’t think about what people will say. Because the people who “ooh” and “ahh” over butterflies when they see them fully formed would be appalled if they saw the goo that was inside the chrysalis early in the process.

Stage 2: Create

The next stage is the draft writing stage, which I call “Create.”
Here you are actively dreaming your book into being, writing that terrible first draft, and it is still a genuine mess. That is what the first draft needs to be.

 

When Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, talks about writing a really awful first draft people often take that as permission to write badly, but what she is really saying is that it HAS to be bad — or you might not get the real lifeblood, the heartbeat.

I often tell people I’m working with that they need to make their book worse — they need to pull off the prettiness, the need to please, and go to the heart of the problem. They have to let their characters suffer. Because that is where the real story is.

The mantra for this stage is, “There are no rules to writing the first draft. And that’s okay.”

Stage 3: Craft

The next stage is the revision stage, which I call “Craft.” Here you will need to know the craft, apply it, test it, be willing to revise and revise until you have it right.

I have heard from best-selling mystery writer Mary Burton, who is prolific, that she puts each book through seven revisions, from first draft through several stages of developmental editing to address plot, character development, and dialogue, to copyediting for coherence, to proofreading for technical corrections, to one final read-through.

Although it is often the case that you have a good idea, if you don’t know the craft, you are going to have to learn it. And when you’ve learned it, you’ve going to have to practice it and be willing to fail — a lot.

It is easy to write and publish a book these days, but if you want it to have lasting relevance and readership, one thing is required: it has to be good.

Here the butterfly is struggling into being, doing the hard work of taking her final form. Now is the time to embrace the difficulty of the process, to buckle down and learn the craft, ask for and listen to good critique, and revise and revise.

Although you can do this on your own, it is easier, faster, and more reliable with help.

My mantra for this stage, is, “This writing a good book is much harder than I thought. And that’s okay.”

Stage 4: Connect

And then comes the fourth stage: taking the book into the world.

For many of us who love the dreaming and the drafting and who might even get a kick of a hard revision process, the “Connect” stage of publishing can be confusing and the marketing more of a challenge than we ever dreamed.

For one thing, nothing ever seems to stay the same in the world of publishing. But this has always been the way publishing has been — just when the monks got good at copying manuscripts, 

Gutenberg came up with the printing press!

Change is at the very heart of the business and the ”golden days” of publishing are just that — a dream and delusion that either never were or lasted briefly.

When the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, a whole new adventure and set of challenges is ahead. It’s time to take full advantage of the good advice you’ve gotten about publishing and platform, toughen up, and have a clear goal, and pursue it.
My mantra for this stage is, “Everything is changing in the world of publishing and marketing. And that’s okay.”

It’s a Natural Process

People often make the first two stages of conceiving and creating the first draft much harder than they need to be by not understanding that these are the stages of hands-off, self-compassionate acceptance of messiness and imperfection.
And the last stages—the revision and the publication and marketing—are by their very nature demanding, difficult stages that call for self-discipline, craft, investment, resilience, and persistence.

In the natural course of things, my kids are grown and my dad gone. Now I’m a full-time writer, speaker, and book mentor who has written five novels, one collection of essays on being a single working mom, and a nonfiction book.

We can make the seasons of our life and writing easier by understanding their nature. I am and work with people doing the work of book metamorphosis every day. The work is both challenging and miraculous.

How do you approach the different stages of writing your books? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Ginger Moran, Ph.D., has published in salon.com, Oxford American, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and magazines. Her first novel, The Algebra of Snow, was nominated for a Pushcart Editor’s Choice Award and published in 2012.
She is a certified Martha Beck Life Coach and KMCC Creativity Coach and a member of the National Speakers Association Academy. She now works full time as a writer, speaker, book mentor, and editor.
Her book mentoring business, Creative Authority, is here to help you write the story you have in your heart and mind and get it to your readers. She offers teaching through her blog and a free strategy call. You can sign up for either or both at her website.

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St. George woman focuses on #brain health to prevent #memory loss

 

 By Aley Davis, KSL TV

ST. GEORGE — The start of the new year often has people flocking to the gym to stay on top of their workout goals, but some of the most valuable exercises don’t happen in the gym. One St. George woman is setting new goals to enhance her brain fitness.
Health is always on the forefront of 68-year-old Jane Stoughton's mind. She moved from Wyoming to sunny St. George for the outdoor activities the weather offers like walking and hiking. 

There's more to it than meets the eye, however. She recently learned the brain starts to shrink when someone stops learning. Upon hearing this Stoughton thought, “Whoa, I gotta get some classes going here.” 

She enrolled in Intermountain Healthcare's Brain Fitness class at Dixie Regional Medical Center. Body/mind specialist Hannah Rothlin said there is a rising number of baby boomers developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease. She said brain disease is becoming one of the most progressive diseases in America. 

Rothlin said many experience challenges with memory over time. 

“And that can be very frustrating as we age,” she said. 

 

Rothlin said studies show we can slow down the process of memory loss. “But there are many studies our program is based on research that shows that we can slow down the progression,” she said. “It’s so important to start early." 

The program is based on preventative care to keep the brains of midlife and older adults healthy and strong. Rothlin said the lessons are based on 12 various topics like how to exercise, manage stress, eat healthy and develop social connections. 

"Social health is considered really important for brain health and interaction because older adults can get isolated,” Rothlin said
Rothlin said a few practical changes could make a big difference. Stoughton is developing new hobbies like learning how to use a digital camera. “So that’s a challenge and it’s something I’m interested in,” Stoughton said of her new interest. 

She is also practicing mindfulness as part of the curriculum. Stoughton participates in guided meditation led by Rothlin.
“My expertise is to teach the participants various forms of breathing exercises, visualization, (and) various meditation practices so that they can really work on a daily basis to keep their stress level under control,” Rothlin explained. 

Rothlin said stress can be damaging to brain function if unmanaged. She said the class is designed for healthy individuals who want to preserve their memory. 

 

Stoughton said she is benefitting from the sessions. 

“Look at the scenery, be aware of things around me, and it calms me down and also makes me better just a better human being,” she said. 

Stoughton said she thinks the class is something everyone should be taking and should start as early as kindergartens. She wants to do everything she can to stay healthy, and to “be [a] benefit to moving, to walking, to staying aware, and to also engage,” she said.
Rothlin said the program is a seven-week course unique to the Live Well Center in St. George. She encourages all adults to start adopting a brain-healthy lifestyle early in life. 

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