Half of teenagers sleep deprived, say experts- Carlota Valls

More than half of all teenagers may be sleep deprived, according to experts.

A combination of natural hormone changes and greater use of screen-based technology means many are not getting enough sleep.

Research has suggested teenagers need nine hours' sleep to function properly.

"Sleep is fundamentally important but despite this it's been largely ignored as part of our biology," said Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford University.

"Within the context of teenagers, here we have a classic example where sleep could enhance enormously the quality of life and, indeed, the educational performance of our young people.

"Yet they're given no instruction about the importance of sleep and sleep is a victim to the many other demands that are being made of them."

'All-nighters'

At One Level Up, an internet cafe and gaming centre in Glasgow, I found a group of young people who are used to very late nights.

"There's things called 'grinds' which we have on Saturdays which are an all-nighter until 10 in the morning," said 17-year-old Jack Barclay.

"We go home, sleep till 8pm at night and then do the exact same thing again. I like staying up."

Fourteen-year-old Rachel admitted occasionally falling asleep in class because she stayed up late at night playing computer games.

"If it's a game that will save easily I'll go to bed when my mum says, 'OK you should probably get some rest', but if it's a game where you have to go to a certain point to save I'll be like, 'five more minutes!' and then an hour later 'five more minutes!', and it does mess up your sleeping pattern.

"For me it takes me about an hour to get to sleep and I'm lying there staring into nothing thinking 'I'm going to play THAT part of the game tomorrow and I'm going to play THAT part of the game the next day."

Hormonal changes

Research has shown that teenagers naturally veer towards later bedtimes and are later to rise in the morning, possibly because of the hormonal changes that occur during puberty.

However Prof Foster said electronic equipment accentuated this natural night-owl behaviour.

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“Start Quote

The data that's

emerging suggests that these computer screens and gaming devices may well have a big effect in increasing levels of alertness”

Prof Russell FosterOxford University

He explained: "The data that's emerging suggests that these computer screens and gaming devices may well have a big effect in increasing levels of alertness.

"That will make it harder to get to sleep after you've stopped playing.

"The great problem with teenagers is that you're not only biologically programmed to go to bed late and get up late, but there's also many attractions like gaming and Facebook and texting and many teenagers are doing this into the early hours of the morning and delaying sleep even further."

Psychologist Jane Ansell set up the charity Sleep Scotland to help children with special needs establish good sleeping patterns.

However an increasing amount of the charity's workload is now spent working in mainstream schools with teenagers.

"People were being sent to me and were generally being diagnosed with Aspergers, and a lot were being diagnosed as ADHD," she said.

"I felt the first thing we had to do was to work out a sleep programme for them so that they weren't sleep deprived. Once they weren't sleep deprived, some no longer had ADHD symptoms because the symptoms of hyperactivity and sleep deprivation are pretty similar.

"I'm not saying they were all free of ADHD but it is a common mistake."

Pilot studies

Her pilot studies in three Scottish schools suggested 52% of teenagers were sleep deprived, and about 20% reported falling asleep in class at least once in the last two weeks.

While many teenagers have received exam grades over the summer, Ms Ansell said most of them did not realise that a healthy sleeping pattern could have improved their performance.

She added: "We have probably not understood how important sleep is.

"It affects your growth, and especially things like memory consolidation.

"If you don't have enough sleep your short term memory doesn't consolidate into your long term memory which is going to affect your school grades."

Steve Jobs' speech at Standford University - By Elena Sisternas

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Video of the Commencement address.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Historic Fun Facts about England (by Ignacio Pons)

You can reach back into the history of the British Isles and pull out fun facts about England from any year. The following are the most interesting fun facts that you may not have known or realized. Some may even surprise you.

• The first public zoo in England opened in London in 1829. It was also a world's first.
• Though you won’t see it in any modern royal courts, animals were tried and convicted based on the bad deeds they got into in Medieval England. Their owners were fined damages occurred!
• Windsor Castle is the largest royal home in the world. It is also the oldest still in use as a royal residence.
• The first hot chocolate store opened in London around 1600. Ironically it was started and run by a Frenchman who made it very popular to drink hot chocolate. In a hundred years you could find almost as many hot chocolate stores as you could coffee and tea houses.
• The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest constructing edifice until 1280, when the Lincoln Cathedral took that moniker. Some of the cathedral was demolished in 1549, but it still retained its tall stature until 1884.
• In 1752, England (and the rest of the United Kingdom) adopted the Gregorian calendar eleven days after it was deemed impractical by the rest of the world.
• If you ate breakfast in Medieval England, you were also often served beer.
• The first telephone directory for England was published in 1880 and contained 25 names.
• Queen Victoria loved Valentine's Day cards. In fact, during her reign, she sent nearly 2500 cards.
• In the early days of England, numerous Kings presided over many of England's Realms. It's possible that you had to follow different laws in different sections of England, depending on where you traveled.

Modern Fun Facts

• In the year 2003, England suffered a record-breaking heat wave with temperatures hitting 100 degrees for the first time in recorded history.
• The English gulp down more tea than anyone else on Earth. Even though Americans enjoy their tea also, the English use about 20 times more.
• The flag of England is called the Union Flag when it is seen on land and Union Jack when it is being used on a ship. "Jack" because it must be flown on the jack mast of a vessel.

Did You Know?

Newtown is the most popular name for a British town. Over 150 towns are named Newtown.
• England boasts the company that is the third largest employer on Earth. The National Health Service is preceded only by China's Red Army and India's main railway.
• England is known for cities and town with long names. It may shock you to know that Ely is the city in England with the shortest amount of letters it the name.
• It is common knowledge that Athelhampton house is haunted by three ghosts. What isn't common knowledge is that one of them is an ape.
• Over 12,000 accidents happen per year when English people put on socks, pantyhose or other type stockings.
• Big Ben is not the name of the entire building that contains the clock. The name is actually what the bell inside the tower is called. The structure is actually called St. Stephen's Tower.
• The tallest Ferris wheel in Europe is housed in London. It was called Millennium Wheel, but has since been redubbed The London Eye.
• There are over 300 languages spoken by people in the country of England.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF STRESS - By Pepe Tey

A brief history of stress

    A key to the understanding of the negative aspects of stress is the concept of milieu interieur (the internal environment of the body), which was first advanced by the French physiologist Claude Bernard. In this concept, he described the principles of dynamic equilibrium. In dynamic equilibrium, constancy, a steady state (situation) in the internal bodily environment, is essential to survival. Therefore, external changes in the environment or external forces that change the internal balance must be reacted to and compensated for if the organism is to survive. Examples of such external forces include temperature, oxygen concentration in the air, the expenditure of energy, and the presence of predators. In addition, diseases are also stressors that threaten the constancy of the milieu interieur.

    The neurologist Walter Cannon coined the term homeostasis to further define the dynamic equilibrium that Bernard had described. He also was the first credited with recognizing that stressors could be emotional as well as physical. Through his experiments, he demonstrated the "fight or flight" response that man and other animals share when threatened. Further, Cannon traced these reactions to the release of powerful neurotransmitters from a part of the adrenal gland, the medulla. (Neurotransmitters are the body's chemicals that carry messages to and from the nerves.) The adrenal medulla secretes two neurotransmitters, epinephrine (also called adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline), in the response to stress. The release of these neurotransmitters leads to the physiologic effects seen in the fight or flight response, for example, a rapid heart rate, increased alertness, etc.

   Hans Selye, another early scientist who is known for his studies of stress, extended Cannon's observations. He included the pituitary gland, a small gland at the base of the brain, as part of the body's stress response system. He described how this gland controls the secretion of hormones (for example, cortisol) that are important in the physiological response to stress. Additionally, Selye actually introduced the term stress from physics and engineering and defined it as "mutual actions of forces that take place across any section of the body, physical or psychological."

    In his experiments, Selye induced stress in rats in a variety of ways. He found typical and constant psychological and physical responses to the adverse situations that were imposed on the rats. In rats exposed to constant stress, he observed enlargement of the adrenal glands, gastrointestinal ulcers, and a wasting away (atrophy) of the immune (defense) system. He called these responses to stress the general adaptation (adjustment) or stress syndrome. He discovered that these processes, which were adaptive (healthy, appropriate adjustment) and normal for the organism in warding off stress, could become much like illnesses. That is, the adaptive processes, if they were excessive, could damage the body. This observation, then, was the beginning of an understanding of why stress, really overstress, can be harmful, and why the word stress has earned such a bad name.

Reviewed by Roxanne Dryden-Edwards, MD on 9/4/2013