Traffic delays buses
November election races set
Dog killed after shelter escape
New county home administrator jumps into job
Ice bucket challengeTop Headlines Poll: How much do you think children would gain if school started later in the day?
Many studies have documented that the average adolescent in the U.S. is chronically sleep-deprived and pathologically sleepy. A National Sleep Foundation poll found 59 percent of 6th through 8th graders and 87 percent of high school students in the U.S. were getting less than the recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep on school nights.
The policy statement is accompanied by a technical report, “Insufficient Sleep in Adolescents and Young Adults: An Update on Causes and Consequences,” also published online Aug. 25. The technical report updates a prior report on excessive sleepiness among adolescents that was published in 2005.
The reasons for teens’ lack of sleep are complex, and include homework, extracurricular activities, after-school jobs and use of technology that can keep them up late on week nights. The AAP recommends pediatricians counsel teens and parents about healthy sleep habits, including enforcing a media curfew. The AAP also advises health care professionals to educate parents, educators, athletic coaches and other stakeholders about the biological and environmental factors that contribute to insufficient sleep.
But the evidence strongly suggests [see studies linked below, JH] that a too-early start to the school day is a critical contributor to chronic sleep deprivation among American adolescents. An estimated 40 percent of high schools in the U.S. currently have a start time before 8 a.m.; only 15 percent start at 8:30 a.m. or later. The median middle school start time is 8 a.m., and more than 20 percent of middle schools start at 7:45 a.m. or earlier.
Napping, extending sleep on weekends, and caffeine consumption can temporarily counteract sleepiness, but they do not restore optimal alertness and are not a substitute for regular, sufficient sleep, according to the AAP.
Let Them Sleep: AAP Recommends Delaying Start Times of Middle and High Schools to Combat Teen Sleep Deprivation in Healthy Children.
School Start Times for Adolescents
ABSTRACT—The American Academy of Pediatrics recognizes insufficient sleep in adolescents as an important public health issue that significantly affects the health and safety, as well as the academic success, of our nation’s middle and high school students. Although a number of factors, including biological changes in sleep associated with puberty, lifestyle choices, and academic demands, negatively affect middle and high school students’ ability to obtain sufficient sleep, the evidence strongly implicates earlier school start times (ie, before 8:30 AM) asa key modifiable contributor to insufficient sleep, as well as circadian rhythm disruption, in this population. Furthermore, a substantial body of research has now demonstrated that delaying school start times is an effective countermeasure to chronic sleep loss and has a widerange of potential benefits to students with regard to physical and mental health, safety, and academic achievement. The American Academy of Pediatrics strongly supports the efforts of school districts to optimize sleep in students and urges high schools and middle schools to aim for start times that allow students the opportunity to achieve optimal levels of sleep (8.5–9.5 hours) and to improve physical (eg, reduced obesity risk) and mental (eg, lower rates of depression) health, safety (eg, drowsy driving crashes), academic performance, and quality of life.
Insufficient Sleep in Adolescents and Young Adults: An Update on Causes and Consequences
Rule No. 54 – Eat Less.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
The first volunteer was beset by anxiety: she couldn’t decide whether to give up her job and move across the country to be with her fiance – what if he wasn’t the one for her? “So maybe he turns out to be a jerk and you get divorced,” [psychologist Albert]Ellis said, or rather shouted, partly because he’s deaf but also, I think, because he enjoys shouting. “That would be highly disagreeable. You might feel sad. But it doesn’t have to be awful.”
That last statement isn’t as glib as it sounds. It encapsulates a key principle of cognitive therapy, which he helped create: that it’s our thoughts – our irrational beliefs about the events that happen to us – that make us upset, not the events themselves. We take the things we merely want (success at work, a fulfilling relationship) and elevate them into things we believe we absolutely must have or else catastrophe will strike. “Pretty much every time a human being gets disturbed, they’re sneaking in, consciously or unconsciously, a ‘must’,” Ellis said. “That’s what I call ‘awfulising’.” By regularly arguing with ourselves, we can identify our hidden “musts”, realise they’re irrational, and gradually become happier.
Oliver Burkeman writing in Discovering the secret of happiness for The Guardian.
159 run, walk in Y5 road race
WASCO’s superhero
New rabbit and poultry barn is ready
Honey remains the focus of annual festival
Spanning timeTop Headlines Poll: Is your charitable giving up or down this year?
[Dr. Robert] Lustig has spent the past 16 years treating childhood obesity. His meta-analysis of the cutting-edge research on large-cohort studies of what sugar does to populations across the world, alongside his own clinical observations, has him credited with starting the war on sugar. When it reaches the enemy status of tobacco, it will be because of Lustig.
“Politicians have to come in and reset the playing field, as they have with any substance that is toxic and abused, ubiquitous and with negative consequence for society,” he says. “Alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine. We don’t have to ban any of them. We don’t have to ban sugar. But the food industry cannot be given carte blanche. They’re allowed to make money, but they’re not allowed to make money by making people sick.”
Lustig argues that sugar creates an appetite for itself by a determinable hormonal mechanism – a cycle, he says, that you could no more break with willpower than you could stop feeling thirsty through sheer strength of character. He argues that the hormone related to stress, cortisol, is partly to blame. “When cortisol floods the bloodstream, it raises blood pressure; increases the blood glucose level, which can precipitate diabetes. Human research shows that cortisol specifically increases caloric intake of ‘comfort foods’.” High cortisol levels during sleep, for instance, interfere with restfulness, and increase the hunger hormone ghrelin the next day. This differs from person to person, but I was jolted by recognition of the outrageous deliciousness of doughnuts when I haven’t slept well.
Zoe Williams writing in The man who believes sugar is poison for The Guardian.
I know it is the place of the man to do brilliant things with money, but this manhood thing has me completely worn out. I just want to be a writer. –– to Don Farber on 7 January 1972, p. 179
The reality seems to me to be self-imposed. How much trouble do we cause ourselves by attempting to hold to societal constructs of proper place and action? I rely on another literary figure, Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Of course, Kipling’s own son, Jack, did not come to a good end.
The fourth aspect of Right Diligence is that when something beneficial arises, we try to keep it with us as long as possible in the living room, like a friend. p. 94
From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh
Found in my electronic chapbook.
Rule No. 53 – Pay More, Eat Less. (Corollaries: Better to pay the grocer than the doctor, or Better to pay the farmer than the pharmacist.)
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
Hmmm… This morning Garry Trudeau, Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman are in sync…
Local News
Honey Festival
Legislators want tank laws revised
Interim committee to meet
Recipes being taken for annual cookbook
Phelps/Tavenner residence living historyTop Headlines Poll: In light of the algae bloom that has been blamed for polluting drinking water in northeast Ohio, will agricultural companies be the next target for environmental regulators?
The editorial board of the Washington Post newspaper will generally avoid using the word Redskins when referring to Washington’s football team, it announced on Friday, saying the term denigrates Native Americans.
A growing number of newspapers and sportswriters, including the Post’s Mike Wise, have said they will no longer use the team’s official name.
“While we wait for the NFL [National Football League] to catch up with public opinion and common decency, we have decided not to use the slur ourselves except when it is essential for clarity or effect,” the board said in a statement.
The editorial board controls only the paper’s opinion pages and is separate from the Post’s news-gathering side, which will continue to use the name, Marty Baron, the paper’s executive editor, said.
“Standard operating policy in the newsroom has been to use the names that established institutions choose for themselves,” he said.
“That remains our policy, as we continue to vigorously cover controversy over the team’s name and avoid any advocacy role on this subject.”
From Reuters in Editorial board at Washington Post refuses to play ball with Redskins
I’ve written a lot on this topic over the years—extending long before I first published Have Coffee Will Write—and I think the stance by the journalists at the Washington Post flat out stinks. Imagine if they took a page from Prince and substituted this every time they were about to casually type the offensive slur.
I turn 59 next month. My dad emailed me a series of photos and captions purported to be from 1955. I haven’t verified any of the quotes, but they’re fun nonetheless.
From my dad, of course…
This is my exercise in shoveling out the blogpile…
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From my dad, of course…
From my dad, of course…