The Importance of Doing Absolutely Nothing

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Having too much to do is a national epidemic and, in many ways, a status symbol. Americans work more hours than citizens of any other developed nation in the world, according to the International Labor Organization. On average, we annually work 137 hours more than the Japanese, 260 hours more than the Brits, and 499 hours more than the French. We’re so busy that many of us don’t even take time for vacation. According to a study by the US Travel Association’s Project Time Off, 54 percent of Americans didn’t use all of their vacation time last year, resulting in 662 million unused vacation days. “We are working more and more,” says Katie Denis, Vice President of Project Time Off. “Being the last car in the parking lot is no longer the metric. Now it’s who answers email fastest and latest.”

I am actually quite good at doing nothing.  Read the entire article here.

Significant financial stress is associated with a 13-fold higher odds of having a heart attack

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Both work stress and financial stress were associated with a higher risk of acute myocardial infarction. The odds of myocardial infarction was 5.6 times higher in patients with moderate or severe work stress compared to those with minimal or no stress. Patients with significant financial stress had a 13-fold higher odds of having a myocardial infarction.

Small study with interesting findings.

Brain imaging reveals ADHD as a collection of different disorders

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The study, published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, has the potential to radically reframe how researchers think about ADHD. “This study found evidence that clearly supports the idea that ADHD-diagnosed adolescents are not all the same neurobiologically,” said first author Dr. Michael Stevens, of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, Hartford, CT, and Yale University. Rather than a single disorder with small variations, the findings suggest that the diagnosis instead encompasses a “constellation” of different types of ADHD in which the brain functions in completely different ways.

Click here for the full article.

The Great College Loan Swindle

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America as a country has evolved in recent decades into a confederacy of widescale industrial scams. The biggest slices of our economic pie – sectors like health care, military production, banking, even commercial and residential real estate – have become crude income-redistribution schemes, often untethered from the market by subsidies or bailouts, with the richest companies benefiting from gamed or denuded regulatory systems that make profits almost as assured as taxes. Guaranteed-profit scams – that’s the last thing America makes with any level of consistent competence.

Going to college doesn’t guarantee a good job, far from it, but the data show that not going dooms most young people to an increasingly shallow pool of the very crappiest, lowest-paying jobs. There’s a lot of stick, but not much carrot, in the education game.

An interesting point of view and well worth reading.  Click here for the full Rolling Stone article.

 

My Wakelet

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I’m playing with a new social sharing platform called Wakelet.  Click here for a local news article.

So what is Wakelet? It’s a web application that lets people, businesses and academic institutions organise links to online information into neatly-presented collections called ‘wakes’.

In a world of information overload, big data and real-time streams, search engines work hard to index the ever-growing amount of online information. While search algorithms help us find isolated pieces of information faster, they don’t know which ones are most relevant to us as individuals. Wakelet brings a human touch to this process by giving us the ability to easily collect and organise anything we read, view or listen to in a way that’s useful to us and to others.

Check out my diabetes Wakelet.  I’m toying with the idea of cataloguing the online articles I read rather than link one by one on the blog.  I started my wakes in November 2017 and we’ll see how it goes.  At first blush I don’t see this platform replacing my blogs.  But I think it may be useful for my followers to have one stop shopping for the fruits of my research.  Enjoy.

The Fragile Generation – Reason.com

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Must read.  HT naked capitalism.

Source: The Fragile Generation – Reason.com

We’ve had the best of intentions, of course. But efforts to protect our children may be backfiring. When we raise kids unaccustomed to facing anything on their own, including risk, failure, and hurt feelings, our society and even our economy are threatened. Yet modern child-rearing practices and laws seem all but designed to cultivate this lack of preparedness. There’s the fear that everything children see, do, eat, hear, and lick could hurt them. And there’s a newer belief that has been spreading through higher education that words and ideas themselves can be traumatizing.

How did we come to think a generation of kids can’t handle the basic challenges of growing up?

A few years ago, Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray was invited by the head of counseling services at a major university to a conference on “the decline in resilience among students.” The organizer said that emergency counseling calls had doubled in the last five years. What’s more, callers were seeking help coping with everyday problems, such as arguments with a roommate. Two students had dialed in because they’d found a mouse in their apartment. They also called the police, who came and set a mousetrap. And that’s not to mention the sensitivity around grades. To some students, a B is the end of the world. (To some parents, too.)