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This is the book that I want. What do you think?
Me playing with friends in the pre TV age. What have boys lost?
Technorati Tags: Being Real, Books, Boys, Conn Iggulden
A lost era - I am the boy in the life raft looking at the camera - it is 1957 and we were lost in the ocean. There was no TV and we spent all day outside with each other when not at school. Our mothers? Inside.
Is your boy allowed to play like this?
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So, if networks are the future, how do we set them up? We are so used to using engineering that we can default into using engineering rules.
Real networks ALL "Emerge".
This sounds weird but we actually have a lot of experience in how to do this. It's called Gardening! It's also called Parenting. When we apply machine principles to gardening we get monoculture agriculture. When we apply machine principles to parenting, we get badly adjusted children.
When we apply the Rule #4 we get life and the full potential of the network, the garden and our kids.
In this part of my book, You Don't Need a Job, we look at how the rules of Emergence work. They apply of course not only to your work network but also to how you parent. I will show you both.
For more on this - My book is here on Amazon
If this all looks a little abstract, tomorrow I will share with you how we used these ideas to transform a public TV station.
Rule#4 Emergence is How Real Networks Grow
source: Perennial Garden Plants
This is a perennial garden. Once the gardener has set the conditions up correctly, the garden does all the work.
This process is called emergence. It is as different from engineering as dynamite is from the atom bomb. Engineering uses mechanics, emergence uses physics. It is in this process that the quantum improvement in performance between an engineering culture and a network culture will be seen.
The challenge for us today is to find out how to set the conditions for emergence to occur. The answer is to be found in the concept of initial conditions.
All natural things, living or not, develop when they find the ideal starting conditions. Hurricanes don’t happen in January. They happen between June and November when the initial conditions of temperature and water are right. Without these conditions, a hurricane will not develop to its full potential, but with the right conditions it will. It will do this all by itself.
Human social networks are the same they emerge when the optimal conditions for development take place.
We can start to explore this idea best by looking at how our children develop, or do not, to their full potential. If we can understand this, then we can understand how to set up the ideal initial conditions for a human social network. For we know that in nature all development is fractal. What happens at one scale happens at all scales.
Source - Link Santa Fe Institute
This figure shows us what it looks like when a child acquires language. What we see is a pattern that becomes denser and denser as more and more connections are added. Then, at some point, the new system takes off and has a life all of its own. This is emergence. Emergence is how life itself begins. At some point of connection inside an ideal environment, life itself emerges. This insight makes me wonder what will happen after 100 years of humans being connected as we are today? Is this how language itself emerged after millions of years of people sitting around a campfire?
We know now what the optimal initial conditions are for human language and development so we can apply this knowledge to human networks. (A full explanation of this process is here if you wish to explore this.)
To initiate the process of human development, children need to be touched a lot. They need to hear a lot of words. Infants also need to hear these words in the right social and cultural context. The right context is in a firm, safe and loving family culture.
As you will see, initial conditions are also time sensitive. The window for development is largely closed for a child by 3.
This is what success or failure looks like.
We can see two separate trajectories that diverge over time to produce a significant difference. At 2 years of age one child can understand 300 words and the other 150. Not much of a difference. However, look at the trajectory. In the case of the 300 word child, by 15, she will be at 2nd year university level. The 150 word child will be stuck at grade 5.
The difference looks tiny, but that is the key to understanding initial conditions. Tiny differences at the outset extend over time to huge differences. Trajectories have a power of their own.
Willms’ and Hart and Risley’s work shows us that family culture is how initial conditions are set for every human being’s development. The optimal culture sets the maximum amount of trust.
Willms’ team identify the three key family cultural groups as being:
Authoritative – Parents who establish a warm and nurturing relationship with their children, but set firm limits for their behaviour.
Authoritarian – Parents who are highly controlling, requiring their children to meet an absolute set of standards.
Permissive – Parents who are overly nurturing and who provide few standards for behaviour and are extremely tolerant of misbehaviour.
The Willms research informs us that the poorest learning and development outcomes are found in families that have authoritarian and permissive cultures. Most machine organizations have these kinds of cultures too.
I think it follows that human culture is the driver for human social networks, for trust is the critical element.
In summary, human development is tied to initial conditions that promote trust and then exposes the child to the maximum amount of the right patterns. If these conditions are applied in a time sensitive manner, then emergence will take place. If done very well, the trajectory will take the person to her full potential.
What works for you and me as individuals, will work for groups.
For this is how natural systems work. They are fractal, they are the same at all scales. The brain and the universe share the same organizational pattern.
However, that is not all we need to know. If we were planting a perennial garden we would also need to know what kind of mix of plants is best. For we know that, even with the best growing conditions, a garden that reaches its potential must have the kind of reinforcing diversity that will drive good health and resilience.
There must be a healthy iteration between the elements in the mix.
In a later post we will talk about the "protocols" that all networks have in order to connect and have great complexity and so life. The good news is that no real network has more than 4 of these. The complexity comes from their iteration. So they are in fact easier to set up than a traditional organization that depends on thousands of rules.
All is in my book - You Don't Need a Job
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It is clear now that the Network will replace the Bureaucracy as the core social design for how humans get things done. So what are the rules for growing a network?
I know that all real networks do have rules. Solar systems and galaxies have rules. Human Social Networks surely have to have them too? In my book You Don't Need a Job - I go deeply into what these rules may be. Here is a glimpse of how I think they are - with much help from the brilliant Valdis Krebs.
"Rule #2 Structure and the Shaping Forces of Purpose and Trust
These networks will be natural. They are not like the telephone network that is based on engineering and on the plans of man. They will, instead, follow the laws of nature’s networks. This means that when we study nature, we will discover how best to set up the conditions to grow healthy human networks. This means that these networks will have laws and will have math to support these laws.
A good model to think of is the universe, which has a network structure of planets, solar systems and galaxies. These systems are shaped and held together by powerful forces of gravity and time. The new network model for humans has the same kind of structures and is also subject to powerful shaping forces. They have shaping forces just like gravity and time.
In the trust network, ‘gravity’ is purpose.
Human networks are brought into being by a purpose. This purpose can be a mundane purpose, such as with Visa, where all the banks joined together to do something that, pragmatically, they could not do alone. The purpose can be deeply spiritual, such as local foodies, including both producers and consumers, getting together to change how we grow and eat food. The purpose can be political, like Al Qaeda. The stronger the common purpose, the more powerful the gravitational pull.
The space-time field that governs the scale of the trust network is trust itself.
The stronger the trust, the larger and more coherent the system. We will explore this concept in greater depth later.
Rule#3 Trust Networks Have a Consistent Structure, Like Galaxies or Hurricanes
All hurricanes are different but share similar structure. All galaxies are different, but most share a similar spiral structure. In fact, most galaxies and hurricanes share a similar structure. They share the same mathematical underpinning and have predictable lives within a framework of probability. They all have set rules for development.
It is the same with real human social networks. They are not arbitrary. They are all unique, like a snowflake, but l share a consistent, overarching structure. Their behaviour can be predicted within a framework of probability. The rules for how they develop are certain.
This is what a real human network looks like. (The next 3 figures are all the work of the brilliant Valdis Krebs, the master navigator of the human networks.)
Human social networks are dense in the centre and can have offshoots. They look as if they have a point in each core, but we see as we zoom in that they don’t have a point.
Here we can see that the centre is not a point but a core.
It is indeed like a sun or a core set of galaxies in a cluster. We see that there is a hierarchy too. For the green ring is not the same as the core or the outer rings. What holds the whole thing into this shape is purpose. What enables the people on the outer rings to get value is trust.
Let’s go deeper still.
This is the core. We see that this too has a hierarchy. It is more dense at the centre.
We can see this structure very clearly in terrorist groups.
Source: Col David Kilcullen , advisor to General Petreaus
This is a diagram of a typical terrorist network. All real social networks look like this. They are not random. They have deep structure. There is a clear hierarchy.
Many hope for a non-hierarchical world, but in nature all is hierarchy. This is not like the hierarchy of a king, rather this is hierarchy is more like a sun that has mass that attracts and energy that gives out light and life.
All of these structures, like the universe, are based on natural laws. They need a special set of conditions to begin and a special set of conditions to evolve to their full potential. "
Tomorrow we will look at how they emerge and grow - or you can buy my book with it all here.
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I wrote this a year and a half ago. It is more clear now. Why the pressure is on Education and why health will follow
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Source: smartpei.typepad.com via Rob on Pinterest
This is what the hub looks like. Each member of the guild supports the other. It is the opposite of a monoculture. And applies to human natural networks too.
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Source: powerupproject.wordpress.com via Rob on Pinterest
This is what happens as you learned to speak. You copied sounds. You heard patterns. You started to make connections. When you had made enough connections - you could speak in complex terms. This is fractal design that applies to all living systems. It will apply to human networks. How we set up the environment to achieve this transition will be the new organizational skill
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If we are to make a good living in the non job world, how do we get ready to do this?For all we know is the Job.
I think that we have to live the new to get a feel for it. Just like an immigrant does when she arrives in a new country.
So in this post, a chapter of my book You Don't Need a Job, I offer some advice as to how to get your toe in the water of the new world - so that you can immigrate there even if you have a job now.
I offer just 4 simple starting points.
We live in the Matrix. We live in an intellectual and cultural context that we think is reality and normal but it is only a construct just as the medieval world was. There is no harder work than leaving such a construct.
A fifteen-year-old German antiaircrafter of the Hitler Youth, Hans Georg Henke, taken prisoner by the soldiers of the 9th U.S. Army in the city of Giessen, Germany. 29.03.1945. Source: Poignant Photos
Years ago I had a special boss. Peter was German. He is one of the finest people that I have ever met. Truly himself, courageous and honorable. Special. But I knew that as a 14 year-old boy he had been in the Hitler Youth. He had fought in the final days of Berlin and had been a prisoner and DP (Displaced Person) for two years before coming to Canada as an orphaned refugee. I could not explain what I saw as a dichotomy. But one night we had dinner and a lot to drink and he told me what had happened.
“Robert, I was 14. All I had ever known was Hitler. He and national socialism were the only world I could knew. He became more important to me as the war went badly and my family were all killed in the bombing. My friends and I could not imagine a life that was different. We were all willing to die for this life. It was who we were. But when it was all over, it was as if I awoke from a dream. Life did go on, even in the prison camp. By the time I came to Canada and started my first job as a dishwasher, I could see that I had been duped, but it took Gotterdamerung to deprogram me.”
All you and I have ever known is the system that we have. Most of us don’t know how deep the program goes.
To go to the new ‘New World’ demands that we unlearn the lessons of a lifetime. This is why the transition is so hard. We only know the old.
I am not sure that if Peter had read a book like this at the age of 13 that he would have seen the light. It was only the death of his world that opened him to the new and it was only in living the new, that he could discover it and then accept it.
I think that this is true for most of us. The mind is not enough. We have to experience the new many times for it to start to shape us. The process is really emergence!
So, like Peter, we need to live the new to be changed. We cannot will it.
Emerge by Living the New
Until now I have made the intellectual case for the new. I hope that I have shown you the reasons for the change that confronts us. I hope I have shown you how the new works and why the old will fail.
But even if I have been successful in presenting the case, I know that this is not enough when a paradigm shift is involved. For when we are shaped and moulded by a paradigm, we often cannot take in new ideas. The old paradigm prevents us from seeing them and accepting them.
I have learned that the only way to really ‘get’ the new is to live it. The only way to learn to ride a bike is to ride it. The only way a baby learns to walk is to try it. My best advice is for you to start living the new. Use the experiences of the new to help you emerge.
So here are some practical suggestions for what you can do that will give you new experiences and habits that can help you make this transition.
Join a Co Working Site
This link will take you to a comprehensive wiki that has most of the world’s co working sites. Find out who is close to you.
What you will find is a face-to-face connecting trust platform. You can still have a job, but drop in to get a feel. You can still be a student. You can be retired. What you will find is a diverse community of people with all sorts of skills and with all sorts of projects. It is like Cheers but for work.
You will have skills to offer and so will the other members. There will be cool projects underway that you may fit into.
Most importantly you will experience the new culture of work and making a living. You will start to put in the hours that will start to transform your program.
Take a Practical Hobby to the Next Step
Take small steps to make a living by doing things that you love and are good at.
You have always wanted to write a book. You can now self publish easily. You may need help though on a cover, a format, on the supporting web page. On marketing. You may want supporting videos. People at your co working site can help.
You make things. Check out Etsy. You Knit. Check out Ravelry. Here you can find connecting trust platforms that live online.
You have an apartment downtown. Check out Airbnb and see how you can make a little business out of it.
You grow food in a small way. Join the farmer’s market. Set up a CSA. Buy a greenhouse and expand. Soon local connecting trust platforms, like Big Barn in the UK ,will emerge where you live. In 1800, 80 percent of North Americans made their living directly or indirectly from food. Today less than 5 percent do. In 30 years time, my bet is that we will be back to 80 percent. Food growing, processing, distribution, and services will be a major part of the new economy and will be where much of the income will be found as the job goes away.
You are good with machines. Learn how to use a 3D printer. The new manufacturing will be distributed and local and will use open source designs. Mass customization will be the rule. There will be lots of opportunity for mechanically minded people.
You will discover a world of business out there that is alive and growing. Somewhere out there is a place for you. Try what suits you. This first step will teach you so much.
Learn Something New for Yourself
Take a first step to pull away from the gravitational pull of the machine institutions. Teach yourself something!
What really interests you? You don’t need to sign up for a course. You can do all of this yourself. I taught myself about Physics in my forties. I was a history major and knew nothing about the rules that govern the universe. I did not need a teacher or a school to become quite knowledgeable.
But if you want, the teachers are there too. The new thing is to be in charge yourself. Now there are so many new tools that can help you such as the Khan Academy. The web is full of information.
Maybe you have something to teach? Look at how music lessons are now given globally by using tools like Skype. Edit Wikipedia in areas where you know a lot. Tutor kids who are struggling in school.
Education opportunities will explode in the new ‘New World’ as the old system fails. There will be lots of opportunity as the ‘priesthood’ loses its power and the classroom falls away.
Learn How to Take Charge of Your Health
The biggest new habit that I have created for myself is that I learned enough about health and diet to change how I live and so reduce my risk of being ill. I will still need a doctor if I am in a car accident, but it is unlikely that I will get a chronic illness.
Nothing that I have done has felt so empowering. When you see your body change, when pain goes away without drugs, you know you are doing something important. My body has shifted to a new chemistry. A new Rob has physically emerged.
Yet change is hard. Changing our diet is hard, changing how we live is hard and we need to get and give support. There is a mass of information about all of this on the web and soon connecting trust platforms will emerge here too. Maybe you will start one.
It’s all up to you.
In the world we grew up in, we all had to wait for ‘them’. We waited for our parents to do things. We waited for our teachers to tell us what to do and how to do it. We waited for our bosses. We waited for our political leaders.
But to go to the new ‘New World’, you don’t have to wait for anyone. It’s just like being an immigrant to America in the 19th century. All you have to do is to decide to go and go.
It’s not easy. Being an immigrant never is, but just as the real freedom of America called out to millions in the 19th century and pulled people away from the “Old Country”, so the real freedom of the new ‘New World’ calls you.
The full book is here that explains why this shift is taking place, how it will unfold and how each of us can become part of it.
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Source: Uploaded by user via Rob on Pinterest
Aged 18 I was a diamond prospector for De Beers. 9 months on safari! Living like a Hunter Gatherer
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So if you cannot get a job or you have lost one or you fear that you will lose one: what is your future?
I think it is this. The new economy that is emerging out of the ashes of the Job is a return to the Artisan with a difference. This time the Artisan is embedded in a network that leverages the value.
The new economy will not use the rules of the old but the rules of the network. It will not all be about programmers. But about "Makers" and a lot of what will be made will be food. For a new food system will replace the factory food system too. Here is why I think this to be true
In my book, You Don't Need a Job - I explore this is detail. Here is how I see this new world. It is already here - if you look carefully.
Online Global Connecting Trust Platforms
In 1910, Henry Ford opened a new factory at Highland Park. Here were found all the rules that were to make mass production possible in one place. If you had visited Highland Park in 1912, you would have seen the future in working form.
'Highland Parks' exist today. The new Highland Parks are the online connecting trust platforms. They enable global free scaling. If we look at them carefully, we can see the future.
You can easily see this kind of global online connecting trust platform in the craft sector. Community sites like Etsy and Ravelry are enabling millions of people in the craft and knitting worlds to make a living. Who would have thought that a young mother in a rural village in the UK could make a living selling knitting patterns and wool, but many do now.
Trust is built into these systems, they are not mere shopfronts. They enable the old village market, with all its social aspects, to exist globally. These systems enable the Artisan or Pioneer to link up with the Pragmatic and Nurturing archetypes in a systemic way.
Let’s see how they work in more detail.
The Human “Network Effect”: Mutual Benefit, More Trust and Freedom
Connecting trust platforms are emerging all over the place that give us all the benefit of the network effect. In a true network, all the members get more value as the network grows. While there are transactions, the big payoff is more trust. While each member has to fit into the protocols, the result is more personal freedom.
Lets’s start with growing mutual benefit for all. For instance, many people are putting their apartments up for rent on connecting trust platforms like Airbnb. This way you can get some additional income for your place and I can also find a good place to stay when I travel. I rent an Airbnb place 100 yards from where my son lives in Montreal when I visit him at a third of the cost of a cheap hotel room. The apartment is a real home. The owner has a name and cares what happens. She wins and I win. She reduces the costs of her home, I reduce the costs of my travel and I get to see my grandson more because it costs less and is more convenient. How can a budget hotel compete with this?
It’s all About Trust.
As each of us uses Airbnb, the trust grows. It grows locally between renters and owners who meet each other and get to know each other and it grows system wide. As behaving well becomes the new norm, it enters the social immune system of all parties. It is in everyone’s interest to deal with free riders. As trust grows in total, so does the scaling of the system. It is a positive cycle.
Airbnb makes its money by taxing the total system. The more the system grows, the better all do. So every member including the host is aligned.
The Human Network Effect: The Tighter the Protocols, the More Freedom
The high status in the ‘New World’ will be those who are free of ownership. This brings more personal freedom, for in reality, many of the chains we wear come from our attachment to things and to stuff.
Owning things is a legacy of the ancient age, when your clothes, your horse, and your castle proclaimed your status. What we missed is that the more debt we have and the more we are encumbered by our possessions, the more a slave we become. And by slave I mean a person who has little or no control in their lives. A person who has to fit into the old system.
What Could be More Symbolic of this Attachment than Our Cars?
What we have missed is that we don’t really need a car, we really need the service of a car. The car is perhaps the most important status symbol of the industrial world. In Toronto, it costs $9,000 a year, fully depreciated, to own a car. It costs, on average, another $4,000 to park it. You have to earn $22,000 gross for the privilege. There is, however, a network alternative that is growing in power. Car sharing in Toronto can be for an hour, a week or more.; it is priced by time. You can car share like this.
Even bike-sharing in Montreal and London have become the new normal. Platforms like these will grow up in every part of our lives where we gain a networked cost of the service.
The Human Network Effect: More Innovation
When you participate in a connecting trust platform you will also get progressively smarter. Remember that optimal learning comes from high trust environments that allow for many patterns or experiences to emerge.
While the old industrial model fights for more copyright, the human network offers most ideas for free using the open source model. What this means in practice is that new technology is available to the individual at a very low cost. We all share in the human network effect again.
The best open source systems are rooted in connecting trust platforms that facilitate sharing and that create the network effect for members. Such platforms also create better quality products and services. Open source is a Darwinian process where the good replaces the less good and where thousands work at this process of improvement.
Wordpress is a great example of such a connecting trust platform. The 3D printing world is coalescing around connecting trust platforms. Wikipedia is a connecting trust platform, as are MOOCs. (MOOC’s or Massive Online Open Courses are exploding as universities attempt to find an online alternative to the classroom).
The human network world will be a place where ideas grow more quickly, better and cheaper than in the old machine world. The old will hang onto their desire to control and, in doing so, become progressively more stupid and thus more vulnerable.
The Human Network Effect: It Will Cost Almost Nothing to Operate an Enterprise
You will have access to connecting trust platforms of tools that will enable you to compete directly with large corporations.
Back in 1880, we all owned our own tools. With the advent of industrialization and the mass market, however, tools got bigger and became too costly for the individual. Now technology is making most tools affordable for the individual again. In film, any person can afford an editing suite that only ten years ago would have been the preserve of a studio. Coming soon with 3D printing, it will be possible even to custom make manufactured goods as well. I see the day when even cars are made locally using open source designs and 3D printing.
These tools become even more empowering when they are connected to a platform. Between 40 percent and 60 percent of the costs of most organization are overhead. The most affected are companies with 20 to 50 employees. Most of the costs of running a business can simply go away if you choose to use these new work platforms.
Ideally, your organization should have no central office or offices. With the “Cloud” and the many tools that are supported in the cloud, all your core support processes can be virtual. We are moving quickly from a design where each of us keep our data and our applications locally. With the Cloud, all data and all applications can be shared beyond the node. Soon our local devices will pull down only what we need when we need it. The costs of having great tools and of massive amounts of storage are dropping to close to zero.
This trend for more network value is also true for staffing. Here is a link to the hiring page for Automattic, the organization that runs WordPress. See how they fit this new world and how different it is from an old organization.
In such a world, most of the meetings fade away, as the work is fully open and transparent. People can comment as things come up and much of the friction goes away.
Ideally your organization should only have a tiny core that is fully employed. In reality, all business has its ups and downs and a large, fixed overhead takes away your freedom and pushes you off mission.
Skilled workers can have more than one employer and are therefore safer too.
Employers can hire from the global pool and thus have access to the best people. Workers can choose to live where they want and have the best living choices. We are seeing the beginning of a move away from high cost large cities as a result.
We will no longer have to base a company in a big city, it can be anywhere. As a result the costs of a big city life can be reduced.
I will cover this in much more detail in You Don’t Need an Office.
The Human Network Effect: You Will Need the Banks Much Less
We are seeing a return to the classic rules of credit, where investors have a real connection and a stake in the deal. Connecting trust platforms extend the reach and make this kind of deal easy.
Much of the power of banks, and most of their costs to us, will go away in the network world.
For here the core of the idea of capital will not be financial capital, but social capital. The more trust you have, the bigger the network you have and thus the more you will be financed directly by your customers and other members who share your network.
We see the early evidence of this in the new financing connected trust platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. (My Dummies guide here)
The best deals here are where the borrower has a name and a cause and a product or a service that fits the needs of the members. The borrower, in effect, pre-sells to the market who are tied to her directly.
We see this in the new local food system, where farmers sell direct early in the season to buyers who will take delivery at harvest. This is called community supported agriculture.
We see this in community equity financings where the regulations confine the deal to parties who live in the same place.
Again, these systems are all based on finding trust again.
I will cover this section in more detail in You Don’t Need a Banker.
The Human Network Effect: Will Lower the Costs of Education and Health
Today, higher education and healthcare are the two most expensive services that we buy. Most of these costs will go away. You will also get better outcomes.
The cost of secondary education has grown faster than any other part of life. It has grown even faster, and by more, than healthcare. Student debt is now a bigger weight on the young than the mortgage bubble was on their parents.
Few things keep aspiring young people more in thrall than the burden of university. Few services have declined as much in quality than the learning experience provided by universities.
All this is changing.
In the next 10 years, educating yourself will become a new norm for many people. In education, we see the Khan Academy emerging as paradigm changing force. Many of the leading universities are putting their courses online.
Soon we will see even the ‘course’, with one teacher, shift to a tutorial model where the expert and the students engage in a conversation. This is a model where all learn from the emergent properties of conversation and where it will be our reputation that emerges as our credential.
The academic credential is like the job, an artifact of the industrial system. It is a convenient symbol of attainment.
Already, in the software world, employers hire on reputation. If you live in the Drupal world, you know the social hierarchy. You know who the players are. You know who is good or not. New entrants have to prove themselves in this ecology. As more of us live and work in networks, our reputation will become more important than any CV. It will be when others who are trusted say that you can do the work that you will get the work.
Learning will return to being a personal activity. The long death of machine education will open up a huge opportunity for those that really do want to teach and learn. Reputation and real knowledge will replace the credential. Connecting trust platforms for learning will emerge as they are for business.
It’s the same in health.
Many of us live in big cities because that is where the healthcare services are concentrated. Many of us pay enormous sums to access healthcare. This burden will go away.
A new, networked community health model is emerging where we help each other eat and live in a more healthy way. Much of this is connected to the new food system.
It will be the advent of the right kind of connecting trust platforms that will tip this idea into the new health reality.
I will cover these two areas in much more detail when I release You Don’t Need Medicine to Be Healthy in March and You Don't Need a School to Get an Education in the summer of 2013.
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Many of us see sleep as being an inconvenient interuption to the day. Many pride themselves on how little sleep they need. But Sleep is not just a break in the day but a vital part of how we live a healthy life.
It's great to see that this insight is moving into the mainstream. Here is an article today in the Globe and Mail. Snip here.
"It is no coincidence that, over the past 50 years, citizens of the industrialized world have, as well as getting fatter and more anxious, lost about an hour of sleep a night – roughly one full night’s worth every week. And because of city lights, social media and such habits as eating and exercising later at night, what sleep remains is often not the soundest. As Till Roenneberg, the author of Internal Time, points out, 80 per cent of the world now needs an alarm clock to get up each morning. As a result, the head of human chronobiology at the University of Munich’s Institute of Medical Psychology says, we live in a permanent state of “social jet lag.”
And no segment of the population is more jet-lagged than teenagers. Surveys show that no fewer than three-quarters of them fail to get the rest they need, and find themselves in school the next morning expected to learn when their brains want them to sleep.
Society is increasingly torn when it comes to sleep – we lament its loss even as we boast of how little we require. Because rising at dawn made more sense when most people were farmers and candle wax was expensive, the shift from early bird to nighthawk seems of no great consequence.
Yet as science demonstrates how, without enough sleep, the brain falters, there is a growing campaign to turn back the clock. Researchers are calling for more specific school-based interventions, particularly for elementary students, to establish better sleep habits early on life, and to make sleep education more central in health classes."
Here are some excellent resources to help you get more and better sleep.
How much do you need and some tips as to how to get more sleep
Here is an excellent guide that covers a lot of ground and is also very practical
My new book You Don't Need Medicine to Get Healthy will be out in March and will put all of the factors that drive our health into one master context.
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