Author: Dr. Dean

Walking on sunshine

Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

Dr. Dean

(NYTimes​)

The conventional wisdom is that morning people are high achievers, go-getters, while late risers are lazy. But what if going to bed in the wee hours is actually an advantage?

COME ON LUCKY SEVEN!!!!!

According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”

Tell me more …

And I have it fairly bad. My body naturally wants to go to bed around 2 a.m. and rise around 10 a.m. Whenever I try to adjust to an early schedule, my brain is like mush. Conversely, I light up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree around 9 p.m., and for the next few hours I am my most me: alert, clever, inspired to create.

Me too, but writing peaks about 11.

“Here’s to all 180 million of you late risers, night crawlers and can’t-get-to-sleepers,” the voice-over says, as Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” swells in the background. “Because the ones who truly change the world are the ones who are still at it when everyone else is fast asleep.”

I like how this ends.

The Arctic Is Warming And We’re All Screwed

Dr. Dean

(Digg)

In the midst of the Michael Cohen/Paul Manafort/Donald Trump news bonanza this week, some important news got buried. Okay, the Trump news isn’t unimportant, but we’re talking “important” in terms of the long-term survival of the human race in the face of climate change. And recent signs from the Arctic shows that those chances of surviving aren’t great. Here’s what’s going on

Hint: It’s not good!

There Was A Child Went Forth Every Day

Dr. Dean

Image result for last child in the woods

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many

years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover,

\and the song of the phoebe-bird,

And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter,

and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf, . . .

—WALT WHITMAN

I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.

—A FOURTH-GRADER IN SAN DlEGO

Epigraph,  Last Child In The Woods — Richard Louv

 

‘Risky’ Playgrounds Are Making a Comeback

Dr. Dean

(CityLab)

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“The take-home message for municipalities is: Stop setting your bar at the level of the most anxious parent. If you do that, you’re guaranteed to produce boring and dull playgrounds,” said Tim Gill, a London-based researcher and advocate who recently authored a white paper on faulty assumptions about risky playgrounds. “If you set your bar at the level of the average parent or maybe even at the level of the parents … who do want some more excitement and challenge in their kids’ lives, then, things start to look different.”

Go Outside And​ Play!

Communing with the Forest Bathers

Dr. Dean

(Outside)

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The 30th gathering of the San Francisco–based Forest Bathing Club occurred on a Sunday afternoon in the Presidio, the city’s gorgeous 1,500-acre military post turned national park. The group first convened in 2015 and has lately ramped up to four or five events each month.

I try to saunter in nature every day.

How Heroin Came for Middle-Class Moms

Dr. Dean

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(Marie Claire)

By 2013, a new sort of woman was using heroin: Affluent women. Middle aged, middle-class women with carpools. Gen X moms recovering from knee surgeries. College girls with double majors. Women with incomes above $50,000 and private health insurance. Women who had been taking Oxycodone and Vicodin because they’re excellent pain-relievers. Superior to a vodka tonic. Better than smoking a joint.

The CDC declared opioid abuse an epidemic in back in 2011. In October, President Trump declared the epidemic a health emergency. According to the CDC, heroin and opioid use among women doubled between 2004 and 2013—a rate twice that of men. More women are dying from prescription pain pills than ever before. Since 1999, the number of fatal overdoses among women has increased 400 percent, among men, 265.

Kinda puts that whole pot is addictive post in perspective​.

America’s Invisible Pot Addicts

Dr. Dean1 Comment

(The Atlantic)

Public-health experts worry about the increasingly potent options available, and the striking number of constant users. “Cannabis is potentially a real public-health problem,” said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University. “It wasn’t obvious to me 25 years ago, when 9 percent of self-reported cannabis users over the last month reported daily or near-daily use. I always was prepared to say, ‘No, it’s not a very abusable drug. Nine percent of anybody will do something stupid.’ But that number is now [something like] 40 percent.” They argue that state and local governments are setting up legal regimes without sufficient public-health protection, with some even warning that the country is replacing one form of reefer madness with another, careening from treating cannabis as if it were as dangerous as heroin to treating it as if it were as benign as kombucha.

But cannabis is not benign, even if it is relatively benign, compared with alcohol, opiates, and cigarettes, among other substances. Thousands of Americans are finding their own use problematic in a climate where pot products are getting more potent, more socially acceptable to use, and yet easier to come by, not that it was particularly hard before.

A lot​ of public policy yet to be worked out here. Lot’s of potential problems​.