Growing Up: Where is my Cheese?? and the Problem with White Men

Hey team

In the last 24 hours two things happened. I read the book Who Moved My Cheese?, and the lovely boyfriend previously introduced in last week’s newsletter broke up with me. If that’s not life saying “hey here is a real-life example to go and test what you’ve just learnt”, I don’t know what is…

Before I get to that let me share with you the Why We Sleep excerpts as promised in the last two newsletters, or it’s really going to get annoying…

This week I'm (re)reading: Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker

Alright straight into it.

First, as always who’s the author?

In his own words (I assume, how weird that we have to write third person bios about ourselves) from his website:

Dr. Walker earned his degree in neuroscience from Nottingham University, UK, and his PhD in neurophysiology from the Medical Research Council, London, UK. He subsequently became a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, USA. Currently, he is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

And here’s the first extract I wanted to share about early birds vs night owls (bold formatting by me, not the author).

(TL;DR: Takeaway message = Night owls aren’t lazy and it’s not a choice, it’s biology. GRRRR.)

Although every human being displays an unyielding twenty-four-hour pattern, the respective peak and trough points are strikingly different from one individual to the next. For some people, their peak of wakefulness arrives early in the day, and their sleepiness trough arrives early at night. These are “morning types,” and make up about 40 percent of the populace. They prefer to wake at or around dawn, are happy to do so, and function optimally at this time of day. Others are “evening types,” and account for approximately 30 percent of the population. They naturally prefer going to bed late and subsequently wake up late the following morning, or even in the afternoon. The remaining 30 percent of people lie somewhere in between morning and evening types, with a slight leaning toward eveningness, like myself.

You may colloquially know these two types of people as “morning larks” and “night owls,” respectively. Unlike morning larks, night owls are frequently incapable of falling asleep early at night, no matter how hard they try. It is only in the early-morning hours that owls can drift off. Having not fallen asleep until late, owls of course strongly dislike waking up early. They are unable to function well at this time, one cause of which is that, despite being “awake,” their brain remains in a more sleep-like state throughout the early morning.

An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.

Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favour larks. Although the situation is improving, standard employment schedules force owls into an unnatural sleep-wake rhythm. Consequently, job performance of owls as a whole is far less optimal in the mornings, and they are further prevented from expressing their true performance potential in the late afternoon and early evening as standard work hours end prior to its arrival. Most unfortunately, owls are more chronically sleep-deprived, having to wake up with the larks, but not being able to fall asleep until far later in the evening. Owls are thus often forced to burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Greater ill health caused by a lack of sleep therefore befalls owls, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, heart attack, and stroke.

And why are we like this?

You may be wondering why Mother Nature would program this variability across people. As a social species, should we not all be synchronized and therefore awake at the same time to promote maximal human interactions? Perhaps not. As we’ll discover later in this book, humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake timing preferences can be understood. The night owls in the group would not be going to sleep until one or two a.m., and not waking until nine or ten a.m. The morning larks, on the other hand, would have retired for the night at nine p.m. and woken at five a.m. Consequently, the group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable (i.e., every person asleep) for just four rather than eight hours, despite everyone still getting the chance for eight hours of sleep. That’s potentially a 50 percent increase in survival fitness. Mother Nature would never pass on a biological trait—here, the useful variability in when individuals within a collective tribe go to sleep and wake up—that could enhance the survival safety and thus fitness of a species by this amount. And so she hasn’t.

Okay and now the thing about how sleep deprivation can be as dangerous as drink driving:

In a disturbing later study, researchers in Australia took two groups of healthy adults, one of whom they got drunk to the legal driving limit (.08 percent blood alcohol), the other of whom they sleep-deprived for a single night. Both groups performed the concentration test to assess attention performance, specifically the number of lapses. After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk. Said another way, if you wake up at seven a.m. and remain awake throughout the day, then go out socializing with friends until late that evening, yet drink no alcohol whatsoever, by the time you are driving home at two a.m. you are as cognitively impaired in your ability to attend to the road and what is around you as a legally drunk driver. In fact, participants in the above study started their nosedive in performance after just fifteen hours of being awake (ten p.m. in the above scenario).

This week I’m asking: no book is gospel… so how do we think about this?

When I mentioned I was going to talk about this book, one of you beautiful readers sent me a podcast which essentially ripped the book to shreds (unfortunately they started by criticising him for being a white, “conventionally attractive” male... not sure why skin colour is relevant to the validity of his work? but anyway).

It looks like Walker has addressed some of those criticisms. From his website:

Since publication of the first edition, thoughtful questions and criticisms have been raised regarding the book, including a number of errors that required revision. As an essential part of what I see to be good scholarly conduct, I have written a detailed blog response, found here, that addresses these questions and issues in depth. I further discuss these issues in a recent podcast. Finally, I have made a full set of corrections to the book, published in a second edition, which is now out in print.

So hopefully that means the system works? Someone writes something, some people say “hey cool thing you wrote”, other people respond and say “hmmm I don’t think so”. The writer then says “thanks for pointing that out. Let me investigate and make some revisions as necessary.” And ideally this whole process can be done without any personal attacks thrown about as we are all just humans figuring stuff out and humans make mistakes but are also capable of correcting them, given the chance?

Agree? Disagree? Have I missed something?

As my boy Malcolm Gladwell wrote:

'A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.'

Last week you said: Yes, I will do your podcast

And Dad and I recorded the first podcast! And then I recorded the second yesterday. And the third and fourth are scheduled for Monday. Woohoo. All to be released when I’m back from the Himalayas in September. Get excited.

(Last week's newsletter if you missed it: Growing Up: the Deep End, and 15 Ferraris)

This week I am grateful for: lessons from the people who’ve loved you…

So, breakups suck. Not my first rodeo, so I know I can get through it, as painful as it is. (Plenty of books on my shelves with titles like YOU GOT THIS GIRL (don’t think that’s a real book, but you get the picture)). I burst into tears ordering my coffee this morning but then I got a hug AND a free brownie so that’s something?

I thought it would be fitting to share some of the wisdom from Who Moved My Cheese? (Dr Spencer Johnson, 29 million copies sold...) and how it’s helping me move forward at this juncture...

And then I realised that may be a bit too complex for my brain right now (although it’s a very basic story if you haven’t read it).

So instead let’s go with something a bit more raw.

I just found a piece of wisdom from lovely (now ex-)boyfriend in a note hidden away on my phone somewhere. I jotted it down on the 13th of April, a day I’d been plagued by a low mood and the anxiety and frustration that sometimes comes alongside it. We were talking on the phone as I wandered around Hyde Park. Knowing how much I want to have a positive impact on the world, he asked (in a very caring, compassionate and supportive way) if I have ever considered that when I carry this low self-worth around, I am less able to help others. Whereas when I am feeling good and have a positive outlook on things, I have a lot more to offer the world.

A pattern has recently become blindingly apparent to me. And I hope you don’t mind, but it’s very empowering to write it here as I begin to separate myself from it. Any kind of set-back (a breakup, an unsuccessful job application, a career path not working out as expected, and any number of very minor things that could in some way possibly be interpreted as a rejection) my mind uses as evidence to feed the narrative that I am a failure, there’s something wrong with me, I am unwanted, I don’t belong.

Believing these things about myself, also known as being a victim of my circumstances, feeds my low self-worth and to James’ point stops me from doing what I actually want to do on this Earth. That in turn makes me feel more miserable, and the cycle continues.

So, in true Growing Up fashion, I hereby accept the work laid out for me. Time to break the pattern, rewire those neural pathways, and instil some new beliefs. One day at a time type stuff.

I’m eternally thankful to the person in this readership who, this week pointed out to me that, although this work isn’t necessarily fun and it doesn’t provide an immediate income, it’s probably the highest return on investment thing I'll do .

And, as a start, for some counter evidence to that old storyline. This is my 10th newsletter… and you guys continue to open these emails each week. So that’s something!!

Thanks for being on this journey... thought it was just going to be about books, but here we are.

xx Delia

Hi! I'm Delia Burgess

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