The Science of Adolescent Sleep-ins

Anyone who lives with teenagers or has been a teenager (remember when?) knows about the dramas of their waking for their morning. Researching for News Bytes, I discovered an article about this phenomenon The Biology of Bedtime. Seems a team of researchers in Germany has come to the conclusion that sleeping in is "a defining mark of adolescence." The article continues ...."Till Roenneberg, of the University of Munich in Germany, and his colleagues arrived at this conclusion by studying "chronotypes." A chronotype is essentially an individual's personal "circadian rhythm," or 24-hour cycle of biological activity. For example, some people - dubbed "larks" - tend to wake up between 4 and 6 am and are ready for bed between 8 and 10 pm. Meanwhile, others - the "owls" - prefer to wake up between 8 and 10 am and fall asleep somewhere between midnight and 2 am. The majority of the population falls somewhere between these two extremes."

The article continues to report that scientists can measure the end of adolescence by the turn around from later sleeping and rising to increasingly earlier sleeping and rising. And apparently the phenomenon was not limited to those in the cities who partied late, but extended across the population.

Hmmmm ... Sceptic I may be, but there was no mention of the age-old adolescent need to push the boundaries. Partying or not, there is always the effort to push the bedtime later and later, simply because it's a chance to test the rules ... to limit the effects of lack of choice in our lives. And I think this is not limited to adolescents.

I wonder does Mr Roenneberg live with teenagers...??

Fascinating research, though. You can find the link on my News Bytes page.

Assertiveness - how do you rate?

When it comes to communication skills, the ability to be assertive is just so important. Vital in so many of the arenas of our lives. Vital to our relationships in all those areas. I’ve begun a series of posts on assertivenss in the blog I write for ITC itccommunicationedge, and it is a very useful training session to offer, because assertiveness is so vital, and so many of us need to learn to be effectively assertive.

I started the post with three questions,

Do you wish you had the confidence to speak your mind?

Do you feel you have the respect of your family and co-workers?

Would you like to improve your relationships?

hoping that they would apply to people who needed assertiveness either because they were too aggressive or too passive. So which one are you? And which one did the second question apply to?

Shakespeare the man vs the world of his writing

I blogged for ITC on a comment made by Christine Nehring about Shakespeare


"Shakespeare is a biographer's nightmare. Not because the information about him is so overwhelming or incriminating but because it is so slight and so stubbornly innocuous. We forgive our great poets almost anything -- suicide (Sylvia Plath), homicide (Ben Jonson), incest (William Wordsworth), hubris (Oscar Wilde), drunkenness (Edgar Allen Poe), insanity (Friedrich Nietzsche), sexual excess of every description (Byron, Shelley, Houellebecq -- who not?). What we are loath to forgive is quiet respectability."

Christine is certainly a clever writer. But I had to respond by asking what it is that we would want to be remembered for ...

Today I have gone back to the original article to get some more context. And there is some more information available about Shakespeare, it seems, though very little. It paints a picture of a man given to a great deal of control and moral rectitude.

"This was not a man who left much to accident. This was not a man whom but for the capacious and shockingly imaginative plays that he left behind we would ever take for a free spirit."

I wonder how often the personality of the writer is the same as the material they write. For many writers, you and me, right up to the published authors, writing is a chance to escape into fantasies and imagination, to create other worlds. And how many internet romances fizzle because the world of writing doesn't always accurately reflect the world of the writer? And Shakespeare's ability to leave little to accident produced some of the world's best literature. Thankyou Shakespeare, whoever you were.

Male and Female brains - different?

Human beings don't come with manuals. A typical lament. I wished I had a manual for the babies when they were born, and still do now they are teenagers. I wished for one as my mother aged, and I would dearly love some definitions as I navigate a marriage that is in its third decade. One of the greatest challenges has been growing up in the sixties and seventies when we desperately believed that men and women were equal, and somehow made the connection to the belief that therefore they must be the same. Fortunes are being made writing books and offering counselling sessions to our generation as we come to terms with the fact that men and women are different. And the manual? The scientific proof that we so dearly loved in those same decades. Still evolving... but not as clearcut as we would like. I found this site when I was researching for my news bytes in education . For children, simply put, the best conclusion reached is that so far there is no real proof that our brains are different. Thankfully the same research for news bytes bought an article They Just can't help it which puts it in perspective. Here is the scientific theory. Now to just write me a manual.