You Shouldn’t Meditate…Until You Read This.

B.E. Vecchiola

In July 2014, blessed with leisure and opportunity, I allowed myself the privilege of four days of meditation and mindfulness practice on the beach at the Pinery Provincial Park, near Grand Bend, Ontario. On the last day, as I sat on the warm sand, diving deeply into the wonder of our star high in the afternoon dome, the glistening blue water reflecting the sun’s crisp light, the wind howling past my ears, the waves crashing and splashing upon the shore, the heat of the relentless summer air on my receptive skin, and the streaking of birds sailing upon the gusting winds, I had a profound realization, the depths of which I had never experienced before; and have only captured a handful of moments since then. The realization was this: all the moments of my life —every single one— every first kiss, every last goodbye, every failure and triumph, every pang, every confused and tortured night, every jubilant dance, every mistake and misstep, were stones on a path laid out behind me which led me to that beach, where everything was perfect. I felt an alloy of gratitude, meaning, awe, smallness, greatness, understanding, forgiveness, and love that I know I will not be able to convey in English, had I thousand years to study Shakespeare.

I imagine my description is the type of experience novice mediators mostly expect when they think of meditation. What the Tibetan Buddhists call a Proximal Nirvana: close to, but not quite the big Nirvana Shakyamuni Buddha reached in his awakening experience. However, my reason for beginning a meditation practice wasn’t religiously motivated. I just wanted to stop hurting. Like most people who turn to meditation in the West, I did so because I was told that if I wanted to heal, then meditation would help, and like a good little patient, I took my daily dose. Six months later, after the relentless, consistent application of a Mindfulness meditation practice, my relationship with myself and with my life had changed. The functional impairments I was experiencing, which sent me into a meditation practice, were no longer a problem. I believe in what Anderson, Suresh, and Farb, in their article Meditation Benefits and Drawbacks: Empirical Codebook and Implications for Teaching (2019,) call the “non pharmacological cognitive enhancing” effects of meditation, but…it wasn’t easy to develop this practice. At times it was painful, at times it was terrifying, at times I wanted to quit.

In recent decades, meditation, especially mindfulness, has become a cultural staple. There is no shortage of apps, YouTube channels, yoga shops, secular-spiritual organizations, and teachers touting the benefits of mediation. In 2014, the year of my little awakening, the cover of Time Magazine was “The Mindful Revolution”; and things haven’t let up since then. Scholarship and research have kept abreast with, or perhaps, caused this “revolution” of mindfulness. The Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program (developed by Jon Kabat-Zin), a ten-week meditation treatment, was among one of the first quasi-experimental trials (circa 1985) to demonstrate that meditation could be effective in managing chronic pain. This opened the gates to further empirical investigation. Today, Cognitive Neuroscientists from the University of Toronto’s Regulatory and Affective Dynamics Lab (Radlab) investigate how people regulate emotions and thinking in the face of stress, and the way techniques such as Mindfulness can help people get a grip on their emotionality. The benefits of meditation are well known, but not the potential challenges a person will have to face on the road to deepening their  meditation practice.

We need more meditators! In an increasingly medicalized, and over-prescribed society, meditation has the potential to alleviate so many of the daily challenges people face in the course of this crazy western way of living. With the benefits of managing chronic pain so clearly established and considering that the over prescription of opioids has unleashed an epidemic, it seems a disservice to our fellow human beings not to ensure their understanding of what this ancient (yet updated) technology of mind can do. Unfortunately, meditation practices are eventually abandoned by would-be practitioners 30% of the time. Perhaps more people would stick with it if teachers and meditators were aware in advance of the challenges or, quite frankly, horrifying experiences a person could have while meditating.

Anderson and Co. report three categories of challenges that have emerged form the published literature on meditation drawbacks: Mental health, physical health, and spiritual health. The specific drawbacks (prepare yourself) are reported to be “anxiety, mania, traumatic memories, existential challenges, depersonalization and derealization…acute schizophrenia or  meditation-induced psychosis.” Basically, the worst sorts of experiences you can have. Shocking if you don’t  meditate, or you have been misled to believe something untrue about meditation. However, this list of drawbacks were reported by deep-time practitioners who had been hitting the cushion for 9-10 hours a day. Possibly, these elite meditators might be diving into waters the rest of us aren’t. Nonetheless, in my own meditation practice, I have experienced traumatic memories, forgotten memories, existential challenges, and anxiety. As it turns out, I am not alone! 

Anderson, Suresh, and Farb point out that there is not a reliable source of evidence-based benefits and drawbacks supporting the experiences of lay practitioners like  me. Their first-of-a-kind study attempts to derive, from the experience of real-world (present and former) meditators, a model of benefits and drawbacks that would have practical applicability for lay practitioners in a Western context. Anderson and Co. conducted an online survey through the social-media and news source Reddit. Reddit is an online platform where many people can discuss topics of interest in online rooms called subreddits. The study requested participation from members of 20 different meditation subreddits that focus on everything from Mindfulness to something called Psychonaut ( huh?). They solicited the help of 240 people, mostly Caucasian, mostly male, and with an average age of 30. The survey included open-ended and closed questions in five categories: History of meditation,  meditation benefits and Drawbacks, Motivation/Achievement Styles, Personality, and Mood. The research team asked whether people had experienced good or bad events, how long they have been  meditating; asked questions about motivation, rewards and fun; assessed personality types using a short version of a well-established personality inventory; and used a “visual-mood board” to assess participant moods.

In this survey, 160 people reported benefits, while 43 people reported drawbacks;  211 reported continued practice (at least one meditation session a month), and 29 had stopped meditating altogether. Mindfulness, Vipassana (Traditional Indian insight meditation), Zazen (Traditional Chinese Buddhist insight meditation), other breath-based practices (e.g. Counting breaths), other established practices (e.g. Transcendental Meditation), and idiosyncratic practice were reported. The two most commonly reported meditation styles were mindfulness and “idiosyncratic practices”, which are a hodgepodge of various techniques.

After a long and laborious thematic analysis and organization of the data, Anderson and Co. landed on eight categories of benefits and seven categories of drawbacks (See Figure 1). The most commonly reported benefits were the emotional  gains: Calm, peace, relaxation, equanimity. The Cognitive Benefits were superior attention, including increased awareness, clarity of thought, focused concentration, self-control, feeling more intelligent, feeling better able to make decisions, and enhanced memory and creativity. Personal Growth, which includes insight and wisdom, was also endorsed as a common result. A list of desirable traits! The most commonly reported drawbacks were time demands (the most reported item between drawbacks or benefits, as some thought time could be better spent doing other things!), the learning curve (habit formation, slow progress, frustration, and finding a quiet location), and the negative emotional and psychological outcomes, which included troubling, scary, and sad thoughts, over-awareness, negative emotions, boredom, anxiety, nervousness, doubt, and fear of failure at meditation. Not such an appealing list!

What then, is to be done with this information? Firstly, it is important to note that the benefits were found to be more important than the drawbacks, indicating that the former is worth the latter. Secondly, current meditators were rated as having a significantly more positive mood, of being more open, and of feeling more spiritual than former meditators. Ultimately, Anderson and Co. took all of this data and arrived at three  major implications for meditation teachers: Informed consent, time commitment, and parallelism and reframing. With the existing literature on meditation, and now this first crowd-sourced model of meditation benefits and drawbacks in hand, teachers can ensure that students are aware of the potential risks and challenges involved with a “cognitive enhancement” technique like meditation; since it has the potential to be anything but enriching. Clearly, the time commitment issue needs to be broached up front with aspiring practitioners. Meditation demands time. For example, mindfulness-based stress reduction requires at least 45 minutes a day; and many traditional forms require at least an hour. However, according to this study, there was no discernable difference in meditation benefits after 20-minute sessions. Realistically, if you want to change your life, and your relationship with your emotions, thoughts, and sensations, if you can’t carve out 45 minutes a day, you’re probably not serious about personal transformation.

Parallelism and reframing are the most important implications to arise from this study for teaching. Many items on the benefits list had opposing drawbacks. So, even though positive emotional changes were reported, so too were negative emotional experience; Growth was contrasted with stressful personal change; health management clashed with negative health outcomes (e.g., pain while  meditating); and social-interpersonal benefits compete with social-interpersonal drawbacks. They suggest the stress and destabilizing experience of a changing worldview (as can happen with meditation) can be mitigated by a teacher who can keep a student focused on the long-term positive outcomes that will arise from the shift in perspective. They also suggest that people feeling alienated by their practice might be encouraged to more intentionally develop a friend-group of likeminded contemplative aspirants. Essentially, the teacher needs to be aware of these challenges, have experience with them, and know how to provide possible solutions to the challenges of a contemplative life style. I couldn’t agree more.

This study had some limitations, as most studies do. It was a qualitative study, exploring in depth a contextual phenomenon. As such, no experimentation was conducted; therefore, scientifically, causation of these benefits and drawbacks cannot be assumed to be the direct result of meditation. That doesn’t mean this article doesn’t have relevance; it means we must carefully consider these findings with other evidence. It was the first-of-a kind study and was not meant to be an exhaustive exploration or definitive determination. The participants were from a non-representative sample of the whole population, so it may not be appropriate to apply these findings to other populations of people. Participants were sourced from a potentially biased population (well-off Redditers), and this was a snapshot in time. A long-term study, which explores how these benefits and drawbacks change over time, would be significantly informative. Indeed, Anderson and Co. are currently working on such a study. They are sending follow-up emails, “indefinitely”, to a group of meditators asking questions derived from the meditation benefits and drawback framework they have developed in this current study. All that being said, this is an important article for meditators and teachers.

In summation, meditation isn’t a practice to be taken up lightly. It has arrived here, in the 21^st century, after 1000s of years of R&D in the Eastern traditions. Buddhist meditation, particularly mindfulness, arose from a sophisticated, introspective map of the human mind, as a technology to be used to deconstruct, what Buddhists think, is the delusion of an inherent, permanent, essential self. In a sense, mindfulness has been hijacked, washed of its spirituality, stripped of its psychological map, and presented as a kind of whimsical remedy for work related stress. It has the potential to be so much more for you.

According to the Buddhists, wisdom, ethical behaviour, and meditation are the three disciplines needed on the path to sustainable happiness. Therefore, we can view this article as an attempt to establish, in some meaningful way, the discipline of wisdom. The long and winding road to freedom from stress and trauma is riddled with obstacles and challenges. This was known by the ancients, and it is known by anyone trudging the path. Nonetheless, because we are scientifically minded people, we need evidence. Here is a little bit. If you want to start meditation because you have hit a wall, or a bottom, or anything else of the sort, find a trained guide, not an app. Then you might actually start reaping the rewards of meditation and continue the practice, despite the drawbacks.

Anderson, T., Suresh, M., & Farb, N. A. (2019). Meditation Benefits and Drawbacks: Empirical Codebook and Implications for Teaching. Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, 3(2), 207–220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41465-018-00119-y

Kabat-zin, J., Lipworth, L., & Burney, R. (1985). The Clinical Use of Mindfulness Meditation for the Self-Regulation of Chronic Pain. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 8(2).

Radlab's Website:  https://www.radlab.zone/

Culture and Goal-Setting: The implications on Adolescent Emotional Distress

How can one's culture affect the emotional distress in an individual? For adolescents, the use of goal-setting has provided a glimpse into the possibility that culture has an effect on the emotional distress experienced by the adolescent. The role of the parent in goal-setting has caused some speculation that parents socialize the type of goals they want in their child, which originally sees the parent socialized by their cultural views and how their respective culture emphasizes different goal-setting methods. In turn, some goal-setting methods may be more susceptible to causing more emotional distress in an individual. 

Individualist vs. Collectivist cultures
Individualist cultures emphasize the individual and the need for personal growth, with less emphasis on the needs of the community coming before the individual. This type of culture is mostly seen in North America (as the main association with the culture is narcissism),and the goal-setting method associated with individualist cultures are self-worth goals. These goals aim to improve the self-esteem of the individual by focusing on their strengths and focusing less on what they need to improve. Self-worth goals may decrease the emotional distress of an adolescent, but they are not as strong when trying to improve academics. Collectivist cultures emphasize the needs of the group over the individual, with pop-culture often referencing Asian cultures and the importance of Honour because it provides respectability within a community. Self-improvement goals are the main method of collectivist cultures, with emphasis on the improvement of weaknesses directly and less acknowledgement of the individual's strengths. This method may provide improvements to the adolescent's academics, but the method may enhance emotional distress in an adolescent.

Adolescents and their Vulnerability to Emotional Distress
The adolescent demographic is very vulnerable to emotional distress and other psychological issues. This is a period in one's life that many changes and developmental experiences are at the forefront, so the stress of these changes can become quite overwhelming. 30% of adolescents will report that they are anxious or depressed by the experiencing of adolescent stress (Bethune, 2014). Suicide is also the second leading killer among adolescents (WHO, 2016). Academics can become stressful for adolescents as their is an urge from within themselves and from socializing forces like their parents to find some academic success. For an adolescent to struggle, they might fear falling behind academically because of the certain goals they set for themselves. By continually striving for improvement, an adolescent might become burnt-out with constantly trying to improve, but might also lack the emotional support that comes with self-worth goals. 

How can goal-setting silence the emotional distress influenced by culture? To silence one's culture, the individual would need to put less emphasis on the predominate behaviours of that culture. By incorporating a hybrid self-worth and self-improvement goal-setting strategy, the role of parents or other socializing forces would be to foster principles of both methods. This strategy would include self-improvement principles that aim to better the individual's academic performance, but also include the self-worth principles that acknowledge one's strengths and provides emotional support. Taking the example of an academic environment, an instructor or teacher might dedicate a period of time to talking about an individual's strengths on an assignment or evaluation, after participating in constructive feedback measures that are aimed at improving an individual's weaknesses on a task.

Benefits of Hybrid Goal-Setting

• Adolescents get the feedback they need to improve but also the support of authority figures when completing tasks
• Emotional distress is decreased or balanced so that adolescent mental health issues decline
• Eliminate some of the stress associated with being an adolescent, helping the adolescent function without burn-out and reach their potential
•  Foster a collaborative learning program that improves the student academically while caring for the emotional state of the student 

Bethune, S. (2014, April). Teen stress rivals that of adults. Retrieved from
     https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/teen-stress.

Ng, J., Xiong, Y., Qu, Y., Cheung, C., Ng, F. F., Wang, M., & Pomerantz, E. M. (2019).  

     Implications of chinese and american mothers’ goals for children’s emotional       distress. Developmental Psychology, 55(12), 2616-2629. doi:10.1037/dev0000834

Suicide data. (2019, September 27). Retrieved               from https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/.

The Implications of Sex Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Faith and I have been kindred spirits ever since I began nannying her seven years ago. We, like most kids like to go to the mall, are suckers for a good selfie, and often chat about life.  

However, not everything with Faith is like a typical child. For instance, when we would want to go to the mall, she would often complain that it is "too noisy". Or when we were at the mall trying on clothes, she would say that her clothes are "too scratchy". And instead of going out in the community, she would prefer to play at home with her same dolls, like we did almost every day after school. Faith's insistence on sameness and odd requests, as I saw it, was just what made Faith, Faith, and didn't raise any red flags for me.  

However, my perspective on Faith's cravings for sameness and some of her apparently odd behaviours finally seemed to all make sense when she received an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis at the age of eleven. As a psychology student, I wondered why Faith received her diagnosis at the age of eleven when the typical age for an ASD diagnosis is four ("What Is Autism"). I was baffled why Faith received her diagnosis so late when she had a psychology student as her nanny, involved parents and teachers, and yearly doctor appointments. That was until I turned to academic literature and found out girls are often at a higher risk for being left undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or diagnosed later and much less frequently than boys with ASD (Knutsen, Crossman, Perrin, Shui, & Kuhlthau, 2018). Currently, ASD affects one out of every 66 children in Canada. Males are four times more likely to receive an ASD diagnosis, despite expert's belief that the actual prevalence of ASD may be lower than popular approximations ("What Is Autism"; Knutsen, Crossman, Perrin, Shui, & Kuhlthau, 2018).   

So, why should we care?

Girls being underdiagnosed and diagnosed later isn't just a problem for Faith, but would help girls who are going undiagnosed and not receiving resources and support they need. For instance, if we look back at Faith's complaints regarding her clothes being "too scratchy" for her, had she been diagnosed earlier, she would be more likely to receive clinical services to help teach her ways to overcome the feelings of scratchiness of her clothes. Hence, if girls are going undiagnosed, then they are living without access to resources and available clinical interventions that are linked to impacting their quality of life.

Why are girls going left unseen? 

There is no one definite reason as to why girls are being left unseen; however, one going theory is that girl's symptoms and behavioural presentation of ASD are different than boys (Hull, Mandy, & Petrides, 2016).  For instance, to receive an ASD diagnosis, an individual must display behavioural deficits in their: 

1. social communication 
2. restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests (RRBIs) ("Diagnostic Criteria", 2019) 

This means that individuals must struggle with both domains, at a severe enough level that a doctor would diagnosis them. But if the presentation of  these behaviours is different amongst the sexes (and there has been a historic male bias as demonstrated by the discrepancy in the ratio between the sexes), then more awareness should be put on recognizing these differences. Currently, far more is known for sex differences in social communication deficits and much less is known about RRBIs, which may be linked as to why girls aren't being recognized with ASD as well as boys (Knutsen, Crossman, Perrin, Shui, & Kuhlthau, 2018). This is why the authors of the current paper being featured for discussion conducted a brief review of the RRBI profiles of females with ASD (Mcfayden, Antezana, Albright, Muskett, & Scarpa, 2019).

But first, what are RRBIs?

 ("Diagnostic Criteria", 2019)

RRBIs are behavioural symptoms that appear different in individuals but are clustered into four main diagnostic categories (i.e. the categories doctors use to diagnosis individuals with ASD). To best understand the different types of RRBIs that kids and adults with ASD present, I will be using Faith's RRBIs as an example. 

  

1.  Stereotyped Repetitive Motor Movements or Speech

 This category is utilized to describe behaviour that is overly patterned and repetitive, such as saying the same line from a movie over and over,  or playing with your dolls the exact same way every time. An example of this for Faith is when she would play with all her toys, she would meticulously line them all up during play and do this all throughout her play with them.

2. Insistence on Sameness and Inflexible Routines 

Insistence on sameness is generally categorized as a need for wanting to maintain rigid schedules and feeling distressed when changes are made to the routine. For example, Faith would prefer to perform the same afterschool routine every day, and changes to her routine would be distressing. 

3. Highly Restricted or Fixated Interests 

Remember for all kids these are different but are related to the individual's specific highly focused rigid interest. Faith has a fixated interest in dolls, as she only wants to talk about her toys and is not overly interested in anything else.  

4. Increased or Decreased Response to Sensory Input

This category means that the individual is highly responsive or unresponsive to sensory input, such as smells, hearing or touch. For example, when Faith would say her clothes are "too scratchy", that is her way of saying that she is more sensitive to her clothes than what someone typically without ASD would experience. 

So, what did the literature review find?

McFayden and colleagues examined multiple research articles and found that on the whole, prior research has actually demonstrated mixed results for the presentation of RRBIs in females relative to males. You may be thinking, "hmmm, this isn't really helpful". But in reality, mixed results are an indication that further research needs to be conducted. Moreover, these mixed findings may predict and represent how complex it is to measure these RRBIs. For instance, one study in their review found, in a large sample of youth, that males and females demonstrated differences in the frequency and severity of certain RRBIs. This study found that boys expressed more stereotyped and restricted interests, yet, girls displayed increased behaviours related to insistence on sameness. These findings are fascinating in that they may predict that girls and boys show differences in their RRBIs. These predictions may link to why girls' RRBIs are not being recognized as easily. In spite of these potentially promising findings, other studies in their report observed no significant sex differences in young children in terms of RRBIs, demonstrating the need for more comprehensive studies in this growing research topic. One explanation that McFayden and colleagues offered for the inconclusiveness of their analysis was the effectiveness of the diagnostic tools. utilized in practice. They theorized that these tools may be linked to not being sensitive enough to assess a female's RRBIs comprehensively. 

Nevertheless, I am optimistic that the increased focus on differences in the behavioural presentation of ASD in the sexes is one positive step forward. These studies have the potential to help learn more about why girls are being underrepresented in diagnoses. By shining a light on the different behavioural presentations of ASD, girls like Faith will hopefully be diagnosed sooner and get the resources they need. Because in the end, ASD is linked to being variable between the sexes. 

Interested in reading the articles yourself, look here!

Diagnostic Criteria. (2019, August 27). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html.

Hull, L., Mandy, W., & Petrides, K. (2016). Behavioural and cognitive sex/gender differences in autism spectrum condition and typically developing males and females. Autism, 21(6), 706–727. doi: 10.1177/1362361316669087

Knutsen, J., Crossman, M., Perrin, J., Shui, A., & Kuhlthau, K. (2018). Sex differences in restricted repetitive behaviors and interests in children with autism spectrum disorder: An Autism Treatment Network study. Autism, 23(4), 858–868. doi: 10.1177/1362361318786490

Mcfayden, T. C., Antezana, L., Albright, J., Muskett, A., & Scarpa, A. (2019). Sex Differences in an Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnosis: Are Restricted Repetitive Behaviors and Interests the Key? Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. doi: 10.1007/s40489-019-00183-w

What Is Autism. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.autismspeaks.ca/about-autism/what-is-autism/.

Sleep Deprivation: A Common Obstacle to Mental Performance

It all too common that our lives get so busy, that our schedules start to burst at the seams. Juggling a work life, a social life, and personal health can be difficult and sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day to get to everything we planned. We all want to be the best versions of ourselves and in order to do that, we usually have to make sacrifices to get there. Sleep is often the easiest thing to bump out of our schedules in order to balance meeting deadlines and spending time with our family and friends. It might seem like the easiest option, to bump out portions of sleep from our schedules but, interfering with your sleep can have significant impacts on your life in more ways than one! The Irving Medical Center of Columbia University identifies sleep deprivation as a common problem amongst the general population. Although it might feel like coffee or morning caffeine helps us feel alert and awake, there are some underlying consequences of sleep deprivation on our brains that can’t be remedied with caffeine alone. Sleep is an important practice that keeps the human body healthy and interfering with it can have significant impacts on many parts of our daily lives. This leaves a lot of room for questions to be asked about the importance of sleep and sleep deprivation.

What is sleep deprivation?

Sleep deprivation is generally classified as not getting enough sleep per night. The University of Columbia identifies that most adults need between seven and eight hours a night in order to maintain good health. The amount of sleep that each person needs varies, so it is important to look out for the initial signs of sleep deprivation before greater health issues ensue. Consistent drowsiness, inability to concentrate and reduced physical strength are some of the easier symptoms of sleep deprivation to spot. These are among the smaller effects that stem from not getting enough sleep one night. But there are also much more serious effects from not getting enough sleep over a long period of time. 

How does Sleep deprivation impact the brain?

            Multiple researchers have investigated sleep deprivation and the effects that it can have on the body. Most recently, Stepan, Fenn & Altmann (2019) investigated how sleep deprivation affected our ability to complete procedural tasks. These are tasks that require multiple steps to be accomplished in a specific order before the task is completed. For example, baking cookies and following a recipe would be considered a procedural task. These tasks also require some use of memory in order to remember what steps have already been completed. These researchers conducted their experiment using 200 undergraduate university students who were between 18 and 25 years old. They gave these individuals a long set of procedural tasks in the evening of day one, and then again in the morning of day 2. While doing these tasks they would create interruptions which would make participants use their memory to resume the steps of the task. During the gap between day 1 and day 2, a random selection of half the participants were allowed to go home to sleep and the other half stayed the night and did not sleep. When the procedural tasks were attempted again on day 2, the researchers found that the sleep deprived participants performed significantly worse overall when compared to the sleeping group. Furthermore, they found that the sleep deprived group would make significantly more errors, compared to their counterparts, when interruptions were included in the task that would interfere in completing the steps of each procedural task. The researchers found that the number of errors increased much more in the sleep deprived group than the sleeping group after the interruptions especially. Although the number of errors in these tasks went up for both groups after they were interrupted during their tasks, the sleep deprivation group made significantly more errors than their sleep group counterparts. This allowed the researchers to conclude not only that sleep deprivation had an impact on procedural task performance, but also that memory was affected in some respect by sleep deprivation.

What can be done about sleep deprivation?

Balancing work life, social life and personal health can be difficult, but when contemplating the consequences of sleep deprivation, it is important to acknowledge the hindered mental state that will be experienced. As previously mentioned, when sleep deprivation occurs, there is a significant impact on our ability to complete procedural tasks. For many of us, every single day is filled with a variety of procedural tasks! Everything from cooking breakfast and dinner to tasks we complete at work for a livelihood would be negatively impacted. Hindered memory and less ability to perform these procedural tasks has a strong negative impact on our lives through its small impact on many facets of our day. Consciously putting ourselves in these situations, where we sleep poorly, has consequences on every aspect of our lives, not just our health. Therefore, sleep should be acknowledged as a very important aspect of our lives.      

It is far too simple however, to say sleeping more is the end all be all solution of sleep deprivation. Whether choosing to stay out late with friends, struggling to fall asleep on the odd occasion or even cases of insomnia, sleep is not always an easy thing to obtain more of. In balancing all of the responsibilities of life and our own well being, sleep will fall to the wayside from time to time. What we should focus on, is identifying the importance of sleep and understanding its consequences. Holding sleep in a higher regard would allow for the serious consequences of regular sleep deprivation to be more effectively combated. Consciously thinking about how much sleep we should get each night would serve as a catalyst for preventing serious and regular sleep deprivation. As previously investigated by Stepan, Fenn & Altmann (2019), one night has been shown to have significant effects on mental performance and memory. Multiple nights of similar behaviour would only exasperate the issue. Therefore, on the nights when we have the most control over when we sleep, we should consciously weigh the consequences of not sleeping well. One good night sleep can mean breaking the cycle before the consequences of sleep deprivation get significantly worse.

What should I do about this?

Current research only emphasizes the importance of getting a good night sleep before important days of work or school. The research has shown that not getting enough sleep will hinder your memory and ability to complete procedural tasks. Putting importance on sleep and consciously weighing the consequences of sleep deprivation is would allow for a better balance between our work life, social life and personal health. This being said, there are two key questions that should be considered when in a situation to control how much sleep you get. First, how much sleep do I need to feel my best? This depends on the individual and understanding how much sleep you need minimum could help you stay healthy. Second, what will happen if I don’t get enough? Asking this would allow for better planning of your schedule to occur and therefore help balance the aspects of your life. Both of these questions stem from acknowledging sleep as an important aspect of our day. Asking these questions allows us to think about our sleep in a more meaningful way. We all want to reach our own goals in life. Working on getting a healthy amount of sleep would only make you better equipped to reach them.

Stepan, M. E., Fenn, K. M., Altmann, E. M., Stepan, M. E., Fenn, K. M., & Altmann, E. M. (2019). Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Procedural Errors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(10), 1828-1833.

Columbia University Irving Medical Center. (2015, September). Sleep Deprivation. Retrieved November 21, 2019, from http://www.columbianeurology.org/neurology/staywell/document.php?id=42069.

Adolescents and Heavy Cannabis Use

Mariam Elnazali

      As a university undergrad, marijuana has always been the common and

acceptable drug of choice among students, normalized in society long before its recent legalization in Canada. As someone who does not smoke it, I have always been bombarded with the wonderful medicinal benefits of marijuana, admittedly of which there are many; it helps to treat a multitude of issues or conditions. While the positive aspects of cannabis use are well-known, the negative effects that heavy cannabis use can have on an individual are not, particularly the risks associated with individuals who begin smoking it from a young age.

 Often one of the first drugs that a teen is offered, cannabis is the

 drug of choice among youth.To emphasize its frequent consumption among
 teens in Canada, rates of cannabis consumption are triple the amount as
 compared to adults. Consequently, Canada ranks among the top countries
 in the world for youth cannabis users, illustrating the prevalence of
 cannabis use among the teenage population in Canada.

     On October 17, 2018, Canada formally legalized cannabis with the Cannabis Act. This is troubling because we may not understand the full implications of cannabis use. By legalizing cannabis, the Canadian government has essentially given an invisible stamp of approval concerning cannabis use and its safety for consumption. As a result, ignorant youth may regard smoking cannabis as a harmless habit, since the government has approved it.

Early cannabis consumption has been revealed to impair cognitive functions in many different areas of the brain, some of which are involved in certain complex behaviours such as decision-making and organization.

This is because early and heavy cannabis use effects pruning of the brain. This is what forms our brain connections, which are crucial to its development. In extreme cases, these cognitive effects can sometimes be permanent. Heavy usage can also have negative respiratory impacts, for example, asthma and/or negatively affect memory.

A literature review was conducted by Sideli, Quigley, La Cacia, & Murray, (2019) to analyze the relationship between cannabis use and certain mental health disorders. For example, psychotic disorders. Their analytical method included all relevant studies pertaining to this relationship.The findings of their extensive review were significantly adequate to merit public concern. It revealed how excessive cannabis use has been associated to certain mental illnesses. Specifically, in the propagation of these mental illnesses, such as the risk of psychosis. It also was linked to the persistence of these illnesses. This was dependant on a number of factors, primarily the amount of consumption of cannabis. This risk increased based on certain behaviours, such as consumption of more powerful strains or if smoking had begun from an early age. This increased risk was found to be specific for copious consumption of cannabis strains that were low in cannabidiol (CBD)/high in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), two cannabinoids, that are found in the cannabis plant. They did not find clear evidence regarding illnesses such as depression and anxiety.

Many of the studies they included also presented evidence related to the link between cannabis consumption and a greater risk for schizophrenia-like psychotic episodes and symptoms. Further, they found that drug dependency on cannabis consumption increased if individuals began using cannabis from a young age. One of the studies included in their review, found that for those who began smoking cannabis as an

adolescent up to the age of 15, a greater chance of experiencing psychosis symptoms of schizophrenic similarity by age 26 more than doubled in comparison

to individuals who began smoking later at 18 or older.

Why is this a problem?  This is extremely concerning because our youth are not educated on the negative effects that regular marijuana use can have on their brains from an early age. Therefore, education about these negative effects is imperative, in order to deter these teenagers from initially smoking cannabis, or if they have already started smoking it, to help prevent them from becoming heavy users.

Research suggests that the brain does not stop growing until we are about 25 and yet, you can legally purchase marijuana when you are 19. This raises the question of whether the government should increase the legal age of purchase and consumption of cannabis.

Based on the research, it is clear that early and heavy cannabis use can have damaging effects on the brain in relation to adolescents; further research is definitely needed in this area in order to gain better insight on these effects and their causes. However, the Canadian government should certainly take a step back and rethink the current laws pertaining the legal age for cannabis consumption and purchase. This will by no means prevent adolescents from gaining access to cannabis through illegal avenues, which is common, but it would be a step in the right direction towards prevention. As recommended by Sideli et. al (2019), the findings regarding cannabis use and the risk of psychosis are "ample to warrant an educational campaign to inform the public about these potential risks." Overall, these findings are important as they could benefit a wide array of people by increasing their knowledge on all aspects of cannabis use, so adolescents can hopefully make more informed decisions, moderating their consumption of cannabis, potentially lowering such risks for these mental illnesses in youth populations. As well, these findings could help aid the government in reforming the Cannabis Act, concerning the legal age of purchase.

    

 

Drug Free Kids Canada.Org. (2019). Prevention: Cannabis is often one of the first drugs a teen is offered. Retrieved from

https://www.drugfreekidscanada.org/prevention/drug-info/cannabis/

   

Morin, J. G., Afzali, M. H., Bourque, J., Stewart, S. H., Séguin, J. R., O'Leary-Barrett, M., & Conrod, P. J. (2019). A population-based analysis of the relationship between substance use and adolescent cognitive development. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 176(2), 98-106. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18020202

Sideli, L., Quigley, H., La Cascia, C., & Murray, R. M. (2019). Cannabis use and the risk of psychosis and affective disorders. Journal of Dual Diagnosis, doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/10.1080/15504263.2019.1674991