https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201001/the-decline-play-and-rise-in-childrens-mental-disorders?utm_source=FacebookPost&utm_medium=FBPost&utm_campaign=FBPost

The Decline of Play and Rise in Children's Mental Disorders

Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past 50 to 70 years. Today, by at least some estimates, five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.

The most recent evidence for the sharp generational rise in young people's depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders comes from a just-released study headed by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University.[1] Twenge and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a questionnaire used to assess a variety of mental disorders, has been given to large samples of college students throughout the United States going as far back as 1938, and the MMPI-A (the version used with younger adolescents) has been given to samples of high school students going as far back as 1951. The results are consistent with other studies, using a variety of indices, which also point to dramatic increases in anxiety and depression—in children as well as adolescents and young adults—over the last five or more decades.

We would like to think of history as progress, but if progress is measured in the mental health and happiness of young people, then we have been going backward at least since the early 1950s.

The question I want to address here is why.

The increased psychopathology seems to have nothing to do with realistic dangers and uncertainties in the larger world. The changes do not correlate with economic cycles, wars, or any of the other kinds of world events that people often talk about as affecting children's mental states. Rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents were far lower during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the turbulent 1960s and early ‘70s than they are today. The changes seem to have much more to do with the way young people view the world than with the way the world actually is.

Decline in Young People's Sense of Personal Control Over Their Fate

One thing we know about anxiety and depression is that they correlate significantly with people's sense of control or lack of control over their own lives. People who believe that they are in charge of their own fate are less likely to become anxious or depressed than those who believe that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. You might think that the sense of personal control would have increased over the last several decades. Real progress has occurred in our ability to prevent and treat diseases; the old prejudices that limited people's options because of race, gender, or sexual orientation have diminished; and the average person is wealthier than in decades past. Yet the data indicate that young people's belief that they have control over their own destinies has declined sharply over the decades.

The standard measure of sense of control is a questionnaire developed by Julien Rotter in the late 1950s called the Internal-External Locus of Control Scale. The questionnaire consists of 23 pairs of statements. One statement in each pair represents belief in an Internal locus of control (control by the person) and the other represents belief in an External locus of control (control by circumstances outside of the person). The person taking the test must decide which statement in each pair is more true. One pair, for example, is the following:

• (a) I have found that what is going to happen will happen.
• (b) Trusting to fate has never turned out as well for me as making a decision to take a definite course of action.

In this case, choice (a) represents an External locus of control and (b) represents an Internal locus of control.

Many studies over the years have shown that people who score toward the Internal end of Rotter's scale fare better in life than do those who score toward the External end.[2] They are more likely to get good jobs that they enjoy, take care of their health, and play active roles in their communities—and they are less likely to become anxious or depressed.

In a research study published a few years ago, Twenge and her colleagues analyzed the results of many previous studies that used Rotter's Scale with young people from 1960 through 2002.[3] They found that over this period average scores shifted dramatically—for children aged 9 to 14 as well as for college students—away from the Internal toward the External end of the scale. In fact, the shift was so great that the average young person in 2002 was more External than were 80% of young people in the 1960s. The rise in Externality on Rotter's scale over the 42-year period showed the same linear trend as did the rise in depression and anxiety.  

[Correction: The locus of control data used by Twenge and her colleagues for children age 9 to 14 came from the Nowicki-Strickland Scale, developed by Bonnie Strickland and Steve Nowicki, not from the Rotter Scale. Their scale is similar to Rotter's, but modified for use with children.]

It is reasonable to suggest that the rise of Externality (and decline of Internality) is causally related to the rise in anxiety and depression. When people believe that they have little or no control over their fate they become anxious: "Something terrible can happen to me at any time and I will be unable to do anything about it." When the anxiety and sense of helplessness become too great people become depressed: "There is no use trying; I'm doomed."

Shift Toward Extrinsic Goals, Away From Intrinsic Goals

Twenge's own theory is that the generational increases in anxiety and depression are related to a shift from "intrinsic" to "extrinsic" goals.[1] Intrinsic goals are those that have to do with one's own development as a person—such as becoming competent in endeavors of one's choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, are those that have to do with material rewards and other people's judgments. They include goals of high income, status, and good looks. Twenge cites evidence that young people today are, on average, more oriented toward extrinsic goals and less oriented toward intrinsic goals than they were in the past. For example, a annual poll of college freshmen shows that most students today list "being well off financially" as more important to them than "developing a meaningful philosophy of life"—the reverse was true in the 1960s and 1970s.[4]

The shift toward extrinsic goals could well be related causally to the shift toward an External locus of control. We have much less personal control over achievement of extrinsic goals than intrinsic goals. I can, through personal effort, quite definitely improve my competence, but that doesn't guarantee that I'll get rich. I can, through spiritual practices or philosophical delving, find my own sense of meaning in life, but that doesn't guarantee that people will find me more attractive or lavish praise on me. To the extent that my emotional sense of satisfaction comes from progress toward intrinsic goals I can control my emotional wellbeing. To the extent that my satisfaction comes from others' judgments and rewards, I have much less control over my emotional state.

Twenge suggests that the shift from intrinsic to extrinsic goals represents a general shift toward a culture of materialism, transmitted through television and other media. Young people are exposed from birth to advertisements and other messages implying that happiness depends on good looks, popularity, and material goods. My guess is that Twenge is at least partly correct on this, but I will suggest a further cause, which I think is even more significant and basic: My hypothesis is that the generational increases in Externality, extrinsic goals, anxiety, and depression are all caused largely by the decline, over that same period, in opportunities for free play and the increased time and weight given to schooling.

How the Decline of Free Play May Have Caused a Decline in Sense of Control and in Intrinsic Goals, and a Rise in Anxiety and Depression

As I pointed out here and here—and as others have pointed out in recent popular books[5]—children's freedom to play and explore on their own, independent of direct adult guidance and direction, has declined greatly in recent decades. Free play and exploration are, historically, the means by which children learn to solve their own problems, control their own lives, develop their own interests, and become competent in pursuit of their own interests. This has been the theme of many of my previous posts. (See, for example, the series of posts on "The Value of Play.") In fact, play, by definition, is activity controlled and directed by the players; and play, by definition, is directed toward intrinsic rather than extrinsic goals

By depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives. We may think we are protecting them, but in fact we are diminishing their joy, diminishing their sense of self-control, preventing them from discovering and exploring the endeavors they would most love, and increasing the odds that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and other disorders.

How Coercive Schooling Deprives Young People of Personal Control, Directs Them Toward Extrinsic Goals, and Promotes Anxiety and Depression

During the same half-century or more that free play has declined, school and school-like activities (such as lessons out of school and adult-directed sports) have risen continuously in prominence. Children today spend more hours per day, days per year, and years of their life in school than ever before. More weight is given to tests and grades than ever. Outside of school, children spend more time than ever in settings in which they are directed, protected, catered to, ranked, judged, and rewarded by adults. In all of these settings adults are in control, not children.

In school, children learn quickly that their own choices of activities and their own judgments of competence don't count; what matters are the teachers' choices and judgments. Teachers are not entirely predictable: You may study hard and still get a poor grade because you didn't figure out exactly what the teacher wanted you to study or guess correctly what questions he or she would ask. The goal in class, in the minds of the great majority of students, is not competence but good grades. Given a choice between really learning a subject and getting an A, the great majority of students would, without hesitation, pick the latter. That is true at every stage in the educational process, at least up to the level of graduate school. That's not the fault of students; that's our fault. We've set it up that way. Our system of constant testing and evaluation in school—which becomes increasingly intense with every passing year—is a system that very clearly substitutes extrinsic rewards and goals for intrinsic ones. It is almost designed to produce anxiety and depression.[6]

School is also a place where children have little choice about with whom they can associate. They are herded into spaces filled with other children that they did not choose, and they must spend a good portion of each school day in those spaces. In free play, children who feel harassed or bullied can leave the situation and find another group that is more compatible; in school they cannot. Whether the bullies are other students or teachers (which is all too common), the child usually has no choice but to face those persons day after day.

The results are sometimes disastrous.

A few years ago, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeremy Hunter conducted a study of happiness and unhappiness in public school students in 6th through 12th grade.[7] Each of 828 participants, from 33 different schools in 12 different communities across the country, wore a special wristwatch for a week, programmed to provide a signal at random times between 7:30 am and 10:30 pm. Whenever the signal went off participants filled out a questionnaire indicating where they were, what they were doing, and how happy or unhappy they were at the moment.

The lowest levels of happiness by far (surprise, surprise) occurred when children were at school, and the highest levels occurred when they were out of school and conversing or playing with friends. Time spent with parents fell in the middle of the range. Average happiness increased on weekends, but then plummeted from late Sunday afternoon through the evening, in anticipation of the coming school week.

As a society we have come to the conclusion that children must spend increasing amounts of time in the very setting where they least want to be. The cost of that belief, as measured by the happiness and mental health of our children, is enormous.

It is time to re-think education.

Another Way

Anyone who looks honestly at the experiences of students at Sudbury model democratic schools and of unschoolers—where freedom, play, and self-directed exploration prevail—knows that there is another way. We don't need to drive kids crazy to educate them. Given freedom and opportunity, without coercion, young people educate themselves. They do so joyfully, and in the process develop intrinsic values, personal self-control, and emotional wellbeing. That's the overriding message of the whole series of essays in this blog. It's time for society to take an honest look.

In my last post I invited readers to submit their stories of self-directed education, and many of you have responded. That invitation is still open, but please respond soon. Over the next several weeks I will post essays about how children learn to read through their self-directed play and exploration, how and why they learn math, and how they develop special interests and skills that lead eventually to careers.

Stay tuned.

See new book, Free to Learn
 

Source: Basic Books, with permission

Notes

[1] Twenge, J., et al., (2010). Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938-2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI. In press, Clinical Psychology Review 30, 145-154.
[2] For references, see Twenge et al. (2004).
[3] Twenge, J. et al. (2004). Its beyond my control: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of increasing externality in locus of control, 1960-2002. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 308-319.
[4] Pryor, J. H., et al. (2007). The American freshman: Forty-year trends, 1966-2006. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute.
[5] Examples of such books are Hara Estroff Marano's A Nation of Wimps and Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids.
[6] Consistent with this claim is evidence that the more academically competitive the school, the greater is the incidence of student depression. Herman, K. C., et al. (2009). Childhood depression: Rethinking the role of school. Psychology in the Schools, 46, 433-446.
[7] Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Hunter, J. (2003). Happiness in everyday life: The uses of experience sampling. Journal of Happiness Studies, 4, 185-199.

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Perspective

"Perspective!! The perception of your reality becomes your truth.  Not the truth, but your truth.  Change your perception and watch your reality change!! There are deeper beliefs that are called limiting beliefs that need to change!!"

(Joe Sheffield)

https://www.facebook.com/joe.sheffield2/posts/10153711101497183

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/2016/06/7-things-i-wish-christians-knew-about-the-bible/#

7 Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible

As a follow up from John Pavlovitz’s 5 Things I Wish Christians Would Admit about the Bible, I’ve included my own list of 7 Things I wish Christians knew.

1. The Bible did not fall out of the sky, bound in leather, written in English.

The Bible is not a single book, but more of a complex library, written over some 1500 years, in the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. There were real human processes behind its composition and canonisation which God used to give the Bible to us. First, the composition of many of these texts was a process rather than a single event. For instance, while Moses is recognized as the originator of the Pentateuch, it is very unlikely that he recorded his own death (Deuteronomy 34) and there are several references to what cities were called in the days of the patriarchs  and how they are still called similarly “to this very day,” indicating a perspective from a later time (e.g., Gen 26.33; Deut 3.14-15). Similarly, the ending of the Gospel of John includes an affirmation of the Beloved Disciples’ testimony with the words “we know his testimony is true” (Jn 21.24) indicative of an epilogue added by those who edited the Beloved Disciples’ testimony. That some Old Testament texts were edited or updated by a prophet’s followers is something debated in relation to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, but there here is no prima facie case against this. To this end I rather like John Webster’s description of inspiration as including the “sanctification” of all human processes involved in the formation of Scripture. Second, on canonisation, if you didn’t notice, the Bible does not tell us which books should be in the Bible! So who decided that the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s Letter to the Romans were to be included, while we the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter were left out?  No, it wasn’t Constantine, but neither did a sherry of bishops in the secondary century go an Indiana Jones type of adventure with their inspiration-o-meter looking for Christian books to add to their growing collection authoritative texts. The basic criteria was books that contained the words of Jesus and the apostolic message about Jesus, and a consensus began to emerge by the late second century based upon the four Gospels, Acts, Paul’s thirteen letters plus Hebrews, 1 John, and 1 Peter,  with the other books in our NT eventually finding consensus, but over a much longer period. To be sure, the Church did not invent the Bible, the Church itself is a creation of the Word of God, but the Church was tasked with putting the divine word into its canonical location.

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2. The Bible is for our time but not about our time.

The Bible is for us, but not about us. This can create problems when we assume that the Bible professes the perspectives of our age or intends to speak directly to our context. If we assume that the Bible supports Marxist economics or laissez faire capitalism, the right to carry arms or non-nuclear proliferation, gender fluidity or home schooling, then we are either reading stuff into the Bible (which is bad) or maybe trying to reason from the Bible (which is okay), but either way we are not taking stuff directly from the Bible. The Bible was written for its own world and not directly to ours. That does not mean that it cannot address our own context and concerns, of course it does, but we have to remember that our reading of the Bible is mediated by 2000 years of history, and shaped by our own language, culture, history, and identity. Being a 30 year old, white, middle-class, female, Pentecostal, living in New Zealand will inevitably shape the way you read the Bible and you should not assume the normativity of your own reading experience. We must acknowledge the socio-cultural distance between the biblical world and our world and that our reading of the Bible is partly a product of our own environment. That will teach us that we cannot just jump from ancient text to modern time without first engaging the chasm that exists between the two. Therefore, a good interpreter will need a basic grasp of the biblical world, pay attention to the history of interpretation, cultivate global conversation partners, and be self-critical of what we assume about the Bible.

3. We should focus on taking the Bible seriously, not necessarily literally.

Debates about taking the Bible literally or metaphorically are often missing the point. For instance, Genesis 1 is not a moment by moment commentary on how God made the world, nor narrating the story in such a way that the main purpose is to refute Darwinism. Genesis 1 is primarily about worldview, adopting a God-centred view of reality, affirming that however the world was made that it owes its existence to God, and admiring the artistry of God as seen in splendor of creation. This does not mean that Genesis 1 is merely “myth” in the sense of fairy tales, but it sets forth in a literary masterpiece the truth that God is the Creator and there is no Other. This is a competing narrative to other ancient near eastern accounts about creation and in practice it means that you don’t worship the stars, you worship the God who made the stars. In many places in the Bible the main point is not literal but literary, and reading the Bible in light of its genres and context is the best way to take it seriously.

4. If interpreting the Bible was easy, we wouldn’t need teachers.

Protestants believe in the clarity of Scripture. However, even Protestant confessions like the Westminster Confession and London Baptist Confession state that the clarity of Scripture only applies to the things “necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation.” Everything else is not necessarily “plain in themselves” nor “clear unto all” (WCF 1.7/LBC 1.7). In other words, the Bible is clear about the gospel, how to get right with God, but after that it can get a bit sticky. So we need teachers, we need metaphorical Phillip’s to run beside us in our chariot and to explain the Scripture to us. First, we should always be prepared to consult tradition. Now tradition often gets a bad name, but tradition is simply what the church has learned from reading Scripture. I like to say that tradition is a tool for reading Scripture, a tool we be wise to use. We engage are recklessness if we venerate tradition as infallible and yet we are foolish if we ignore what tradition has to teach us. Second, we need to look to those who inhabit the offices of pastors and teachers, and listen to them in their learning of Scripture, languages, doctrine, and history. While you may think that your soul has the competence and liberty to interpret the Bible as the Spirit leads you, as a professional scholar let me tell you something, some souls are more competent than others, and listening to some teachers will give the Holy Spirit more to work with in guiding you into the truth!

5. The Purpose of Scripture is Knowledge and Hope.

God is a revealing God. God makes himself known through creation, through history, in the words of the prophets, through the preaching of the gospel, most definitively in the incarnation of the Jesus the Logos, and also by the inspiration of human authors to write books that convey divine message in the medium of human language. The purpose of revelation is that we might know God and know him as our Saviour. The purpose of that knowledge is to create faith in the sense of assent and trust towards God, but more properly to give us an assurance that God is for us and with us, in other words, hope. This is what St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans: “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope” (Rom 15.4). Scripture, then, should not be reduced to a list of rules, nor a box full of ancient stories, nor even a map for the future. God speaks to us in Scripture so that we would know the God of Creation and Redemption, and by knowing God, we would have hope amidst the trials of human life.

6. Scripture is Normative Not Negotiable.

Theological debates within both evangelicalism and conservative Catholicism have focused not so much on if the Bible is true, but how the Bible is true. The challenge has been how best to articulate Scripture’s truthfulness amidst on-going conversations about science and religion, biblical criticism and pre-modern interpretation, postmodern reading strategies, and the role of the Bible in the public square. Among conservative groups one’s stance on this subject is often treated as a life and death matter and resultantly terms like “inerrancy” or “infallibility” become tribal colors which identify a person in relation to particular perspectives and postures related to the Bible.  However, I want to suggest that conservative shibboleths are not or should not be the primary marker for what constitutes an “orthodox” or “high” view of Scripture. The main point of contention between the orthodox and progressives is not over nomenclature (inerrancy vs. infallibility) or even symbolic theologians (Ratzinger vs. Rahner), but over the more fundamental question as to whether or not Scripture is normative or negotiable. Is Scripture a word from God to be heeded and obeyed even if it means going against culture (normative) or is Scripture a human word about God to be selectively utilized insofar as it enables us to speak a transcendent word to our native context (negotiable)?

7. Christ is the Foundation of our Faith and the Center of the Christian Bible.

The Bible is the enduring Word of God. But it is not the foundation of our faith. Rather, Jesus is the foundation of our faith, as St. Paul says: “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11). Because of that foundation, we should build up from it by reading the Bible as a Christ-centered book that finds its highest testimony and interpretive center in him. In fact, this is precisely how the early church interpreted Israel’s Scriptures. Just look at how they read and preached about Psalm 2, 16, 110, and 118, or even Isaiah 53, or Deuteronomy 32. These texts, in their various ways, are about Jesus. This is something that Jesus himself taught to the two strangers on the road to Emmaus: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). If you want to understand the Bible you need to understand Jesus. And if you want to understand Jesus you need to understand the Bible.

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When will something great happen to me?

Oh, how true! If only I could have learned this at age 5...or 4. Make that 3. 

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

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http://news.health.com/2016/04/06/this-is-what-happens-to-your-brain-on-no-sleep/

This Is What Happens To Your Brain On No Sleep

April 6, 2016 | By Alice Park, Time.com

Photo: Getty Images

Bedtime is one of the most important parts of the day for the brain. The latest studies show that when we slumber, the brain performs important housekeeping tasks that clear away the debris of the day’s work and help reset and restore nerve networks so they are ready to operate again at full capacity when we wake.

But a lack of sleep deprives the brain of this essential rest period, and our ability to get through the day might be compromised. In a small study published in the journal Radiology, a team of Chinese and European researchers report a more detailed analysis of how insomnia can affect specific types of brain nerves in parts of the brain that regulate cognition, emotion and sensory processes.

The researchers compared the brain images of 23 people with insomnia and 30 healthy controls. They specifically focused on white matter volume, which represents nerve cells that are coated in a special protein called myelin that improves their ability to send signals to one another. Earlier brain imaging studies had suggested that people with insomnia have differences in certain parts of the brain that could be connected to inadequate myelin. So Shumei Li from the Guangdong No. 2 Provincial People’s Hospital and her colleagues compared white matter function among people with insomnia and those who slept well.

RELATED: Why Interrupted Sleep Is Worse Than Short Sleep

They found that people with insomnia—defined as trouble sleeping for over a month that’s associated with daytime sleepiness and sleep disturbances—had significantly less white matter connectivity, especially between areas that control sleep and wakefulness, than those without insomnia. Li speculates that this disruption in signals between these regions was triggered by thinning of the myelin surrounding the neurons, which resulted in less chatter among them.

In fact, 83%, or five of the six major nerve tracts that the scientists analyzed, were reduced among people with insomnia. Most were concentrated in the right part of the brain, where emotions and many thinking functions are regulated, as well as where sensory information like sight, smell and touch are processed.

Li says that more studies are needed to explain what might be causing the brain differences in people with insomnia, but the results hint at a starting point.

This article originally appeared on Time.com.

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A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted With Grief

A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted With Grief

"We find Him closest in our deepest sorrow, dearest in our deepest despair, wisest in our greatest doubt. In agony, we catch a brief glimpse of Savior GOD, the true face of unfathomable understanding and love that will never let us go." 

JGR

5-30-16