Perfectionism has become a hidden epidemic among young people

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/perfectionism-has-become-a-hidden-epidemic-among-young-people

1. Thomas CurranAssistant Professor, University of Bath
2. Andrew HillAssociate Professor, York St John University

In this new market-based society, young people are evaluated in a host of new ways.
Image: REUTERS/Marcelo del Pozo

In our roles as academics, young people knock on our doors almost every day. They are typically ambitious, bright and hard-working. They have a broad network of friends, and most come from supportive families. Yet no matter how well-adjusted they can appear, we are finding that our students are increasingly likely to seek our support for mental health issues, as well as academic ones.

We are not alone in observing this trend. Student mental illness on UK campuses is at record highs. And right across the globe, young people are reporting to clinicians at unprecedented levels with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

One possible reason for this is that across the US, Canada and the UK, today’s young people are the first generation to grow up in a society based on the principles of neoliberalism championed by the leaders of the late 20th century – Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney and Margaret Thatcher respectively. Over the last 50 years, communal interest and civic responsibility have been progressively eroded, replaced by a focus on self-interest and competition in a supposedly free and open market place.

In this new market-based society, young people are evaluated in a host of new ways. Social media, school and university testing and job performance assessments mean young people can be sifted, sorted and ranked by peers, teachers and employers. If young people rank poorly, the logic of our market-based society dictates that they are less deserving – that their inferiority reflects some personal weakness or flaw.

There is, then, enormous pressure on young people to demonstrate their value and outperform their peers. And there is evidence that they are struggling to cope. In particular, emerging epidemics of serious mental illnesses speak to the negative effects of this market-based society, and a culture which is fundamentally changing the way young people think about themselves and others.

The rise of perfectionism

Leading psychologists, Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett have suggested that one of the ways in which younger people are acting differently to their older peers is by showing a greater tendency toward perfectionism.

Broadly speaking, perfectionism is an irrational desire for flawlessness, combined with harsh self-criticism. But on a deeper level, what sets a perfectionist apart from someone who is simply diligent or hard-working is a single-minded need to correct their own imperfections.

Perfectionists need to be told that they have achieved the best possible outcomes, whether that’s through scores and metrics, or other peoples’ approval. When this need is not met, they experience psychological turmoil, because they equate mistakes and failure to inner weakness and unworthiness.

We recently published a study in the Psychological Bulletin, which shows that levels of perfectionism have risen significantly among young people since 1989. We think that this may, at least in part, be a symptom of the way that young people are attempting to feel safe, connect with others and find self-worth within market-based, neoliberal societies.

Irrational ideals of the perfect self have become desirable – even necessary – in a world where performance, status and image define a person’s usefulness and value. You don’t need to look far to find examples; corporations and their marketers offer all manner of cosmetic and material solutions for the flawed consumer. Meanwhile, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat provide platforms to exchange curations of the perfect version of oneself and lifestyle with others.

Image: Linkedin

This is a culture which preys on insecurities and amplifies imperfection, impelling young people to focus on their personal deficiencies. As a result, some young people brood chronically about how they should behave, how they should look, or what they should own. Essentially, agitating to perfect themselves and their lives.

It’s no wonder that there’s substantial evidence indicating that perfectionism is associated with (among other things) depression, anorexia nervosa, suicide ideation and early death.

We feel a deep sense of sympathy with our students’ struggles. For the first time on record, young people are expected to be materially less well-off in adulthood than their parents. And it’s not just their material well-being that’s at stake – their mental and physical well-being is threatened by this hidden epidemic of perfectionism.

It’s time for organisations such as schools and universities, as well as the politicians and civil servants who help to shape the way these organisations operate, to take steps to safeguard the welfare of young people. They must resist marketised forms of competition, at the expense of young people’s mental health. 

They should teach the importance of compassion over competition. If they do not, the rise of perfectionism – and its association with serious mental illness – is likely to continue unabated.

Why do we dream? Matthew Walker explores the theories in this exclusive essay

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/why-do-we-dream-matthew-walker-explores-the-theories-behind-nocturnal-fantasias-a3799396.html
MATTHEW WALKER
In an exclusive essay, neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker explores the mystery of sleep and dreams



Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons.

First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—some- thing psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking psychological treatment. Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones. 

Having cast off the non-scientific theory of Sigmund Freud, neuroscience research has since demonstrated that dreaming is not just a byproduct of REM sleep, but serves critical functions for our wellbeing. Can we even take conscious control over our dreams? Scientific evidence suggests the answer is indeed, yes. That fact alone leads to the possibility of self-selecting what experiences (and benefits) we harness from our nocturnal fantasias each and every night?

Creative Inspiration

We often hear stories of people who’ve had remarkable dream-inspired creativity. Think of Paul McCartney’s story of how his hit song, “Yesterday,” came to him in a dream. Keith Richards had a similar dream experience that gifted to him the iconic opening guitar chords of the song, Satisfaction. Or take Mendeleev’s the dream-derived construction of the table of the periodic elements.

It’s been shown that deep non-REM sleep strengthens individual memories. But recent work in my sleep centre, and work of other scientists, has now shown that REM-sleep dreaming is when those memories can be fused and blended together in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge and then extract what overarching rules and commonalties, creating a mindset that can help us divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems.

How do we know dreaming and not just sleep is important to this process? In one study, we tested this by waking up participants during the night—during both non-REM sleep and dreaming sleep—and gave them very short tests: solving anagram puzzles, where you try to unscramble letters to form a word [i.e. OSEOG = GOOSE]. We monitored the participants during sleep, woke up them up at different points of the night to perform the test. When woken during non-REM sleep, they were not particularly creative—they could solve very few puzzles. But, when we woke up participants during REM sleep, they were able to solve 15-35 percent more puzzles than when they were awake. Not only that, participants woken while dreaming reported that the solution just “popped” into their heads, as if it were effortless. 

In another study, I and my colleagues taught participants a series of relational facts—such as, A>B, B>C, C>D, and so on—and tested their understanding by asking them questions, for example: Is B>D or not? Afterwards, we compared their performance on this test before and after a full night’s sleep, and also after they’d had a 60-90-minute nap that included REM sleep. Those who’d slept or had a long nap performed much better on this test than when they were awake, as if they’d put together disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in their sleep. 


Peace at last: neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker 

Some may consider this trivial, but it is one of the key operations differentiating your brain from your computer. It also underlies the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). The latter seems to be the work of REM-sleep dreaming.

Dreaming improves creative problem solving, too. In one study, participants learned to navigate a virtual maze, with the goal of finding an exit as quickly as possible. They did this using trial and error, aided by the placement of unique objects at certain locations in the maze, such as a football or a Christmas tree. After this learning session, the research participants were split into two groups, with half taking a subsequent afternoon nap, while the other half watched a video for 90 minutes. Nappers were occasionally awoken to ask about the content of their dreams. At equivalent times, those watching a video were also asked about thoughts going through their minds. Afterwards, all participants went back into the virtual maze again.

Those individuals who napped were significantly better at it than those who didn’t, as expected. But, the nappers who reported dreaming about the maze were 10 times better at the task than those who napped and didn’t dream about the maze. Interestingly, when looking at the content of these dreams, it was clear that the participants didn’t dream a precise replay of the learning experience while awake. Instead, they were cherry picking salient fragments of the learning experience and attempting to place them within the catalog of preexisting knowledge. 

Therefore, sleep was not the engine of creativity. Rather, it was dreaming of salient features of the experience that enhanced problem solving. Little wonder, then, that you have never been told to “stay awake on a problem.” Instead, you are instructed to “sleep on it.” Interestingly, this phrase, or something close to it, exists in most languages (from French “dormir sur un problem,” to Swahili “kulala juu ya tatizo”), indicating that the problem-solving benefit of dream sleep is universal, common across the globe.

Overnight therapy

It’s said that time heals all wounds; but research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals. REM sleep, and dreams themselves, appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, episodes experienced during the day. In this way, dreaming provides a form of emotional first aid, offering psychological resolution when you awake each morning.

REM sleep is the only time when our brain shuts off the anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline (the body’s equivalent of which is adrenaline). At the same time, emotional and memory related centers of the brain are reactivated as we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress-related neurochemical, which allows us to re-process painful and even traumatic memories in a safer, calmer neural environment.

Supporting evidence comes from one study in my sleep center in young adult participants watched a set of emotion-inducing images while inside an MRI scanner. Twelve hours later, they were shown the same emotional images; but for half the participants, the twelve hours were in the same day, while for the other half the twelve hours were separated by an evening of sleep—a full hours. 

Those who slept in between the two sessions reported a significant decrease in how emotional they felt in response to seeing those images again. Their MRI scans agreed—there was a palliative decrease in reactivity in the amygdala—the emotional center of the brain that can create painful feelings. In addition, there was a reengagement of the rational prefrontal cortex of the brain after sleep that provides a dampening brake on emotional reactivity. In contrast, those who remained awake across the day showed no such dissolving of emotional reactivity over time. 

This evidence itself doesn’t say anything about the role of dream sleep. But, we had recorded the sleep of each participant during the intervening night between the two test sessions. We discovered that a specific kind of electrical brain activity that reflects a drop in stress-related chemistry during the dream state determined the success of overnight therapy from one individual to the next. 

These studies, and those of many others, led to the suggestion that dream sleep has the potential to help people recover from especially difficult traumatic experiences, since the emotional content of dreams is paired with a decrease in brain noradrenaline. 

Support for this idea came from research by the psychiatrist, Murray Raskind. He studied war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), who often suffer debilitating nightmares. When given the drug Prazosin—a medication that lowers blood pressure and also acts as a blocker of the brain stress chemical, noradrenaline— the soldiers had more REM sleep, fewer nightmares and while awake, fewer PTSD symptoms, than those given a placebo. Newer studies suggest this effect can be shown in children and adolescents with nightmares, as well; though the research on this is still in its infancy.

Scientific evidence therefore fits the prophetic wisdom of Charlotte Brontë’s, who stated that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow”. Said more optimistically, the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep.

Controlling your dreams

Lucid dreaming occurs at the moment when you become aware that you are dreaming. However, the term is more colloquially used to describe gaining volitional control of what an individual is dreaming, and the ability to manipulate that experience, such as deciding to fly, or perhaps even the functions of it, such as problem solving.

The concept of lucid dreaming was once considered a sham. Scientists debated its very existence. You can understand the skepticism. First, the assertion of conscious control over a normally non-volitional process injects a heavy dose of ludicrous into the already preposterous experience we call dreaming. Second, how can you objectively prove a subjective claim, especially when the individual is fast asleep during the act?

Several years ago, a truly ingenious experiment removed all such doubt. Scientists placed lucid dreamers inside an MRI scanner. While awake, these participants first clench their left and then right hand, over and over. Researches took snapshots of brain activity, allowing them to define the precise brain areas controlling each hand of each individual.

The participants were allowed to fall asleep in the MRI scanner, entering REM sleep where they could dream. During REM sleep, however, all voluntary muscles are paralyzed, preventing the dreamer from acting out ongoing mental experience. Yet the muscles that control the eyes are spared from this paralysis, and give this stage of sleep its frenetic name. Lucid dreamers were able to take advantage of this ocular freedom, communicating with the researchers through eye movements. 

Pre-defined eye movements would therefore inform the researchers of the nature of the lucid dream (e.g., the participant made three deliberate leftward eye movements when they gained lucid dream control, two rightward eye movements before clenching their right hand, etc.). Non-lucid dreamers find it difficult to believe that such deliberate eye movements are possible while someone is asleep, but watch a lucid dreamer do it a number of times, and it is impossible to deny.

When participants signaled the beginning of the lucid dream state, the scientists began taking MRI pictures of brain activity. Soon after, the sleeping participants signaled their intent to dream about moving their left hand, then their right hand, alternating over and over again, just as they did when awake. Their hands were not physically moving—they could not, due to the REM-sleep paralysis. But they were moving in the dream.

At least, that was the subjective claim from the participants upon awakening. The results of the MRI scans objectively proved they were not lying. The same regions of the brain that were active during physical right and left voluntary hand movements observed while the individuals were awake similarly lit up in corresponding ways during times when the lucid participants signaled that they were clenching their hands while dreaming!

There could be no question. Scientists had gained objective, brain-based proof that lucid dreamers can control when and what they dream while they are dreaming. Other studies using similar eye-movement communication designs have further shown that individuals can deliberately bring themselves to timed orgasm during lucid dreaming, an outcome that, especially in males, can be objectively verified using physical measures by (brave) scientists.

It remains unclear whether lucid dreaming is beneficial or detrimental, since well over 80 percent of the general public are not natural lucid dreamers. If gaining voluntary dream control were so useful, surely Mother Nature would have imbued the masses with such a skill. 

However, this argument makes the erroneous assumption—that we have stopped evolving. Is it possible that lucid dreamers represent the next iteration in Homo sapiens evolution? Will these individuals be preferentially selected for in the future on the basis of this unusual dreaming ability—one that may allow them to turn the creative problem-solving spotlight of dreaming on the waking challenges faced by themselves or the human race, and advantageously harness its power more deliberately? 

Before trying to answer these lofty, even preposterous, questions, could I suggest we first take a night to sleep on it.    

Matthew Walker is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the university’s Center for Human Sleep Science.

Matthew Walker: meet the man who can make you better in bed

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/matthew-walker-meet-the-man-who-can-make-you-better-in-bed-a3799381.html?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#link_time=1522075916

• KATIE LAW 
• The clocks have changed and the capital is restless — but neuroscientist Matthew Walker has found the solution

Peace at last: neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker Matt Writtle

Matthew Walker is probably one of the most influential people on the planet. The professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California in Berkeley has spent the past two decades studying sleep. Now he’s written a book about it.

Why We Sleep, which came out last September, is a gripping account of why we sleep, why we dream, what happens to our brains when we are not awake and — crucially — how long-term sleep deprivation is killing us. Yes, killing us.

Given that two-thirds of the adult population in the developed world consistently fail to get enough kip — enough being seven to eight hours a night — Walker’s work couldn’t be more timely.

In fact, the book became a bestseller the moment it came out, which in turn led Penguin to take the unusual step of releasing a paper-back edition after only four months.

Why We Sleep has been at the top of Amazon’s bestseller list ever since, even knocking Yuval Harari’s Sapiens off the top slot last week. We are all obsessed by this apparently elusive commodity.

Walker’s research, conducted on volunteers in a futuristic-sounding sleep lab — all beds and electrodes and scanners — in the bowels of the university building, proves conclusively that sleep deprivation contributes to depression, anxiety, obesity, memory loss, Alzheimer’s, cancer, stroke, infertility, heart attacks, an impaired immune system and more.

It lowers testosterone levels in men, causes fatal car accidents and contributes to ADHD in adolescents, who are often prescribed Ritalin when what they really need is sleep.

Worse still is the epidemic abuse of prescription sleeping pills, which far from inducing natural sleep are addictive sedatives that have devastating side effects and significantly raise mortality risk. Ultimately, however, Dr Sleep’s prescription is positive and blissfully simple: prioritise getting a good night’s sleep over everything else. That’s it.

He has flown over to London on a lightning-quick publicity tour and is so in demand from the media that his publicist has had to put him on a limobike to get him through the London traffic on time. Bright-eyed and dapper in a grey tweed waistcoat, with a surprising shock of frosted blonde hair, Liverpudlian born Walker, 44, admits that he is a self-confessed sleep fascist. “I give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night,” he says, and concedes that his social life suffers.

“Friends say, ‘shall we go out to dinner at 8’? I say ‘I can’t, I’m a 10am till 6.30pm kind of guy.’ I keep that very regular, no matter what,” he says, rapidly chowing down a box of salmon sashimi while we talk. “I’m trying to stay off the carbs”.

He meditates up to four times a week using the Headspace app to relieve stress, which is the leading cause of insomnia, and to which “I’m just as susceptible as everyone else”; he cycles and goes to the gym daily; he avoids caffeine after midday and alcohol after 6pm.

He lives with his long-term partner, a musician, “she’s the cool part of the equation in the arts, I’m the nerdy scientist,” he says, and they sleep happily in separate bedrooms, having negotiated a “sleep divorce” a year into their relationship.

“The quality of the physical relationship that you have is actually increased when you undergo that sleep divorce, if the sleeping equation isn’t working.”

He admits modestly to being overwhelmed by the book’s success, because he didn’t know if he could write well — he can — yet acknowledges that the combination of our collective chronic fatigue and the explosive interest in neuroscience has created the perfect storm for “such a remarkable topic”.

Not only remarkable but one that could really change your life. 

Get a Sleep Divorce

Snoring or thrashing about in bed can be a deal breaker so get a sleep divorce, says Walker. Thirty per cent of the population, when asked anonymously, will admit to not going to bed at the same time, or sleeping in the same bedroom as their partner.

There’s a stigma attached because it implies that you don’t have a good sex life. But if you look at the data, says Walker, the opposite is true, so long as you have a bedroom goodnight routine. 

Find time to have a cuddle and do the same in the morning. The quality of your physical relationship will actually improve.

How to Survive the Move to BST

From a medical perspective, we should do away with British Summer Time entirely. On the last Sunday in March, when the clocks change, there is a marked spike in road traffic accidents and heart attacks, as a direct result of getting one hour less sleep. It’s hard to drag yourself back an entire hour in terms of bedtime. Instead, split the difference by going to bed and waking up 30 minutes earlier and later.

Sleep Trackers and Orthosomnia

Should we wear sleep trackers? Brands vary in their accuracy, says Walker, but the tech industry, including intelligent home systems that regulate light and temperature, will be revolutionised in the next few years and we’ll be tracking almost all of our physiology, including sleep, says Walker. But beware orthosomnia, a condition in which the tracker wearer becomes so obsessed that he or she isn’t getting the right kind of sleep, they get insomnia. Luckily it’s rare and trackers can help build a long-term picture of sleep patterns, says Walker.

Social loafing

Current work culture dictates that longer working hours result in higher productivity. Wrong, retorts Walker, who’s on a mission to smash themyth. His data show that under-slept employees select fewer challenging problems, come up with the leastcreative solutions and will ride on the coat tails of others – known as social loafing. They are also more likely to lie.

Under-slept bosses are rated less charismatic, even when their employees don’t know how much sleep they have had.

Sleep hygiene and the economy

Sleep deprivation is estimated to cost the UK economy up to £40 billion a year. Walker advises companies on how to have better “sleep hygiene”. Goldman Sachs and Procter and Gamble have introduced sleep hygiene courses. Nike and Google, two highly profit-driven companies, are among those to adopt more circadian rhythm-friendly staff schedules, differentiating between larks and owls, and allowing employees to set their own shift pattern. Just imagine the savings for the NHS and ultimately the entire UK economy 

Don’t Fall Prey to Social Jet Lag

Getting up and going to bed early every weekday, followed by a weekend of staying up late and sleeping in, is, says Walker, a bad idea, otherwise known as social jet lag. You are “torturing your biology”, he says, because you are doing the equivalent of flying in and out of different European time zones every week. To improve sleep health, stick to the same times seven days a week.

How to Avoid Real Jet Lag

Travelling west to east is harder than vice-versa. Get into the new time zone by adjusting going to bed/getting up times by 15 minutes each day in the few days leading up to travel. Avoid alcohol and caffeine on flights and only sleep at the start of your trip, eating meals at the same time as your new time zone. Melatonin can re-set your body clock, as can getting sunlight in the morning without wearing sunglasses.

Don’t Boast About How Little Sleep You Get

It’s not cool and anyone who claims to be getting only four to five hours a night sleep is making irrational decisions. After 20 hours of being awake, your faculties are as impaired as that of a drunk driver, so yes, you can make decisions but you’ll be cognitively impaired. Trump is the perfect example. Matthew Walker has written an essay exclusively for the Standard.

8 steps for the night of your dreams

• Go to bed and get up at the same time every day, seven days a week.
• Keep your bedroom cool. No more than 18 degrees C.
• Don’t drink caffeine after midday, or alcohol after 6pm.
• Don’t lie in bed awake. Get up and do something else until you feel sleepy again.
• A hot-water bottle placed at your feet will draw body heat downwards and cool core body temperature.
• Use blackout curtains or blinds.
• Keep lighting low for the two hours leading up to lights out.
• Turn computers, smartphones and tablets off an hour before lights out.