Losing our brains with disruptive technologies (XIV): Can we become sleeping beauties?
Have a beautiful day. Our mission for this week is to make a conscious effort to understand through collective thinking expressed in data, how much the NAIQI (Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum, and the Internet) technologies have impacted our daily habits and in consequence our brain normal functions.
I am not a physician, neither a psychologist, but I do know for sure that the last 20 years of NAIQI technologies has been worst than atom bombs thrown into our brains. The damage is already felt by Generation X recently ascended to decision-making positions who are in charge of managing younger talent. Younger talents who don’t get enough sleep are 4 times as likely to suffer from poor concentration, short-term memory, relationship problems and 3 times more likely to be depressed and 2.6 times more likely to commit suicide. As I mentioned in my last publication, signs of sleep deprivation include:
- excessive daytime sleepiness, inattention, tardiness
- irritability, hyperactivity, depression, impatience, mood swings, low self-confidence, low tolerance for frustration and other impulse control problems
- falling grades and reports of drowsy driving
- On younger adults, it includes increased obesity risk, fatigue, narcissism, lack of memory and poor concentration.
We must be tough cookies when it comes to recovering our traditional sleeping habits. When I returned from Switzerland to El Salvador (the year 2003), a fantastic friend of mine in town who studied Agricultural Economics at Cornell University, taught me an English idiom phrase: to be a tough cookie. He used it then and he told me I was a tough cookie. A tough cookie is someone who is very determined and brave. I beg for your comprehension, and I am not sure if by being a “tough cookie” I still have not found academic grants to survive through this academic blog, but when it comes to showing you how the excessive use of technology has deprived our brains, and that our brains are getting sick, please forgive me if I am being a “tough cookie”. We have lost our 4,000 years of evolution sleep routines. Can you believe that it took more than 4,000 years to realize that our beautiful brains necessitate at least between 7 to 9 hours per day of sleep on average for adults, and in less than 20 years many countries which have adopted technologies do have decision-makers at higher places, factory, and office workers, teenagers and kids with sleep routines of 6 hours per average?. Just 6 hours! We have reduced our sleep time between at least 25% to 33% in less than 20 years.
Front view girl sleeping book. Source: Freepik.com
This is too much for our brains. Look, we must be extremely thankful to God that he has built us to be resilient and our brains are always trying to adapt and to cope with our crazy inventions… but poor brains, they are trying to go to sleep, but they can´t do it. After being exposed to digital screens for more than 8 hours a day, the brain is overstimulated. It is full-on information and “tries to switch off. But it can’t because it’s just overloaded”.
Baby Boomers´generation should have put us to sleep. I wished that Baby Boomer’s decision-makers at higher places would have been “tough cookies” and wiser to stop or at least slow down our Generation X in relation to how the NAIQI tech was being adopted. We are the result of what our parents let us do it. When parents don´t guide, or don´t put roadblocks for us to keep our brain sanity, their kids mess up. Thanks to God I belong to Generation X in one developing country: I was raised in an era of Pacman and if we wanted to play it, we had to go to the mall where the video game machines were soaking for quarters of dollars to be played. My adolescence was a time in which it was impossible for me to have an ATARI console (the video gaming) at home, it was truly expensive. We couldn’t afford it. I was raised in a time of no mobile phones, and the internet was not around during my childhood. The usage of videogames was not spread out to all levels of society. I did not have access to the internet or an email account until I traveled to study at NYU and then to Santiago de Chile at 26 years old (1996). In summary: I am so glad for my brain and neurons. I had the opportunity to be raised without the internet, email, nanotech, AI and social media. I was able to develop a different brain, my brain was pretty much well-grounded, and OMG I had the chance to sleep well. I had the opportunity to learn with profoundness, not with wideness.
Generation Z is the most exhausted of all the generations in relation to their sleep habits. At the moment, the youngest adults of Generation Y or Millennials are the first pure internet generation who were born with the Internet. Even though they have been gathered through Social media, at least they had some years without Smartphones or tablets or the internet of things. The iPhone came up to us by the year 2007, and tablets by the year 2010. Social media had its impact just during the 2010´s decade. The Millennial workforce had at least some core years to sleep. But, Generation Z is the most ruined of all the generations in relation to their sleep habits. Generation Z has been born with the whole combo of NAIQI technologies in place, not just the Smartphone, but every technology that has risen recently all together in one cup. As explained two years ago in two of my last publications, please read:
We all live in a yellow submarine
Please let Zers sleep. After reading those two publications, I beg you: Please let Zers sleep. These little ones of us are suffering right now what the previous generation of their parents (Millennial and Generation X) were not able to stop on time. It is our responsibility to start to put ourselves in their shoes. At least we had years to develop our brains correctly, and Zers have not.
Let me show you some data. These slides have been prepared by other intellectual brains who have been able to do data analysis. Sleep deprivation is not my domain area, but at least let´s get a flair overview:
Princess Aurora and her animal friends. She was converted into a Sleeping Beauty until her Prince saved her.
Sleeping beauty mood is strongly required. After watching the last slides from all the collective thinking around us, don´t you think that we need to put our world to sleep some hours more? Whatever the source of information that I have selected on the latter slides is just a drop of water, or a tiny tip of the iceberg when it comes to the disaster that we (our generation X and Millenials) are provoking to the next generations to come. We must stop our excessive technology hours. We must be tough cookies in relation to rebuilding our own good sleeping habits. And the only way is by turning off our drug addiction tech after 6pm.
Let´s go all to sleep, please. The American Sleep Association affirms that more than one-third of American adults don’t get enough sleep, and 50-70 million US adults have a sleep disorder. If you interpret this data as a sample all over the world, my intuitive mind is convinced that at least 50% of the internet societies are sleep deprived (adults, teens, and kids), and this is enough reason to find a solution: let´s go to sleep, please! Now, ironically, after excessive exposure to technology has sickened us, new technologies that promise to cure our sleep deprivation have emerged. Wait a minute: we provoke the problem with our inventions, and we wish tech to help us to recover our health back. Even if the market throws us snooze-inducing headphones and smart pillowcases, or smart beddings built-in with foot warmers or belts that track every toss and turn or smart alarm clocks designed to drag ourselves out of bed or apps that can record snoring, REM cycles or sleeping wearables… all the latter is insane. The cure to our lack of sleep is to control and decrease our tech addiction and go to sleep at least 9 hours per day. Kids and teenagers will follow our adults’ role modeling, only when we change.
Sleep Technologies Market Map. By CBInsights. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/sleep-tech-companies-and-trends/
Thank you. Next week we will continue with the move-transport activities. Blessings.
Source of reference utilized to write this article:
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/why-electronics-may-stimulate-you-bed
https://thriveglobal.com/stories/why-millennials-are-sleep-deprived/
https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/data_statistics.html
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/sleep-tech-companies-and-trends/
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/how-sleep-and-mental-health-are-linked-in-the-brain/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6473877/
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/134/3/e921
http://www.columbianeurology.org/neurology/staywell/document.php?id=42069
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/americans-arent-getting-enough-sleep_n_56c61306e4b0b40245c9687b
https://mdhs.unimelb.edu.au/news-and-events/news-archive/how-does-technology-affect-our-brains
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-015-9440-2
https://www.sleepdr.com/the-sleep-blog/cdc-declares-sleep-disorders-a-public-health-epidemic/
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/06/sleep-tech-science/
Disclaimer: Illustrations in Watercolor are painted by Eleonora Escalante. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY. Nevertheless, the majority of the pictures, images or videos shown on this blog are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.
Thank you for reading to me.
Click to access 09_Adolescent_factsheet.pdf
Click to access 09_Adolescent_factsheet.pdf
Eleonora Escalante Strategy 