Hasta La Gadget!

It can be downright Sisyphean to get a teenager out of bed. Just like adults, they’re often significantly sleep-deprived — and the first period bell is doing them no favors.

Adolescents have been steadily logging fewer hours of sleep over the last 20 years, according to a recent study. Surveys from the early 1990s found that 52 percent of 15-year-olds and 36 percent of 18- year-olds got at least seven hours of shut-eye a night, LiveScience reports. For teens in 2011 to 2012, those numbers dropped to 43 and 33 percent, respectively. The National Sleep Foundation currently recommends that teens age 14 to 17 need eight to 10 hours a night, while and 18- and 19-year-olds should aim for seven to nine.

But between homework, field hockey practice, band rehearsal and, let’s face it, new episodes of “Pretty Little Liars,” it can seem like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for teenagers to get adequate rest. To help combat this chronic sleep deprivation in teens, some schools are implementing a seemingly obvious solution: just start later.

The American Academy of Pediatrics made a landmark policy statement in August 2014 recommending later school start times, and several districts across the country are finding success doing just that.

In Honolulu, the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability, or SEEQS, starts the school day at 8:30 a.m. with 45 minutes of physical activity before any classroom learning takes place. In Massachusetts, Deerfield Academy shifted start times to 8:30 a.m. from 7:55 a.m. A 2014 Deerfield viewbook notes how quickly the benefits of the change, which the school implemented in 2008, became clear: Students “earned higher grades; ate more breakfasts, visited the health center far less frequently; and performed better in athletics. Teachers reported that first-period discussion classes were uncharacteristically vibrant from the beginning bell.”

Some experts note that part of the push for later school start times is about acknowledging the way young people’s bodies work.

“Younger individuals tend to have a bit more of a circadian delay, which means they want to go to bed later and get up later naturally,” W. Christopher Winter, the medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center, told The Huffington Post. “To force a child to get up really early is sort of working against this inherent biological rhythm.”

This inherent desire to sleep, Winter said, doesn’t just make kids and teens drag in the early morning — it also limits their ability to learn during morning classes and increases the risk of car accidents on their way to school.

According to a new poll, parents are coming around to the idea of letting kids hit the snooze button. A survey conducted in November and December 2014 by the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital as part of its National Poll on Children’s Health found that about half of parents of teenagers whose schools start before 8:30 a.m. would support a later school start time. Forty percent said a later start time would allow their teens to get more sleep, and 22 percent said a later start time would help their teens do better in school.

“This would be a major shift in terms of the rhythm of daily life of children and families of children at those ages,” Matthew M. Davis, the director of the National Poll on Children’s Health and a professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at the U-M Medical School, told The Huffington Post. “It’s too early to say it’s a movement across the country, but with half of parents saying they’re willing to support a shift toward later school start times, our study supports that when schools consider making this shift many parents are going to be in favor of it.”

The poll also revealed some of the complications that starting later could cause. Of the parents who remained unconvinced about delaying start times, many cited obstacles such as financial burdens, transportation issues and shortened windows for after-school activities.

Thirty minutes may not seem like a big deal, but as Winter said, “If you’re starving, nobody turns their back on a half a plate of food!” Even a 15- or 20-minute delay at least sends the message that a school or school system values sleep and the ever-expanding research about its importance, he said. “There may not be a way for us to completely eliminate the school start time [issue], but we are at least taking steps to move in that direction.”

In Kenston, Ohio, officials decided in 2012 to change middle and high school start times from 7:20 a.m. to 7:50 a.m. “Beyond medical studies, when you step back and look at students getting up for school between 5:30 and 6 a.m. to catch a bus by 6:30 a.m. with many juggling jobs, sports, homework and extracurricular activities, there had to be a better way,” Robert Lee, then-superintendent in Kenston, told the News-Herald at the time.

While Kenston doesn’t have statistical data reflecting the payoffs of the change, current Superintendent Nancy Santilli said the switch has been positive. “It has worked well for our district allowing our younger students a little more ‘sleep’ time and hopefully mornings that are not as rushed and stress filled,” she wrote to HuffPost in an email. She added that students now board their buses in daylight, which adds an additional layer of safety to the a.m. hours.

Fairfax County in Virginia plans to implement a later school start time for the 2015-2016 school year. In a video statement on the Fairfax County’s Public Schools cable channel, Superintendent Karen Garza said that the school board was prompted to reevaluate school start times after reviewing “compelling scientific evidence” supporting such a move for teens. The school board provided the community with a number of proposed revisions to the schedule, ultimately deciding all high schools will start between 8 and 8:10 a.m.

“Because we are such a large and diverse district, these changes will be easier for some parents and more challenging for others,” Garza said in the video statement, “but in the end our goal is to improve our students’ safety, health and academic performance.”

LONDON (AP) — British spy agencies are facing questions about how a young Londoner who was on their radar as part of terrorist investigations was able to travel to Syria and become the masked militant known as “Jihadi John.”

Officials have identified the man shown in hostage-beheading videos as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwait-born computer graduate in his mid-20s. Emwazi was known to the British intelligence services since 2009, in connection with investigations into Islamic terrorism in Somalia and elsewhere.

He is one of a number of men from West London believed to have traveled to Syria in 2012. Several are now dead.

Chris Phillips, former head of Britain’s National Counterterrorism Security Office, said Friday the case showed that police and intelligence agencies lacked the resources to monitor a growing number of suspects.

This year’s flu strain was particularly brutal, disproportionately affecting children and the elderly. A record-breaking rate of 217 of every 100,000 people over the age of 65 have been hospitalized for the flu, while 80 children so far have died from the disease, reports AP. And while flu season is officially in retreat as of Feb. 14, researchers are hoping to take lessons from this year that can be applied to the 2015-2016 season.

A small survey presented on Feb. 23 at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology in Houston illustrated one area of concern: racial disparities in flu vaccine rates. The survey, conducted in the suburbs around Detroit, found that black people are less likely to get vaccinated for the flu than either white or Asian people.

The survey data shed light on an opportunity to improve the communication around vaccines — especially when it comes to dispelling myths about the injections in some communities, according to lead researcher Dr. Melissa Skupin of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there about vaccines in general, but particularly the flu vaccine,” said Skupin in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. “People don’t think it works, and when they don’t think it works, they’re less likely to get it.”

Skupin sent anonymous surveys to six outpatient clinics in the suburbs of Detroit in 2013. The survey asked patients whether they had received a flu vaccine the previous year. It also asked them about demographic information and their perceptions of the flu vaccine. She received 472 responses and found that 93 percent of people who identified as white had gotten a flu vaccine, 84 percent who identified as Asian got one, but only 62 percent of people who identified as black got one.

However, Skupin did find that a doctor’s recommendation could significantly influence a person’s decision to get vaccinated; 90 percent of people got the shot if their doctor recommended it, but only 58 percent of people did so if their doctors didn’t recommend it. Unsurprisingly, Skupin’s survey also revealed that people who believed the flu vaccine would help them were more likely to get one (90 percent), as opposed to the people who got a flu vaccine despite not believing in their benefit (58 percent).

Skupin didn’t break down the different reasons people gave for not getting the flu vaccine by race, so she can’t say for sure why the racial disparity in vaccine rates exists in suburban Detroit. But doctor recommendations depend on trust and communication, and previous research has shown it can be notoriously lacking between medical professionals and some communities of color. As a result, people of color sometimes suffer the most when it comes to vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, as the 1989-1991 resurgence in the U.S. showed; Black, Native American and Latino children were three to sixteen times at greater risk for contracting measles than white children during that epidemic, according to a 2014 CDC report.

Skupin’s survey wasn’t nationally representative, but she hopes that her data inspire doctors to be more pro-active about recommending vaccines, as opposed to simply offering them to patients. “A lot of doctors do recommend the flu shot, but for some reason the message is not getting through to patients — that we want them to get it, and that we think it’s beneficial to them,” said Skupin.

“Some of it may have to do with the approach — saying, ‘Would you like the flu shot today?’ as opposed to ‘I recommend you get the flu shot, and here’s why,'” she suggested. “Maybe physicians should be a little bit more proactive and interactive with their patients on vaccines.”

The flu affects an estimated five to 20 percent of all Americans and puts more than 200,000 in the hospital every year, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The flu caused 3,697 deaths in 2013.

Health authorities recommend the flu vaccine to anyone over six months old. However, only about 45 percent of adults get vaccinated for the flu every year, according to CDC numbers from the 2011-2012 flu season. There is a silver lining, however. While there are disparities among different races, vaccine rates for all race groups have inched upward since 1989.

Skupin hopes that trend continues, as more people bring questions about vaccines to their doctors. “We want people to ask questions and bring in any concerns they have about vaccines, rather than just not getting vaccinated.”

For 30 days, GPS for the Soul and meQuilibrium are providing you tips on how to live a healthier, happier and stress-free life. See the previous stress tips here.

It’s natural to feel angry when you’ve been hurt, but holding a grudge? That’s no good. As they say, it’s like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. But this is more than a metaphor; a grudge can have potent physical effects. A study published in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science found that grudge-holders who focused on their negative feelings couldn’t perform tasks as well as participants who had forgiven their wrongdoers.

Instead of seeing forgiveness as letting someone “off the hook,” see it as freeing yourself. Tune your inner radar to the possible positive in the situation. To start, pick one person who hurt you whom you haven’t forgiven and ask yourself what you’ve gained by not doing so. Are you happier? Freer? More at peace? We’re guessing not. You don’t need an apology from that person, either. Recognize that forgiving isn’t conditional — it’s your decision to let go of a heavy weight so that you can lighten your inner load.

Read more on forgiveness.

–Posted by Lindsay Holmes

Learn more useful information about stress and your health! Order meQuilibrium’s new book, meQuilibrium: 14 Days to Cooler, Calmer, and Happier, co-authored by meQuilibrium CEO Jan Bruce, Adam Perlman, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, and Andrew Shatté, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer.

Sony’s robot dog, Aibo, is the seminal pet robot of the early 21st century. A new version hasn’t been released in almost ten years, but that hasn’t stopped collectors from clamoring for the Aibo. Models sold for almost $2000 USD, so the robot dog wasn’t really ever accessible by the everyday consumer. Despite its elite following, Sony has officially announced … Continue reading