Friends to cross Humber Bridge in wheelbarrows for mental health charity
A group of landscapers will attempt to cross the Humber Bridge in wheelbarrows, raising cash for a mental health charity.Elliot Scholey, 25, along with three others, hope to complete the challenge on Saturday, taking it in turns to push and be carried.He said: "Men sometimes need that push from one another in life, and we're local landscaping lads of course." Cash raised will go to Mysterious Minds, a Hull charity that supports families affected by suicide.
Mr Scholey added: "Mental health isn't really spoken about around us men and it's got worse over the years. We want to show people you can talk about it. "I'm going to start by pushing. I'll have my Weetabix in the morning. If I get tired, someone can push me." Ashley Harris, 31, who is also taking part, said: "I've known people from school who've lost their lives to mental health and we've all struggled ourselves at some point."We just want to show other men in the city it's OK not to be OK." The journey will start at 09:00 BST at Darley's pub in Hessle and finish in Barton upon Humber.
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
WFH fuelling drug and alcohol abuse, warns top mental health boss
Working from home can increase the risk of drug abuse and alcoholism, the head of the world's most expensive mental health clinic has warned. Jan Gerber, founder of Paracelsus Recovery in Zurich, Switzerland, where treatment plans start at £61,000 and clients include royalty and Hollywood celebrities, said people resisting a return to the office in the belief that remote working helped their mental health 'may actually suffer' in the long term. He says office working and talking with colleagues encourages the body to release oxytocin, a hormone that reduces stress and anxiety. By contrast, people working from home risked suffering 'prolonged isolation' and blurring the lines between their professional and personal lives, fuelling stress. This can then result in habits such as drug-taking or excessive drinking to soothe the 'disconnection' from others caused by long periods of working alone at a computer, Gerber said. 'This disconnection can trigger a need to self-soothe, often with alcohol. The absence of regular social structure and blurred professional boundaries – for example, knowing you only have a 12pm meeting the next day – makes it easier to fall into harmful habits,' he added. A Norwegian study showed that people who worked from home for more than 15 hours a week were inclined to drink more alcohol than their office-based counterparts. Another survey from 2021 by drug recovery firm Sierra Tucson reported 20 per cent of US workers admitted to using alcohol, marijuana or other recreational drugs while working from home. 'Working in an office is a significantly healthier choice for mental well-being,' Gerber said. He added: 'Workers who are resisting a return to the office, perhaps believing remote working gives them a better work-life balance and is good for their mental health, should be aware that in the long term, their mental health may actually suffer.' The warnings come as many British workers refuse to return to the office following a boom in remote working during the pandemic. In May, research from King's College London revealed that Britons worked from home more than the workforce of any other country in Europe, with the average white-collar worker spending 1.8 days a week working outside the office. It followed a study from the university revealing that fewer than half of British employees said they would comply if their employer ordered them back to the office full-time, with 10 per cent saying that they would quit immediately. Concerns are growing that large numbers of people still working from home are damaging critical parts of the UK economy and Government. A scathing report into the UK's Office for National Statistics revealed that the agency's policy of allowing staff to work from home five days a week was making the quality of crucial economic data less reliable. It means bodies such as the Bank of England are having to rely on other types of data to make critical decisions on interest rates, which affect millions of mortgage borrowers.
The Sun
2 hours ago
- The Sun
Shocking reality of kids mobile use revealed as teens bombarded with 100s of messages & spend 5 hours a day on phones
TEENS are bombarded with up to 360 phone messages a day – and could spend a total of 25 YEARS glued to their mobiles, a Sun on Sunday probe reveals. Concerned experts are warning that the shock usage poses a threat to kids' mental health. 4 We tracked four youngsters' phone use over seven days and the results surprised even their parents. One 16-year-old got almost 2,500 alerts — that is nearly 360 messages a day and one text every two-and-a-half minutes. Another was sent more than 1,600 messages, and one 15-year-old admitted she had messaged a friend back and forth for 967 consecutive days. Our shock findings come as a new report lays bare the amount of time kids spend on their devices — and experts fear youngsters' mental health is being hit by extreme usage. Labour MP Joani Reid, who is leading the call for a ban on smartphones in schools, said: 'Hundreds of messages a day isn't just about distractions in school — it's about safety. 'Every notification could expose our kids to serious dangers — grooming by predators, cyberbullying and graphic, harmful content. Apps like Snapchat and TikTok often shield these interactions from parents, leaving teenagers vulnerable and isolated. 'We need tougher regulations forcing tech companies to prioritise child safety over profit. Parents alone can't monitor every message or app — Government and schools must step up.' Addictive apps A new study has found that the average secondary school pupil is on their mobile for five-and-a-half hours each day. If they keep that up, they could spend up to 25 years of their lives staring at a phone screen. And 68 per cent of youngsters polled by Fluid Focus said their academic performance was affected by their smartphone use, with 40 per cent admitting to constantly checking their mobile while studying. Popular teenager Art McGrath, 16, from Leyton, East London, had the most smartphone traffic of all the youngsters we tracked — receiving a staggering 2,493 messages in seven days. His notifications comprised 2,320 Snapchat messages, 112 WhatsApp chats and 61 Instagram alerts. This averages out to 356 messages a day. Art said: 'Snapchat is the main messaging app. I've been on it since I was around 12. Everyone is on it. 'I have groups with different friendship groups. I don't give myself phone breaks. If I get a message, I can end up stuck in a loop.' Snapchat is the biggest player in the world of youngsters' messaging apps and is used by 74 per cent of teens in the UK, according to Ofcom. It has been accused of exposing youngsters to bullying and grooming, and slated for its addictive qualities. 'Zero tolerance' Snapchat insists it has a 'zero tolerance' approach to sexual exploitation and says it removes harmful content immediately. Its Streaks function, which tracks the consecutive days two users have messaged each other, has been criticised for being addictive. But bosses at the tech firm say it is just a 'fun thing'. Grace Dainty, 15, from Witney, Oxfordshire, maintains a Streak of 967 days with one pal. Over seven days, she received 1,620 messages, with the vast majority — 1,594 — on Snapchat. She said: 'All of my friends, bar one, are on Snapchat. I have a Streak with my best friend of 967. I don't want to let this go. When I get an alert, I look at my phone and respond straight away if it's good. 'If a close friend didn't reply straight away, I would be concerned.' Mum Caroline, a 46-year-old social worker, said: 'I was surprised at the number of messages. This has opened my eyes to how Snapchat works.' While Grace may feel as if constant messaging is key to her friendships, psychologist Dr Charlotte Armitage insists: 'As much as people feel like they're connected through phones, they're not — it's a pseudo-connection. 'We need a connection in real life to feel the benefits. Our relationships are crucial for health and life longevity, so we become more disconnected. 'It's snowballed in the last five years and it's getting worse with AI, because not only are people not talking to other people, in apps they are now talking to bots instead.' Dr Armitage, the author of Generation Zombie, also warned of the addictive nature of messaging apps. She said: 'The brain becomes used to frequent stimulation and struggles to focus without it, as it starts to search for the next hit of dopamine. 'This has consequences for a child's attentiveness, interpersonal skills such as listening in conversation, ability to engage in academia or any other activity that doesn't provide a dopamine release at regular intervals.' A study from King's College London found that one in four children has 'problematic smartphone usage', meaning they use their devices in a way that is consistent with addiction. Banned in lessons But none of the teens we polled considered their phone use to be unusual or over the top. They all went to bed with their devices and checked them as soon as they woke. Every one of them was allowed to take their handset to school, though the vast majority were banned from using devices in lessons. Some continued to text anyway, while others said teachers didn't enforce the rules. Lottie Taylor, 14, from Farsley, Leeds, received 1,243 messages over a week — 75 per cent of them via Snapchat. She said: 'I like Streaks and have 39 people I send to on a daily basis. 'I wake up and the first thing I'll do is get on my phone. The longest streak I've got is 574 with my best friend. I like to keep them up. It's a symbol of friendship. I check my Streaks last thing at night as well.' I wake up and the first thing I'll do is get on my phone. The longest streak I've got is 574 with my best friend. I like to keep them up. It's a symbol of friendship. I check my Streaks last thing at night as well Lottie Taylor Lottie's mum Lydia, 43, a primary school teacher, said: 'It's hard to get Lottie moving on a morning because she won't get out of bed until she's done her Streaks.' In Snapchat messages shared with The Sun on Sunday, Lottie and her friend discuss meeting up in the park. Lottie says: 'Ikk [I know] we need to hang out… Bruh I just washed my hair.' Her pal replies: 'Aw bless. Anyway meet you at mine then we'll out.' Meanwhile, Logan Hook, 15, from Pudsey, West Yorkshire, received 528 messages in a week on Snapchat and WhatsApp. He said: 'I'm in a couple of WhatsApp groups for football mates, and one with school mates. 'I don't think I get a crazy amount of messages, but I will chat to arrange stuff or talk football.' In messages on a football team WhatsApp group, sneakily sent during class time, one friend laments his poor performance on the pitch, saying: 'I was awful.' Another pal adds: 'I didn't play bad but didn't play good either', before Logan replies: 'What do you think ur doing texting in class'. ART McGRATH, 16 - Leyton, East London 4 Messages per week: 2,493 Average per day: 356 Platforms: Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram Parent: Dad Nick, 54, a writer, gets around 160 messages in a day, mostly on WhatsApp. LOGAN HOOK, 15 - Pudsey, West Yorks 4 Messages per week: 528 Average per day: 75 Platforms: Snapchat and WhatsApp Parent's use: Mum Kirsty, 44, a doctor's receptionist, gets around 55 messages a day, mainly on WhatsApp. LOTTIE TAYLOR, 14 - Farsley, Leeds Messages per week: 1,234 Average per day: 178 Parent's use: Mum Lydia, 43, has around 186 messages a day on WhatsApp, texts and Instagram. 'Getting more addictive' By Daisy Greenwell, Founder of the campaign group Smartphone Free Childhood THE amount of messages these kids receive is staggering. I was also struck by how long teens are maintaining their Snapchat Streaks for. These findings make me particularly angry because it's a design seemingly aimed at keeping kids on their phones for as long as possible. Children are being manipulated into staring at a rectangular screen when they could be out discovering the real world with real friends. The amount of time kids spend with friends has plummeted since 2010, when they started getting smartphones, while cases of teenage anxiety, depression and self-harm have skyrocketed. Seven in ten students believe phone use has harmed their academic performance. It's not surprising! Studies show it takes 20 minutes to refocus after your attention has been broken. If that's happening hundreds of times a day, that's a large portion of your day you're not focused on what you're doing or what's happening around you. Phones will not stop getting more addictive unless change happens. We are working with politicians to pressure the Government into stopping profit-driven companies from infiltrating our kids' minds.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Can I tame my 4am terrors? Arifa Akbar on a lifetime of insomnia – and a possible cure
I can't remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep. The artist Louise Bourgeois suffered a bad bout of insomnia in the 1990s, during which she created a series of drawings. Among them is an image that features musical notes in red ink, zigzagging across a sheet of paper. They look like the jagged score of an ECG graph that has recorded an alarmingly arrhythmic heartbeat. It sums up the torment of my insomnia: there is a raised heartbeat in every sound. I have been told that to overcome an inability to sleep you must find its root cause, but this quest for an original impetus is guesswork. Was it self-inflicted in childhood, or does it track further back than that, to infancy, to the womb, to genetics? One starting point is Professor Derk-Jan Dijk's view of a 'sleep personality', and the idea that childhood sleep habits can be the same later in life. I was born in London, but my family moved to Lahore when I was three years old, before returning to the UK a couple of years later. In Pakistan, there was vigorous, carefree slumber, on the roof of the house on the hottest nights, with the extended family in close proximity. It was sleep as communal ritual. Then the standstill after lunch when everyone lay down again in siesta. I remember my sister, Fauzia, sleeping beside me on these afternoons. There was no hint of insomnia until the move back to Britain when we found ourselves homeless, living in a disused building in north London for a while, crammed into a single room, before moving into a council flat. In light of Dijk's words, I see how my insomnia might be a reaction against this early chaos, along with my exacting need for order and silence in adulthood, but that is my own armchair analysis. There are so many gaps in sleep science that I wonder if sleep is by its nature too mysterious to systematise. If science can't explain the grey areas around sleep, maybe art can shed a light. It is surprising, given the painting's sense of joyous night-time, that Van Gogh painted his post-impressionist masterpiece The Starry Night in the midst of depression, after being admitted to an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the summer of 1889. A year before, in a letter dated 16 September 1888, Vincent tells his brother, Theo, that he is doing six to 12 hours of non-stop work, often at night, followed by 12 hours of sleep. By the following year he was in the grip of a 'FEARSOME' insomnia. On 9 January 1889, weeks after slicing part of his ear off in a high state of anxiety, he writes to Theo about his torment. He is fighting sleeplessness with a 'very, very strong dose of camphor' on his pillow and mattress, he says, and he hopes it will bring an end to the insomnia. 'I dare to believe that it won't recur.' I read Van Gogh's hope as optimistic desperation. In my case, it has always returned. Yet, even in his 'insensible' state, Vincent tells Theo that he is reflecting on the work of Degas, Gauguin and his own art practice; he continues to think, paint, write letters, with the insomnia existing alongside his productivity. The glittering night sky Van Gogh imagines beyond the confines of his asylum is an embodiment of the way we so often think of the gifted artist at night: synapses fizzing, imagination touched by divinity, a compulsively unsleeping genius channelling a heightened state of buoyant creativity. Countless artists and writers have elected to work after dark, from Toulouse-Lautrec, documenting night revelries at the Moulin Rouge, to Franz Kafka, Philip Guston and Patricia Highsmith. Musicians, too: the Rolling Stones' all-night jam in the lead-up to their appearance at Knebworth in 1976, for instance; or Prince, whose recording sessions could last across a continuous 24 hours. Certainly, if Van Gogh still suffered from insomnia when he was painting The Starry Night, it makes sleeplessness seem beatific – a curse turned gift. There is none of this buoyancy in Louise Bourgeois's night scribblings. She suffered from sleeplessness throughout her life but faced a particularly debilitating bout of night-time anxiety between 1994 and 1995, during which time she made her Insomnia Drawings series. 'It is conquerable,' she said, and for her it was conquered, by filling page after page of a drawing diary with deliriously repeated doodles and circles within circles, a mess of scribbles that look like screams on paper. They are so different from the enormous stainless steel, bronze and marble spiders and other caged sculptures for which Bourgeois is better known, but I feel a peculiar kind of excitement upon seeing these images, with their agitating boredom and alertness, side by side. The artist Lee Krasner also painted her way through chronic insomnia, around the time her mother and then her husband, the painter Jackson Pollock, died – the latter in a drink-driving car crash in 1956, with his lover Ruth Kligman, who survived, in the seat beside him. Krasner's Night Journeys series has some similarities to Bourgeois's drawings, featuring repeating, abstract patterns, but washed in an earthy sepia brown. The patterns are insect-like, as if ants are crawling across the retina. I am inspired by the images. Rather than seeking escape or avoidance of their sleepless state, Bourgeois and Krasner stare it in the face, and it stares back at them, an abyss of maddening monotony. There has only been one instance in my adult life when sleep became easy. Or rather, it became compulsive – as much as the insomnia was, and perhaps even more disturbing. It happened when Fauzia died in 2016, at the age of 45, of undiagnosed tuberculosis. She had been admitted to hospital with an unknown illness, and lay wired to a ventilator in intensive care. When the hospital called to say she had had a fatal brain haemorrhage one morning, the shock of it was too much to take in. So I began to sleep. No amount was enough and I felt increasingly worried by the long, blank nights, which did not bring relief but became as strangely burdensome as the insomnia had once felt. Haruki Murakami's novel After Dark features two sisters, the younger, Mari, mourning the older sibling, Eri, who is in a coma-like state. The book takes place over a single night in Tokyo as Mari roams through the city, meeting its nocturnal characters: a trombonist, a Chinese sex worker, the manager of a love hotel. All the while Eri lies in a trapped and mysterious kind of sleep. It might be an undiagnosed illness, a psychological condition or even a radical protest at the world and her place in it – we are never sure. Mari refuses to see her sister as 'dead', even though there seems no prospect of Eri's waking up. She looks at her sister's face and thinks that 'consciousness just happens to be missing from it at the moment: it may have gone into hiding, but it must certainly be flowing somewhere out of sight, far below the surface, like a vein of water'. This is how I saw Fauzia as she lay in hospital, after her haemorrhage. Even though we were told she'd remain on a ventilator for 24 hours as a formality before being pronounced dead, I kept watching for her to twitch awake, sure that it would happen. It seemed as if she was in a deep sleep, albeit so submerged by it that she had become unreachable. In her lifetime, Fauzia went through long bouts of oversleeping brought on by depression. There seemed to be a rebellion in it, too. From the age of 19, when she first became seriously depressed, she began holing herself up in her room, sleeping for the night and most of the following day. In the medieval era, the act of daytime sleeping, for men and for women, was seen to harm one's reputation. Many still regard it as slovenly and it can be subversive for exactly this reason. For a woman, especially, to refuse to get up and assume her role in the world – which may be one of monotonous domesticity, of caring for others, or of participating in the tedious, lower-rung machinery of capitalist productivity – might be a defiant act of saying 'no'. What might look like inertia, or passivity, can be an active summoning of inner strength, as suggested by Bruno Bettelheim in his psychoanalytic interpretations of fairytales in The Uses of Enchantment. He speaks of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) not as an example of meek femininity but as an adolescent 'gathering strength in solitude'. Her sleep is a temporary turning inward in order to foment, mobilise and psychically prepare for the battles of adulthood to come. A glassy-eyed, self-medicating woman in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation also 'hibernates' in her New York apartment. She is a Manhattan princess, narcissistic and hard to like, who does not want to experience any of life's sharp edges. Yet there is something I recognise in her overwhelming desire to disconnect from the terrible reality of the world. She plans to sleep for a year and wake up cured of her sadness, and she is. My sleep wasn't a cure, but the oversleeping did eventually lift and leave me feeling less numbed to my own sadness. Now I was glad to be returned to myself, and to my insomnia – an old friend, missed. There is evidence to suggest that women sleep differently from men and feel the effects of insomnia in discrete ways. Professor Dijk cites the familiar list of causes, from lifestyle to social class, wealth and genetics, but he has also found sex-based biological factors, with differences in the brainwaves of women and men when they sleep. Women intrinsically have different circadian rhythms, which are on average six minutes shorter than men's cycles; they experience more deep (or 'slow wave') sleep and may need to sleep for longer; while a mix of social factors, from breastfeeding to lower-paid shift work, means they face higher levels of insomnia. Sleep science makes a significant connection between hormones and sleep for women in the throes of menopause. About 50% of women who suffer with insomnia as they approach menopause are thought to sleep for less than six hours a night. The cumulative effects of this sleeplessness can be so intense that some have questioned whether they might be linked to UK female suicide rates, which are at their highest between the ages of 50 and 54. This brings another kind of insomnia for me, as I turn 50. It creeps duplicitously into my night, so I don't recognise it; I fall asleep quickly but am awake again at 4am with alarm-clock precision. This is not the organic and woozy 'biphasic' interruption believed by some to have been common in the centuries before electric light, in which communities were said to have a first and then a second sleep through the night, getting up to work or chat in between in a brief window referred to as 'the watch'. My brain is pin-sharp, as if the sleep before has been entirely restorative and I am ready to start the day, except there is a move towards a certain line of thought, a search for the faultlines of the previous day, the urgent address of an old argument or decision far in the future. And it is, in its scratchy insistence, so much like Bourgeois's scribbled red balls and Krasner's insects, that I wonder if they were experiencing menopausal sleep disruption while creating their works. Whereas younger insomniacs struggle to fall asleep, those in midlife might doze off quickly but wake up in the middle of the night as a result of hormonal changes, and it is in these 4am 'reckonings' that they encounter the night-time brain, says Dr Zoe Schaedel, who sits on the British Menopause Society's medical advisory council. 'Our frontal lobe [which regulates logical thought] doesn't activate as well overnight, and our amygdala [the brain's command centre for emotions, including fear, rage and anxiety] takes over.' So the very nature of thinking is different at 4am. In the daytime it is primarily logical, but at night we become more rash, anxious, catastrophic. That sets off its own physiological reaction in the nervous system, with a surge of adrenaline and cortisol, as well as rising heart and breathing rates. Between the waking, there is a welter of dreams, so many it seems like someone is changing between the channels on a TV set. Dr Schaedel says this apparent assault of dreams is an illusion. When oestrogen drops, women start sleeping more lightly and waking up in the latter part of the night, in the shallower REM, or dream, phase, which gives the impression of dreaming more because you are waking up more often in the midst of them. Still, I am wrongfooted by this second life in my head, this middle-aged night, as busy, as complicated and as exhausting as the day. When insomnia is at its most agitating, engaging the brain visually may be a way to lull ourselves back to sleep, says Dr Schaedel. This idea makes better sense of Bourgeois's scribbling. Maybe I would find my own recurring patterns on paper if I did the same thing, I think, and so I put a notebook beside my bed. I know I have had a maelstrom of dreams but, when I try to discover them on paper, it is like a stuck sneeze. I write a few words down, but I am left straining for more. A few snatched images come back, but far more float out of view, so much unreachable. The next night I can recall even fewer details, although I know I have dreamed heavily. So my odyssey of dreams evades any attempt at codification. They are determined to remain mysterious, on the other side of daytime. This is an edited extract from Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into the Night, published by Sceptre on 3 July at (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
