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21 Feb

Are people in their 20s really adults or are they Kidults?

New research suggests that real adulthood begins around age 25 because neurological changes are still occurring that could be due to delaying big responsibilities like marriage, parenthood and mortgages. Beatriz Luna, a professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, discusses the findings.

So what is happening, neurologically, to delay adulthood now to the mid-20s?
What we’re seeing in the latest findings are two things: number one, the prefrontal cortex, which supports planning, complex cognition and so forth, that’s already there. It’s the limbic system, which supports motivation and reward and enthusiasm and novelty-seeking, which we had thought was peaking during adolescence, that seems to continue to increase its hyperactivity all the way through the beginning of the 20s.

LSA’s 30 Days of Change Challenge

So here we are it’s February in Canada when we spend more time indoors and think about what we’re going to be able to do when the weather gets better.

For some of us we are still deep in the ritual of our New Years resolutions to eat clean, lose 40 lbs and solve world peace. Our goals are often lofty and set out by what the new trend in the media is. Maybe we are eating more quinoa and going to Crossfit.

Sleep! It’s just common sense :)

Article Summary: Disturbed Sleep contributes to significantly diminished mental health and is a gateway to increased risk of serious mental health problems.

Depression and insomnia

Insomnia was in the past seen as a symptom of ‘something else’ or, if associated with depression, the general consensus was that the insomnia would just ‘go away’ when the depression was treated. This concept was first challenged with the finding that if individuals had previously experienced depression, sleep disturbance in the form of insomnia was found to be a symptom that preceded a recurring bout of depression (Breslau, Roth, Rosenthal, & Andreski., 1996). More direct relationships between untreated insomnia and depression have since been established (Riemann & Voderholzer, 2003; Cole & Dendukuri, 2003)