Thoughts of a Psychology Student

It is known that teenagers’ body clocks are far from normal. Staying up till early morning is all too common for whatever reason, whether it’s because you are re-watching your favourite TV series again and can’t draw yourself away from the compelling storyline or whether, for some unknown reason, as soon as the clock hit 9pm, you developed the energy of several condensed suns. Inevitably this causes us to wake up well into the hours of early afternoon the next day, leaving little time for any productivity and ironically, no energy either. From what I can gather (through some regrettably brief and incomplete research), we need sleep because: during sleep, a growth hormone is released our body needs a chance to replace tissue and chemicals that are used up or destroyed during the day our brain needs a chance to “sort through” the information we have processed during the day So the firs two reasons are bodily reasons why sleep is so important. It seems to suggest that wit...

I am an ordinary teenager. I go to bed too late and struggle to rise in the morning. I mindlessly complain about having to go to school, having to do homework, having to revise; the list is endless. Like many teenagers, I have wild and unrealistic dreams about how good it would be to stop going to college and travel the world to experience different cultures and meet new people. Making my way across continents in a campervan, reading books and writing poetry. However it is depressingly obvious that these dreams are out of the question and that getting decent grades to get to a good uni to complete a highly regarded degree to get a well paid job is what is expected of us all in today’s society. So, when I stumbled across this video this afternoon on Facebook, I realized that it’s not learning and education that’s the problem, its school itself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-eVF_G_p-Y Now don’t get me wrong. I  love  to learn and I thrive on discovering new...

So I know over the past couple of weeks, rumblings from North Korea have made their way across the Pacific Ocean to the USA raising concerns about the looming threat of nuclear war, and after watching a BBC Panorama on North Korea, it got me thinking… What psychology lies behind the mass hysteria and indoctrination that has engulfed North Korea and is eerily reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s infamous Nuremberg Rallies in the 1930′s… Firstly, inevitably, we must address the nature of North Korea’s society which so clearly states that anyone attempting to oppose either Kim Il-Sung (Eternal Leader) or Kim Jong-un (Supreme Leader) has to be punished, either by exile to a political concentration camp or execution. Even doctors asking for more funding to buy medication for hospitals face death as a consequence of their actions. This oppressive society – reminiscent of George Orwell’s ’1984′ ministry-of-truth style novel – is such that people are forced to comply with state rules ...

So I was sat on the train the other day, and I overheard a conversation between a mother and a child about the supposed ‘excessive’ amount of time that he spent on ‘screens’ during the day. The mother’s argument was that his ‘addiction’ to these screens had a negative effect on the way he socialised in real life, and his performance at school. Now, whilst I agree that sitting on Facebook for hours on end, absent mindedly refreshing the page for something remotely interesting to appear on your news-feed is counter productive to say the least, I strongly disagree that spending time on ‘screens’ is a bad thing; providing you go about it in the right way. We are blessed with the gift of the internet. We have an enormous archive of valuable knowledge quite literally at our fingertips, and the younger generations have all the skills and intuition to access it. I have been struck recently at the amount of fantastic educational channels that exist on YouTube. Ter...