you r not alone in this

There is no other way to put it – we were a ragtag bunch. After all, what do you get when you bring together two middle-aged mums, one dad, two younger techies, a designer and a journalist?

Probably a row of people sitting next to one another on the MRT train on the way to work.

Instead, this group came to The Mind Cafe in Prinsep Street every week to chat. And not just about anything, but well-being skills, and how we can put them into practice in our lives.

In other words, the one thing all seven of us had in common was our wish to cope better with life’s difficulties and be happier.

This was one of the well-being circles by social enterprise Happiness Initiative. Being in the circle involves attending eight Saturday morning group discussions on various topics, led by two trained volunteer facilitators.

Well-being circles are not a replacement for therapy, but meant to enable us to bounce back from life adversities, reads the message by Happiness Initiative co-founder Simon Leow in the participant journal we were all given.

I had signed up to kick habits that make me unhappy.

The mindless doomscrolling – excessively scrolling through content that makes one feel negative – tended to be my go-to coping mechanism when I was stressed or sad. I would dwell upon what I was lacking and reproach myself – which stressed me out even more.

Our facilitators at the well-being circle pointed us to American psychologist Martin Seligman’s theory that humans are primed to worry to stay alive. We are constantly on the lookout for things that demand our attention, to recognise dangers and think about how to survive them.

In the programme, we learnt that the key is to catch the negative thoughts beginning to take hold and to question them. For instance, is it really true that everything is always going wrong in my life? Not so. I might be having a bad day, but there are many things I am thankful for in my life.

We took some time to identify our triggers – events that draw a negative reaction from us – and ways to put a stop to the negative thoughts that come up whenever we are “triggered”. For me, I find that breaking away from a certain app to take a shower can stop a downward spiral of social comparisons and self-loathing.

We were taught to become more aware of our beliefs – and the feelings that flow from them. Negative or limiting beliefs like “I’m not good enough” could then be challenged and reframed to a more constructive narrative, such as “I can learn from this”.

The sessions gave us a structured way of thinking about our problems and coming up with solutions – an empowering experience.

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Real talk

We had our doubts about how effective the circle would be when we started out. Our backgrounds were different and the age range was wide. “Thank goodness you’re in my group,” one person told me. “I thought I would be the only young one.”

Interestingly, it was this diversity that enabled candid discussions. Knowing that these were people who I wouldn’t have had a chance to talk to outside of sessions, I confided in them freely, without fear of judgment or repercussion.

The others must have felt the same, and soon earnest conversation flowed among near-strangers. Questions were asked and answered.

I soon found myself taking in different perspectives, going beyond the assumptions of my usual circle. (After knowing your bestie for over a decade, you kind of know what she’s going to say when you tell her about another Instagram hang-up: “You’re still on this?”)

Often, what we see in a hyperconnected social media age are the highlight reels of people’s lives – the girls too good to be true, the paper-white teeth and perfect bodies that can make even Olivia Rodrigo want to throw her phone across the room.

The circle, in contrast, prompted us to think about our attachment styles, past pains, triggers and the bumpier stretches in life, whatever we were comfortable sharing. 

I was moved by the mum trying to improve her relationship with her daughter, the man navigating the difficulties of a job transition to a new company, the 20-somethings finding their way around loneliness or trying to start their own businesses.

We showed up week after week ready to share and to listen, with some of the conversations continuing into lunch at Plaza Singapura.

We’d skip the small talk and the niceties usually associated with strangers, diving straight into things that mattered to us.

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The circles, which have just concluded their sixth wave, have had a ripple effect.

The two facilitators in my group are former participants who came back as volunteers. Happiness Initiative’s other co-founder, Mr Sherman Ho, tells me that 46 out of 168 volunteers have participated in previous circles.

The next round of well-being circles for the social enterprise will be an inter-university one, starting in January 2025 with student participants from the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University and Singapore University of Social Sciences.

Apart from Happiness Initiative’s programme, there are now 11 other well-being circles in Singapore that address the specific needs of each community. These include youth-centric circles such as Project Re:ground @ The Red Box in Orchard Road, and one in the Yuhua area, where there is rising concern for the mental well-being of elderly people.

More than 3,000 people have participated in these community well-being circles, overseen by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth as a key component of the SG Mental Well-Being Network. This is a national platform launched in 2022 to connect citizens, social service agencies and mental health advocacy organisations to safeguard mental health.

On my part, I’ve made my partner take tests to find out his character strengths and attachment style, or think about his deep-seated beliefs, often right after the sessions over a cooling plate of mala.

It has made for some good lunch conversations.

Meanwhile, my circle has come to the end of its eight sessions.

Reflecting on my life and hearing about the lives of others has helped me feel less alone in my struggles.

I’m reminded of the lyrics of a song one group member brought up when another mentioned a sense of isolation in adulthood. “You’ve got troubles, I’ve got ’em too. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you. We stick together, we can see it through, ’cause you’ve got a friend in me.”

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building and moving house and the memories we have

Somewhere along the East Coast Park stretch, there is a tree branch “planted” into the sand.

It was a Covid-19 project. During the pandemic years, my family would sometimes cycle to the beach near our home in the evenings and make a quick picnic out of dinner.

On one of those excursions, my daughters – then three and six – delighted in finding a snapped-off branch with leaves still attached to it. They dug a little hole in the sand, stuck the branch in it, and carefully doused it with water from their drinking bottles.

In the intervening years, we’d search for “our plant” when in the vicinity. “There it is,” the girls would sometimes say when they glimpsed a sapling, imagining that the branch had grown.

Later on, as they got older and busier, and my time got more compressed, we did not look for the plant as often any more, but it still looms large in our collective memories – a moment of no significance to others, but evocative of a certain time and place for us.

At the end of 2024, my family will be moving out of our home in Siglap, where we have been living for eight years and which is pretty much the only home that the girls, now six and nine, have known. We will be shifting almost halfway across the island to be closer to their school, so we are leaving not just the apartment but the entire neighbourhood and community.

When my husband and I decided on the move earlier this year, we quickly and decisively set things in motion, recognising the good sense that drove it.

Yet, in the months since, I have also found myself at times unexpectedly bowed by emotion at the prospect. At dinner with a good friend and current neighbour one night, I found myself tearing up in the restaurant as I spoke about the impending move.

What was I grieving for?

The music in the community

At work and even at home, much of my attention is turned outwards.

In a particularly hectic year of elections and hot wars around the world, my colleagues and I are constantly keeping abreast of fast-moving developments across different time zones, ranging from big-power rivalry to political polarisation, economic malaise, religious nationalism and disinformation campaigns – so that we can make sense of what is happening and why it matters to our readers in Singapore and South-east Asia.

It is exciting and meaningful work. But it can also be consuming. As The Straits Times US bureau chief Bhagyashree Garekar remarked during a recent work retreat back in Singapore, “you have to be a little in love with what you are doing” to constantly seek to understand the nuances of all that is unfolding.

To keep things on an even keel, I find myself hunkering down at home and in the neighbourhood during my spare time, seeking solidity in everyday life.

When someone asked me what I do for self-care, I replied that I enjoy going to the wet market every week in Marine Terrace.

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The reasons are twofold: For one, I reckon I am being somewhat productive even as I relax by buying fresh produce and flowers for the home.

But there is another factor at play: Over the years, I have struck up some sort of relationship with the vendors there.

The vegetable uncle knows that I am always on the lookout for Singapore-harvested vegetables and throws in some sprigs of spring onion or coriander. The flower auntie thrusts Cantonese mock-scoldings and packets of Yakult at my daughters. I exchange holiday plans with the fishball noodle uncle.

Our mutual dance of commerce has evolved, from the initial years of fumbling in wallets and fanny packs for banknotes and coins to a quick wave of the mobile phone as the QR code became ubiquitous in the market. Some were faster, others were slower, but everyone is now on board and I saw the market aunties and uncles grow, in that sense, as they saw my children grow.

On weekends, our family evening routines generally take one of the following two forms. We bike along the park connector – where both girls have learnt how to ride as we run and pant alongside them – to a nearby playground where children from nearby homes play grounders. Or we bike to Bedok Jetty, where taciturn fishermen oblige the girls with their many questions: “What did you catch? Is the fish dead? What are you going to do with it?”

We will miss them, as we will miss the friendly Burmese woman at the dry-cleaners in Frankel Avenue, the staff at a hipster bagel-and-records joint in Joo Chiat Road that once made my daughter’s day by playing her then favourite Beatles song over the speakers, and the Jalan Tua Kong coffee shop stall owners who helped me out when I urgently needed cash for a funeral wake – I PayLah-ed them in return.

Research has shown that eight out of 10 people apparently buy goods from their local business because of how that same business helped the community. That might be true, but I like to think that what is greasing these relationships is simply humanity.

Of course, at our new home, there will be new places to discover, new memories to make, new community relationships to build. It will just take time.

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Regrets, I’ve had a few

I have wondered if what is really also happening is that I am grieving the passing of my children’s childhood, one associated with our current home.

Our older daughter is in the final months of her single-digit years, and the younger one is fast losing her babyishness as she prepares for primary school. While I try to live in the present, I sometimes pre-emptively don the armour of mentally girding myself for the future when they grow up and necessarily grow apart.

Parenting experts, in trying to offer exhausted parents of young children some perspective as they ride out the challenging period of herding little ones, warn that “the days are long but the years are short”.

I have found both the years and the days to be incredibly short.

Mixed into all of this is the seemingly inevitable guilt of being a working mother, one trying to juggle the many balls up in the air.

On one of my days off work this year, I walked our younger daughter to school instead of dropping her off on the way to the office. She is young enough to still find magic in the pathways, be it blowing on a lalang stalk or balance-walking on the ledges that line the street-side verges.

Midway, we found a snail across the pavement. We worried that someone was going to step on it, and tried to move it. But the creature simply would not budge and I gave up after a while. After taking a few steps, my daughter said: “Mama, let’s try to make it wet so the snail can walk.” She doubled back, splashed some water from her bottle on the snail and I moved it to the side with ease.

Having saved the world, or rather, a snail, we carried on.

Will such moments be gone, I think, allowing myself to be melodramatic. Have I given her enough of myself, at a time when she still wants me?

The answer is probably no. But I have also come to the conclusion that what I can give of myself – if I am not busy and am happy at work – is also not satisfactory.

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In trying to reframe my thinking, I have landed on the takeaway that what I am closing a chapter on is not so much my children’s childhood, but a specific idea I have had about the kind of mother I can or should be. A colleague, who is mum to a teenager, reassures me that my children will still need me, albeit in different ways.

While preparing for the move, we are sorting out our worldly possessions accumulated over eight years – from the massive amounts of artwork that the children did in their pre-school years to clothes now too tight, too faded, too faddish.

We are throwing out stuff and making space. A new home awaits.

happy teacher day

SINGAPORE – In 1948, at the age of 23, my grandmother, Madam Zhang Juan, raised $500 to buy Poi Chai school in Sembawang.

Situated in the kampung at Chong Pang, the Chinese-medium school served the children in the area.

In those difficult times, she served not just as the principal managing the school’s administration, but also had to take on the roles of music teacher and operations manager.

To encourage parents to send their children to school, she went door to door visiting families, waiving fees where necessary so that no child would be deprived of an education due to life circumstances.

Life in post-war Singapore was difficult, as individuals and families struggled to pick up the pieces.

No doubt my grandmother was one of those who heeded the call of the 1947 Ten-Year Programme introduced to provide education for all children, though this is something I cannot know for sure.

I had not thought to ask her before she died recently, just before she turned 100.

Training new teachers

To educate the young, the government of the day recognised that more teachers were required. The Teachers’ Training College (TTC) was set up in 1950, first for English-language teachers and later expanded to other language teachers.

After Singapore obtained self-rule in 1959, the courses at TTC were consolidated into a single three-year, in-service and part-time certificate course in January 1960. This was to grow the supply of primary school teachers to meet the needs of new schools.

TTC was replaced with the Institute of Education (IE) in 1973 under the charge of founding director Ruth Wong to focus on enhancing the quality of teacher education and professionalism.

My former mentor Edith See, an English language and literature teacher at Raffles Girls’ Secondary School, remembers teaching in the morning and reporting to IE in the afternoon as one of those in the inaugural batch.

She chose the part-time, 18-month course over the one-year, full-time one because the work-study arrangement included pay, which was necessary to contribute to family expenses, including her younger siblings’ education.

Caring for our children

Beyond the mandate of teaching to upskill a nation to meet its economic goals, teaching in its essence is a caring profession.

American philosopher and educator Nel Noddings (1929 to 2022) highlights that we should “want more from our educational efforts than adequate academic achievement” and that real education can only begin when “our children believe that they themselves are cared for and learn to care for others”.

This labour of caring was why my grandmother knocked on doors to talk to parents, borrowed money to improve the school premises and organised excursions for children who would not have much of a chance to venture out of Sembawang.

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At home, she cared for her seven children and, at school, she took care of more.

Emotional work continues to remain a crucial element in teachers’ encounters with students. This is why teaching is paradoxically both so rewarding and exhausting.

Learning to teach

By the time I chose to join the teaching profession in 1999, the Institute of Education had merged with the College of Physical Education to form the National Institute of Education (NIE).

I was part of the last batch of Postgraduate Diploma in Education students to complete my diploma in English Language and Literature at the Bukit Timah campus. In 2000, NIE would move to its current campus at the Nanyang Technological University.

In my first year as a teacher, I saved my lesson plans and resources on floppy disks, and printed Calvin And Hobbes comic strips and other classroom materials on flimsy transparent plastic slides.

Associate Professor Loh Chin Ee is deputy head (research) at the National Institute of Education’s English Language and Literature Academic Group. PHOTO: COURTESY OF LOH CHIN EE

I would go to the classroom, switch off the lights and turn on the overhead projector. The light would project an enlarged image of the slide so the entire class could view it.

For their assignments, my students recorded “talk shows” on cassette tapes and, a few years later, would create videos of Shakespeare parodies which they submitted using compact discs.

Fast-forward to 2024: Teachers look for resources on the Student Learning Space and the seemingly infinite worldwide web. They make use of apps such as Google Classroom, Nearpod and Kahoot, and dabble with generative artificial intelligence tools such as Midjourney and ChatGPT to generate lesson ideas and materials.

Besides grappling with new technology, teachers need to be continuously learning about their core discipline and updating their pedagogical knowledge and skills. My former and current students tell me they find time to read, keep up with the news, and go for professional development workshops, so that they can become better teachers for their students.

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Teaching the future

The purpose of teaching has not changed, but the context in which teaching occurs has.

Technology has accelerated the rate of transformation. Borders are porous, yet invisible walls may be put up both within a nation and across nations. Our teachers have to constantly adapt, managing their own lives and their students’ lives, to thrive.

At the opening ceremony of the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference held at NIE in 2024, Education Minister Chan Chun Sing brought up the concept of the “pedagogy of one”, which refers to the personalisation of education for a child according to his or her needs and strengths.

While technology will play a significant role in this move, teachers remain key for educating a nation.

To plan a single 40-minute lesson, a teacher needs to consider the content to be covered, the best pedagogical methods for engaging students and how to make full use of various resources, including technology.

An excellent teacher, as a study of award-winning English-language teachers by my NIE colleagues found, utilises his or her autonomy to design lessons with a student-oriented mindset, flexibly adapting the lessons to optimise learning.

In 1957, Singapore’s literacy rate was 52 per cent.

Today, the country counts as one of the highest performing ones on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment tests.

More crucially, we continue to engage with the question of how we can create opportunities for our children to flourish.

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The education of a nation is accumulative, beginning with my door-knocking grandmother, and many others like her.

To the many educators who continue in her footsteps, happy Teachers’ Day.

In memoriam Madam Zhang Juan, 1925-2024

A former secondary school teacher, Associate Professor Loh Chin Ee is a teacher educator at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University.

reducing teacher workload

SINGAPORE – Before I left the teaching service in April 2023, I was in 15 WhatsApp chat groups that were related to work.

These included chat groups with my form class of 37 Secondary 3 students, 12 English language department teachers, 35 drama club students and 11 subject teachers who also taught my form class.

More than half of these groups had important messages I had to take note of, or reply to, on a daily basis.

Sometimes after five periods of back-to-back lessons, I would check the notifications on my phone and shudder seeing the number of unread messages.

This came to mind when Education Minister Chan Chun Sing said on Sept 18 that teachers do not need to share their personal phone numbers or respond to work-related messages after school hours.

The aim of these new guidelines, he said, is to ensure educators have protected time to spend with their families, rest and recharge.

This is a step in the right direction. I do not think, however, that it will afford teachers more “me-time”. Teachers have many demands on their time and taking calls after school hours is just one issue, and perhaps not even the biggest one.

For one thing, the scenario of parents hounding teachers over trivial issues like spelling lists and which attire to wear is probably more common in primary schools, where most children do not have their own mobile phones.

And when I taught in secondary school, I seldom encountered the challenge of being overly accessible to parents or students after school hours.

The messages I received were typically from students, five minutes before the morning flag-raising ceremony, telling me that they were in the toilet with a tummy ache and would not make it for assembly.

So if you tell teachers that they won’t be disturbed after school hours, they will thank you. But they will also ask you to look at other aspects of their job that make it difficult.

One hat too many?

What truly drains teachers of their time and energy is the range of responsibilities they have to juggle.

The work that teachers need to handle during the school day often spills over into their personal time after school.

Teaching is just one small part of a teacher’s job.

The hours I spent in the classroom were often dwarfed by the time needed for lesson preparation, marking, meetings, organising events, managing co-curricular activities (CCAs), conducting remedial lessons, handling disciplinary issues, performing committee and department work, as well as national examination duties.

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Teachers are pulled in many directions, often forced to balance the expectations of teaching in classrooms effectively with the numerous additional “out of classroom” duties.

The issue is systemic, and no amount of after-hours relief can address the exhaustion caused by overburdened schedules.

I’ll use myself as an example.

On a typical week day, I’d arrive in school before 7.15am and head over to the parade square for the flag-raising ceremony.

I’d mark my form class’ attendance, and message students who had not arrived to check if they were late or unwell.

My first lesson would start at 7.45am, and each period was 45 minutes long. I’d get a one-period break at 10am, which I would use to snack, print materials for the next lesson and squeeze in some marking.

After another two periods of lessons, I’d get my next break at 12.15pm. This time was spent having lunch, responding to e-mails and WhatsApp messages, and preparing the next lesson’s materials.

Since I was in charge of the Secondary 3 English lesson materials, I’d also use this time to print out the week’s resources for my colleagues and place the materials on their desks.

At 1.45pm, I’d begin my last two classes of the day. I’d finish at 3.15pm and quickly head over to the drama club room, to open it for students and the trainer before the co-curricular session started at 3.30pm.

Along the way, I’d meet three errant students and tell them to start on essays that were overdue.

While the CCA was ongoing, I’d go back to the staffroom and see two test papers on my desk that I needed to vet and pass on to my colleagues before leaving school for the day. So I’d grab the papers and my laptop, and head back to the drama club room, where I was stationed till 6pm.

I’d take attendance and start calling up the parents of students who did not report for their CCA.

I’d complete the vetting of the test papers and run up to the staffroom to hand them to another teacher, while trying to locate one of the students who had yet to submit his overdue essay.

Back in the drama club room, I’d read an e-mail about committee work. As a member of the spatial and learning environment committee, which is tasked to improve the school’s infrastructure, I was responsible for duties such as writing synopses for 10 student artworks to be displayed around the school.

After dismissing my CCA students and firming up administrative details like rehearsal timings, I’d look through the next day’s timetable to ensure all was in order.

I’d notice that some niggling tasks such as drafting a letter to parents, booking a bus and catering snacks had not been done. But since it was already a little past 6pm, I’d leave them for the next day.

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By the time I finally collected the three essays my students submitted late and drove home, it was almost 7pm.

While spending time with my children and having dinner with them, my mind would also be on the three essays I needed to mark after they went to bed.

So while this new policy may offer some relief to teachers and set some boundaries, it is merely a small Band-Aid on a much larger problem – the excessive workload which pressures teachers to perform and also overwhelms them.

21st century problems

The ministry has taken some steps to lighten teachers’ workload in recent years, including giving schools greater flexibility to pace the implementation of some initiatives, and experimenting with technology to support some tasks like planning lessons and administrative work.

But challenges persist. Teachers do so much more than just teach, and the job has become very complex in the last decade. Today, they are expected to weave technology into lessons, use hybrid learning platforms and manage students’ use of personal learning devices while ensuring they remain engaged.

Teachers also have to cater to an increasingly diverse profile of students with behavioural issues, special learning needs or mental health concerns. Discipline in schools can get more challenging with problems like vaping and cyber bullying. The push to develop “21st century skills” like creativity, collaboration and problem-solving has resulted in several curriculum reviews which teachers have to stay on top of.

All these developments are necessary and good, but does a teacher need to wear so many hats? Being spread so thin may in fact do a disservice to students under their charge.

Beyond the core duty of subject teaching, some educators are better at connecting with students, some have a passion for certain CCAs, others prefer reviewing broader school policies and brainstorming for new ideas, while some are adept at refining the curriculum for different student profiles.

Instead of expecting teachers to perform a variety of tasks and evaluating how effective they are across all of them, one way is to give them space and time to find their niche and where they can make the most difference.

It’s time to consider reforms that prioritise teaching quality and teacher well-being over multi-tasking ability.

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happiness

NEW YORK – You have experienced it: the urge to withdraw and duck experiences you know you will enjoy, even when a mood boost is what you need most.

You skip the birthday party. You cancel lunch. They just do not seem worth the effort. And then, more likely than not, you feel worse than you did before.

So how do you find the motivation to get out there, especially when you are feeling low, stressed, tired or lonely? One proven strategy is to strengthen what psychologists call your reward sensitivity.

People’s drive to seek out happiness is a muscle that they can develop. So is their ability to relish experiences. And almost anyone can learn to amp up their reward sensitivity by training himself or herself to notice and savour his or her positive emotions.

That is even true for people with depression and anxiety who struggle to experience pleasure, a condition called anhedonia.

Of course, many people have trouble pursuing pleasure sometimes.

I recently took my young sons to the beach for the weekend. Hours before our getaway, I learnt a friend had died. Numbed by the news, I was in no mood to have a good time, even though I wanted to make things special for my family.

It is part of my job as a therapist to teach people how to manage their emotions. And, as I tell my patients, it is possible to honour legitimate sources of pain and still recognise that moments of brightness improve our well-being.

The research-backed strategies below, which I use in my practice, helped me to make the most of our trip.

Reward sensitivity and mental health

When it comes to mental health treatment, doctors and therapists tend to focus on easing their patients’ negative symptoms – they want “to take away the bad”, said professor of psychology Alicia Meuret at Southern Methodist University.

Yet most people do not just need to reduce pain, but they also need to boost joy.

In fact, improving positive emotions can be a higher priority for patients than containing their depressive symptoms. And research shows that treatments based on this idea can be effective.

A 2023 study co-led by Dr Meuret found that when adults experiencing depression or anxiety participated in 15 weeks of psychotherapy focused on enhancing positive emotions, they reported more improvement than a group whose therapy focused on reducing negative emotions.

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Shorter interventions have shown benefits as well.

A 2024 study of 85 students, led by assistant professor of psychology Lucas LaFreniere at Skidmore College, gave subjects with anxiety regular smartphone prompts to plan pleasurable activities, savour positive moments and look forward to future positive events. After a week, they showed significantly improved feelings of optimism.

An exercise to boost your reward sensitivity

Your drive to seek out happiness is a muscle that you can develop. So is your ability to relish experiences. PHOTO: PIXABAY

To raise your reward sensitivity, you can try an exercise based on the treatment plans in these studies. Make it a daily practice for as long as it is helpful, but commit to at least a week.

Begin by planning one activity a day that will make you happy or give you a sense of accomplishment. This will make you less likely to postpone positive experiences. Be realistic – it can be as small as treating yourself to a favourite snack, reading a few pages of a novel or video-calling a friend.

After you have enjoyed that daily moment, close your eyes and recount out loud, in the present tense, where and when you experienced the greatest joy. Home in on details and physical sensations, like the breeze cooling your face as the sun shines.

This might feel hokey, but do not gloss over the specifics, Dr Meuret cautioned. The idea is not just to remember how you felt, but also to amplify and re-experience it.

More ways to stretch positive feelings

Here are some more subtle but powerful tweaks you can make to nurture a positive mindset.

Expand your joy vocabulary: Many people struggle to label their positive emotions much beyond fine, good or great. But research suggests that finding more words to describe those feelings can validate and intensify them, Dr Meuret said. When reflecting on how something made you feel, try to be precise, using words like serene, elated, exhilarated, delighted, inspired.

Share your highlight reel: Think about the details you typically volunteer when asked about your day or a recent trip. It can be tempting to vent. But broadcasting what made you happiest can make you feel better, spread that happiness to another person – and strengthen a bond, said associate professor of psychiatry Charlie Taylor at the University of California, San Diego, who researches social reward sensitivity.

Find silver linings: With practice, it is possible to notice the positives hidden in things that you might first see as negative, Dr Taylor said. For example, if you invited co-workers to get together and only one person showed up, you could easily view that as a failure. But the silver lining, he said, would be that you got to know that one person better.

Forecast future wins: If looking at your calendar sparks dread, Dr Meuret said, pick an event that is approaching and think of the best possible outcome. If you are tired and want to back out of meeting a friend for a workout, picture an especially energising class. Imagine smiling at each other across the room, feeling proud. Using imagery can encourage motivation and prime you for more uplifting experiences, Dr Meuret said.

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Give yourself permission to feel happy

Keep in mind, too, that it is normal to sometimes feel uncomfortable with pleasurable feelings, particularly if you experience depression and anxiety.

“Some people can feel vulnerable when they let themselves feel good,” Prof LaFreniere said. Worrying can make you feel like you are ready to respond to threats – but by constantly preparing for disaster, he said, people miss the happiness in front of them right now.

On my recent weekend trip with my kids, it was a challenge to let myself have fun.

But sharing s’mores by the glistening ocean still filled me with lingering delight. I made sure to pause and savour the best parts, like when some florists gave us fistfuls of hydrangeas and roses from a wedding arch they were taking apart alongside the beach.

I felt waves of sadness crashing through the trip, thinking of the friend I had lost, but letting myself bask in love and levity helped me find my balance again.

“The truth is,” Prof LaFreniere said, “sometimes we need to behave like happy people if we actually want to be happy.” NYTIMES

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connected workplace

We all want to feel like we belong. Psychologists have known this for a long time, describing belonging as a fundamental human need that brings meaning to our lives.

Traditionally, this need was filled by family and community networks. But as society becomes more individualised, with many people moving away from their community and family, the workplace has become an increasingly important source of meaning, connection and friendship.

Many employers know the value of belonging, boasting that their organisation is like a family – a place where everyone is welcome and takes care of one another. But, in reality, just being hired isn’t necessarily enough to feel like you belong. Belonging is about feeling accepted and included. This might mean feeling “seen” by your colleagues and manager, and that your work is recognised, rewarded and respected.

Most people want to do meaningful work; a sense of belonging and connection with others are part of this. Meaning in work may come from the job itself – doing something that aligns with our purpose – or from the relationships and roles people create in the workspace. Consider someone who has a (formal or informal) position of offering support to their colleagues. This sense of connection and belonging can make the job feel more meaningful.

Belonging is also good for business. Feeling excluded and lonely can lead people to disengage, negatively affecting their work performance. Surveys have found that over 50 per cent of people who left their jobs did so in search of better belonging, with younger workers more likely to leave.

The exclusion that comes from not belonging can be as painful as physical injury, and feeling isolated can have a range of negative health impacts. In contrast, when employees feel that they belong, they are happier and less lonely, leading to greater productivity, fewer sick days and higher profits.

As a psychotherapist, I work with people who feel unsupported and alone in the workplace due to direct or indirect discrimination and exclusion. The instinctive response can be to work harder to be accepted – but this can lead to burnout, trying to get the approval that might never come.

The Covid-19 pandemic altered how we think about and engage with work. Some businesses may feel that bringing people back into the office is the answer to building connections and fostering belonging. But the truth is, such actions alone could have the opposite effect.

People may withdraw and become less connected in such spaces. Those who prefer working from home may feel unsupported by their workplace if they have to come in to the office to deliver work they can do equally, if not more productively, at home.

On the flip side, for some people, being in the office offers a sense of belonging and connection that can be missing when working from home. Ideally, enabling a balance between the two allows people to benefit from the advantages of both spaces and work in a way that maximises productivity and connection. But it may be some time before employers figure out how to get the balance right.

ST ILLUSTRATION: MIEL

Finding belonging

Belonging is particularly important to consider as workplaces become more diverse. Workplace discrimination is more likely to be experienced by marginalised groups, and is a major barrier to belonging.

Employees in organisations that are more diverse, particularly in senior leadership positions, are more likely to feel a sense of belonging. Diversity is also related to greater productivity and profitability. But organisations must consider the diversity distribution. While grand statements of inclusion may attract new workers, if the senior leadership team is predominately white and middle class, these statements have little meaning.

For diversity to effectively create belonging, it has to go hand in hand with psychological safety. This means that everyone – not just those who share characteristics with the majority or the leaders – feels they have a voice and are listened to. A workplace where people feel nervous about raising concerns, are worried about making mistakes, or feel there is a lack of transparency is one that is lacking in psychological safety.

When people feel unable to bring their authentic selves to work, they may end up performing different identities or code-switching – adjusting their language – to become more “acceptable” and fit in. These strategies initially help workers create a sense of safety for themselves in the workplace, but can result in exhaustion and burnout.

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Friendships in the office

Creating ways that people can express their authenticity – for example, through employee resource groups such as women’s staff networks – can build a safe space to share with others who have similar experiences in the workplace. For those who are self-employed or work mostly from home, to combat isolation, consider finding online groups or local coworking spaces that mirror the social benefits of a workplace community.

Employees feel more connected with the wider team when their efforts are recognised and rewarded. But this does not have to be through a pay rise or promotion – even an e-mail from a manager can boost someone’s sense of belonging. The more recognition and appreciation for the work we put in, including from our colleagues, the more positive the benefit.

Not everyone has the opportunity to leave workplaces that make them feel unsafe or unhappy. If you are in this position, you can minimise the negative impact by finding connection and belonging outside of work, and reconnecting with people and activities that bring you meaning and joy.

Nilufar Ahmed is senior lecturer in social sciences at the University of Bristol in the UK. This article was first published in The Conversation

hardwork mummy

There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy seven-year-old to look after, but Dr Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called.

Dr Casares, 42, a paediatrician in Portland, Oregon, tried to clean up both messes and race back to her computer. “But I was completely unnerved and underperformed,” she said. “When my husband” – who hadn’t picked up when the school called – “and younger daughter came home a few hours later, the first words out of their mouths were ‘Didn’t you get anything for dinner?’ and ‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’”

In that moment, said Dr Casares, the author of Doing It All: Stop Over-Functioning And Become The Mom And Person You’re Meant To Be, she related to a Taylor Swift lyric, “I did all the extra credit, then got graded on a curve”.

It has always been exhausting to be a mother, but each generation has had its particular pressures and ways of coping. Boomer mums didn’t expect motherhood to be anything but difficult, though the lack of social awareness around anxiety and depression meant most would never openly discuss it.

Generation X mums had to prove that they could do everything men could do – and then return home and work a second shift. Some Gen Xers were children of divorce, manifested an ironic detachment from their troubles and were prescribed Prozac to deal with the problem.

‘You go, girl!’

And then came millennial mums, the women raised on “You go, girl!” in the 1980s and 90s and who today are in their 30s and early 40s. On average, they enrolled in college in higher numbers than men, married later and delayed having children, sometimes to prioritise careers and other times because – with student debt and less wealth than previous generations – it felt impossible not to.

Still, it seemed like some things had worked out in their favour. Perhaps they could juggle work and motherhood more successfully. Maybe their male partners, if they had them, would be more attuned to gender imbalances at home.

“No one had these hard conversations with us about just how difficult it is to be a parent, have a career and a partner,” said Professor Brandale Mills Cox, 38, the mother to a four-year-old and a 15-month-old in Silver Spring, Maryland. “No one really talked about the burden social media plays, where a huge part of what we see of other people’s experiences makes us feel we are lacking as mothers. And no one talks about the real day-to-day, such as the friction between you and your partner regarding how you raise your children.”

Prof Mills Cox of Howard University said she wished that her boomer mother had sat her down for a frank conversation about the moments when “you’ll just want to go into a room and cry”.

The millennial mother midlife crisis

Lately, some millennial mothers – particularly those who are middle- to upper-middle class – are finding themselves at a crisis point.

While many Gen X mums confronted the middle of their lives as children were leaving for college, millennial mums are doing so with much younger children, and many more years of mothering ahead of them. Some are struggling to reconcile the vision they had of motherhood with a harsher reality they did not feel totally prepared for.

Call it the millennial mother midlife crisis, or MMMC. The hallmark of an MMMC is not going off the grid, a la Rachel Fleishman, the strung-out mother in the novel (and hit streaming TV series) Fleishman Is In Trouble, or meeting up with other mums to release primal screams.

After all, rage and angst are out, and wellness, equanimity and mental health are in.

For lots of mums, the MMMC is about maintaining a chipper facade, the appearance of having it together while quietly imploding. If the MMMC had a mascot, it would be a swan, an animal gliding easily on the surface while paddling furiously beneath the water.

Professor Jean M. Twenge, the author of Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers And Silents – And What They Mean For America’s Future, said there was more of a bait-and-switch for millennial mothers than for Gen X mothers.

“Women are graduating at much higher rates, young women are accomplishing so many things, and then who is the one who still has to work when they aren’t feeling well during their first trimester?” said Prof Twenge, 52, of San Diego State University and the mother of three preteen and teenage children. “There is still this gender expectation.”

This is just one of the stinging realisations that can plant the seeds for an MMMC. While millennial women might have expected a more equitable home life, they still, in most cases, do a larger share of the domestic work and household worrying than men.

The expectations for modern parenting have grown alongside the pressure on women to have careers, Prof Twenge said, making the standards for achievement in every arena feel stratospheric for millennial mums.

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The self-improvement treadmill

Gen X mums were expected to do better, too, but millennials were the first to step into parenthood with social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, which made it easier than ever to compare just how well they stacked up against other mothers.

“It’s hard not to internalise, even though I know it’s all curated, that you could be doing it better,” said Ms Sophie Brickman, a 40-year-old mother of three, whose forthcoming novel, Plays Well With Others, follows a frazzled New York City mother, Annie, navigating the competitive landscape of 21st-century parenting.

Recently, Prof Twenge was looking at a picture on social media of an influencer who had just had a baby and was posing with perfect make-up.

“I feel bad for millennial women who have to look at this,” she said. “I had my first child in 2006, and now it has become this whole thing that you have to have these glamorous pictures right after you’ve given birth, which is crazy.”

With the internet at their fingertips, millennial mums can also fall down a rabbit hole of searching for the perfect stroller and endless – and often contradictory – advice about breastfeeding or sleep training. Rinse and repeat for every other parenting quandary.

“When we had questions about parenting, we went to a book or called the doctor,” said Professor Margie E. Lachman of Brandeis University, a baby boomer with millennial children. “We got an answer, and that was it. Millennial parents have immediate access to unlimited information.”

Millennials are more likely than previous generations to think about these mounting pressures in terms of therapy speak. But the drive to become a more mindful, less reactive, more positive parent – a kind of mantra among many millennial mums – can create its own kind of pressure cooker.

Ms Natasha Jung, a 37-year-old founder of a digital media company in Vancouver, British Columbia, said that while her immigrant parents worked very hard to put food on the table and give their children a better life, “there wasn’t enough of an opportunity to support me on the emotional side”.

Ms Jung said she tries to focus on her three-year-old son’s emotional development and accommodate his sensitivities. “Through therapy, journalling and working with a life coach, I’ve learnt how to re-parent myself so I can be a better parent and have patience,” she added.

She recalled times when she had “adult breakdowns” because she found it difficult to cultivate the more thoughtful, emotionally evolved parenting style she expects of herself. “It’s so much easier to default to yelling and threats,” she said.

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One of the crushing realisations of the MMMC is that there is little choice but to forge ahead.

I found myself in the midst of my own mothering crisis a few months ago, after my six-year-old daughter lashed out at me and my four-year-old son had a meltdown because he did not like that “water is wet”.

It was in many ways a mundane scene that many mothers would recognise, regardless of their generation. There were e-mails to send to school, play dates to arrange and lingering work tasks to complete.

Like many in my generation, I was also taking care of an elderly parent.

For the most part, millennial mums are not blowing up their lives. The divorce rate is lower for this generation, and the stereotypical trappings of a midlife crisis – like buying a flashy car – are more closely associated with men, anyway. Rather, millennials are testing what is possible at a moment when more is demanded of them and they are demanding more of themselves.

The MMMC is about grappling with the notion that for all the strides made by previous generations of mothers, motherhood is just as difficult as – and perhaps even more conflicted than – before.

“I think the core question for the current 30- and 40-something mothers is whether they are going to do anything about a society that continues to overburden them,” said Leslie Bennetts, the author of The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?

Otherwise, she added, more and more women are going to “feel like they are going to explode”.

There is no Instagram parenting hack or self-care practice that can lift my generation out of the MMMC – and our culture has some serious work to do to be more accommodating to mothers. But right now I need to pick my daughter up from the bus and nudge an elderly parent about taking a walk. NYTIMES

Hannah Seligson is a millennial and a mother to a daughter, six, and a son, four.

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dementia

Our brains change more rapidly at various times of our lives, as though life’s clock was ticking faster than usual. Childhood, adolescence and very old age are good examples of this. Yet for much of adulthood, the same clock seems to tick fairly regularly. One lap around the sun; one year older.

However, there may be a stage of life when the brain’s clock starts speeding up. The brain starts changing without you necessarily noticing it. It may even be caused (partly) by what’s in your blood. This stage of brain ageing during your 40s to 50s, or “middle-ageing”, may predict your future health.

Psychologists studying how our mental faculties change with age find that they decline gradually, starting in our 20s and 30s.

However, when assessing people’s memory of everyday events, the change over time appears to be especially rapid and unstable during middle age. That is, even among healthy people, some experience rapidly deteriorating memory, while for others, it may even improve.

This suggests that the brain may be going through accelerating, as opposed to gradual, change during this period. Several structures of the brain have been found to change in midlife. The hippocampus, an area critical for forming new memories, is one of them.

It shrinks throughout much of adulthood, and this shrinkage seems to accelerate around the time of middle age. Abrupt shifts in the size and function of the hippocampus during middle age could underlie memory changes like the ones mentioned above.

Ultimately, what allows the brain to carry out its functions are the connections between brain cells – the white matter. These connections mature slowly throughout adulthood, especially the ones connecting areas of the brain that deal with cognitive functions such as memory, reasoning and language.

Interestingly, during middle age, many of them go through a turning point, from gaining volume to losing volume. This means that signals and information cannot be transmitted as fast. Reaction time starts deteriorating around the same time.

Through the white matter connections, brain areas talk to one another and form interconnected networks that can perform cognitive and sensory functions, including memory or vision. While the sensory networks deteriorate gradually throughout adulthood, the cognitive networks start deteriorating faster during middle age, especially those involved in memory.

Much like how highly connected people in society tend to form cliques with one another, brain regions do the same through their connections. This organisation of the brain’s communication allows us to perform some of the complex tasks we might take for granted, such as planning our days and making decisions.

The brain seems to peak in this regard by the time we hit middle age. Some have even referred to middle age as a “sweet spot” for some types of decision-making, but then the network “cliques” start to break up.

It is worth stating at this point why these subtle changes matter. The global population aged 60 and over is set to roughly double by 2050, and with this, unfortunately, will come a considerable increase in dementia case numbers.

Too much focus on old age

Science has long focused on very old age, when the detrimental effects of time are most obvious, but, by then, it can often be too late to intervene. Middle age could be a period when we can detect early risk factors of future cognitive decline, such as in dementia. Critically, the window of opportunity to intervene may also still be open.

So, how do we detect changes without having to give everyone an expensive brain scan? As it turns out, the contents of blood may cause the brain to age. With time, our cells and organs slowly deteriorate, and the immune system can react to this by starting the process of inflammation. Inflammatory molecules can then end up in the bloodstream, make their way to the brain, interfere with its normal functioning and possibly impair cognition.

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In a fascinating study, scientists from Johns Hopkins and the University of Mississippi analysed the presence of inflammatory molecules in the blood of middle-aged adults and were able to predict future cognitive change 20 years down the line. This highlights an important emerging idea: age in terms of biological measures is more informative about your future health than age in terms of years lived.

Importantly, biological age can often be estimated with readily available and cost-effective tests used in the clinic.

“Middle ageing” may be more consequential for our future brain health than we think. The hurried ticking of the clock could be slowed from outside the brain. For example, physical exercise confers some of its beneficial effects on the brain through blood-borne messengers. These can work to oppose the effects of time. If they could be harnessed, they might steady the pendulum.

Sebastian Dohm-Hansen Allard is a PhD candidate, anatomy and neuroscience, at University College Cork in Ireland, and Yvonne Nolan is a professor in neuroscience at the same institution. This article was first published in The Conversation

smart ple

12 Habits of Genuinely Intelligent People.

1. They don't talk about how smart they are. They are busy growing their minds.

2. They learn best by studying what works and try it.

3. They try to figure things out themselves. They use a lot of experimentations and problem-solving approach to figure out things. 

4. They're always hunting knowledge. They focus on what they want to know, not what they already know.

5. They don't brag about what they know. They apply their knowledge instead. 

6. They connect the dots. They look for connections between dissimilar things, read across fields and disciplines.

7. They are curious and ask lots of serious questions.

8. They abstract from their experiences.

9. They seek out puzzles and paradoxes.

10. They have no problem with failure.

11. They don't try to sound smart.

12. They don't always use big words. They use the right words, when necessary, both big or simple, but focus on clarity and simplicity.

crucial sleep

TOKYO – Sleep deprivation has long been seen as a badge of honour in Japan, where people can commonly be found catching 40 winks on their daily commutes or even at work, with their fatigue deemed a measure of their diligence.

Many surveys have shown that the Japanese sleep the least among those in developed countries.

In October 2023, the Health Ministry was so alarmed by its own findings that only one in two were getting six hours of sleep a night that it issued guidelines urging people to sleep a minimum of six hours, along with other tips such as to avoid heavy meals or drinking alcohol before bedtime.

Nonetheless, there is a groundswell of social change prompted by a nascent but growing shift in lifestyle behaviour towards better personal well-being. This has catalysed a domestic sleep industry that is forecast to grow from 1.3 trillion yen (S$11.8 billion) in 2021 to 5 trillion yen by 2030.

Products that promote sleep include Tential’s Bakune eye mask, which retails for 3,850 yen, while a basic single-bed airweave mattress costs 115,500 yen.

The products go beyond mattresses and sleepwear, with companies developing sleep algorithms, supplements, and even games, including one by fan-favourite Pokemon.

There is also a loose alliance of companies that swear by the philosophy of a good night’s sleep, and have instilled a positive attitude towards sleep among their employees, such as by encouraging them to switch off and avoid excessive late-night overwork.

Studies cited by the Japanese government have shown that a lack of sleep can cost companies a loss in productivity of as much as 1.03 million yen per person a year, and is tied to increased job turnover. United States think-tank Rand has estimated that the economic loss due to sleep deprivation in Japan is as much as 15 trillion yen annually.

For individuals, not sleeping enough can lead to a vicious circle of further stress, depression, and other health problems like high blood pressure and stroke, experts have found.

As someone who has long cherished the value and benefits of quality sleep, I struggle to fathom why anyone would regard it as a necessary evil.

I wear a ring from Finnish health technology firm Oura that scores sleep quality, measures heartbeat, and tracks daily activity including number of steps taken and length of idle time. Surprisingly, in what I see as a sign of growing awareness of sleep technology, some friends and even my hairdresser either use the ring themselves, or can recognise it.

I also swear by the eye mask developed by home-grown start-up Tential, whose store in Tokyo’s Toranomon business district was doing brisk business during a recent lunchtime visit.

When I began using it more than a year ago, I noticed an immediate difference in sleep quality, waking up with my eyes more refreshed.

Value of sleep

Tential, founded in February 2018 by Mr Yutaro Nakanishi, 30, has seven stores across Japan on top of an online presence.

It sells functional recovery items, such as pyjamas – under its Bakune label – that use a proprietary fabric scientifically proven to promote blood circulation and better relaxation. They have also obtained Japanese government certification as a “home medical device”.

Professor Masaki Nishida, who heads Waseda University’s Sleep Research Institute, studied the product and found the material favourable for quality sleep.

He says: “By making it a habit to sleep while wearing recovery wear, everyone from busy businessmen to athletes can get better quality sleep, reduce stress, and achieve efficient recovery.”

Tential’s chief research and development officer Kenta Funayama, 35, is a national kick-boxer who left a top pharmaceutical firm to join the start-up in May 2022, hoping to focus on preventive care given that lack of sleep has been linked to a host of health issues.

Clothes in Tential’s Bakune series are made using a proprietary fabric which promotes blood circulation and better relaxation and, hence, deeper and more optimal sleep. PHOTO: TENTIAL/INSTAGRAM

He tells me that being an athlete makes him very sensitive to slight changes in his physical condition, which is influenced by sleep.

“Now that it is possible to track and analyse sleep, it is my personal hope that this will catalyse a mindset change towards better personal well-being and care, for society to regard sleep more holistically,” Dr Funayama says.

His colleague Shinnosuke Yoshimoto, 32, was once dismissive about sleep and blighted with issues such as serious insomnia and depression, but becoming a father changed him.

The communication director says: “I don’t want my children to experience what I went through, and better sleep is the key ingredient to a healthier and more positive society.”

A pioneering Japanese company in the sleep space is airweave, which was founded in 2004 and gained global fame at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics for its cardboard bed frames that were mocked as “anti-sex”.

Dr Kenta Funayama (left), a professional kick-boxer and Tential’s chief research and development officer, and communications chief Shinnosuke Yoshimoto in Tential’s store at Toranomon Hills in Tokyo ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

Founded by Mr Motokuni Takaoka, 63, the company is again a sponsor at the Paris 2024 Games, where it will provide 16,000 fully recyclable mattresses and cardboard frames for the athletes’ village.

For the Games, each mattress is divided into three blocks – for the shoulder, waist and lower body. The thickness of the blocks – soft, moderate, firm and extra firm – can be mixed and matched according to an athlete’s needs, which are determined using artificial intelligence.

The company was born in 2004, when Mr Takaoka took over his uncle’s fishing-line business that was on the brink of bankruptcy. Having suffered a neck injury in a traffic accident in his 20s, Mr Takaoka had a eureka moment when he realised that the polyethylene material used to make fishing lines could also be used to create an interwoven mesh for sleeping on.

Published studies have shown that airweave mattresses, with their interwoven mesh, can evenly distribute body weight and regulate temperature. This was proven to help athletes run faster and build up faster reflexes, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports.

Mr Motokuni Takaoka, 63, founder of airweave, jumping on a bed sample that was contributed to the Athletes’ Village for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, in this file photo taken in 2021. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

Gamification of sleep

Even telecommunications giant NTT is innovating and investing in sleep.

Just as Japan Airlines pioneered the Japan Sauna-bu Alliance of 206 companies that share a love for sweating it out, NTT is the driving force behind the “sleep network hub” Zakone that was launched in September 2022 and now has 102 members.

The Japanese word zakone (雑魚寝) literally means to sleep together on the floor in a huddle. Zakone’s community director Midori Sasaki, 35, says they had taken a leaf from the book of their sauna-loving friends.

Zakone gives businesses a platform to meet, network and discuss collaborative ideas over their shared values of a good night’s sleep. It hosts regular sleep seminars by experts, and other public events.

Ms Sasaki is among four leaders who are driving NTT’s sleep tech business, working with the start-up Brain Sleep founded by Professor Seiji Nishino of Stanford University. Together, they are building a sleep algorithm that helps users visualise their sleep quality, via a Brain Sleep Coin device that can be clipped onto pyjamas.

Her colleague Takahiro Umeda, 31, has even got himself certified as a sleep health consultant.

(From left to right) Mr Teppei Ogata, Ms Midori Sasaki and Mr Takahiro Umeda are part of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT’s sleep tech business. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

Mr Umeda, who used to sleep less than five hours a day, now clocks at least eight hours every night. He ensures a better sleeping environment by using warmer-coloured lights and avoiding screens at night. He no longer feels tired in the day, even without drinking coffee.

“People hardly notice a dip in performance due to a lack of sleep, though it is easy to notice the leaps and bounds in improvement during peak performance,” he says.

I ask how he squares the fact that sleep preferences vary by person. Some may prefer a harder pillow, for instance, while others may prefer to sleep with air-conditioning on. He says that at the root of these individual variances is hard science that can be quantified, with improvements that can be tailored to each person.

NTT is monetising its sleep tech business through consultancy services to companies that are eyeing a foray into the sleep space, says team member Teppei Ogata, 35. This could be in any field, from aromatherapy and music to food and education.

An event to promote quality sleep was held in conjunction with World Sleep Day in March 2023, organised by the Zakone sleep network hub and involving 10 of its member companies. PHOTO: ZAKONE

There is an added element of gamification to promote sleep, through “missions” for users to soak in the morning sun or have a protein-rich breakfast. This, Mr Umeda says, can promote the production of the sleep hormone melatonin.

Also in the sleep space is The Pokemon Company. In July 2023, it released the Pokemon Sleep app that now has 15 million users worldwide, of whom half are in Japan. There are 65,000 registered Singapore players.

The app was developed with sleep expert Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba.

Players who use it daily can score points and learn about their sleep patterns through popular characters like Snorlax, known as the Sleeping Pokemon.

A screenshot from the Pokemon Sleep app, developed by Select Button in conjunction with The Pokemon Company. PHOTO: GAME FREAK INC

Project leader Kaname Kosugi, 35, tells me that the game has, anecdotally, helped players identify sleeping problems. The app records sounds players make during their sleep, and some players have sought professional help after realising, through the recordings, issues such as sleep apnea, when no breathing sound could be heard due to a cessation of breathing.

“During our market research, we found that many players regard sleep as an obligation. We wanted to change that image to something more positive,” he says, adding that the game focuses on sleep duration and consistency.

Sleep is tracked using a smartphone’s in-built gyro sensor, with the phone to be placed face-down next to the pillow when one sleeps. Plans are in store to link the game to wearable devices like the Fitbit or Apple Watch in the first half of 2024.

Sleeping 8½ hours is worth 100 points, and through the game, users have reported sleeping up to an hour longer each day on average.

Stress factor

Sleep can be affected by stress, which increases levels of the hormone cortisol, which is involved in the fight-or-flight response and makes it more difficult to relax.

To help users manage stress better, Yakult rolled out probiotic beverage Y1000, which has the highest concentration of its proprietary lactic acid bacteria Lacticaseibacillus paracasei strain Shirota yet. Y1000 packs 100 billion bacteria in a 100ml bottle, or 10 times that of the Yakult product sold in Singapore. Product developer Osamu Watanabe, 45, says Y1000 was born as research emerged of the health benefits to the brain-gut relationship with a higher concentration of the bacteria.

Y1000 is so popular that it once sold out, with some stores still imposing purchase restrictions despite ramped-up production.

Yakult’s Y1000 is said to reduce stress and improve sleep quality. PHOTO: YAKULT

The wellness subsidiary of beverage giant Suntory Holdings in 2022 released the sleep supplement Kaimin Sesamin.

It taps the compound sesamin, found in sesame seeds, to maintain melatonin levels.

Mr Umeda, NTT’s sleep consultant, says: “There was a time in Japan when it was wonderful to work long hours without sleep. But as that generation retires, I hope Japan can embrace a culture where individual performance can be promoted by encouraging everyone to get a good night’s sleep.”

And that is a lifestyle message that, I hope, can be heard loud and clear in other sleep-deprived nations, including Singapore.

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sleep impt

Humanity’s tormented 21st-century relationship with sleep raises a great many questions. Most can be dealt with as follows: No, not nearly enough; yes, but that would require a wholesale transformation of lifestyle and socio-economic context; okay, but that seems extortionate for a mattress.

Yet the most basic question of the lot – how does tiredness work, and what makes us sleepy? – remains tauntingly and magnificently unanswered. Cracking its secrets, says the neuroscientist who has arguably come closest to doing so, could transform the waking and sleeping world as we know it. Professor Masashi Yanagisawa and his team have taken a bigger step towards solving the puzzle than anyone yet, but it remains (for now, at least) a flat-out mystery. Anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.

Which, while we wait for the next scientific breakthrough, is exactly what is happening.

Sleep is big business. Competition for our wakeful spending has fought itself into ever smaller corners of wallets and imaginations. The battle for the third of our lives that we spend asleep, meanwhile, still feels wide open to further commercial exploitation.

Bedrooms as sanctuaries, bamboo pyjamas, sensor-laden bedding, high-end wellness tourism, sleep consultants. The industry, in all its ingenuity, has honed ever-greater skill in casting sleep as both the pathology (terrible things happen to the individual and the economy if you do not get enough) and panacea (amazing things happen if you do) of modern life.

Judging the current scale of the sector depends on what you count, but it is arguably in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The global mattress and bedding markets are together reckoned by some to be worth over US$150 billion (S$204 billion); add in bed accessories, sleep-tracking smartwatches, sleep labs, smart alarm clocks, apnoea treatment devices, sleep-related medicines, dietary supplements, sleep monitors and temperature control equipment, and the figure could be approaching US$300 billion.

A great part of the current and projected growth of the industry derives from how comprehensively sleep, and the lack of it, are entwined in the broader discourse of health and the prevention of disease. National and supranational organisations produce surveys and recommendations on sleep, and the prevalence of smartwatches and other devices is providing an unprecedented glut of data on how well we do it. Generally, sleep seems to be clawing back the respect it has historically ceded to the demands of long working hours.

In Prof Yanagisawa’s home country of Japan, where he is director of the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine and a powerful advocate for more and better sleep, the realisation of what happens when a nation collectively scorns its importance is hitting home.

The government’s most recent (pre-Covid-19) figures found roughly 40 per cent of adult men and women in the country got less than six hours of sleep a night. A 2021 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development survey found that Japanese people get, on average, the least among the 33 nations polled. The Pokemon Sleep app, now downloaded by 10 million people around the world, confirmed those findings.

By the time they are in high school, about a third of Japan’s children, a University of Tokyo study revealed in March, are getting less than six hours a night and falling victim to “social jet lag”.

In this situation, Prof Yanagisawa finds himself with two roles. As one of the world’s great sleep scientists, he is a natural and charismatic proselytiser. But, in the long run, his work could make a practical difference.

Its focus is on the mechanism in the brain that controls the quality and quantity of sleep – the heart of the mystery about what happens during waking hours that later builds to sleepiness. For something so fundamental, he says, it is far more complex than people imagine. Scientists are broadly agreed on the concept of a switch that flips a person between the states of wake and sleep. The puzzle is how it works and how the brain “counts” the accumulation of sleepiness.

In 2021, a team from Prof Yanagisawa’s institute discovered that an enzyme called salt-inducible kinase 3 could be central to how sleep is regulated – and is possibly the clue everyone has been looking for.

Prof Yanagisawa, sitting in his modest office in Tsukuba, Japan, is measured but excited. If science can work out how our sleep switch works, and what controls how long and well we sleep, the practical consequences could be vast.

“We will be able to start manipulating this mechanism. You could develop an entirely new class of medicine that, when necessary, keeps you awake, or when necessary gives you all the hours of sleep you need,” he says. Miseries like sleep deprivation and insomnia could, overnight, become things of the past.

The sleep industry might be on track for its biggest revolution since the pillow. FINANCIAL TIMES

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Outside the town of Yongin, 40km south of Seoul, an army of diggers is preparing for what South Korea’s President has described as a global “semiconductor war”.

The diggers are moving 40,000 cubic metres of earth a day, cutting a mountain in half as they lay the foundations for a new cluster of chipmaking facilities that will include the world’s largest three-storey fabrication plant.

The 405ha site, a US$91 billion (S$124 billion) investment by chipmaker SK Hynix, will itself only be one part of a US$471 billion “mega cluster” at Yongin that will include an investment of 300 trillion won (S$296 billion) by Samsung Electronics. The development is being overseen by the government amid growing anxiety that the country’s leading export industry will be usurped by rivals across Asia and the West.

“We will provide full support, together with SK Hynix, to ensure that our companies won’t fall behind in the global chip cluster race,” South Korea’s Industry Minister Ahn Duk-geun told SK Hynix executives during a meeting at the Yongin site in March.

Most industry experts agree the investments at Yongin are required for South Korean chipmakers to maintain their technological lead in cutting-edge memory chips, as well as to meet booming future demand for AI-related hardware.

But economists worry that the government’s determination to double down on South Korea’s traditional growth drivers of manufacturing and large conglomerates betrays an unwillingness or inability to reform a model that is showing signs of running out of steam.

With the country’s economy having grown at an average of 6.4 per cent between 1970 and 2022, the Bank of Korea warned in 2023 that annual growth is on course to slow to an average of 2.1 per cent in the 2020s, 0.6 per cent in the 2030s, and to start to shrink by 0.1 per cent a year by the 2040s.

Worries about the future

Pillars of the old model, such as cheap energy and labour, are creaking. Kepco, the state-owned energy monopoly that provides Korean manufacturers with heavily subsidised industrial tariffs, has amassed liabilities of US$150 billion. Of the other 37 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries, only Greece, Chile, Mexico and Colombia have lower workforce productivity.

Park San-gin, professor of economics at the graduate school of public administration at Seoul National University, notes that South Korea’s weakness in developing new “underlying technologies” – as opposed to its strength in commercialising technologies like chips and lithium-ion batteries invented in the US and Japan respectively – is being exposed as Chinese rivals close the innovation gap.

“Looking from the outside, you would assume that South Korea is extremely dynamic,” says Prof Park. “But our economic structure, which is based on catching up with the developed world through imitation, hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 1970s.”

Worries about future growth have been exacerbated by an impending demographic crisis. According to the Korea Institute of Health and Social Affairs, the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will be 28 per cent lower in 2050 than it was in 2022, as the working age population shrinks by almost 35 per cent.

“The Korean economy will face big challenges if we stick to the past growth model,” Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok told the Financial Times earlier in April.

Some hope that the expected global boom in artificial intelligence (AI) will rescue the South Korean semiconductor industry, and perhaps even the South Korean economy at large, by offering solutions to the country’s productivity and demographic problems.

But sceptics point to the country’s poor record in addressing challenges ranging from its plummeting fertility rate to its outdated energy sector to its underperforming capital markets.

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That is unlikely to improve in the near future. Political leadership is split between a left-wing-controlled legislature and an unpopular conservative presidential administration, with the victory of left-wing parties in parliamentary elections earlier in April raising the prospect of more than three years of gridlock until the next presidential election in 2027.

“Korean industry is struggling to move on from the old model,” says Mr Yeo Han-koo, a former South Korean trade minister now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It hasn’t worked out what comes next.”

One of the reasons it is proving so hard to reform the “old model”, say economists, is that it has been so successful.

The achievements of South Korea’s state-guided capitalism, which took it from an impoverished agrarian society to a technological powerhouse in less than half a century, have come to be known as the “miracle on the Han River”. In 2018, South Korea’s GDP per capita measured at purchasing power parity surpassed that of its former colonial occupier, Japan.

Mr Song Seung-heon, managing partner of consultancy McKinsey’s practice in Seoul, notes that South Korea made two great leaps – one between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the country moved from basic goods to petrochemicals and heavy industry, and the second between the 1980s and 2000s, when it moved to high-tech manufacturing.

Between 2005 and 2022, however, only one new sector – displays – entered the country’s list of top 10 export products. Meanwhile, South Korea’s lead in a range of critical technologies has dwindled. Having led the world in 36 of 120 priority technologies identified by the South Korean government in 2012, by 2020 that number had dropped to just four.

Mindset drift

Prof Park says the country’s leading conglomerates, or chaebol, many of which are now overseen by the third generation of their founding families, have drifted from a “growth mindset” born of hunger towards an “incumbent mindset” born of complacency.

He argues that the present model reached its apogee in 2011, after a decade during which Korean tech exports were driven by the related twin demand shocks of the rise of China and the global technology boom, as well as by massive investments by Samsung and LG to seize control of the global display industry from their Japanese counterparts.

Since then, however, Chinese tech companies have caught up with their Korean competitors in almost every area except the most advanced semiconductors, meaning that Chinese companies that were once customers or suppliers have become rivals. Samsung and LG are fighting for survival in the global display industry they dominated just a few years ago.

Prof Park adds that many of the headline-grabbing gains made by the leading conglomerates have come at the expense of their domestic suppliers, who are subjected to price squeezing through exclusive contractual relationships.

The result is that small and medium enterprises, which employ more than 80 per cent of the South Korean labour force, have less money to invest in their employees or infrastructure, exacerbating low productivity, slowing innovation and stifling growth in the services sector.

“The rationale used to be that the chaebol should be sheltered from disruption at home so they can focus on disrupting rivals abroad,” says Prof Park. “But now they are the incumbents, they are both stifling innovation at home and highly vulnerable to disruption themselves.”

The country’s two-tier economy – in which, according to Prof Park, almost half of the country’s GDP was delivered by conglomerates that employed just 6 per cent of South Koreans in 2021 – also feeds social and regional inequalities. This in turn feeds spiralling competition among young South Koreans for a few elite university places and high-paying jobs in and around Seoul.

That competition is helping drive down the country’s fertility rate even further as young Koreans wrestle with mounting academic, financial and social burdens. The country has the widest gender pay gap and the highest suicide rate in the OECD.

South Korea also has one of the highest rates of household debt as a proportion of GDP in the developed world, according to the Institute of International Finance. The average newly-wed couple in South Korea has combined debts of US$124,000.

While South Korea’s government debt to GDP is relatively low by western standards, at 57.5 per cent, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts that it will triple over the next 50 years in the absence of drastic pension reforms. Forty-six per cent of South Koreans are projected to be over the age of 65 by 2070, and the country already has the highest rate of elderly poverty in the developed world.

“Slowing growth has fed the declining birth rate, which will lead to even slower growth,” says Mr Song of McKinsey. “We are in danger of getting stuck in a vicious circle.”

The Yongin mega cluster illustrates South Korea’s challenge in sustaining an economic model that was first developed at a time when the country was much poorer and less democratic.

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The project was announced in 2019, but was delayed for several years due to wrangles over construction permits and the site’s water supply. Once the first cluster is completed in 2027 – more are planned for later – it will face a shortage of qualified labour. Without a sufficient supply of renewable energy, and without a bipartisan consensus on building new nuclear power plants, it is unclear how the cluster will be powered.

Despite the uncertainties that surround it, the plan reflects confidence that an expected boom in demand for AI-related hardware, including the Dram memory chips needed for large language models, will justify the titanic investments. Shares in SK Hynix have more than doubled over the past year amid investor excitement over its “high bandwidth memory” chips used with Nvidia’s cutting edge processors.

Ahn Ki-hyun, executive director of the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association, says the country needs to press on with the Yongin project as potential rivals are making their own large investments.

He singles out the US and Japan’s efforts to revive their own chipmaking capabilities with generous subsidies. “We could lose our status as a chipmaking powerhouse if our companies continue to build plants abroad, but if facilities are concentrated in our own country, our competitiveness will increase,” he says.

Last week, Samsung announced a US$45 billion investment in Texas to meet expected AI-related chip demand, while SK Hynix is building a high bandwidth memory facility in Indiana.

In the long term, however, executives worry about US rivals absorbing Korean knowhow, as well as the risk that the proliferation of chip clusters around the world will lead to chronic oversupply and inefficiencies that could further undermine profitability.

Samsung’s Texan investments, which have benefited from up to US$6.4 billion in federal subsidies from Washington, also highlight how the Korean government is struggling to match the incentives on offer in other countries.

Divided on future prospects

Some see in the coming AI era an opportunity for South Korea to lift its sights beyond manufacturing and the preservation of its biggest players.

Mr Park Sung-hyun, chief executive of AI chip design start-up Rebellions, notes the country already has capabilities in three of the four pillars needed for AI – logic, memory, and cloud service providers – and now has the opportunity to secure reciprocal access to the world’s most sophisticated AI algorithms, the fourth pillar.

“Our strength in hardware is important, but if we are to progress we need to move up the value chain into design and software,” says Mr Park. “That means investing our money in strategic partnerships with the makers of the world’s leading large language models.”

Mr Park’s argument resonates with those who worry that South Korea’s continued emphasis on manufacturing and hardware – both in the chip sector and beyond – will prove unsustainable as costs continue to rise.

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But Inseong Jeong, a former SK Hynix engineer and author of The Future Of Semiconductor Empires, a book about the Korean chip industry, says the country should focus on its existing strengths. “The world will always need hardware, and the world will always need chips.”

He adds that by remaining at the cutting edge of chip production, Korean companies will be more likely to benefit from future breakthroughs in AI.

“The moat between hardware and software is hard to cross, but it works both ways,” says Mr Jeong. “For example, our memory chip companies would be the main beneficiaries of a breakthrough whereby AI chips would more closely resemble the workings of a human brain. There are no guarantees that AI will run on Nvidia GPUs forever.”

Some observers regard warnings about South Korea’s economic future as overblown, noting that many western countries bitterly regret abandoning the kind of advanced manufacturing base that Seoul has managed to preserve.

The “tech war” between the US and China, they argue, is playing into Korean hands as Chinese rivals in the chip, battery and biotech sectors are restricted or barred from entry into growing western markets, while concern about Taiwan’s security feeds demand for Korean alternatives.

South Korean companies in areas ranging from defence and construction to pharmaceuticals, electric vehicles and entertainment, have shown themselves to be more adept than many of their western counterparts in reducing their exposure to the Chinese market and seeking out growth in south-east Asia, India, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

The Bank of Korea has also said that the most doom-laden scenarios regarding the country’s demographic crisis and growth prospects can be alleviated by bringing the country up to the OECD average on a range of metrics, including urban population concentration and youth employment.

But others argue that while there is much that South Korea could and should do to alleviate its problems, its record on reform is poor.

Spending on private tuition continues to climb as competition for university places grows fiercer, while the fertility rate continues to fall. Pension, housing and medical sector reforms have stalled, while longstanding campaigns to curb the country’s dependence on the conglomerates, boost renewables, raise corporate valuations, close the gender pay gap, and make Seoul a leading Asian financial centre have all made little headway.

But Mr Choi, the Finance Minister, retains his faith that the country’s economy can be reformed, insisting that “dynamism is embedded in the Korean DNA”.

“We need to redesign policies to unleash that economic dynamism again,” he says. “But the miracle isn’t over.” FINANCIAL TIMES

Additional reporting by Song Jung-a

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