Hello and welcome to Pookie Ponders, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. Today's question is, how can adults help to build emotional wellbeing and confidence in children? And I'm in conversation with Sarah Gilbert. My name is Sarah Gilbert. I live in the North of Ireland, in Murie in the North of Ireland. And I am a trained drama teacher. I'm an actress. And I currently work as a voiceover artist for Radio and Television. So many questions already. So the focus of today's episode, the kind of question is how can adults help to build emotional wellbeing and confidence in children? And I just kind of wondered what your sort of jumping off point was there. This is obviously something that I wanted to ask you about because you've done some work in this area. So what are your opening thoughts? Okay, well, it's a long story. I suppose I would have to go back to when I was teaching, which has brought me, this is now nearly 30 years, I suppose, nearly 30 years in the making of me. I suppose I've pondered it for a long time, but never had answers. And I suppose I still ponder those answers. But when I was teaching drama, I trained as a drama teacher. And I taught for 10 years. And through that time, I always felt that once I could put children on the stage and put them through exams and they could do performance and festivals. It was a what I would call a facade of confidence that behind their eyes and in here in their hearts, you just knew that it wasn't there. And it frustrated me so much that I didn't know how to get there, how to make them confident from within rather than from without. So after about 10 years, I gave up teaching at that time and I retrained as an actor. I went back to London and I did, I went to the drama studio in Ealing and did a postgrad in professional acting. And what was very interesting about that course was what they did was, as our principal of the school said, we will, you're like a finely tuned clock.  So when you're acting, it's not as if you're putting on layers. You're actually delving deeper into your own self to find that character. That sounds a bit scary. It is scary because, tell you what, because it's an emotional rollercoaster and you're constantly eating. And I think that's that we found ourselves putting on weight because you're feeding an emotional need. Do you know what I mean? So I found that very interesting because it helped me to find and delve into other parts of me. And it began a journey really of self discovery. So when I came back from London and I was teaching for a while and then I was doing TV and theatre and working when my son was born, I decided to focus on radio work. Plus with radio work then that I could work from home because I could record and send everything that needed to be sent. So I didn't have to go anywhere and I could spend more time with him. So during that time then because of working with radio, I was given the opportunity to write and started writing radio dramas and documentaries and things which I didn't know if I could do or not, but I got the opportunity so I did it. And then I wrote a book and then I start when my son got to about five and he started school. The whole idea of children and feelings reared again because I was then dealing with a child and then I was going to school every day and seeing other children. And one particular incident that really got me thinking again, he was about five at the time and I took him to school in the morning, you have a little porch where the children take off their coats. And one teacher was talking to another child who didn't want to go into the classroom and he was crying and I don't want to go and I want to go home. And the teacher was, as children do when they're first year at primary school.  And my son stood looking up at her, waiting for her to speak to him and tell him he was a good boy. But she didn't. She took this little fellow by the hand and she completely blanked my son. But she was focused on this child to get him into the classroom. It was no reflection on anybody else. But he didn't see it that way because he was five. And he just looked up at me and he said to me, Mama, I'm not a good boy. I'm not the best boy. And that just broke my heart. And she never knew that. She never understood the impact that her words had on him. And for quite a while afterwards he said to me, well, I'm not the best boy. So I knew he was still thinking about that. And then I started to think, you know, here we go. I'm back to square one again. And I'm seeing the insecurity and the uncertainty in his eyes. And I started to think, how can I do something? I really wanted to do something. So I wrote these little children's books about feelings and about emotions. And it sort of evolved from there. So that's what the program that I'm working on now, the little sunflower program, is about helping children. And how we do that is, well, that's a big question, isn't it? It is a big question. Well, tell us a bit about the little sunflower program and how that works and what your kind of hopes are for it. Well, little sunflower is a series of five story books and five animations which are attached together. Now they were to be hard copies, but because of the situation we're living in now, it's been made into a digital package. But they've also been made into audio visual so that you can watch and listen at the same time for the whiteboard or Google classroom and then the animation at the end. So it teaches children a life skill. I know you're part of tapping. Yeah. So these characters go to school and they interact. They're all different animal characters at school and it's how they listen to each other, how they perceive each other and how they learn to understand that we're all different and we're all special. I had somebody write music for me and there's a poem that goes with it and it's been turned into a song. So the children are children singing it and the last line of each verse, there's five verses to go with each book. It's relevant to each story is that big or small, I'm different and I'm special. That's all. So that is the concept behind it that it's like a mantra that they can learn and keep with them and continue to repeat over and over and sing. The song's quite catchy. So I want that to get in there and stay in there and that they can sing it and learn it and become like a part of their life and just to call on at any time they need it. And why do you think that it's helpful to have it in that way, something that they've heard many times become familiar with? It sounds like almost like a bit of an earworm. Why is that a positive? I think the more you hear, well, unless it's a negative, obviously, the more you hear something positive, the more you will begin to believe it and the more we hear something, if somebody tells us repeatedly that we're great, we will start to believe it. Same as my son only had to hear once that another child was wonderful and he believed that that child was wonderful and he wasn't. So that only took one time. So I think the more we hear, I can do this. I am good at this. I am positive. I am happy. I am wonderful. I am super and fantastic. I am incredibly talented. Whatever it happens to be, relevant to whatever the child is doing, it can only be a positive thing. I hope and I think so. And how do those stories and animations get used at the moment? Have you had kind of feedback from people who are using them? Have you used them yourself? Well, it started out as a pilot program and then as a trial period. And I was going to schools and delivering this package myself. Yeah. Then COVID hit. So I couldn't go anymore. So it's nearly completed, but it's been made into, as I said, a digital package for Google Classroom, Whiteboard, et cetera. And a promotional video has just been released. So I've had quite a lot of interest and feedback on it. So fingers crossed. That's good. And we can link to that all in the show notes. So anyone who's listening to this or watching can go through to, it's all on your website, right? Yes. It's on the website at the minute. There's a new website being developed, but it's on the current website, on that Facebook page as well. And how would you know if you've succeeded? So this started with this kind of, you know, deep drive to help your son to kind of really find his feet and to feel more confident. And is that the driving aim still to kind of build that confidence in children or are there other things that you're finding are coming out of this as well? It is a drive to build confidence in children. And from going to the schools and working with children, because there are soft toys involved, but unfortunately you can't use the soft toys now because they can't share anything. I've worked with some children with one child in particular who, he wouldn't do the tapping. He refused point blank to do, and that was fine. But on the second week, he came to me and he said, can I take that toy? Can I use it? Because the toys have extra long arms so the toys can tap. So he, I said, sure, if you would like to do that. And he took it and he sat in a corner and he did everything the rest of the children were doing, but he did it through the medium of the toy. Oh. Yeah. And for me, it doesn't matter. I mean, it's great for the other children were doing it, but for me, that was the huge success to get that child doing something. And the very first day we went because the idea it's called little sunflower because it includes a little sunflower, which week on week grows. And that depends on the work the children do on their emotions to help the sunflower grow. So if they keep doing it as the days, the weeks go by, the sunflower grows and that should reflect in their emotional growth as well. But when this class started this, I want this little boy, in particular, he just said he could draw. He asked could he draw the sunflower, the first sunflower.   And he, she said he absolutely was enthralled doing it. So yeah, for me that was, that one child was a success for me and it made him feel good and that's, that's what it's, that's what's important to helping children to feel comfortable and happy in their own skin. Absolutely. That sounds like a real success. What a lovely story. Can you tell us a bit about tapings? Obviously that's a part of this. And I'm aware you said, you know about tapping and I said yes, but there might be people listening who are wondering. So can you maybe explain a bit about it and how it works and why it was important as part of your tool. Well, I had heard about it a number of years ago and I got the opportunity to go on a course. And it just, I, the only way to describe it is I floated home that night. The most powerful. And experience, one most part of experiences I ever had.  And that's, and repeating mantras, positive mantras that I am. Wonderful. I am special. I am fabulous. I am fantastic. I am amazing. There's 14 tapping points that I use. So we repeat that two or three or four times. And each week we use words. That are relevant to whatever that story happens to be. So if it's about being calm, the teachers love that one. Because then we find words that are about being because we find words that are about being calm, about being quiet, about being thoughtful, about being gentle. And if it's about, you know, a talent, being talented, I'm talented, I'm amazing, I can do this, I'm incredible, I'm awesome. So yeah, yes, the weeks go by that evolves and the tapping changes each week, obviously in the words. Now, obviously with tapping you can include, you can start with the negative. Even though I'm feeling sad, I appreciate that I accept that and I still love myself. And I have used that, but with younger children, I tend to go straight for the positives. Yeah. And that was the question I was wondering about actually, because the kind of genesis here was about how, you know, your son overhearing, that other child being praised, and although that adult was unaware of the impact that they had in that moment, that that obviously had a really lasting effect for him. And I was wondering in your work and in your opinion, really, how much of this is about sort of undoing harm or counteracting difficulties that children might be facing and how much of it is about going in with the kind of positive preventative sort of side of things? Well, the positive of preventative is where I, the angle I'm looking at it from because I don't know the children and I don't know their circumstances. So it's very hard for me to know what those negatives are, but they're obviously, there are negatives all the time with every circumstance that we live in. We don't know what we're saying. We could very inadvertently say something to somebody that is not just not so positive. And it may not be anything to us. We may not perceive it or say it with any back meaning, but that person that's listening to it might hear it in a totally different way depending on what's going on in their life. So you just, we can't live our lives be careful about what we say because then we'd never speak. But when we do speak, we just don't know what we're saying, what impact it's having on somebody else's story. So my idea is to have something out there for those children that is just so positive, so fun, so lighthearted, so passionate that they can just really let go and enjoy themselves. Absolutely. And we're recording this conversation during the pandemic, which that could be at any point in time with a massive great length it feels like, but this is a particular kind of moment in time and it's a different moment in time than when you kind of conceived of this programme and when you started sort of delivering it and seeing those really positive outcomes from it. And I wondered if you have felt any need to adapt or change what you're doing in response to the current situation or if it has felt like the right thing still. I did have to change what I was doing because I couldn't go to the schools anymore. So in order for me to connect with children, I had to go online. So it was an idea that was going, it was going to go online eventually, but it just pushed me into more quickly than I had anticipated. And it's been a fantastic process because I'm getting to, oh, there's my dog, are you sorry about that? It's been a fantastic process because I'm getting to look at animations and colours and I've been able to record the stories and have a sound engineer put in sound effects and everything. And it's just been a lively, bright, fun-filled time for me. I love to do creative things. So it's kept me very, very busy, which is fantastic. But the content has stayed fundamentally the same. The content has stayed the same. I try to develop it a little bit further and add in a few other elements and concepts. But fundamentally, yes, it's still the same. And I wonder if maybe there's more need for it now than ever before, because actually there is this general kind of rumbling of anxiety amongst every adult, every child. And so these things that kind of build up our confidence and give us the ability to kind of express how we're feeling and to find that calm, I would have thought there would be a real thirst for that right now. I think there is.  And that's a huge impact.  So they don't know the difference. But older children, seven, eight, nine, 10, you know, it's a massive impact on them. And also, you would know this yourself, the age of mental health issues is getting younger and younger. It's down as far as 11. That's why I've been focusing on seven to 10 year old children so that I can hopefully provide them with something that they can learn and embrace in that time. So by the time they get that little bit older and become more aware, they have something that they can call on. Yeah, that's the thing. And do you feel like you're making the difference?  Do you think that, you know, when you reflect back on that situation that kind of triggered this whole thing, are you doing what you hoped? I, well, I certainly hope so. I've seen it. I have worked in quite a number of schools and there's been a very positive feedback from teachers and children alike. And they have loved it. Yeah, I certainly hope so. Time will tell. So that was my cat trying to get my attention. Bless her. And I was just wondering as well, like thinking about how this reflects on your sort of personal journey and story too.  And how important do you think it is that as the adults who are working with or caring for children, that we do that work on ourselves first? Or do you think that we can kind of lead this in our children, even if we're not feeling it ourselves? I think it's, especially in today's world, I think it is a good thing for us to do work on ourselves. But not everybody is open or ready to do that. We're all in different places in our lives.  So you need to be emotionally strong or stronger to do what you can to protect them. So yeah, I think it's a good thing for us to be self-aware. It's not always, it's not always easy. And it depends on the circumstances that your lifestyle and the circle, the lifestyle that you're living through or how the world has treated you today. It's not always easy for everybody. No, no, indeed not. And I wonder, looking back earlier, you were talking about when you would teach drama and you'd have these children who would seem kind of outwardly confident on the stage, but then this didn't reflect in their kind of day-to-day life. And I wonder if knowing what you know now and the further work you've done on yourself and learning around the topic, what advice you would give to that kind of younger version of you, do you think that you'd have ideas about how to make that transition between stage and line? Well, I know a lot more than 20 years ago. So I know a lot more now than I did then. And I haven't really done any work on me because it wasn't, I suppose back in the nineties and that it wasn't, we weren't as aware of spiritualism and working on ourselves and doing things to open our own minds. So I suppose I can't punish myself for not being able to do that, but I was very frustrated because I knew something wasn't right and that I wasn't doing what I needed to do, but I have absolutely no idea how to get there. But it was just with the, suppose the birth of my own emotional journey that I thought, ah, okay. So when you start to work on yourself then and you dig deeper and you start to understand why you do the things that you do and what caused it and where it's come from. And it's a fascinating journey to explore yourself and your reasons for doing things. So your relationships with all kinds of things, maybe be it food or maybe the need to, for some people they need to shop. You know, we all have reasons for doing things. I suppose I could say I used to be, I used to suppose, unless I used to feel more confident, shall we put it, if I was dressed properly. And I see people like that now who have to be dressed well all the time, hair's done, makeup's done, everything. And I know for me, that was my own insecurity. I wasn't comfortable with myself. So I had to put on that. The saddest was with Back to the Acting thing again, that we put on layers for people to see is what we really should be doing is taking those layers off. So, yeah, it took, it's taken a while. I can't even say, I can't claim to be there yet, but... I think we're all works in progress, aren't we? I mean, do you think that drama is, you know, is that a good pathway for many people for this? That it's like quite a specific kind of program that you ended up doing. It sounds more therapeutic than many kind of therapeutic programs I've kind of heard of, but... The Acting program. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think most drama colleges will do that.  But I, you know, when you're younger and you are doing Acting and you tend to go on the stage and you create a character, but to be a character, a real character, you have to find that insight. You have to find that case inside of you. If it's, I don't know, psychopath or whatever it happens to be, you've got to do a lot of work to find that character, which is a bit alarming and it can be very uncomfortable because these are parts of ourselves that we don't want to see because it's not normal for the majority of us to think about things like that, but it was an incredible journey. I wouldn't have swapped it for the world. I learned such a huge amount, not just of the craft, but again, personally. Yeah, and you said in our initial kind of back and forth on the email about how drama kind of helped you to feel visible and give you a moment to shine and that finding that one thing can help others to find their moment. And I wondered if you, you know, can you talk a bit more about that? I was really intrigued by that as an idea. Well, I, as a child was, I suppose I saw myself in all those children because when I was a child, I did drama from a young age and I was painfully shy and I was even painfully shy as an adult. It's taken many years to gain self-confidence in myself and going to drama once a week, that was my time to shine. That was the only time of the week that I really was, I felt alive. It was just, because I could be somebody else. I didn't have to be me. I could be, I could hide behind that character as to say, no, you don't, when you learn, you don't hide behind the character, you become the character. But as a young person, as a child and as a teenager, it was, yeah, the drama helped me give me that time, that hour of the week. That's what it was, it was one hour a week and it was my time to just shine. And then when we caught and we did school productions, I was first in the Q2 audition because I just wanted a part so bad, I just needed it. It was just how, well, it was my need and that was good for me, it's good for my mental health. So, and everybody has their own way of finding that, be it to go fishing or to go cycling or whatever it happens to be or to play music. But that's certainly what it was for me. And did it, sorry. No, I was just gonna say, did it surprise people because it sounds like, and I've come across many people who feel similarly and it's certainly something I can empathize with too, but that real dissonance between this painfully shy child and then can't wait to get on the stage, it feels like a bit of a disconnect, doesn't it? It does feel like a disconnect, yes. And I don't even know how to explain it, but yes, I think it's because when you, if you ask me to get on the stage and make a speech, no, absolutely not, it will be petrifying, but because you're hiding behind a character, it's not you, you are being somebody else, so therefore you have, and that might sound strange, but it's true, it's just you're not being yourself, you're given permission to be visible by being somebody else, that's the only way to describe it. But yeah. See, I find I'm most confident and most happy and most calm when I'm stood on a stage giving a speech, but actually for me, that is stepping into the character of that person on the stage, it's a very different person when I'm presenting, I'm, yeah, and then the person who people get, if they come and try and talk to me in the coffee break, isn't entirely different, you know, and I find that, yeah, it fascinates me about myself and I find myself often saying to people in the coffee break, they say, oh, I don't know how you stand on stage so confidently, and I always go, oh, that bit's fine, this terrifies me. It's a, yeah, it's an interesting thing. And did you have any particular kind of characters or personas that you particularly kind of enjoyed, whether bits that you, I don't know, maybe wanted to be more like or that you just particularly enjoyed inhabiting? Yes, I think I asked a while. I just love the wits and the style and the drama and anything, any of those classics or just, oh, I just lived and breathed them. And do you think, you know, drama specifically, I'd be really interested to kind of wonder with you about how drama and acting could be used to achieve similar things than what you're doing with your work at the moment. I find myself remembering when I was at school a long time ago, then when we did one of our school productions, I can remember a teacher making all the naughty boys be in it and usually how productions works in my school were that, you know, it was a voluntary thing. But this one year, I remember the teacher deciding, you know, targeting these boys specifically and they were all in a Midsummer Night's dream. And I do remember it was really transformative for our whole school year because we were in this together and these boys who normally would not have come near this kind of thing with a barge part all had leading roles. And I have no idea what the, you know, what the thought behind it was and it must have been a real challenge for the teacher but she clearly had a plan, I'm sure. I think, funny enough, from my own experience working with young people, teenagers. Oh, it's about 15 years ago.  Yeah. And I had everywhere I needed and I couldn't get anybody to do this and I spotted these two senior boys. Well, I didn't even know them. And I said, any chance boys that you would consider, one was tall and one was shorter. And they didn't really know each other even though they were in the same school and they were, no, we wouldn't do something like that. And I said, well, just give it a thought. Come along to it and then rehearsal and see what you think and it's all a bit of fun. And they did do it. They took on the persona of the two ugly sisters. They wore the makeup, they wore the dresses and one of them actually, I met him about, well, about seven or eight years later after he left school. And he said, I would like to thank you for making me do that. He said, because I found a new friend that I didn't really know. And he said, it gave me a confidence that I didn't know was in me. And he says, I have trained to be an auctioneer. And he said, it was that time on the stage. He said, just made me go, wow, I like this. I'd like to pursue something in this. And so he became, yeah, an auctioneer.   I was like, whoa. Wow. That's special. It was really brilliant. Yeah.  Yes, I would love to do that. It's getting time and unfortunately things. So once this little sunflower gets out there and gets started, I would love to actually, at some point in the future, create a little sunflower production, music and dance and have it for children or some kind of play that schools could use and then devise it themselves and put it on for a proper script. So that is something that I have, yes, I have thought about a lot. I'd love to do like even a radio play of it. Yeah. Talk to me about radio. It's kind of off topic, but I think not entirely. I'm interested because I think obviously when you're just using your voice, then you can't use all the other props around you of body language or makeup or clothing or props or all those things. And so presumably inhabiting a character when you just have your voice and sound effects is hard, no? Well, it's interior, I suppose, because I don't know if you've noticed, but when I'm talking about things, I use my hands and I'm quite motivated. So I know when I'm recording something, if I have to record a piece, I am using my hands because the more you do this, the more passion is coming out in your voice. So if I was just to keep my hands down and keep talking, my voice would become quite flat as well and would lose its momentum and passion. So yeah, movement and hand gestures and all that type of thing helps to create, what is that characterisation in your voice. At the start of lockdown, we wrote a little play, my son and I did it between us and recorded it and a friend of mine, the sound engineer, put it together and it was about a little boy who was stuck at home because of the lockdown. It was only two weeks in at that point with no idea it was going to go on so long and how sad he was and he did the tapping routine on his own to help him feel happier. So yeah, and so I got my son to do it as well. Wow, how old is your son now? He's 12 now.  Not really, but he's naturally quite shy, quite reserved but yeah, I don't know, he is that way but I do think it's things like that that stick with us and become, I know some people say not but I personally think that what we experience becomes part of us and that's who we are, experiences are who we are and can either help us or hindrance depending on what it is and we have to find ways to either promote it or heal it. Yeah, absolutely, and I think that it's important to acknowledge, isn't it, that we are never going to, nor would we I think even want to create a situation where no child is ever gonna face any kind of challenge or adversity, it's about giving them the tools to kind of work through that and bounce back from it, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah, well, we wouldn't much point if everybody was happy all the time. We need to be challenged, you're quite right, we need to be challenged but to have the tools to feel the feeling and move on from it and deal with it, we have to feel happiness and sadness or maybe not winning the race and dealing with we can't be perfect all the time because we need to be well-rounded. And does your son continue to be a kind of a driving force for your work and this desire to support children and adults who kind of work with them? I started this when I say when he was about six or seven when they started their stories. So they're finally, it's taken a long time, come together and trying to get it done in bits and pieces. But yes, he has been a driving force and he's older now but he has been an advisor right the way through the process as a trauma child's perspective. He will tell me what's right and what's not right and what he likes and what he doesn't like and what he thinks is helpful and not helpful. And I take his advice on board because he's the expert. As I say, it doesn't matter what I like, even with the pictures in the books, when the animator created them and he said, what do you think? I said, it doesn't matter what I think, it's what the children think. So I take them to the children to show the pictures and see, were they nice, did they like them? Was it something they could see themselves wanting to look at? And yeah, it's all about them. And have there been any kind of obstacles along the way?  Any kind of obstacles you've had to overcome with it? Well, you do have obstacles obviously on when you're trying to do something yourself, it takes time and then I think sometimes when you go to a school and some teachers are so involved and they're so enthusiastic and they come along and they want to know, but some teachers are busy and they see it as an opportunity to do some work in the classroom and they send them down with a classroom assistant. With me, it doesn't work because there is work to do in the classroom and I need the teacher to work with me so that they know what to do for the next time we meet. So I understand teachers are busy and they have a lot on so they see it as an opportunity to catch up on other things. But for me, that is a challenge. Yeah, and I hear you, I've certainly had that experience in the past when kind of teaching as part of PSHE curriculums and it's something that kind of I latterly got very kind of bullshit about it saying actually if I'm coming in, I need you to be here. You're a really important part of this because I'm just coming in and going away again whereas actually you're the one who's going to continue with this work. And the children also need to know that it's taken seriously I think by the adults around them but they're interested in the care. The schools that I've been to where the teachers are involved and the teachers want to be involved that they have been the most successful. That has been such a fabulous feeling to know that the teacher is on board with you and wants to know, how can I do this? What can I do to make this better? And then you see the results and that's the happy part. Absolutely. So is this your everyday now or are you still doing the voice work or what does life look like? Yes, I do the voice work. That is how I earn my living at the moment. And the rest of the time I am working on little sunflower and trying to get it ready for launch for the schools in January. That's the aim. Wow. And so people listening in or watching this will they can obviously kind of look at the website and find all the information there but is this something that will be available to how do people access it and what are the costs involved and that kind of thing for anyone who's wondering. Well, you can see on the little sunflower website as it is being the new website is under development and that's going to take a little bit of time. So it will be available from January but you can see snippets of the books and watch the promotional video. There will be audio visual books or just eBooks or at some point in the future, the hard copy books and the soft toys will be available. They can't be used in the schools but they could be used at home. And then of course there's the package for the schools which is the books with the animation on the end and a teacher pack to show them how to use the program in the classroom. And you visit schools as well? I mean, presumably now at the moment that's a bit tricky but you know, people will, this will go on forever so people might be listening to this in a year's time and things might be max normal, we hope. No, well, I was born in the schools but I haven't been in the school since March because I can't because I can't, well, first of all they were off but since September, if I go to school I can't then go to another school. I'd have to leave it, you know, a couple of weeks or I could go to another school and it's a five week program. You know, it's impossible, it's an impossible situation. So I'm hopeful that with the development of the teacher pack that I will be able to the teachers do it themselves. Okay, and with that, so you know, thinking in a post pandemic era when one could go in and out of schools safely would you return to visiting schools or do you think that actually empowering the teachers to deliver it themselves is the best way forward? Impiring the teachers to do it themselves. And also the work in the classroom because they make the little sunflower and as the weeks go by and they add in the new positive words the sunflower grows. So I've had in some schools where that actually the teacher hasn't thought it outright and they've made the stalk too long at the start. So it has actually done a circuit of the ceiling of the classroom. Just keeps growing and growing and growing and the children love it because they want to see the next week how big it's going to get. That's really lovely. Yeah, it's cool. Oh, how lovely. Do you miss it? Do you miss going in and seeing the children and doing that work? Absolutely, oh, it's yeah. But I think we're all missing. We're all missing everything that we used to do. Yeah. So we have to live with it until it's over. Absolutely, I'm going to deliver face to face training on Monday in a bizarre kind of, you know, I think 30 people in a whole theater kind of a scenario but I am so excited because it will be the first time since March. Wonderful. Yeah, so yeah, but it's such, as you say, it's such strange times, isn't it? And I think it's such a motivator for our work. I don't know about you but it's brilliant being able to do things online and you can reach so many people and I've reached definitely more people during the pandemic than ever. However, you don't get that kind of that feedback, that buzz, that joy. Do you from being in the room with people who are? Yeah. But look, I started doing a counselling course actually through the University of Ulster and we're doing it because we were going to class and now we can't, we're doing it online so we're doing a lot of Zoom classes. Oh wow. It's fun. It actually makes it, I think in some ways it's easy because I can be at home and still do my work and still be at class, you know? Yeah, so it's a bit more possible to fit it all in. Although, is it not challenging doing, I mean, counselling classes, that's quite heavy now to be doing via Zoom. Sorry? Is it not quite a heavy topic? You know, that kind of study, quite tricky now to be doing via Zoom. Well, yes it is, but they've never done it before but there's nothing we can do about it except work with it at the moment and we are split into groups and the tutor pops in and out. We have a general group and then we pop out into groups of three and council each other from distance which is challenging, but we have to work with what we've got. And what's your motivation for doing that work? So this is another string to the bow. How many strings do we have? Well, yes, I teach and I'm a trained actor and I trained in tapping but I felt that because the programme is about emotional wellness, whilst I've done, I did do a counselling course before, I just felt that I needed to do more and I wanted to have a better understanding of it. So I, yeah, I'm in my first term of the course and I just want to be able to add to the emotional wellbeing study that I have and I think it's important to know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, what would be your sort of party thought? I think for maybe what I was saying about my son that you just don't know what you say, the impact that it might have on somebody else even though it's an innocent comment, that a throwaway comment that somebody else might misinterpret and take it very deeply to heart and it could have a lasting impact on them, especially as I say, especially children. But it's a catch-22 situation because say we can't not speak but it's to be, I think, to be aware of what we say and how we say it, especially in front of children and when little ears are listening. You just don't know, you just don't know.


Hello and welcome to this ASMR conference 2003 tutorial. I'm Gjeldron Peters and I will explain a bit in this tutorial about the pre-record package and about the Inclusive Systematic Review Registration Form, which is actually where this package started and probably the pre-registration form most of interest to delegates at this conference. These slides will be available, the QR code and the link are in the bottom left corner and this slide will also return at the end. And this is a recording so you can always just go back and get it if you're missing it. So this started with me supervising a student who was doing a scoping review about something soccer related. Don't ask me why, I'm not into soccer, but he found it very interesting. And then we wanted to pre-register the scoping review, as one does, and it turned out that there's actually no service that allows this. So I went to Twitter and asked whether anybody knows the service that I didn't know about yet, where you could pre-register such a form. It turned out that actually there wasn't yet, but in the process as it got retweeted and a bit more people responded, I met Nicky who had the same situation. He does studies into veterinary science and he also couldn't pre-register his studies and work with students anywhere. So we had the idea to develop one and to get in touch with the Open Science Framework if they were into this so that we could add one to the Open Science Framework. At some point Brian Nosex responded and that got the ball rolling and then we got together a group of people which kind of snowballed into a larger group over time and we started working on this form. And the idea was of this form that it would be as inclusive as possible so that you could pre-register any kind of systematic review, whether it was a systematic review into case law, because you're like a legal scholar or anthropology or psychology or really anything, and also not specific to any review type. So you can use it for meta-analyses, but also for scoping reviews or qualitative reviews or whatever. As a consequence, we didn't have any items that are mandatory and there are quite a lot of items that are for example relevant for meta-analyses, but not relevant for scoping reviews. So the idea is kind of that you don't use this form. If there is a better form that better fits your specific use case, but because often there isn't, you can use this as a kind of generic full-back form. So we posted it on MetaArchive pre-print. You can get it at this Shoredoy G5FJ. This link will also return later on if you want. And that was that. In this process, I kind of started thinking about this process and the fact that it was necessary and possible. And I realized that this is actually one of the problems of the current preregistration landscape. As you can see here, this is of course the preregistration landscape. And in this preregistration landscape, there are some preregistration providers. For example, clinical trials.gov for RCTs, randomized clinical trials, of course Prospero for health-related systematic reviews. There is the open science framework for lots of different preregistration forms. And because of this landscape, the typical preregistration workflow is that researchers select a provider, they go to their website, they create a new form, they fill out the items that are there, they submit it. And then it's stored in the provider's database. It's published maybe after an embargo on the website of the preregistration provider and then it's shared in an article or a website or some other means. I realized that in this process, there's some room for improvement. One of those, I think the most important ones is to democratize science and to make it easier for everybody, regardless of their ontological, epistemological, methodological perspectives, to create a preregistration form that fits their use case well. In addition, I think it's important that preregistrations as much as possible are machine-readable and can easily be improved or imported and updated or reused. And since I use R, and I expect a lot of people at this conference also use R, I thought it would be nice if you could integrate preregistration in your R Markdown-based workflow. So that's why I started creating Pre-Record. So starting from the beginning, this is an example of two preregistration forms into qualitative research. For qualitative research, there's the concept of saturation. When a researcher thinks they have enough data and they will stop data collection. This is one preregistration form for qualitative research. And here they kind of enforce, they kind of mandate a specific definition of saturation. They follow Fouzhennaise of 2005 and they say, that is what saturation is. But there are different definitions of saturation as always. And this other preregistration form for qualitative and quantitative ethnographic studies allows the researcher to specify their own definition for data saturation. This means that it can make quite a difference which form you use as a researcher. We know that actually this diversity in ontological, epistemological and methodological approaches is actually beneficial. Science approaches or proceeds progresses faster if there is more heterogeneity in how people study things because there is no one single correct way. From this perspective, of course, it becomes a bit problematic that there are only a few forms available. UNESCO also recognizes this in the Oprescience recommendation which was adopted by all member states in 2021. So in principle, we all already believed it. And then they argued that actually it's important that their infrastructure we use and repositories we use are adapted to the user needs. So that basically whatever your ideas are about how things should be studied, you can actually work with this infrastructure. And currently, because there are only a few providers, the form items that they choose to include in the forms and how they're phrased and how the instructions are added change, they influence how people do their research. And this decreases the epistemic and methodological diversity which is a problem because it kind of slows down science. And in addition, ideally, we have open infrastructure that's as much as possible under the control of the whole scientific community rather than a few actors who happen to host pre-registration forms. As I said, that was the first reason for developing pre-regure and I think the most important one. Second reason is to make pre-registrations machine-readable. This is also something that UNESCO recognizes as important. It's also something that's recognized more widely as important. And I think especially at this conference where we do systematic reviews, I don't think I really have to argue very much that it would be great if stuff would just be machine-readable rather than having to code stuff and making mistakes. And then finally, being an R user, it would be nice if you don't actually have to go to this separate website and type stuff in, but you can just have the pre-registration as a part of your R Markdown-based workflow which in my case also means that you can use Git and you can easily go back and see what was changed when, by who, etc. So now I'll give some brief demonstrations of pre-regure using this inclusive systematic review form. And we'll start with creating and importing a form. If you want to create a form, you don't actually do it in R. You can do it in R, but it's usually easier also because you often collaborate with others who might not use R to use a spreadsheet. I have an empty template. Again, the link will be provided later. And this template allows you to specify the pre-registration form's content. So not the content for a study. It's not, you're not creating a pre-registration. You're creating a pre-registration form. So you have some metadata, the title of the form. For example, you could say there's an S Mark pre-registration form, the name, the date, et cetera. Then there are some instructions you can add, which are available to people who complete the form. There are the form items, of course. They have a section that they're placed into. You can see there's here in the third worksheet. So the sections have like an identifier, a label and a description. And items have referred to their identifier to their section with the identifier. They also have an identifier themselves. And they have a human-readable label and a description. So basically, this is quite easy for most people, also not two IT savvy people and not two R-minded people, to edit, and they can actually specify their form's content here. Then once you did this, you can import it into R. So this URL is just the URL from Google. If you click on the address bar, you can copy it. You have to make sure though that it's available to everybody. So it has to be, you have to use the share button to make sure that it is viewable by everybody. Then once you made it viewable by everybody, you can import it like this. So now we're importing it, and now we have it available in R. And we can view the content here. As you can see, there's not actually any content yet. If we would now edit the spreadsheet, I won't do that because of time, but if we would edit the spreadsheet and import it again, then whatever we change would be visible here. This object that we just created can be used to add content. But before we start moving on to adding content, let's think about how you actually get form content, or maybe I should have called it form structure. Because of course, before you can start putting stuff in the spreadsheet, you have to know what you want there to be in your form. So there are four or five ways to do this. The fifth way is just combining more than one of the first four. The duration list approach, the expert consensus approach, the Delphi method or scoping reviews, which I think will appeal to this audience especially. Before I go into that, I want to draw attention to the fact that there is no consensus on what should be in a preregistration form. And it depends on what you think preregistration is for. So John McVeethries wrote about preregistrations and he argues that it should be used for all social science research activities. And you could extend this to saying that it should be used for all systematic, all research science activities. And here the idea is that it's not limited to situations where hypothesis is tested or pre-value is reported because the goal is mostly to restrict research degrees of freedom. Basically to make sure that anywhere in the process you don't either consciously or unconsciously introduce bias. And if you do, it becomes more visible to yourself so that you can try to correct for it later and visible to others, of course. And if you deviate, you can always argue why you thought it was useful to deviate, which is seems the least we can do as researchers. However, Daniel Larkin's disagrees and here argues that preregistration is useful in a context where you test predictions, where you test hypothesis. And therefore, if you don't study a hypothesis, you just do descriptive research and you just want to describe a bit of reality, Daniel Larkin's would argue you shouldn't use preregistration. My personal view aligns more with that of John McFeetries. But my point is that that doesn't matter because there are different views and again, like with the other, like with basically doing science in general, there is no one correct way. It's actually beneficial if people have different ideas about what should be in a preregistration form. And it's beneficial if we have a plethora of preregistration forms. So with the rationalist approach, that's the simplest. Just you or you and a group of colleagues sit together and develop a form. That's it. The benefits are that it's efficient and quick and you have full control of the degree of specificity. So if you have a certain study design that you use a lot with your lab, you can just create a form for that. That's fine. Drawbacks are of course that your procedure is not systematic and reproducible. And it might only be applicable to rare use cases. You can make it a bit more systematic by using expert consensus. Of course, you'd have to think about how you define expert, but that's a different problem. And then they basically just use the rationalist approach. They also just think about what should be in the form. The benefit is that you immediately have consensus with this group. And that helps with adopting the form. The drawbacks are that the process is often still not super well documented and the selection of the experts determines what you end up with. Then you can use the Delphi method, which is a more systematic version of this expert consensus. So it has the benefits of the expert consensus method, but it's more systematic. The nice thing is that the recruitment is often more formalized like emails are sent to listservs and stuff like that. But the selection remains central and still, of course, who you want to include determines what you end up with. And of course, you know, if there's no one correct way to do science, there's also no one correct way to determine what an expert is. Scoping reviews are probably the most transparent approach you can use. Not in the least place because you can pre-register your scoping reviews. And I don't think I have to explain it too much about this to this audience. So it's very systematic and reproducible, but you will always look to the past because you will base it on the existing literature. So you will look at the practices that people applied and then those will form the basis for your form.  That, of course, makes it more time-consuming and expensive, but also better. Okay, so imagine that you chose a way to get your form structure and item contents and stuff. And then you created the form or you want to reuse somebody else's form and now you're doing a preregisteration. So we just saw that we loaded a form specification directly from a spreadsheet, but now we'll use one, the inclusive systematic review form, that's included with pre-regger. So then you can load it very quickly and then pre-regger can tell you what the next item is to fill. In this case, we haven't actually completed anything yet. So the next item is just the first one, which is the target discipline. Now we can look at the content that has been specified in the meta-metadata section. We can see that actually nothing has been specified. And then we can specify the target discipline, the first item, using pre-regger, pre-reg specify. Basically, you pass the object that holds the preregisteration and then you use the item identifier and the content to specify what you want to add. And then you store the result again in an object, usually the same object. You can include validation rules in your preregisteration form specification. In this case, what I passed, passed the validation. And then it's stored. So now we can look at whether this helped. And it did help. So now here we have the psychology as a value. Like this, you can specify everything. Often I think you won't do this in the console, but you will want to do this in an R Markdown file. You can also knit the results immediately. And that's often what you will want to do with the R Markdown file as well, so that you can actually include the entire form contents. Okay, so that's how you initialize and fill a form. As I said, that's usually not what you want to do. Usually you'll want to write an R Markdown template. And for that, I'll show some examples from Nitro. Nitro is actually from a bit of a different R package that's not completely done yet, Meta before. Meta before is mostly intended to help you with extraction. It helps you specify how information should be extracted and then scalably and transparently extract data in a way that can be combined with data from other studies. This is accompanied by this Nitro, which is a narrated illustration of a review outline, which is an R Markdown file. And in this R Markdown file, there are already the commands to generate a preregistration template using the Inclusive Systematic Review template, which then writes it an R Markdown template to preregistration auto-generated, which you then rename to something else. In this case, we use preregistration.RMD, because of course, otherwise, if you accidentally run this again, you override your specified preregistration stuff.  And this R Markdown file contains, that's the first chunk here, contains the entire form specification. That's all the way at the bottom, so that is not in the way. But it's loaded first. And then it initializes this form that has been defined in the R code at the bottom that's loaded at the top. Then here, it shows the information that was specified in the preregistration specification. For example, these are the instructions that are added in the instructions worksheet that I showed earlier. And then it has a sequence of chunks for every item. So basically, you can just fill those out. Here is the target discipline, so you can add the target discipline, you can add the title, you can add the alters, et cetera. And here are the name, the human readable name, the label, and the instructions for every item. So for tasks and roles, describe the expected tasks and roles, blah, blah, blah. So you can give this to students or to collaborators and they can just fill this out. This can be rendered, of course, to PDF, but it can also be rendered to HTML. And if you render it to HTML, or you include it in our markdown file, then it also includes the form and the, so the form specification and the data as JSON. So you can look at that at the preregistration, preregur package download website. You have this where you can see how you can import the preregistration or a preregistration form from embedded JSON from a URL. This is, for example, the vignette for creating a preregistration form, which is also here, that's this one. And that also includes an example of the created preregistration form, which includes the preregistration form specification as well as the data as JSON, which is imported here. And then here you can see that the content has been imported properly. These are the links that I promised earlier. I'll move on from this slide because this is a video. And that was actually it in terms of what I can do in terms of showing, showing preregar a bit and explaining a bit why it was created and the form itself. So I would say, go visit either preregar.openScience or the doi for the form, the inclusive systematic review form and then go play around with it. And if you have any questions or issues, you can mostly find me at Mestodon. I am technically still at Twitter, but you can also email me although Mestodon probably worked best. Thank you very much.


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Everybody's sitting in front of your monthly dodge what I have here what everybody's been asking for the 2020 Jeep Wrangler Sahara with the eco diesel in it. That's right. I said eco diesel Nice the equip navigation 8.4 screen automatic. You didn't see he's steering wheel It's an unlimited. So it's a four-door like I said eco diesel sensors in the back and also the Backup camera. This does have a hard and soft top combination on this one. So we're ready for your jeeps We're gonna go mountain view dodge who you can see me Steve McFarland. Have a great day


Soil moisture was recently added to the list of essential climate variables, ECVs, which are deemed essential for IPCC and UNFCCC needs and considered feasible for global observation. To create a consistent data record, multiple data sources including active and passive microwave observations in the low-frequency range should be used. Sensors such as C-band scatterometers on ERS and Metop satellites and multi-frequency radiometers can be used to cover a time period of more than 30 years. The best approach for fusing different satellite data sets is to merge level 2 soil moisture data derived from individual satellite data records, which has already been demonstrated in the WACMOS project and will be further improved in the Climate Change Initiative Program of ESA. This article was authored by W. Wagner, W. Derigo, R. Dejeu and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


As-salamu alaikum and a very good day dear students, I welcome you to the course Social Entrepreneurship. My introduction first, my name is Dr. Tahira Jabi, I am an Associate Professor and Director for the Centre of Social Development and Social Entrepreneurship in the University of Punjab. I will be conducting this course on Social Entrepreneurship for you. First things first, we will start with the term Social Entrepreneurship because my experience is still going on that this term is not for us, especially in this combination of Social and Entrepreneurship. The word Social, we all use it all the time, we are familiar with it, it is related to people, it is related to the human body, it is related to the human muscles, it is related to the human muscles. Entrepreneurship is a little less familiar for some people and the people who are familiar with it are more familiar with Business Entrepreneurship. So, let us look at the term Entrepreneurship. The term Entrepreneurship comes from Francis Bond. Francis Bond's word is Entrepreneur, which means to do something. Social Entrepreneurship is a unique combination. When we say Social, we are talking about social life, social problems, social issues and entrepreneurship. When we talk about entrepreneurship, we talk about those people who take risks and earn benefits from the business and earn profit from it. So, how can these two be united? We will do an academic definition in a very detailed, scientific way in the future of Social Entrepreneurship. But right now, to start this course, to set a ground, I will give you a working or operational definition. Social Entrepreneurship means in simple words that the principles of business are ways, tools, technologies and the theories used to solve the problems and issues of social life. And those people who use the tools and technologies of business and try to solve social problems, we call them Social Entrepreneurship. Social Entrepreneurship is a new kid on the block. So, we need to know a little bit about it. For example, if a new student comes to your class, we need to know a little bit about his background. So, let's start with the background. If you google it, you get a lot of material on Social Entrepreneurship these days. But what you have done is not mostly on Social Entrepreneurship, but on books. And a lot of books have been written which will help you in this course. But most of the material is about Social Entrepreneurs, those people who do entrepreneurship, not about Social Entrepreneurship. Our imagination, in fact, our collective imagination, when people talk about Social Entrepreneurship in the world, they are actually talking about Social Entrepreneurship. A hero-like status has been found on Social Entrepreneurship.  How people have used innovative ideas, how strange, bad, complex and serious social issues have been solved and are being done. For homeless people, while setting up their shelter, food and lodging, a great restaurant has started. Someone has started giving online tuition somewhere, and it is the biggest online education business owner. And at some point, low-cost health services have to be done. For example, there used to be hospitals in charity, they used to give health services at the expense of Rs.10, but those hospitals themselves used to go for people's donations. Now, they have become successful businesses. And all these success stories revolve around people whom we call Social Entrepreneurs. So, who are these Social Entrepreneurs? And why are these people solving these problems? Because when we talk about social problems, poverty, hunger, child abuse, domestic violence, global warming, energy conservation, these are all our social issues that we are dealing with today. And we all want to solve them. And in our desire to solve them, let us first look at the government's side. The government will solve these issues. And if the government is not able to do it, then we give it to the private sector, they take some money and give us good education. They take some money and give us good health services. So, these social problems are not today. Since the beginning of human history, they have been with people. Since then, governments, private sector, which has far-profit sector like businesses, not-for-profit sector like NGOs, they are trying to solve these problems. They are trying so-called. But there is no progress on it. If you calculate the net progress, then millions of people, millions of people, total 8 billion world population, millions of people are hungry, they have no shelter, millions of children are out of school, they have no education, they are not able to give them government, they cannot afford the private sector, they are not getting health services, they are not getting health services even after giving them money. So, if we have done the progress of our humanity, I am not a doomsayer, I don't know if you know, I am not living in the era of stone. Human history is the history of its progress. But this progress is slow. All those people who are living in poverty, who are hungry, who are shelterless, who are victims of pollution, who are victims of domestic violence, they also have the right to be free. Those people who are using business rules, principles, tools and technologies, trying to solve these social problems, we call them social entrepreneurs. And the processes they use, the work they do, we call them social entrepreneurship. So, in the next lecture, we will talk about that these social entrepreneurs are precisely after the 20th century and why they came in the beginning of the 20th century. How did they feel the need at this time? And what did they do?


Alright, are we good? Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna go. You gotta do it this way. Okay, you gotta come here. That's why I'm putting you on that side. Get Justin into the picture. So I have to introduce myself? That side? Dear Justin, dear Prime Minister. Hello Justin Trudeau. I used to work under your father in Ottawa. I'm a pipe fitter. I'm an Iranian-Canadian. Dear Justin, you can't address climate change and build pipe lines. See, they keep saying jobs, jobs, jobs, but the amount of jobs is really the pipe line is so few. I would really like you to reconsider forcing the kinder Morgan pipeline on the beautiful coastline. We need to look to the future for future generations. I know that we can produce our own energy. We do not need oil and gas. And you can smile. No, I'm angry with him.


Okay, New York City factory footage, here's some footage from the factory, this is... Making a tester. Making a tester. A lot of our factory footage that we do is testers, because we do a test. We test everything, so we like to test how that gets made, and then we like to make them use an Arduino Uno shaped PCB, and what's nice about that is then, you know, we can quickly make new testers, and this is Isaac Speed Rounding RP2040 testing, so it only takes us two seconds to test it once, that's why he's going, don't fast. Yeah, we have a video that we're going to show in a bit about that as well. This is our special tester, which uses the mass storage capabilities of a teensy to actually use, like it shows up as a disk drive, it drags the file onto the disk drive, and then make more renders as well. Well, this is us testing this week's new product, the Neo-Key, and the next week's new product, the Neo-Key 2. You can see how the auto stencil works, it fixes the holding pins in a specific spot, so when it presses down... Yeah, things stay nice and flat, and here it is, getting ready, squishing, like a pro, nice bead, nice squish, okay, got a back squish, yeah, squish both directions, and for the folks, for the person who asked, they want to see a video of how we make testers, we actually talk about this a lot, there's a bunch of videos, we have a guide, yeah, we even have a guide, so check it out, we also talk about this at Descalada, and I think we also did with the Digi-Key video series, make it a market. Alright, and it would be made in New York City factory footage without the Disney building across the street, that's still going, so here's a time lapse of all the construction going on across the street. They're starting to fill in, usually they took away the ramp, I wonder how they, I guess they have to just build every floor now, and then maybe they lift the, maybe they lift it out with the crane, I don't know how they do. They bury them. You think so? Yeah. Oh, that's cool.


Did you know that having student loan debt may increase your risk for heart disease? According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, which analyzed the association between adults that didn't pay down their student debt, or took on new educational debt between young adulthood and early midlife, had an elevated risk for cardiovascular disease. As if having student debt alone wasn't enough already. Now you get to add a little sprinkle of heart disease into the situation. Lovely. If you've watched any of my other videos, welcome back. And for those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael, aka Dr. Cellini, and I'm a board certified diagnostic and interventional radiologist. And also for those of you who are new around here, I love talking about student debt. It's a passion of mine, really. So on today's video, we are doing just that. We're talking about student debt and how it increases our risk for heart disease. Let's go. Also, before we get into the video, if you want a chance at getting five free stocks, literally just click the link in my description from Weeble. All you need to do is deposit literally one penny and you get five free stocks. It's that simple. Click the link in my description. So as we know, student loan debt has become extremely common for young adults these days. In fact, about 46 million Americans have student debt totaling upwards of $1.75 trillion. That's right, trillion. And among the seemingly never ending rise of education costs and declining state support for higher education and mixed in with the little middle class wage stagnation, student loans have become the highest form of debt for U.S. households just behind mortgages. So this is probably the only time where second place is better than being first. Per the article, the average holder of debt graduates with greater than $30,000 in student loans and it has become increasingly more challenging for people to repay it. Furthermore, there's probably no surprise that the default rate on these loans just continues to creep higher and higher as well. It only makes sense after all. Another interesting stat here is that less than half of borrowers who are currently in their repayment status have paid at least $1 towards their principal within five years of being in repayment. And for those of you that don't know what that means, basically half of the population that has student loans has been paying only the interest and not even touch the principal yet. And by principal, I mean the actual amount you borrowed minus the interest rate. And unlike almost any other debt in America, student loans do not go away with bankruptcy, which means you are literally stuck with it for life, regardless of your financial situation. Say you lose your job? Well, too bad. Still gotta pay those student loans. Better find a way to make those payments. And you've heard me talk about the income driven repayment plans where you pay a portion of your income every single month, which I used to do as well before I refinanced my student loans. But even those people are having difficult time paying their loans back as well. So as we get into this article, it may come at no surprise that carrying student loan debt may increase your levels of stress. It's not shocking here. And per the article, on one hand, longitudinal findings reveal that higher education, especially a four year degree is associated with lower inflammation and better health. Many have thought that secondary education promotes better health because additional years in school bring knowledge, skills, and other resources. It provides you with a prestigious, stable job that you are well compensated for, right? Well, maybe if you don't have student debt. Mounting evidence shows that student debt is a financial stressor. And it takes a toll on mental health and your overall well being. Per the article in Young Adults, student debt is associated with poor psychological functioning, shorter sleep, and lower life satisfaction. Furthermore, student debt has also been shown to be associated with smoking and high blood pressure, both of which result in cardiovascular disease. Some studies even show that there is an association with student debt and poor health, which is most prevalent when students first finish their college education and start having to pay off their loans, which makes sense. You're having to deal with the added stress of finding a job, just finishing higher education. And piled on top of all that, you have to start paying off your loans when you don't have an income yet. You can see how this could be a little bit stressful. And trust me, I've been there. And I guess I still am there, to be honest. Okay, so now let's get into the actual study. I'm going to read off here. So this study looks at the changes in household student loan debt between young adulthood and early midlife and two related outcomes. The first is the 30 year Framingham cardiovascular disease risk scores and CRP assays showing chronic stress and inflammation. And CRP stands for C reactive protein, which is a way we measure inflammation and stress. The second is future risk disease and healthy adults. Now I'm not going to sit here and read off all the materials and methods and go through the statistical analysis that they did to come up with all of these results, but I am going to summarize the article for you because that's the point of this entire video. Researchers included data from 20,745 participants from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Participants were first followed from the grades seven through 12, and then again between the ages of 22 and 44. And then biological measures were performed for cardiovascular health and C reactive protein levels on certain participants. The results of the study demonstrated that those who consistently had debt or took on debt had higher cardiovascular risk scores than those who have never been in debt or had paid off their debt. Also, the study showed clinically significant C reactive protein levels in those who took on debt or were consistently in debt between young adulthood and early midlife. Of note, ethnicity and race had no impact on outcomes. Now there were some limitations of this study, which I'll get into right now. There were three of them. So for one, the student debt was measured at the household level, which could conflate an individual's debt with their family's debt. So stay for instance, I was in a household and I had debt, but also my two brothers that live with me and my mom also had debt. The debt would be artificially elevated in my household versus it just being me there. The second limitation of this study was that CRP and cardiovascular disease was measured at a single point in time, which cannot really identify the changing factors associated with cardiovascular health over time. And lastly, participants conceding to the at-home medical exams and blood tests to get the cardiovascular measures and CRP assays were not chosen at random and therefore, selection bias could have been a concern. Overall though, in conclusion, this study suggests that student debt negates the health benefits of college completion and socioeconomic advantage of a four-year credential. This study joins a growing body of research demonstrating student debt to be a financial stressor affecting population health. Furthermore, student debt may have other long-term health consequences that we have yet to figure out. So what do I think about all of this? You know, I probably have some strong feelings because I always have strong feelings about student debt. Well, I think it's obviously no secret that America has a student debt crisis. And I think now we are just starting to understand that the student debt may impact Americans in ways we weren't prepared for. I was actually just having this conversation with my friends at my other friends, birthday barbecue this weekend. Shout out, Sandy. A lot of my friends there had kids in the two to three year old range and we were talking about what's going to happen 15, 16 years from now when it's time for their kids to finish high school and potentially go to college. Will college still be relevant at that time? Is it even going to be worth it? Is tuition going to be like $100,000 per year by then? And now when you read articles like this, it makes you think twice about the future of our education. And is it worth to pay all this money and add so much stress to our lives just to get educated? Like what else are we going to discover in the coming years? Is being indebted financially to the government and sacrificing your own health worth a degree? It really makes you think. And one thing we haven't really touched on yet is how this all leads to increased cardiovascular risk besides the stress and inflammation. Well, think about it. What's the first thing to go when you're stressed out and strapped for cash? Your diet. When you're strapped for cash, you're not going to be stopping by Whole Foods every day and buying expensive healthy meals. You're going to be going for the cheap carb-heavy option like McDonald's.  I haven't eaten at McDonald's in like 15 years. And you don't do this because you want to.  Well, maybe you do. But for the purpose of this argument, you don't want to go to McDonald's, but you're kind of forced to because it's the cheaper option and it's the less stressful option for you. And it's pretty much the only thing you can afford in that time. And also that $150 a month gym you are a member of, you're probably not going to go to that either because that gets slashed too and you can't afford these things. So this is why your diet kind of goes out the window and you start this downward spiral effect and you start developing increased risk for cardiovascular disease. And then what do you do when you're stressed out? You maybe take up smoking or you start smoking even more, which increases your cardiovascular risk.  Also, who do you think is impacted the most by this student debt crisis? Well, the study shows that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are disproportionately affected by the negative health consequences of having student debt. And I came across an interesting quote while doing research for this article. I'll pop up on the screen right here. These findings provide a benchmark for widening health inequalities among a cohort bearing more student debt than any other in US history. The study points out in this conclusion, as student debt accumulates within cohort disparities in cardiovascular disease and related morbidities may undermine the health benefits of post-secondary education. Said another way, the health ramifications associated with growing debt burden associated with higher education may outweigh the benefits of continuing education for low income populations. It may be more significant. The low income population is more unlikely to be able to repay their debt, which would make them be consistently in debt and more likely to take on more debt. And it's crazy here. Once you kind of get into the details of student debt, how much it impacts everybody, you think it's just associated with the financial burden of being in debt. But there are so many other factors that go along with it. And the goal of this whole video is to kind of highlight some of those. But what about the Biden administration and the debt forgiveness that they keep talking about? I'm prepared to write off the $10,000 debt. For one, I thought about doing a whole video on this topic, but there's not enough data out for me to really go and do a deep dive like I want to. And allegedly, I keep hearing that there's rumors of it coming down the pipe. But who knows? Allegedly, they've been talking about this student loan forgiveness, but it has many contingencies. Some rumors say that not everybody will get their student loans forgiven. And it may be related to your current income level. So the high income earners will not be invited to have their student loans forgiven. And they might not even forgive a student loan amount over $10,000. I think they said for certain that they would not forgive anything over $50,000, which means it'll probably be like less than half of that. So I'm guessing around like $10,000 if it even happens. Because as of now, it's a very long way away. So I wouldn't hold your breath and I wouldn't count on that student loan forgiveness, especially since nowadays $10,000 doesn't even cover like what a semester in med school. So it's not gonna really do much for your student loan debt, but every little bit helps, right? So I think we pretty much touched on everything about this article and student debt and the impact of student debt on your health. Hopefully you all enjoyed this. Hopefully you all learned something. Let me know in the comments what you think about this article. As always, I will link it in the description box below. Make sure you gently press on that subscribe button, follow me on Instagram and TikTok if you don't already. And as always, I'll see you all on the next video. Bye.


I wish I'd stayed in touch with friends. This is interesting because it's good to ask yourself the question, occasionally, is there anybody you regret losing touch with? And if there is, can you find a way to get back in touch with them? It may not be the level of connection you had when you lost touch with them, neither you nor them are perhaps looking for that. So that's going to be the scary thing if you reconnect with them or someone does with you. But as you age, I think it's worth asking yourself, is there someone I regret losing touch with?  So it just needs one of us to initiate connection and contact, to break that sort of standoff, because they don't think you want to hear from them, and you don't think they want to hear from you, but one of the regrets of the dying as I wish I'd stayed in touch with friends.