Adulting 101: How to survive the real world

By Jen Thorpe

Sometimes it is hard to be an adult. Yes, you can go to bed as late as you want, but you have to make decisions all the time. You have bills to pay and taxes to do. It’s enough to make you want to scream – WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS?
Adulting 101 will help you navigate the tricky terrain of adulthood. Jen Thorpe guides you through everything you need to know from relationships, sex, work, health and money to how government and the media work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780795710452

Jen Thorpe

Jen Thorpe is a feminist writer and researcher based in Cape Town, South Africa. Jen published her first novel, 'The Peculiars', with Penguin South Africa in 2016. It was long listed for the Etisalat Prize for Literature (2016) and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize (2017). Jen has published poetry, flash fiction, and short stories on a number of online publishing platforms including 'Itch', 'Brittle Paper, 'Aerodrome', 'Saraba Magazine', 'BooksLive', and 'Poetry Potion'. She has completed writing residencies in Uganda, the USA and France. Find out more via http://jen-thorpe.com

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CHEAT SHEET

8 ADULTING TIPS FOR TAKING CARE OF YOU

1.

Get enough sleep.

2.

Take a deep breath.

3.

Take care of your mental wellbeing.

4.

Move your body.

5.

Consider health insurance.

6.

Eat less meat, eat more veggies.

7.

Don’t drink too much. Don’t smoke at all.

8.

Get creative.

TAKING CARE OF YOU

Ah, you’re an adult now. Congratulations. That means you get to decide when to go to bed, what to eat, if you’re going to exercise, who to have sex with, and what to do with your creative impulses. You are the master of your own health (except for those pesky genetics and global pandemics, of course).

Maybe when you read that you think – FINALLY, I’ve been waiting all this time to make my own choices and I can’t wait to try different things. Good for you. In contrast, maybe you are someone thinking ‘Can’t someone just tell me what to do and deliver me meals and snacks all day, and do my exercise for me?’ It’s okay. We’ve all been there. Or at least I certainly have.

Being healthy can feel like a chore, or boring, or puritanical. This chapter includes some information that can help you make better choices that are right for you.

There are three important things you should know at the start of this section.

One, being healthy isn’t about how you look, it’s about how you’re feeling and what’s going on inside your body. Even supermodels get diarrhoea.

Two, I don’t have any interest in telling you what to eat or what exercise to do, or what bed to buy. I’m not a brand representative for anything and I already have to decide for myself, so I don’t have time to decide it for you.

Three, being able to make decisions about your health is an absolute privilege. Many people do not have the economic freedom or leisure time to even be thinking about this stuff. So, try to think of it as a luxury, not a chore.

The thing is that there is so much about the outside world that you can’t control. Sometimes it is just weird out there. But you can take care of yourself so that you’ve got enough energy – emotional and physical – to handle everything that being an adult throws at you.

1.

GET ENOUGH SLEEP

Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, ‘Sleep, the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing’. He was so right. The people who say things like ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ or ‘I only need four hours of sleep a day’ will be dead way earlier than those who are getting the recommended eight hours.

How much sleep do we need?

We all absolutely need to sleep – every species on the planet does. It is vital to our health, emotional wellbeing, and safety. We ALL need between seven and nine hours of sleep. Some people slightly more (me), some a little less. The chances of being able to be a full and functioning human on four to six hours of sleep are one in four million.¹ There is a reason why sleep deprivation is a form of torture.

Two things cause our need to sleep. The first is a chemical in our brain called adenosine that builds up throughout the day causing a sleep pressure or sleepiness. More adenosine = more sleepiness. Sleep cleans away adenosine in our brain and relieves that pressure.

The second is our circadian rhythm. In the early morning hours, our circadian rhythm helps us to wake up. It’s a 24-hour cycle that makes us feel alert and tired at different points of the day. Most of us are at peak wakefulness around midday, and then in the late afternoon we dip, and keep dipping as we get closer to bedtime.

These two factors ideally work together. As our circadian rhythm peaks, our adenosine levels are low, and we feel awake. As the circadian rhythm starts to descend towards sleep, our adenosine levels are high, and we feel sleepy.² It’s a magical system that we don’t need to do much to keep going.

How much sleep we need depends on our stage of life. The recommendations according to the National Sleep Foundation (in the USA) are included in the table below.

What sleep does for us and the types of sleep

Our brain is extremely active when we sleep, and sleep is vital for our physical and emotional health. In fact, our brain’s desire to sleep is stronger than its desire for food or sex.³

The different types of sleep we get affect our bodies in different ways. Sleep occurs in two broad categories – Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Non-REM. In Non-REM sleep there are two further categories of sleep: light and deep.

As we fall asleep, we move through different stages over roughly 90-minute cycles.⁴

In light sleep our breath and heart rate slow down, as do our brain waves. In deep sleep, the brain waves are even slower and bigger. Non-REM sleep is good for consolidating information and learning, capturing and filing our memories, lowering our blood pressure and heartrate, repairing and relaxing our muscles, restoring our energy, and boosting and restoring our immune system. Matthew Walker, a leading sleep scientist, calls non-REM sleep ‘the best health insurance policy you could ever wish for’.⁵

REM sleep is when we dream. During REM sleep, our brain is active and our brain waves are faster than they are in non-REM sleep (and even faster compared to some of our brainwaves when we’re awake). In this stage of the sleep, we process things that happened to us during the day and work through emotionally difficult events (what Matthew Walker calls overnight therapy). We link new things we’ve learned with what we already know, helping us with creative problem solving. REM helps to regulate our emotions. People who have more REM sleep typically live longer.⁶

Morning larks vs night owls

Here is a quiz to help you find out what type of sleep personality you have. Let’s call it ‘the Thorpe MethodTM’. Picture this scenario, then answer the question that follows. It is the morning. Your alarm has just gone off and you have managed to get up without pressing snooze. You haven’t yet had breakfast (or coffee / tea). For a bonus detail, let’s say birds are chirping and it’s a beautiful day. Then … the person you live with starts talking to you.

Do you (a) respond and continue with lovely conversation, inspired, and delighted by the opportunity to chat; (b) feel an emotional tidal wave start to drown you and want to murder them? If the answer was (a), the chances are you are a morning lark. If your answer was (b), chances are you aren’t.

Whether you are a lark, or an owl, it is called your sleep chronotype. This is determined by your genes, so you can stop feeling guilty that you’re not one of those people who can stay up all night at parties, or who can get up at 5 am and write or run every morning. Between the larks and the owls are the hummingbirds, people who get up early enough and can stay up a little bit.⁷

Even before you took my highly unofficial quiz you probably already had an idea of whether you were a lark or an owl, or something in between. These chronotypes shift over time from infancy (larks) to adolescence (owls), then settle in our adulthood (depends), before tending back towards larks during our old age. If you’re interested, there are official quizzes you can take to get more information. They’re included in the Extra Resources section of the book.

Right now, the world is structured to benefit morning larks. We’ve all be trained to get up early, go to work or school, then come home and go to bed earlyish. Early to bed, early to rise, makes you happy, healthy, and wise, right? Except if you’re not a lark.

The thing about sleep chronotypes is that if you start trying to fight against the way you need to sleep, you will end up tired (and miss out on all the health benefits of sleep listed above). Forcing the whole population of the world to behave like larks is bad for those who aren’t.

Many of us get up and go to bed early in the week, and then at the weekend we sleep in and go to bed late. Some scientists call this a ‘sleep bulimia’⁸ and others call it ‘social jetlag.’⁹ Changing up our sleep messes with our body clock and might keep us up on Sunday night, meaning that we start the week feeling low and tired (no, it’s not just the depressing Carte Blanche episode you watched).

Things that affect our sleep

Light and screen time

The light in your work and home environment matters because of your circadian rhythm. Poor lighting in your office can make you feel snoozy because the brain doesn’t know it’s daytime and might start to produce melatonin. When you get home after work, bright computer, phone, and tablet light can make you feel alert and awake because the brain isn’t getting the message that it’s night time and so it doesn’t make melatonin.

Adulting tip: Keep your work environment bright and light. Keep your bedroom lights dim and leave your phone outside the bedroom.

Caffeine

The timing of caffeine matters. For most of us, about five or six hours after we have some caffeine, 50 per cent of it is still circulating in our brain and bodies. Ten to twelve hours after your cup of caffeine, about a quarter of it is still going, circulating in your brain. That’s whether you’re having a double-shot flat white, a Red Bull, or a Monster.

Adenosine builds up in your brain, regardless of how much coffee or how many energy drinks you consume. Caffeine blocks the adenosine signal in the brain though, so it doesn’t know that it’s getting tired. Eventually, when the caffeine is metabolised by your body the adenosine signal comes screaming through, and the pressure to sleep is way more intense than usual (you might call this a ‘crash’).

Caffeine affects our deep sleep. Having late night caffeine might not stop you from falling asleep, but it will affect how adequately your sleep restores you. So, try not to overdo it on the caffeine (which is hidden in many things we normally eat and drink, and is in flu meds too).

Adulting tip: If you need / enjoy / want a cup of coffee, you should drink it in the morning, so it has time to get out of your body.

Alcohol

Contrary to popular advice, alcohol is not good for your sleep. Yes, it’s a sedative, but sedation isn’t sleeping.¹⁰,¹¹ If you drink and you’re honest, you’ll know that you don’t feel rested after a night out, even if you didn’t drink that much.

At the same time, sleep deprivation can lead to increased risky behaviour when it comes to drinking – research from the USA showed that teens who had sleep problems were more likely to binge drink into their adulthood, develop drinking problems, and drive drunk. In that study, each hour of extra sleep in the high school years was associated with a 10 per cent reduction in binge drinking later in life.¹²

Even low amounts of alcohol (one or two drinks, depending on your size and sex) are linked to decreased sleep quality and long-term alcohol abuse is linked to chronic sleep problems and insomnia.¹³

Alcohol disrupts and reduces the quality of your sleep. It causes you to wake up more often during the night (though you might not even remember this). The major disruptions happen late in the night when you should be getting your REM sleep.¹⁴ This means you’re less able to be creative, less able to retain information, and miss out on all those REM benefits described above.

Adulting tip: If you do want to drink, a drink with lunch has a better chance of being processed by your liver before you go to bed than a nightcap. Don’t go to bed tipsy.

Stress

Many people don’t sleep when they’re stressed, and a lack of sleep makes you feel even more stressed.¹⁵

Getting enough sleep on a regular sleep schedule can help reduce acute stress because of the ability of REM sleep to help work through difficult emotions. As the School of Life explains, ‘what can determine the difference between madness and sanity may be nothing grander, but then again nothing more critical, than how long our minds have been allowed to lie on a pillow in the preceding hours.’¹⁶ I’ll talk more about stress later in the book, but keep in mind that sleep and stress are connected.

Adulting tip: If you are stressed, one self-care tool is to try and create a good environment for sleep. I describe that later in this chapter.

Sleep deprivation is terrible for you and is extremely dangerous to others

For many of us, the first thing we give up when becoming an adult is sleep – when we finish high school and head off to a job or varsity or to look for work, we generally get up early to travel or go to bed late because we’re partying hard.

In the past, some people have even tried to stay awake for days at a time, for charity, or to try and break world records. The results include hallucinations, permanent personality changes and, ironically, chronic insomnia later in life.¹⁷ After these results were shown to be common across attempts to break the record, the Guinness Book of Records now no longer lists records for voluntary sleep deprivation because it is too dangerous. Keep in mind that they still let people do a bunch of dangerous stuff – like letting Felix Baumgartner break the sound barrier while free falling from space at a height of 30 km (higher than Mount Everest!)¹⁸ – so that should tell you how bad avoiding sleep is.

Depriving ourselves of sleep, as Julia Roberts says in Pretty Woman, is a ‘Big mistake. Huge.’ People who avoid sleep in order to work can end up suicidal, in hospital, or having seizures.¹⁹ Ariana Huffington collapsed at work from exhaustion, having slept around four hours a night in order to work more. After that experience, she prioritised sleep and now they have nap pods at the Huffington Post offices because of the proven benefits of rest.

Sleep deprivation is linked to a weakened immune system, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, poor ability to learn and remember things, dementia, poor motor skills, increased chances of diabetes and obesity, feeling more emotional, increased impulsivity, increased risk of suicide, road accident deaths, and decreased sex drive and fertility.²⁰,²¹ Sleep deprivation makes it harder to stop smoking too.²² The scary thing is that when we’re deprived, we don’t always know it.

Maybe some of those risks feel as far away from you right now as the chance of freefalling from space, but driving while tired, or getting into a car, bus, or taxi with a driver who is, is a common daily danger for all of us. Driving tired is like driving drunk – it slows your reflexes and makes you slower to respond to dangers on the road. You’re generally less aware of danger when you’re tired²³ and are more likely to ‘micro-sleep’ (just a few seconds of falling asleep), which can be long enough for someone to get hurt. The scariest thing about micro-sleeps while driving is that we underestimate how long they are.

The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA estimates that one in 25 adult drivers fall asleep while driving, and that drowsy driving was responsible for 72 000 crashes, 44 000 injuries and 800 deaths in 2013 alone.²⁴ Estimates in the UK are similar – driver tiredness causes more than 20 per cent of car accidents there.²⁵ While we don’t have statistics on this for SA, we do know that ‘human factors’ were responsible for 86 per cent of road accident deaths in 2019.²⁶ Most people who die in car accidents in South Africa are pedestrians, so it’s not only your life you’re putting in danger when you drive tired.²⁷,²⁸

Signs of tiredness

Maybe you’re so tired all the time that it feels normal to be bleary-eyed and emotional. I know new parents, school teachers at the start of term, and late-shift workers all feel this way (at least some of the time). Perhaps you’ve forgotten what the signs of tiredness are.

Signs that you’re tired include frequent yawning, heavy eyelids, or frequent eye blinking, daydreaming or wondering thoughts, headaches and muscle aches, moodiness, irritability, food cravings, and slow reflexes.

If you’re driving, some other signs are an inability to remember the last stretch of the road, tailgating and having to break suddenly, struggling with maintaining a constant speed, missing traffic signs or exit signs, drifting from your lane, or dozing off for microsleeps.²⁹

Adulting tip: Listen to your body when you’re tired, and to get the sleep you need.

Create a good sleep environment

The mismatch between the sleep we need and the sleep we get can result in sleep debt and, although it would be nice, we can’t regain the lost sleep we skipped because of that deadline or party.

The adulting tip for this one is to get up and go to bed at roughly the same times every day. That way, your body gets in a groove, your brain is cleaned up every night, and you get the overnight healing you need. Regularity is key.

Matthew Walker has a few more suggestions for getting a good night’s sleep. He suggests creating a wind-down routine, so that your body knows that you’re about to go to bed. Try some meditating or some journaling so that you calm your emotional self. Walker suggests limiting activities that are harmful to sleep (caffeine, booze, and screen time) for a few hours before bed.

He also recommends limiting your bed use to sleep and sex because this sends the message to your body and brain that your bed is only for these two things.

If you can, create a safe and comfortable space for sleep. We need to be quite cool to sleep well, for instance. The ideal temperature is around 18 degrees Celsius.³⁰ If you can’t control the room temperature, a warm shower or bath before bed can encourage your body to cool itself down.

If you’re lying in bed and getting stressed out because you haven’t fallen asleep, there are some things you can try. After fifteen minutes, get out of bed and move to another area and try to do something that relaxes you (reading, meditating, listening to music – no screens), then when you start to feel sleepy again, go back to the bedroom.³¹

To make waking up easier, try to get as much natural light as you can as soon as you can. This tells our brain it’s daytime, and so gets our body clock running on the right time.

Naps can help to mitigate some of the impact of bad sleep and are at their most beneficial in the early afternoon,³² but the goal is to get the recommended hours as often as you can for the most benefits.

2.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH

Managing the outside world on top of your own feelings and emotions can be a tricky part of adulting. There’s stuff that’s going on inside of us to deal with (new pressures and responsibilities, financial concerns, relationships to work out) and when that’s added to the outside stuff (longer working hours, a 24-hour news cycle, global pandemics, political shenanigans and so on) it can feel a bit like you signed up to CrossFit when you meant to sign up for yoga.

Many of us hold our breath, clench our teeth, hunch our shoulders and tense our bodies when we are stressed or overwhelmed. The amazing thing is that there is something simple and free that we can do throughout the day to stop that pressure from building up so badly. Breathe consciously.

The benefits of meditation and breathing well

There is good scientific evidence around the importance of the breath – in particular, the value of breathing through your nose instead of your mouth – for managing your immune system, stress levels, and sleep.³³

Why in through the nose? It’s built for smelling and breathing. Your nasal passages are specifically designed to filter and warm the air you breathe in, to moisten it, and to help it boost your oxygen absorption.³⁴ Breathing through the nose helps to regulate the direction and strength of the air coming into your body, allowing it be directed properly and so increasing

the rate of oxygen in your bloodstream, and slowing your rate of breathing down.³⁵

Your mouth, on the other hand, is designed for eating, drinking, and speaking.³⁶ When you breathe in through your mouth it dries it out, increases the amount of pollutants and germs that are drawn into your lungs, slows down the passage of oxygen into the bloodstream, and increases the risk of mouth and throat infections.³⁷ It means you’re breathing inefficiently into the upper chest only, and introducing unfiltered and poorly humidified air into the lungs.³⁸ Breathing through your mouth is linked to poor sleep, snoring, sleep apnoea, periodontal disease, bad breath, tooth cavities,³⁹ noisy eating, speech and swallowing problems and enlarged tonsils and adenoids. It’s linked to asthma, particularly exercise-induced asthma, and it can change the shape of your face and negatively affect the way your tongue works.⁴⁰

When we don’t breathe through our nose regularly it forgets how to do it. That means you may need to practise, and relearn how to breathe.⁴¹

Traditions from all over the world encourage breathing practises to help calm the mind and the body. The mental and physical health benefits of meditation – even for short periods each day – are well researched.⁴²,⁴³,⁴⁴,⁴⁵

Here are a few: stress reduction, decreased anxiety, decreased depression, reduced physical and psychological pain, improved memory, reduced