Journalist and author William Leith explores hidden problems with living in a 24-hour world in an article in The Guardian. Leith interviews Kate, a 36-year-old counsellor who is "drained beyond belief", and Greg, a man in his 40s "crushed with tiredness". Both suffered series' of viral attacks and subsequent sleep and fatigue problems.Leith discusses a number of books on the consequences of modern life in the Western world, and speaks to Dr Frank Lipman, a South African doctor working in New York who argues that the total amount of physical, psychological and environmental stress on a person's body in the developed world has quadrupled in the past 30 years. "My philosophy," Lipman tells Leith, "is that we are out of sync with our body rhythms. We're also overfed and undernourished with food, and undernourished when it comes to light."
"We get spent," writes Lipman, "because our modern lifestyle has removed us from nature and we have become divorced from its rhythms and cycles. We are slaves to the corporate model," he says. "I think it is going to get worse and worse - and I don't see any improvement in the near future until we reach some kind of tipping point and wake up." Source: Guardian, 12 July 2009. tinyurl.com/nkafxd
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