Exuberance is Beauty.
Thứ Bảy, 11 tháng 4, 2020
Thứ Sáu, 10 tháng 4, 2020
Thứ Năm, 9 tháng 4, 2020
Cải Cách Chữ Việt- Chuyện Xưa Rồi Diễm, tác giả Lê văn Nghĩa
Trong thời gian vừa qua trên báo chí và mạng xã hội lại dậy sóng với đề xuất cải cách chữ Việt. PGS Bùi Hiền có công bố công trình cải cách chữ Việt mà một số người cho rằng đây là công trình đầu tiên. Rồi hai ông Kiều Trường Lâm và Trần Tư Bình vừa được cấp bản quyền trong mùa dịch Covid 19.
Tuy nhiên , có ý kiến của một Tiến Sĩ cho rằng trước đây nhiều nhà nghiên cứu của viện ngôn ngữ học, trong đó người đầu tiên là giáo sư Hoàng Phê, và nhiều những ý kiến riêng lẻ từ những năm 1960 đã đưa ra đề xuất thay đổi cách viết chữ cái tiếng Việt được nhà truyền giáo người Pháp Alexandre de Rhodes phát minh ra vào thế kỷ 17. Như vậy có thể hiểu rằng chuyện cải cách chữ Việt đã bắt đầu từ thập kỷ 60.
CHUYỆN CẢI CÁCH CHỮ VIỆT-KHÔNG MỚI.
Tuy nhiên, nhờ có một tài liệu mà tôi vừa tìm được thì biết rằng từ năm 1948, ông Phạm Xuân Thái đã cho xuất bản quyển “Việt Ngữ Cải Cách” ( NXB TUQSHAIF- Maison d’Edition-Publishing-House, 22 Delorms Hanoi-131 Lagrandière Saigon). Ông Thái đã cho biết lý do xuất bản quyển sách nầy như sau:
“Chữ VN hiện giờ còn nhiều chỗ khuyết điểm, nhất là các dấu, rất bất tiện, dễ lầm lẫn. Những chữ in, đánh máy hay đánh điện tín thường có những sự lầm lẫn buồn cười như hà lạm trở thành hả lắm, thắng lợi trở thành thẳng lối, hối lộ thành hơi lo v.vv….Cái dấu tách riêng khỏi chữ, nên thường bị bỏ quên hay hiểu lầm, vì người ta cho chữ là quan hệ, còn cái dấu là phần phụ thuộc, không quan hệ mấy. Vậy phải viết dấu liền “sau chữ”, để đem nó lên địa vị quan trọng. Về phương diện nhanh chóng, viết lối cũ chậm hơn nhiều, vì sau khi viết xong chữ lại phải lùi bút lại đánh dấu, rồi mới đưa bút đi tới để viết chữ sau, thành ra chậm đà bút. “
Ông Phạm Xuân Thái đã đề nghị cải cách là thay các dấu bằng chữ theo nguyên tắc chữ tượng hình. Dấu sắc thay bằng chữ S vì chữ S gợi ý dấu sắc, thí dụ Hans (Hán). Dấu nặng thay bằng chữ J vì chữ J có dấu chấm gợi ý dấu nặng cũ thí dụ langj (lạng). Dấu hỏi thay bằng chữ F vì chữ F gợi hình dấu hỏi, thí dụ Hoaf (Hỏa). Dấu ngã thay bằng chữ W vì chữ W gợi hình dấu ngã cũ. thí dụ Maw (Mã). Dấu huyền thay bằng chữ B vì chữ B gợi ý chữ bình, bằng, thí dụ Hanb (Hàn). Có lẽ kiểu cải cách này do Ông Thái muốn tiện dụng cho chuyện đánh điện tín chăng vì theo ông “phải dùng những dấu nào tiện lợi cho việc ấn loát, đánh điện tín và đánh máy chữ”.
Những phụ âm , theo ông Thái cần phải cải cách là C thay cho chữ K và Q: thay cho chữ K trong những chữ như kêu viết là cequ, thay cho chữ Q như Cuoqcs (quốc), Coan (quan). Trong những chữ có chữ H sau cùng của những chữ êc, ic thí dụ thích được viết là thics, xếch được viết là xeqcs. Chữ D thay cho chữ Đ thí dụ đưa phải viết là duqa. Chữ F thay PH thí dụ phải viết là fải. GH thì bỏ H đi thí dụ ghê thì được viết là gê. Chữ K thay KH, ví dụ kang được thay cho khang. NGH thì bỏ H ví dụ nge viết thay cho nghe. Riêng chữ Y thì chỉ viết Y khi đứng một mình như Y (nó). I không được dùng khi đứng một mình vì …mỹ thuật. Không dùng Y trong những chữ Y là nguyên âm thí dụ cái ly thì phải viết là cái li, hy sinh thì phải viết là hi sinh . Về dấu thì ông Thái đề nghị cải cách như sau: AQ: ă, EQ thay ê, OQ thay ô, UQ thay cho một số phụ âm cùng nguyên âm khác khá dài nên không tiện nêu ra đây. Sau khi quyển “Việt Ngữ Cải Cách” đã phát hành thì năm 1949-trong phần sau quyển “Việt Anh Thông Thoại Từ Điển” do chính ông biên soạn, đã viết:
“Cải Cách Chữ Việt Triệt Để. Trước đây đã có nhiều người hô hào cải cách chữ Việt như quý ông Chéon, Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh…song những lời hô hào ấy đã rơi vào cõi im lặng. Trong một cuộc họp mặt có cả các ông Thiên Giang, Thê Húc, ông Đông Hồ có tỏ ý với tôi nên cải cách triệt để. Ông nhấn mạnh rằng năm dấu không nên dùng trong những chữ đã dùng làm tử âm (phụ âm). Thể theo ý các ông, tôi xin trình bày một sứ cải cách triệt để, đặng chất chính cùng các bậc cao minh. “
Và lần nầy, theo ông Phạm Xuân Thái năm chữ cái J, W, Q, P, Y thay cho các dấu theo thứ tự nặng, ngã, hỏi, sắc và dấu huyền. Những phụ âm được thay thế là: B thay cho P khi đứng sau cùng, thí dụ: labj=lạp. C thay cho K và Q, thí dụ Ceeu = Kêu; Cuooc = Quốc. Chữ D thay cho chữ Đ. Ba chữ ECH thay cho ACH ( Sechp=Sách), EEI thay cho Ây ( Leei=Lây)… Một số nguyên âm được “cải cách” là Ô= oo, Ư=uu, Ê=ee, Ă=aa…
Tôi không thể trích dẫn hết những phụ âm mà ông Thái đề nghị cải cách rất vô cùng rắc rối, bảo đảm không rắc rối thì không ăn tiền . Xin được “tổng kết” sự cải cách của ông ấy bằng bốn câu đầu của Kiều viết theo sự cải cách triệt để của ông và học giả GS nào thấy hay thì xin tiếp tục nghiên cứu:
“Traam naam tronh coiw nguoeiy ta/Chuuw taiy chuuw meenhj keup lay getp nhau/Traiq cua mootj cuoocj beeq zaeu/Nhuunhw dieeuy troonh theeip may dau doenp lonhy” (Trăm năm trong cõi người ta/Chữ tài chữ mệnh khéo là ghét nhau/Trải qua một cuộc bể dâu/Những điều trông thấy mà đau đớn lòng)…
Vì không có tư liệu báo chí nên không biết thời đó các báo có phản ứng về sự cải cách triệt để chữ Việt của ông Thái hay không mà các thể loại cải cách của ông chẳng được áp dụng trong văn chương và cách viết báo thời ấy.
CẢI CÁCH CHỮ VIẾT TẠI SÀI GÒN
Riêng tại Sài gòn vào khoảng thập niên 60, có ông nhà báo tên Nguyễn Hữu Ngư, bút hiệu là Nguiễn Ngu Í cũng có đề xuất cải cách chữ Việt. Cũng giống như đề nghị cải cách của ông Phạm Xuân Thái, lúc ấy chẳng có tờ báo, tạp chí, sách giáo khoa nào thực hiện cải tiến chữ quốc theo đề xuất của ông Nguiễn Ngu Í nên khi tự xuất bản sách ông đã viết theo cách của mình. Việc đầu tiên là ông không chấp nhận chữ “Y” nên đã thay bằng “I” ngay trên bút hiệu của mình: Ngu Ý thành Ngu Í. Và những chữ sửa đổi tiếp theo là:
NGH=NG. (Nghĩa = Ngĩa). PH=F. (Fong=Phong). P=B (Hiệp=Hiệb) , Q= Qu (Quê=Qê). C=K (Kỳ =Kì), GI=J (Gia=Ja), D=Y (Dung=yung)…
Dòng đời trôi qua theo tháng năm, vận nước thế mà Việt ngữ từ năm 1948 (hay trước đó đã có) được đề xuất cải cách đến năm 2020 vẫn i xì như thế thì rõ rằng sự đề nghị cải cách là một chuyện nghiên cứu cá nhân cho…thỏa mãn cái sự cải cách của mình. Cái gì hợp lý thì nó tồn tại. Nghĩa là đề nghị cải cách chữ Việt đã không hợp lý nên đến nay chữ Việt vẫn là chữ Việt xưa, chưa nhuốm màu cải cách. Và cũng không nên lầm lẫn PGS Bùi Hiền và GS Hồ Ngọc Đại là người đi tiên phong trong ý muốn cải cách chữ Việt vì trước đó cũng có ông Phạm Xuân Thái và Nguiễn Ngu Í và còn học giả nào nữa, biết đâu…?
US-bound students being hit by “rampant” agent fraud in Vietnam
Families in Vietnam are falling victim to unscrupulous education agents charging for scholarships to US institutions.
Education agents in Vietnam are taking money upfront with the promise for accessing scholarships to study in the US, and stakeholders in the country are concerned that it will have a lasting detrimental effect on Vietnamese students seeking to study in the US.
“In Vietnam right now, there’s a massive fraud going on with agents,” said Ken Cooper, chairman of Access American Education.
Agents are taking a slice of non-merit scholarships – often 20% of the worth of the scholarship – and telling families that only through them, can students access scholarships, he added.
Scholarships can give students a deduction of fees for anything up to US$30,000 – they are little more than discounts, Cooper suggested.
Previously, the I-20 “Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Student Status” forms that students need for their applications had been sent to agents, who would keep them until families paid them.
An update in regulations means that those forms are now sent to students, but agents are now telling families they need to pay upfront fees.
“They’re getting upfront money. $5,000-10,000 upfront from the families in order to get the ‘discount letters’. It’s rampant. It’s massive. Lots of agents are doing it,” he said.
Agencies are now using scholarships as headlines to their marketing campaigns and running scholarship events, he added.
“My guess is that parents and students believe it’s a service they’re paying for,” explained Mark Ashwill, managing director of educational consulting company Capstone Vietnam.
“Perhaps they think the agency has some sort of special influence or connection with the institution, and/or they view it as an “investment,” not knowing that it’s unnecessary,” he said.
“[This is] one of many examples of cheating in a still largely unregulated industry. Educational consulting is still the Wild West in Vietnam and many other countries,” Ashwill contended.
According to Ashwill, smaller agencies are being “rewarded” for the scholarships that “their” students earn from good but not necessarily elite institutions.
Larger agencies are more specialised in helping students gain admission to “highly selective colleges and universities”, with packages that include help with writing essays – in some cases, completing them on behalf of students – and other services, including creating extracurricular activities that their clients can add to their application.
“This is yet another example of the adage ‘success without integrity is failure’,” he said.
“Companies that engage in this unethical practice are probably also taking a fee from the parents and/or a commission from the admitting institution. Think of it as double- or triple-dipping.
“In short, it’s just another way to make money for companies fixated on short-term profit at the expense of ethics.”
Education USA has been a “leader” in telling families they do not have to pay agents, Cooper explained, but the message is not effectively reaching families.
“I guess it’s because it’s a rising middle class and the parents just don’t have the knowledge that these are discounts, not scholarships. Now, that being said, there are merit scholarships, but you don’t have to pay for them either. You apply to the school.”
Education USA attends events and fairs in Vietnam, Cooper added.
“I love Education USA for doing that. That’s why I beg them every time I do a fair…I’d rather the government [came to explain] students do not have to pay advance fees to agents to get scholarships.
“You don’t have to pay advance fees to get essays written. You don’t have to pay advances. Come to the American centre and we’ll help you. Go to an AIRC certified agent. They’ll help you,” he said.
US schools must be checking with students to find out whether they paid for scholarships, Cooper warned.
“I hope that schools speak to kids on Skype [and ask] ‘did you pay?’ because that’s the only way the school could be not complicit. They have to take the initiative.
“And by the way, if they get caught on this, they’re [taking] a risk. There’s no doubt if this becomes an issue where a kid says, ‘hey, I paid $10,000 for that scholarship’, they’ve got a problem.”
How to Edit Your Own Writing - Source NY Times
Writing is hard, but don’t overlook the difficulty — and the importance — of editing your own work before letting others see it. Here’s how.
The secret to good writing is good editing. It’s what separates hastily written, randomly punctuated, incoherent rants from learned polemics and op-eds, and cringe-worthy fan fiction from a critically acclaimed novel. By the time this article is done, I’ll have edited and rewritten each line at least a few times. Here’s how to start editing your own work.
Understand that what you write first is a draft
It doesn’t matter how good you think you are as a writer — the first words you put on the page are a first draft. Writing is thinking: It’s rare that you’ll know exactly what you’re going to say before you say it. At the end, you need, at the very least, to go back through the draft, tidy everything up and make sure the introduction you wrote at the start matches what you eventually said.
My former writing teacher, the essayist and cartoonist Timothy Kreider, explained revision to me: “One of my favorite phrases is l’esprit d’escalier, ‘the spirit of the staircase’ — meaning that experience of realizing, too late, what the perfect thing to have said at the party, in a conversation or argument or flirtation would have been. Writing offers us one of the rare chances in life at a do-over: to get it right and say what we meant this time. To the extent writers are able to appear any smarter or wittier than readers, it’s only because they’ve cheated by taking so much time to think up what they meant to say and refining it over days or weeks or, yes, even years, until they’ve said it as clearly and elegantly as they can.”
The time you put into editing, reworking and refining turns your first draft into a second — and then into a third and, if you keep at it, eventually something great. The biggest mistake you can make as a writer is to assume that what you wrote the first time through was good enough.
Now, let’s look at how to do the actual editing.
Watch for common errors
Most writing mistakes are depressingly common; good writers just get better at catching them before they hit the page. If you’re serious about improving your writing, I recommend you read “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, a how-to guide on writing good, clear English and avoiding the most common mistakes. “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell is also worth studying if you want to avoid “ugly and inaccurate” writing.
Some of the things you’ll learn to watch for (and that I have to fix all the time in my own writing) are:
- Overuse of jargon and business speak. Horrible jargon like “utilize,” “endeavor” or “communicate” — instead of “use,” “try” or “chat” — creep in when people (myself included) are trying to sound smart. It’s the kind of writing that Orwell railed against in his essay. All this sort of writing does is obscure the point you want to make behind false intellectualism. As Orwell said, “Never use a long word when a short one will do.”
- Clichés. Clichés are as common as mud but at least getting rid of them is low-hanging fruit. If you’re not sure whether something is a cliché, it’s better to just avoid it. Awful, right? Clichés are stale phrases that have lost their impact and novelty through overuse. At some point, “The grass is always greener on the other side” was a witty observation, but it’s a cliché now. Again, Orwell said it well: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Oh, and memes very quickly become clichés — be warned.
- The passive voice. In most cases, the subject of the sentence should be the person or thing taking action, not the thing being acted on. For example, “This article was written by Harry” is written in the passive voice because the subject (“this article”) is the thing being acted on. The equivalent active construction would be: “Harry wrote this article.” Prose written in the passive voice tends to have an aloofness and passivity to it, which is why it’s generally better to write an active sentence.
- Rambling. When you’re not quite sure what you want to say, it’s easy to ramble around a point, phrasing it in three or four different ways and then, instead of cutting them down to a single concise sentence, slapping all four together into a clunky, unclear paragraph. A single direct sentence is almost always better than four that tease around a point.
Give your work some space
When you write something, you get very close to it. It’s almost impossible to have the distance to edit properly straight away. Instead, you need to step away and come back later with fresh eyes. The longer you can leave a draft before editing it, the better. I have some essays I go back to every few months for another pass — they’re still not done yet. For most things, though, somewhere from half an hour to two days is enough of a break that you can then edit well. Even 10 minutes will do in a pinch for things like emails.
And when you sit down to edit, read your work out loud.
By forcing yourself to speak the words, rather than just scanning them on a computer screen, you’ll catch more problems and get a better feel for how everything flows. If you stumble over something, your reader will probably stumble over it, too. Some writers even print out their drafts and make edits with a red pen while they read them aloud.
Cut, cut, cut
Overwriting is a bigger problem than underwriting. It’s much more likely you’ve written too much than too little. It’s a lot easier to throw words at a problem than to take the time to find the right ones. As Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century writer and scientist (no, not Mark Twain) wrote in a letter, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”
The rule for most writers is, “If in doubt, cut it.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John McPhee has called the process “writing by omission.” Novelist Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (and not William Faulkner) exhorted, “In writing you must kill all your darlings.” This is true at every level: If a word isn’t necessary in a sentence, cut it; if a sentence isn’t necessary in a paragraph, cut it; and if a paragraph isn’t necessary, cut it, too.
Go through what you’ve written and look for the bits you can cut without affecting the whole — and cut them. It will tighten the work and make everything you’re trying to say clearer.
Spend the most time on the beginning
The beginning of anything you write is the most important part. If you can’t catch someone’s attention at the start, you won’t have a chance to hold it later. Whether you’re writing a novel or an email, you should spend a disproportionate amount of time working on the first few sentences, paragraphs or pages. A lot of problems that can be glossed over in the middle are your undoing at the start.
Pay attention to structure
The structure is what your writing hangs on. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the individual sentences are phrased if the whole thing is a nonsensical mess. For emails and other short things, the old college favorite of a topic sentence followed by supporting paragraphs and a conclusion is hard to get wrong. Just make sure you consider your intended audience. A series of long, unrelenting paragraphs will discourage people from reading. Break things up into concise points and, where necessary, insert subheads — as there are in this article. If I’d written this without them, you would just be looking at a stark wall of text.
For longer pieces, structure is something you’ll need to put a lot of work into. Stream of consciousness writing rarely reads well and you generally don’t have the option to break up everything into short segments with subheads. Narratives need to flow and arguments need to build. You have to think about what you’re trying to say in each chapter, section or paragraph, and consider whether it’s working — or if that part would be better placed elsewhere. It’s normal (and even desirable) that the structure of your work will change drastically between drafts; it’s a sign that you’re developing the piece as a whole, rather than just fixing the small problems.
A lot of the time when something you’ve written “just doesn’t work” for people, the structure is to blame. They might not be able to put the problems into words, but they can feel something’s off.
Use all the resources you can
While you might not be lucky enough to have access to an editor (Hey, Alan!), there are services that can help.
Grammarly is a writing assistant that flags common writing, spelling and grammatical errors; it’s great for catching simple mistakes and cleaning up drafts of your work. A good thesaurus (or even Thesaurus.com) is also essential for finding just the right word. And don’t neglect a second pair of eyes: Ask relatives and friends to read over your work. They might catch some things you missed and can tell you when something is amiss.
Editing your work is at least as important as writing it in the first place. The tweaking, revisiting and revising is what takes something that could be good — and makes it good. Don’t neglect it.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the phrase “kill your darlings,” originated with novelist Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and not William Faulkner, to whom the phrase is often attributed
An astronaut’s guide to surviving isolation
Much of the world is having to learn fast about self-isolation. What tips can we glean from those who do it for a living?
In 2017, I tried to live like an astronaut. I didn’t float around in weightlessness, conduct any ground-breaking experiments or see the Earth from space. But I did spend two days confined to my apartment, where I worked, worked out, and limited my meals to freeze dried food from a pouch. It was an attempt to explore the effects of living in isolation from society and confined in the same place 24 hours a day, like astronauts do aboard the International Space Station, or may one day do on Mars.
Fast-forward to 2020. Millions of us are socially distancing around the globe in an attempt to slow the spread of coronavirus and no longer have to imagine what it’s like to spend the vast majority of the day in our homes.
As we grapple with our new routines, what advice can we glean from people who have already spent months in isolation? To find out, we caught up with two Nasa experts. The first is Kjell Lindgren, an astronaut who spent 141 days in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015 with five crewmates. The second is Jocelyn Dunn, a human performance engineer who spent eight months living inside a dome habitat with five fellow volunteers as part of a Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (Hi-Seas) mission in 2014 and 2015. Here’s what they suggest.
Stay busy and make a schedule
On the ISS, astronauts’ days are scheduled down to five-minute increments with time for experiments, maintenance, conference calls, meals, working out and more. But even at home, Lindgren says it’s helpful to stay busy with meaningful work, even if it’s not your usual gig. “If you’re able to work from home it’s a gift,” he says. “Many people don’t have that opportunity. But finding some other meaningful work will help the time go fast. It is one of the blessings of being in the space station. The work can make six or nine months go very quickly.”
Lindgren, who is currently socially distancing at home with his wife and three children, says he talks to his kids weekly about what they want to accomplish and make sure to carve time out for it in addition to their regular schoolwork.
Dunn suggests breaking the day into parts with transitions like working out or going for a walk. At Hi-Seas, the crew would end the workday and transition into leisure time via a group work out. “When you work from home it’s easy to end up constantly working and never breaking,” she says.
In her forthcoming research Dunn and her colleagues also looked at how different crews on four, eight and 12-month missions spent their time and self-organised in the habitat, which included less than 1,500 sq ft (139 sq m) of living space. The results suggest that given autonomy, most people spent about the same amount of time on different activities.
In the habitat, participants spent about seven to eight hours on sleep, three to four hours on leisure activities, three to four hours on personal projects, an hour and a half working out, two hours on meals and half an hour on personal hygiene (which is low because shower time was extremely limited to simulate what life would be like on Mars). The rest of the time was spent on work.
Don’t dwell on the negative and forgive yourself for making mistakes
Lindgren recalls spending three hours fixing an exercise machine on Expedition 44/45. He got all the way to the end and realised the bracket he was left with didn’t fit. It turned out he had installed something that was intended for the left side on the right side of the machine and had to undo and redo all his work.
“I was really down on myself and folks on the ground gave me great advice. They asked for feedback on how to make the instructions clearer so that everyone could get something from my mistake,” he says. “They told me not to feel bad about it and move on, otherwise it would compromise my ability to do other things. That attitude served us well on the space station and I think it’ll serve us well here too.”
So, if you forget to buy toilet paper at the store or burn dinner, don’t sweat it, he says.
Communicate expectations to your crew
It’s important to manage expectations, both your own and those of your crew or the people you are living with, says Lindgren. And to regularly talk about what those expectations are.
In the Hi-Seas habitat, Dunn’s crew had a schedule for splitting shared household duties. They also set aside time each Sunday to debrief how the previous week had gone.
“We would take an hour to talk about the last week, reflect on things that went well, things that didn’t go so well and look at any challenges coming up in the next week. We considered it a safe place to bring up any frustrations we had,” she says.
Do fun things with your crew but also spend time by yourself
“Like our homes are now, the space station was our lab but also our home. So we had to find ways to have fun together. But it’s also important to read your team. Sometimes people need time alone to decompress,” says Lindgren.
On the Russian segment of his mission, the crew ended their work week with a group dinner. On the US segment, they had movie nights. “We would bring little treats to those," says Lindgren. "On the weekend we spent time coming up with games we could only do in weightlessness. That was a lot of fun and some of my fondest memories.”
On Earth, Lindgren’s family tries to schedule in social activities like a weekly TV show. “Anything that’s different from work that you can look forward to like staying in touch with loved ones over video conferencing – can be really helpful.”
Former Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year on the ISS, told the New York Times that he also made sure to make time for fun activities while on the space station – even if he was hurtling far above the Earth. That included watching all of Game of Thrones – twice.
For those finding themselves spending more time than they ever expected to with the people they live, Dunn reminds us to schedule alone time too. “One of the main takeaways from Hi-Seas was the importance of scheduling alone time in a confined situation. It’s fine to say I need 30 minutes on my own to do some mediation or journaling or just not have to talk to someone.”
Work out
It’s easy to motivate yourself to work out when your ability to walk when you return to Earth is on the line. But there are still lessons we can learn from the space station as we distance ourselves at home.
“We had two hours a day to work out, it was carved out into our schedule and expected that we were going to do it. That made it as easy as you could ask for,” says Lindgren.
Still, Lindgren, who’s now doing a group workout with fellow astronauts once a week over video chat, says we can make it easier for ourselves on Earth by removing as many barriers as possible. For example, schedule a specific time to work out, queue an internet workout onto your computer in advance, and prep any gear or clothes you need in advance.
Waking heart rate is a good indicator of biological and perceived stress
“Exercise is critically important,” he says. “Especially when we have this underlying stress because of the current situation, exercise provides a physical and psychological release.”
Speaking of stress, track your levels
As part of her research, Dunn tracked her crew’s stress levels during their eight-month stay in isolation and the stress levels of crews who were isolated for a year. Though the timing varied depending on the individual, participants tended to follow a similar pattern.
Everyone started with high biological stress levels but low perceived levels, which likely reflected their initial excitement of entering the dome. But from about six months on, both their biological and self-perceived stress levels were higher. Around the same time, people also started changing their sleep routines to avoid each other. Early birds started getting up earlier than before and night owls stayed up even later.
Dunn’s research in the habitat also proves that waking heart rate is a good indicator of biological and perceived stress. While a lot of wrist wearables can track your waking heart rate over time, Dunn says you don’t really need a high-tech device. Instead you can check in with yourself when you wake up and feel if your heart is racing.
“The reason is the way your circadian rhythms work – melatonin makes you go to sleep and stress hormones wake you up. So if you already have higher stress hormones from confinement stress or other factors, a high waking heart rate represents your overall chronic stress level,” she says. If your waking heart rate increases over time, your coping strategies might need to be improved.
Expect conflict to happen
It was also around the six-month mark on Dunn’s mission that people started getting more confrontational and more likely to air their frustrations. Researchers call this the “third quarter phenomenon”, when people completing missions in challenging conditions, like astronauts, report a drop in morale.
“The third quarter phenomenon can start around the halfway point,” says Dunn, “People begin to feel there isn’t really an end in sight and the novelty of everything is gone. You might need to find some intrinsic or extrinsic motivation to keep you on good behavior and on better terms with the people you live with.”
She says that people tend to isolate themselves further in the third quarter too, which perpetuates their low mood. So it might be critical to keep those regular check-ins with friends and family, even if you no longer feel like it.
Interestingly, when Dunn compared the data from her own mission to that of the 12-month crew, the same issues appeared at around six months. An increase in conflict occurred in the third quarter in each instance, but there might also be something about six months of living together that makes people get on each other’s nerves.
“People might start off on their best behavior but after a few months they start to slide into their worst habits,” she says. When conflict arises, Dunn suggests refocusing on your own habits and modelling good behavior.
Though people are trying to predict when our need to socially distance might end, no one knows for sure how long it will last. So it’s hard to predict when our individual frustrations might surface. While six months might feel like “the third quarter” to some, two weeks might feel like “the third quarter” to others. It’s clearly a matter of expectation.
Perhaps that’s why we should mentally prepare for the long haul
“The most important difference between our experience and what is going on globally today is that we volunteered for our mission,” says Lindgren. “We knew what we were getting into and had the opportunity to prepare for it. Unfortunately, our communities have been thrown into this without much preparation so they’re having to learn to deal with the stress on the fly.”
Astronauts also know how long their missions will last, and any changes can be hard to cope with.
“When you build a mental model of when you launch and come back, changes to your launch or return dates are challenging,” Lindgren says. “I tried not to set a countdown timer so that if something changed, I wasn’t emotionally invested in the schedule.”
Lindgren suggests it might be smart to mentally prepare for the long haul and be pleasantly surprised by any reduction of restrictions. “It’s not as hard on you as the other way around.”
Remind yourself of the big picture
Our mission on Earth comes down to the health and safety of your loved ones and the community at large, says Lindgren. “If you think about working together to solve a crisis rather than be at odds with one another, the benefits are spectacular.”
He says that means we have to prioritise self-care, or doing things that prepare us to accomplish things as though we’re on a mission, like getting exercise and sleeping and eating well. This can help the people we’re home with but also the community at large.
“It would pay huge dividends if we look at this crisis as a united group rather than as individuals. Within our households we’re all crew mates, but we’re also crewmates within our communities, countries and the global community.”
So, if you have two packs of toilet paper, and see somebody scrambling for one at the market, give them one, he suggests. “Little expressions of love like that can go a long way.”
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