Sleep is Not For Sissies

"The best bridge between despair and hope," said Harry Ruby, "is a good night's sleep." When you don't get enough sleep, your body produces extra stress hormones, making you more vulnerable to anxiety and stress.

The authors of Painfully Shy: How to Overcome Social Anxiety and Reclaim Your Life wrote: "For people prone to social anxiety, adequate sleep is crucial. It can mean the difference between thinking about an issue realistically and becoming needlessly upset over something that's not really important. In other words, when you're overly tired, you're more likely to misread social situations and interpret them negatively."

A large percentage of people go day after day without enough sleep, causing themselves extra unnecessary stress and anxiety.

The question is, of course, what is enough sleep? The research can answer that question quite specifically. People are healthiest when they sleep somewhere between seven and eight hours every night. Health problems are associated with both more and less sleep than eight hours. Of course that is an average. Some nights you won't get enough sleep, but if you sleep extra the next night or two, you're getting eight hours sleep on average, and that is healthy.

Just to give you an example, a recent study at Yale University found that when people slept less that six hours a night on average, their risk of adult-onset diabetes doubled. When they slept more than eight hours, their risk of adult-onset diabetes tripled. This is typical of the findings. Too much sleep is bad. Too little sleep is bad. The right amount is good.

But seven to eight hours of tossing and turning won't do it. Researchers have also uncovered some useful information about how to get good quality sleep. You will sleep better if you:

Go to bed and get up at the same time every day.

Keep your feet are warm.

Eat three hours before going to bed. The closer to your bedtime you eat, the lighter the meal needs to be (especially light in fat, which takes the longest to digest).

Do something relaxing immediately prior to going to bed rather than doing something agitating. For most people, reading or stretching gently are relaxing; watching television or working on a computer are agitating (produce alertness and tension rather than relaxation, and therefore interfere with the going-to-sleep process).

Hormones that control wakefulness and sleepiness rise and fall in a cycle with regularity throughout the day. Most people feel sleepy around three in the afternoon, and if you take a nap then, you lower your risk of heart disease. Why? It is natural and healthy to sleep in two periods rather than one. It allows you reboot in the middle of the day. Not trying to power through "slump time," probably lowers your stress hormone level.

As Winston Churchill said, "You must sleep some time between lunch and dinner, and no half-way measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed…Don't think you'll be doing less work because you sleep during the day…You will be able to accomplish more."

It is important to sleep when you feel sleepy, and not force yourself to stay awake, because the opportunity will go away. It's not like hunger where you just get hungrier and hungrier. Your body cycles through ultradian rhythms (biological rhythms that cycle more than once a day) and you need to strike while the iron is hot. You may feel sleepy now and if you went to bed you would sleep well. But if you wait for forty-five minutes, the wake-sleep cycle has rebounded, and now it might be more difficult to fall asleep.

If you can fall asleep very quickly any time, by the way, that is a definite sign you are chronically sleep-deprived.

The sleep researcher and author of The Promise of Sleep, William Dement, probably knows more about sleep than any other person. His research will give you a respect for sleep. It needs to be taken seriously. It effects your motivation level, your competence at your job, your likelihood of making a mistake while doing something dangerous, like driving a car. It effects your immune system. It obviously effects your mood.

Good sleep has been proven to be a better predictor of how long you will live than exercise, heredity, or diet. Amazing but true.

Did you get that? According to Dement, regular good sleep will help you live longer — and it will help you more reliably than even exercise, diet, or your genetic tendencies (all of which have a major impact on how long you will live).

One of the things Dement has discovered is that not getting enough sleep influences your motivation level, especially for creative people. It doesn't take a scientist to figure this out, although scientific research is the best way to sift fact from mistaken observations.

Another good way to find out what works is to only pay someone when they produce results. Under those conditions, there is a strong commitment to discover what works, regardless of anyone's pet theory. That's why salespeople often come up with so much practical information. When you're on commission and your entire income depends on your effectiveness, you lose your attachment to ideas that impair your abilities, or you don't make it.

W. Clement Stone wrote about sleep in The Success System That Never Fails. Stone worked his way up from a young man of limited means and no connections to an extremely wealthy man. He started out as a commission insurance salesman, selling door-to-door to businesses. In the process, he learned about the importance of sleep. He tried to get ten hours of sleep every night, plus a nap in the afternoon. This may be too much for optimal health, but it worked as a salesman putting out intense effort all day, and he said getting a lot of sleep gave him the energy he needed to keep at it, and it helped him maintain the high motivation he needed, to work his way to the top.

Sleep is important. When you feel tired or sleepy and you can sleep, you ought to. It's one of the best things you can do to lower your stress level, improve your health, and increase your ability to accomplish your goals.

Adam Khan is the author of Slotralogy: How to Change Your Habits of Thought, Direct Your Mind, and Cultivating Fire: How to Keep Your Motivation White Hot. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

Interesting Facts About Alcohol Fuels

1. Since at least 1791, most American farmers used their own alcohol stills to turn crop waste into ethanol for stove fuel. In the 1830's, whale oil became expensive, so using alcohol for light became increasingly popular.

2. In 1860 Nikolaus Otto built an early internal combustion engine. It was fueled by ethanol.

3. By 1900, alcohol fuel (ethanol) was used for lighting and many other uses including cars, farm machinery, stoves, laundry irons, heaters, coffee roasters, hair curlers, etc.

4. Around the same time, most cars on the road used gasoline because it was abundant and inexpensive. But racing cars used alcohol for fuel because it could generate more power in a lighter engine. There was a tax on the industrial use of alcohol, and Henry Ford helped American farmers stop the tax because he was familiar with experiments on alcohol fuels in Germany.

5. In 1906, the alcohol tax was lifted and alcohol became cheaper than gas — 14 cents versus 22 cents per gallon. Bills were also passed that exempted farm stills from government control. When he endorsed the bill, President Teddy Roosevelt said, "The Standard Oil Company has, largely by unfair or unlawful methods, crushed out the competition...It is highly desirable that an element of competition should be introduced by the passage of some such law as that which has already passed in the House, putting alcohol used in the arts and manufacturers upon the [tax] free list."

6. In 1908, the Model T Ford began coming off the assembly line. It had a built-in adjustable carburetor so it could burn either alcohol or gas. In other words, it was a flex fuel car. At the time, of course, gas stations weren't everywhere, but most farms had stills, so it made the car more practical to be able to burn both fuels.

7. In 1917, Alexander Graham Bell said, "Alcohol makes a beautiful, clean and efficient fuel… Alcohol can be manufactured from corn stalks, and in fact from almost any vegetable matter capable of fermentation…We need never fear the exhaustion of our present fuel supplies so long as we can produce an annual crop of alcohol to any extent desired." He was ahead of his time.

8. In 1920, Prohibition began and lasted for 13 years. John D. Rockefeller, the owner of Standard Oil Company, had backed the Eighteenth Amendment to ban alcohol. Farmers were no longer allowed to have a still.

9. In 1925, Henry Ford said: "The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years."

10. In 1964, there was a seven-car crash at the Indianapolis 500, killing two drivers because 150 gallons of gasoline caught fire. One of the drivers involved in the crash survived because his car was running on methanol, which didn't ignite. So the United States Auto Club banned gasoline. The cars ran on methanol exclusively for the next 41 years. In 2007, they switched to ethanol, which is still much safer than gasoline.

11. In 1971, American farmers were producing enormous grain surpluses, which threatened to put them out of business (because the price of grain sank too low because there was so much of it), so the Nebraska APIU Committee was formed to find new uses for the surplus grain. They tested gasoline-ethanol blends extensively and discovered ethanol could be used to boost octane, and could potentially replace lead in gasoline (to prevent knocking).

12. In 1973, OPEC initiated the first oil embargo (as a retaliation for America's support of Israel during the Yom Kippur war). The member countries of OPEC drastically reduced their oil production, which raised world oil prices catastrophically. It threw the whole world into an "energy crisis" and seriously hurt the American economy.

13. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter created government incentives to help develop alcohol-fuel production, and by 1984 the United States had 163 ethanol refineries producing almost 600 million gallons of ethanol fuel that year.

14. In the late 80s and early 90s a global oil surplus drove gasoline prices very low, putting many American ethanol plants into bankruptcy. By the end of 1985, only 74 American ethanol refineries remained in business.

15. From the late 90s until now, the ethanol and methanol industries have been making a comeback. Ethanol alone employs 400,000 Americans today, and that's with only a very small percentage of flex fuel cars on the road. Imagine what could happen with the passing of an Open Fuel Standard.

The list above was edited from the more complete article, Timeline of Alcohol Fuels.

What OPEC Does is Illegal

What OPEC does to control the world price of oil is illegal. They all agree to raise or lower their oil production for the purpose of keeping the price of oil high.

As Robert Zubrin notes in Energy Victory, "Collusion by suppliers to fix prices is not only a crime under US law, it is banned by international law as well. The rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) contain antitrust provisions that prohibit member nations from setting quota restrictions on import and exports. The WTO outlaws conspiracies to fix markets, and permits member nations to prosecute all parties to such conspiracies. The US Justice Department would thus be entirely within its rights to initiate prosecutions against OPEC principals with interests in the United States (for example, Saudi royals), as well as against corporations, such as international oil companies, found to be acting in concert with OPEC. In addition, the imposition of retaliatory trade measures against OPEC nations would be fully justifiable."

Do You Know Anyone About to Get Chemotherapy?

Fasting before a chemotherapy session might prevent some of the side effects of chemotherapy, and might even kill more cancer cells.

Researchers studying fasting have found that when they poison mice, if the mice have been fasting, fewer of them die of the poison. It got the researchers to thinking that perhaps (since chemotherapy drugs are toxins) fasting before chemotherapy might help. So they tried it on mice with cancer.

Comparing mice with cancer that didn't fast before chemotherapy with mice that fasted for 48 hours before chemotherapy, the ones that fasted beforehand shrank their tumors significantly more. After two cycles of fasting and a high dose of chemotherapy, 42% of the mice lived longer than 180 days. For comparison, by that time ALL the well-fed chemo-treated mice were already dead.

While a mouse (or a human) is fasting, its normal cells change how they use energy, shifting away from growth and reproduction and focusing more on maintenance and repair. But cancer cells do not make that switch. In fact, fasting makes cancer cells hungrier. Cancer cells are notoriously voracious, and fasting just makes them even more so, which makes cancer cells more susceptible to the toxin and healthy cells less susceptible to the toxin — exactly what you want.

Valter Longo, the lead researcher in this study, says fasting puts your healthy cells in a "protective mode," but cancer cells have the opposite reaction to fasting. (The mice in the study fasted for two or three days, which Longo says in a human is the equivalent of four or five days.)

You can find a good article about the study in Scientific American here: Fasting Might Boost Chemo's Cancer-Busting Properties.

A video called The Science of Fasting covered some of this research, and pointed out that fasting before chemotherapy is the exact opposite of what is normally recommended. Usually doctors suggest a patient eat extra calories before a chemotherapy session, since the treatment tends to kill a person's appetite for many days.

Human trials have begun. A woman interviewed in the video, who was diagnosed with breast cancer, said she realized that by the time the first human trial was over, she would already be dead of cancer, so she decided to try it on herself. She was scheduled for five chemotherapy sessions. She fasted before the first one and felt fine afterwards. Her doctors then talked her out of doing it, so she did two more chemotherapy sessions without fasting. She said she felt terrible both times. So for the last two she fasted beforehand, and felt much better. She experienced fewer side effects.

Many of the side effects you get from chemotherapy are from your healthy cells dying. The whole principle behind chemotherapy is to give you a toxic enough dose to kill cancer cells without killing the patient, but that also means destroying a lot of healthy cells. This fasting protocol might prevent many of those healthy cells from being harmed, which would mean fewer side effects.

Several people have tried this on their own, just like the woman above, and in a survey of these pioneers, they reported it made the chemotherapy more bearable. They had less nausea, less fatigue, fewer headaches, and less weakness — all typical side effects of chemotherapy.

The Emperor of All Maladies

Ken Burns makes historical documentaries. He's made some famous ones about the Civil War, the Vietnam War, Prohibition, etc. But he also made one about the history of fighting cancer. It's called, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.

The story starts with a hospital that took care of children with childhood leukemia. At the time, it was pretty much a death sentence. There was a man who worked in the morgue of the hospital, and it broke his heart to see all these children dying while he stood by helplessly, so even though he wasn't a doctor, he decided to try to do something about it. He came up with the idea of killing the cancer with poison.

They tried one toxin and it killed some cancer cells, but the cancer adapted to it. So then they tried two different toxins at the same time, and that killed even more of them. When the cancer cells tried to adapt to one of the toxins, the other toxin got them. But it still didn't kill them all. So then they tried three toxins and that worked even better. And then they finally tried four toxins and that worked even better. And that's the normal protocol now. And childhood leukemia went from being almost a zero percent survival rate to now 85 to 90 percent of children diagnosed with it survive. Advances in chemotherapy have been truly amazing.

But this method of fasting before a chemotherapy session might make it even better. If you know somebody who is going through chemotherapy or about to go through chemotherapy, please tell them about this. Although many people can't imagine going for four or five days without food, I have done it several times, and it's really not that bad. It's not nearly as bad as you'd think. I was one of those people who didn't think I could possibly do it, and I found I could without difficulty. 

Besides, if you think about the normal side effects of chemotherapy, suffering through some hunger pangs doesn't doesn't seem so bad in comparison.

I chronicled my last fast — which was 14 days long — on my podcast, and I talked a lot about what fasting does and what it is like. Check it out here: What's So Great About Fasting?

I made this article into a podcast. Listen to it here.

Read some articles about this: Fasting and Chemotherapy.

Adam Khan is the author of Antivirus For Your Mind: How to Strengthen Your Persistence and Determination and Feel Good More Often and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

All In Your Head

In 1914, a small ship sailed into the icy Weddell Sea, on its way to the South Pole. It carried a crew of twenty-seven men, and their leader, Ernest Shackleton. But unseasonable gales shoved the floating ice together and the temperature sank below zero, freezing more than a million square miles of ice into a solid mass. And they were stuck in the middle of it. They had no radio transmitter. They were alone.

For ten months the pressure increased until it crushed the ship, stranding them in the middle of an icy wasteland which could, at any time, break up and become a sea of floating ice chunks. They had to get off this ice while it was still solid, so they headed for the nearest known land, 346 miles away, dragging their two lifeboats over the ice. But every few hundred yards they ran into a pressure ridge, sometimes two stories high, caused by the ice compacting. They had to chop through it. At the end of two backbreaking days in subzero weather, they were exhausted. After all their hacking and dragging, they had traveled only two miles.

They tried again. In five days they went a total of nine miles, but the ice was becoming softer and the pressure ridges were becoming larger. They could go no further. So they had to wait...for several months. Finally the ice opened up and they launched the boats into the churning mass of giant chunks of ice and made it out. But now they were sailing across a treacherous sea. They landed on a tiny, barren, ice-covered, lifeless island in the middle of nowhere.

To save themselves, they needed to reach the nearest outpost of civilization: South Georgia, 870 miles away! Shackleton and five men took the best lifeboat and sailed across the Drake Passage at the tip of South America, the most formidable piece of ocean in the world. Gales blow nonstop — up to 200 miles an hour (that’s as hard as a hurricane) — and waves get as high as ninety feet. Their chances of making it were very close to zero.

But determination can change the odds.

They made it. But they landed on the wrong side of the island, and their boat was pounded into the rocks and rendered useless. The whaling port they needed to reach was on the other side of the island, which has peaks 10,000 feet high and had never been crossed. They were the first. They didn’t have much choice.

When they staggered into the little whaling port on the other side of the island, everyone who saw them stopped dead in their tracks. The three men had coal-black skin from the seal oil they had been burning as fuel. They had long, black dreadlocks. Their clothing was shredded, filthy rags, and they had come from the direction of the mountains. Nobody in the history of the whaling port had ever been known to enter the town from that direction.

Although all the men at that whaling port had known about Shackleton’s expedition, his ship had been gone for seventeen months and was assumed to have sunk, and the crew with it. The whalers knew how deadly and unforgiving the ice could be.

The three ragged men made their way to the home of a man Shackleton knew, followed in silence by a growing crowd of people. When the man came to the door, he stepped back and stared in silence. Then he said, “Who the hell are you?”

The man in the center took a step forward and said, “My name is Shackleton.”

According to some witnesses, the hard-faced man at the door turned away and wept.

This story is incredible, and if it weren’t for the extensive verification and corroboration of the diaries and interviews with the men on the crew in Alfred Lansing’s account, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, it might easily be disbelieved. The story is true, and as incredible as what I’ve told you seems, I’ve only given you some highlights.

Shackleton went back and rescued his friends on the other side of the island first, and then after many attempts to get through the ice, on August 30th — almost two years since they’d embarked — he made it back to that barren island and rescued the rest of his men. Every man in Shackleton’s crew made it home alive.

Fifteen years earlier, a different ship got stuck in the ice in the Weddell Sea — the Belgica, led by Adrien de Gerlache — but they didn’t do so well. During the winter in the Antarctic, the sun completely disappears below the horizon for seventy-nine days. Shackleton’s crew endured it. But the crew of the Belgica grew depressed, gave up hope, and succumbed to negative thinking. Some of them couldn’t eat. Mental illness took over. One man had a heart attack from a terror of darkness. Paranoia and hysteria ran rampant.

None of this happened to Shackleton’s men because he insisted they keep a good attitude, and he did the same. He once said that the most important quality for an explorer was not courage or patience, but optimism. He said, “Optimism nullifies disappointment and makes one more ready than ever to go on.”

Shackleton also knew that attitudes are contagious. He was fully aware of the fact that if anyone lost hope they wouldn’t be able to put forth that last ounce of energy which may make the difference. And they did get pushed to the limits of human endurance. But he had convinced himself and his men they would make it out alive. His determination to remain optimistic ultimately saved their lives.

And it can achieve great things for you too. It comes down to what you say: Either you say it’s hopeless or you say it can be done. You can never look into the future to find the answer. It’s in your head.

Make up your mind you will succeed. 

This article was excerpted from the book, Principles For Personal Growth by Adam Khan. Buy it now here.

Starting Fresh: Rebooting Your Immune System

Researchers at the University of Southern California found one of the reasons fasting is so good for your health: It kills off weak or damaged white blood cells, causing your body to generate healthy new white blood cells to replace the old ones.

"The researchers say fasting 'flips a regenerative switch' which prompts stem cells to create brand new white blood cells, essentially regenerating the entire immune system," writes Science Correspondent Sarah Knapton.

"It gives the 'OK' for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating and rebuild the entire system," said Prof Valter Longo, Professor of Gerontology and the Biological Sciences at the University of California.

In an article in the Telegraph, Knapton writes:

Prolonged fasting forces the body to use stores of glucose and fat but also breaks down a significant portion of white blood cells.

During each cycle of fasting, this depletion of white blood cells induces changes that trigger stem cell-based regeneration of new immune system cells.

In trials humans were asked to regularly fast for between two and four days over a six-month period.

Scientists found that prolonged fasting also reduced the enzyme PKA, which is linked to aging and a hormone which increases cancer risk and tumor growth.

"We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have such a remarkable effect in promoting stem cell-based regeneration of the hematopoietic system," added Prof Longo.

"When you starve, the system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged," Dr Longo said.

"What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we started thinking, well, where does it come from?"

Fasting for 72 hours also protected cancer patients against the toxic impact of chemotherapy.

"While chemotherapy saves lives, it causes significant collateral damage to the immune system. The results of this study suggest that fasting may mitigate some of the harmful effects of chemotherapy," said co-author Tanya Dorff, assistant professor of clinical medicine at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital.

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal Growth, Slotralogy, Antivirus For Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcasts, The Adam Bomb and Talk to Klassy. You can email him here.

Why Does Homelessness Seem To Be Out Of Control?

A friend of mine sent me a three-hour podcast of Joe Rogan interviewing Michael Shellenberger, the author of the book, San Fransicko. You can listen to the interview here: #1719 Michael Shellenberger.

I don’t normally listen to podcasts that long, but I found it fascinating. I bought and read the book, and it's full of surprises. 

I'm originally from Southern California, and I've lived in Seattle for a long time. In my adult lifetime, I've seen homelessness increase decade after decade. But that’s mainly because I have lived in cities on the West Coast. In the U.S. as a whole, homelessness has gone down in the last fifteen years. I never would have guessed.

Just to be clear — it’s not just because people from around the country are moving to West Coast cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle), although that is happening. But in the United States, the number of homeless people has dropped from 763,000 to 568,000 between 2005 and 2020.

We take it for granted that we call the problem “homelessness,” but this term is only one possible name for the issue, and it gives the impression that the problem has something to do with housing. As a matter of fact, news stories often call it a “housing crisis,” which sounds sensible since we’re calling the problem “homelessness.” But this may not be the most accurate way to label the issue.

I remember reading something a couple decades ago that the main reason the number of homeless people began increasing suddenly in the 1980’s and has continued ever since is that Ronald Reagan made it illegal to keep someone in a mental institution who wasn’t dangerous. It saved taxpayer dollars, and there was a strong argument to be made that these are U.S. citizens and human beings and they have rights.

On the other side of that valid argument is the problem that many mentally ill people don’t want to take medication or be treated for their illness. In fact, many do not believe they are mentally ill. And since it’s now illegal to force treatment on them, where do these people go? They often alienate their families, many are unable to keep a job, so they can end up on the street.

This is dangerous for them, and it makes a mess on public streets and public parks, as they have to urinate and defecate somewhere. And many of them turn to drugs as a way to self-medicate (and because the largest majority of chronically homeless people are those with serious drug addictions).

Another thing I was surprised about is that some powerfully addictive drugs like heroin, fentanyl, meth, and crack, have become extremely inexpensive over the last twenty years or so. This makes it much easier for people to become addicts and to remain addicts. Many of the addicts now on the streets were once prescribed opioids for a surgery or some other valid medical reason, became hooked, and then substituted heroin or fentanyl to avoid withdrawals when the prescription ran out.

The large majority of chronically homeless people are addicts and mentally ill people. In other words, rather than identifying this as a problem with housing, it could justifiably — and perhaps more accurately — be defined as a medical problem. 

If we approached this issue as a medical problem or a health problem, different solutions would present themselves more readily, wouldn’t they? 

But because the most obvious thing about homeless people is that they don’t have an established residence, this definitely looks like a housing problem. And if you live in a place where rent has gone up, doing something about the cost of housing seems like a reasonable response. But it’s not working. Obviously. Look around. Wherever that is the main focus, homelessness has only grown. 

It’s not as self-evident as it seems anyway, because there are plenty of places where rents are going up just as fast but they do not have homelessness to the degree we do in West Coast cities.

Another common reason given for why homelessness is growing here is because the weather is so mild. People can be homeless and live outdoors or in a tent without freezing to death in the winter. Except that there are plenty of other places that also have pleasant year-round weather, but without a homelessness problem.

Those seem like fairly obvious causes of homelessness, but they are not the real problem. 

Another thing most of us don’t know is that there are lots of services available for homeless people, but usually those services are not available to people who continue to take drugs. When someone is addicted to alcohol or heroin, for example, they may not want to sleep in a shelter because they can’t go that long (from dinner until morning) without a fix. For the safety of the other people in a shelter, there are necessarily rules about people not shooting up or taking meth or smoking crack. They have to have rules like that because they need to look out for the safety of everybody else there.

So if you're addicted to something and you can't go ten hours without it, many of the services being offered can’t help you. There are groups, organizations, and government programs that help people with a warm place to stay at night, food, even to get training or medical care, get off drugs, find housing, etc. You rarely find a woman with children homeless on the street, even though they really should be the most likely to end up there. They have more mouths to feed and have a tougher time keeping a job while taking care of kids, but you don't see them living in a tent on the street because there are so many services available to people who need help.

Some mentally healthy and unaddicted folks do, of course, temporarily become homeless, but they get help and things improve for them. The ones who are chronically homeless, who have been there for years, are very likely to be addicted to a drug or mentally ill, or both.

One way of dealing with this issue is to simply arrest people for defecating on the street, sleeping on the sidewalk, or taking drugs. These things are already illegal in most cities. But then instead of being homeless on the street, they would be in jail. This doesn’t help them get a job or a place to live when they get out. It doesn’t even help them get off drugs (which are often illicitly available in jail). It gets them off the street, but it doesn’t really solve the whole problem. 

In an effort to become more humane, some West Coast cities and other places have decided to offer housing first with no strings attached. This is, of course, an expensive solution in most cities, which means there’s not enough money to house everybody, so by not putting any effort into shelter and putting it all into housing, you end up with some people in housing who are still drug addicts or mentally ill without treatment, and the rest of them on the street because there are no shelters.

And many of these “housing first” projects are resisted by people who don’t want an apartment building full of drug addicts and mentally ill people in their neighborhood. 

Shellenberger talks about possible solutions. He suggests we do something like what they do in Amsterdam and some other European and American cities: When someone does something illegal, the police arrest them, but then offer them the option of jail or treatment. This encourages more people to get treatment and end their addictions. It encourages the mentally ill to get the help they need rather than go to jail.

Everybody I’ve talked to about homelessness seems as interested in the topic as I am. That’s why I’m writing about it. I've been reading about homelessness and watching videos about it for years now, and I thought I would just share some interesting things I’ve found out. I am by no means an expert on this topic. But there seem to be some things about homelessness that people are both interested in and don't know that I thought should be more broadly known.

If you have something you’d like to add or ask, I invite you to leave a comment here.

I've seen Shellenberger interviewed a couple of times in shorter interviews, and his clarity and succinctness are really good for getting an overview of what he’s discovered. Here are a few good (and brief) interviews with him:

Author Says Los Angeles and San Francisco Must Get Tough With the Homeless

The Homelessness Crisis in America, with Michael Shellenberger

Focusing on Mental Health to Combat Homelessness, with Michael Shellenberger

This one is longer (22 minutes): How San Francisco Creates More Homeless While Championing Equality 

Adam Khan is the author of Self-Reliance, Translated, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb. You can email him here.