Reflection

Now that my 30 days is up, I just wanted to take a little time to reflect on my experince from this project.  Getting the amounts of sleep that I didn't regularly get before felt great for me.  I now understand the importance and value of getting a good night's sleep.  I am overall happy that I did this study and would do it again.  The biggest thing I feel that I personally took from this project is learning how to better manage the hours of sleep that I get and how to make up for sleep whenever I lose it!

More Sleep humor

Here's some more sleep humor, Enjoy!

Music and Sleep

One of my scholarly sources covered a study that saw the effects of listenign to music after awaking from sleep.  Basically the result of the study found that listening to music, even of low-prefernce, can have a positive effect on sleep inertia.  Listening to music of high-preference has an even more positive effect on it.  It helps stimulate daily activity and helps get you awake faster! I took a lot of interest in this article because I happened to notic that when I listen to music when I wake up it helps me a lot.  I never knew that it was proven that it was helpful but yet it is something that already helped me! http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=9e150e0d-2261-4a6d-874b-aa32e17d0363%40sessionmgr112&vid=5&hid=128

One of my sources

Attached is a link to one of the articles I used for one oy my popular sources: http://news.discovery.com/human/health/sleep-seven-hours.htm

The articles talks about seven hours of sleep being the best amount of sleep for someone to get.  My take on this is that I now have a range to argue for being the best amount of sleep.  Granted this range is small being 7-8, but I feel as though it gives me flexibility in an arguement.  Think about it, some people that you argue with or have discussions with can get very specific and might try to stick with eight only. Now I feel as though I can argue that its not a bad thing if the amount of sleep you get is at least close to the range.

Reaction to Napping

Ever since I added napping into my schedule to catch up on sleep I have been EXTREMELY happy.  Its so difficult to get 8 hours of sleep during the week at night so napping gives me an excellent alternative to make up on sleeping hours.  Often after waking from naps (usually the longer ones) my body feels refreshed and after I've completely woken up so does my mind.  Sometimes it is difficult to wake up from naps but I think it's because my body feels so good recorvering that it wants to stay in that state of recovery.  Overall adding napping into my research was one of the best this I've done with this project.

Thoughts?

I want to know if anyone has questions about my project. This post is mainly for me to try be as informative as I can to anyone that is curious about getting sleep or more of it.  I know how difficult it is to get sleep being a college student... so I can understand anyone with curiousities about sleep.

lol

Here's a little sleep humor. Enjoy!

Slight Change In Plan

Instead of going for eight straight hours of sleep at night I have found a knew and more effective method.  Some nights because of work, school work, early classes, on some nights it is either difficult or impossible to get eight straight hours of sleep at night.  Now I have changed my question from "How will getting eight hours of sleep at night benefit me and why is it important?" to "How will getting eight hours of sleep in a 24-hour period benefit me and why is it important?" I have discovered that napping is a great way to make up for lost sleep! Check out this article about it from the National Sleep Foundation: http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/sleep-topics/napping

Slip up... already!

So... about that whole sleep eight hours a night thing.... I messed up on the first night.  I pulled a literal all-nighter and I ended up awake for around 40 hours between thursday and friday.  I had so much to do and things for this project (go figure) to do I couldn't afford to lose the time by sleeping.  HOWEVER, this is not necesarily a bad thing! I decided to make this "slip up" and learning and/or research experience.  As well as learning the value of doing work earlier (well a reminder), I now have first-hand personal experience with sleep deprivation, the result of a lack of sleep.  After this little occurance, I can get back on track and use day 1 as reason to make sure I stay there!

What exactly am I doing?

Well... It's pretty simple.  I always hear how important it is to get sleep, specifically 8 hours of it.  So for 30 days I'm trying to get 8 hours of sleep every night to see how it benefits me.  I'm gonna see how it effects me during the day and how different it is from my current sleep scheduele..... which is pretty bad to say the least.  The biggest challenge that goes along with it is trying to get sleep when I have homework, work and early classes on some days. We'll see how this goes!