this scene's serene

I went to a seminar earlier this week about sleep, and it seriously rocked my world. I took notes and I figured I’d share what I learned with all of you because I found it really interesting. First off, answer these four questions:

Do you need an alarm to wake up?
Do you constantly hit snooze multiple times before actually waking up?
When you go to bed, do you instantly fall asleep?
Do you find it easy to get drowsy when sitting through class, or after eating a meal?

If you answered yes to two of these, you are sleep deprived, along with about 75% of all college students. Don’t worry, I answered yes to all four of these too.

College students need about 9.25 hours a sleep each night. I don’t know about you guys, but I definitely do not sleep that much. 

Sleep is vital to everything. It controls our moods, our physical capabilities, anxiety, humor, hormones, social skills and pretty much everything that makes us function. People who get only 6-7 hours a night on average are 50% more likely to get a viral infection. Also, a person that goes two weeks straight only getting 6 hours a night has literally the same reasoning and motor skills as someone with a .1% BAC level. Crazy right?

Also, people who think that pulling all-nighters is the best way to study have got it all wrong. During your sleep, you enter different cycles that allow different parts of your mind to rest. Sleep is the only time your brain takes new information and places it into neural networks for long term storage. The memories of events that take place throughout the day enter the hippocampus and then the information is transfered to the cerebral cortex in order to form connections and help you understand concepts. If you don’t get enough rest before an exam, you’re gonna have a much harder time remembering what you learn. 

A study was done in a sleep laboratory where they made a bunch of students do math problems while having machines scan their brain for cognitive action. One day the students slept eight hours, correctly answered most of the problems, and had scans that showed certain parts of the brain that lit up—meaning that these parts were in use. A few days later, the scientists took the same group of students, had them only sleep six hours, and although some of them still got problems right, the scans showed that none of the parts of the brain were lighting up. Meaning that they weren’t putting any thought into their work and functioning almost on auto-pilot. 

I don’t want to make this long, but point being, sleep is important. It’s not something that you can just make up on the weekends. When you’re sleep deprived, you literally have to make up each of those hours you missed in order to be restored to where you should be. Think of it almost like a bank account. Just because you slept 10 hours on Saturday doesn’t mean you could make up for sleeping 6 hours every other night that week. You’re still about 8 hours deprived because you should have been sleeping at least 8 hours each of those nights.

Also, sleep is one of the largest predictors of life length.

I’m definitely considering getting one of these:

&

Will To, if you happen to be reading this. I’m sorry, but I had to. :)