Introduction
Due to lack of sleep, during school days with a morning lesson, I always feel sleepy and rely on coffee and tea to keep me awake. Although this seriously affects my health and learning efficiency, I never tried to sleep earlier at night as I have a strong addiction to electronic devices before bedtime. This habit then harms my natural sleep pattern by making me awake and energetic during nighttime.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the age group that I am in, adult, 18-60 years old, is recommended to have 7 or more hours of sleep per night. When I have lessons starting at 9 am, I will need to wake up at roughly 7:30 am. If I am able to fall asleep before 12:30 am, I would technically get enough sleep.
This week, I will try my best to achieve a healthy amount of sleep for each day through various methods listed below and observe their effects on my sleep duration increase.
- Reduce consumption of caffeinated beverages after 2 pm
- Stop taking long naps (especially at weird times such as from 4 to10 pm)
- Take shower before 10 pm
- Sleep Aid Aromatherapy
Statistics Collected
By keeping track of the time I go to bed and the time I wake up in the morning, I made the bar chart below shows my sleep duration from 6 pm of the previous day to 6pm on the labeled day.
| Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Monday |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Daily Log
Couldn’t resist a nap after my Interaction lesson. I was less sleepy but started to have a headache when I woke up, not sure why that happens to me so often when I wake up from naps.
Unable to fall asleep last night, maybe it's because of the nap I took, but it was only 2 hours long!!
Today is the only day that I don’t have a morning lesson, so I stayed up late again last night…
Fell asleep last night reading my art history textbook, they can be such a sleep aid.
The sound of children screaming woke me up this morning, why do they wake up so early, it’s the weekend!!
Starting to give up early bedtimes…
Did technically got enough sleep, but still sleepy as I’m not used to waking up early after the weekend.
Reflection
The results prove that I am able to get enough sleep with the help of the methods mentioned above. The only day hat I failed to reach 7 hours of sleep was on Wednesday, and that was probably caused by the nap I had during noon on Tuesday. It was much harder to sleep early when knowing that I do not have to wake up early tomorrow, causing me to also want to stay up late the next night.
I have always considered the time after I start lying down on my bed and before I fell asleep is the only time I have to myself, the only time I am enjoying life, and the only time I surf deeply into the internet. Staying up late at night gives me illusion of entering a space with absence of the concept time, but actually I am just stealing the energy from the future version of myself. With this section of my day being reduced foe a week, I feel a sense of emptiness. Maybe late-night leisure time outweighs healthy sleeps? Making up my mind to give up healthy life could be the solution…