Mental Health: 4 - Sleep
This week’s response focuses on good sleeping patterns as a vital aspect of healthy routine and hence a vital aspect of staying positive during lockdown.
“Having read some of the other contributions to the blog in the past weeks it got me thinking about what had been important to or impacted other people at certain times. Factors such as a routine, sport/exercise, studying, and diet have all come up as areas that people have focused on during lockdown to try to keep in order and as a result make lockdown easier for themselves. What has also been common is that these factors are important to us as students in helping with our studies and college work, which led me to think of a crucial one for me: my sleep pattern.
This is important at the best of times, but lockdown and the effects of being in lockdown have highlighted this in my view. With exams and assignment deadlines coming up, many students will spend large amounts of time studying. Sleep is crucial for studying to be effective, with plenty of scientific examples found online – one TED talk in particular recently highlighted this point to me. Being in the house all day can sometimes make it easy to stay up later than necessary. Having spent hours studying or working from home, it can be easy to then stay up late doing nothing in particular (watching television, scrolling on the phone, etc) instead of sleeping, especially when you have nothing specific on that evening. Naturally, this will leave you tired the next day and make it even harder to study or work etc. This will not help anyone’s mental well-being, especially if it results in falling behind on the work I have to get done, potentially making me more likely to be up late the following night and creating a vicious circle where I neglect my sleep.
A second impact of staying up unnecessarily late – although not felt by myself in the way the last point mentioned is – is that it could also mean it’s harder to get out of bed at a “normal” time. While this is probably fine sometimes, I feel personally that getting up later and later each day makes it harder to remain in a good routine, or the active lifestyle where we exercise regularly, or even could affect the diet if it led to skipping breakfast due to not getting up early enough for example, all of which I have seen mentioned in recent posts as important factors to others during lockdown.
As students one massive change to our lives has been the switch to online learning. Almost all lectures are now done online and also recorded, meaning they can be watched at any stage. While this is a good thing for learning as it is flexible and useful for going back over things repeatedly which does help a great deal, for someone like me who always attended college for in-person lectures, this does mean there is less of a reason to be up and out of bed early. It is easier to sleep through an alarm or tell yourself you can just spend the extra half an hour in bed because sure you don’t need to go to the lecture or you can watch it later. Again this is fine most of the time but it could also turn into a bad habit with the same consequences resulting from this poor sleep pattern as I mentioned above.
Finally, COVID has created a lot of uncertainty and negativity in peoples’ everyday lives, you don’t even have to leave your house to be reminded of its existence (awareness of health guidelines and the people knowing danger of COVID is, of course, vitally important) but when tired or sleeping poorly, it can be easier for this negativity and uncertainty to increase our own personal levels of worry or maybe for some anxiety and stress, and while sleep might not eradicate the worry some of people will feel, it is yet another reason why a decent pattern of sleep is so important in my own opinion.”
Sleep is so important and I’m sure we can all relate to the consequences outlined by this respondent. As always, remember it is okay to feel sad. We all have bad days. It is important to try to adopt healthy habits and not to beat ourselves up when we break these good habits occasionally – it happens to everyone.
Tá laethanta níos gile roimhainn.