gee really... really???

After staying up till 5am today writing a grant that's all about the negative health consequences of being up at night, what do I see today from Gizmodo's working-the-night-shift-is-hazardous-to-your-health page?



A picture of Yuki and Kyo (they sure do look exactly like my cats, even in mannorism), who did indeed stay up all night with me being unhealthy. But wait... cats are nocturnal, so it's ok. But wait, a single night time light exposure results in days and days and days of circadian disruption. According to my grant, even if we go right back to a good sleep schedule (and supposedly good light dark cycles), its still weeks and weeks before our rhythm goes back to normal. And yes, my grant is very convincing with preliminary data and all, so you better watch out when I do the actual experiment!

Sleep Ed

Remember those Sex Ed/health classes in school? In my case, 'specialists' came to our school with models, and full length videos of the birthing process in glorious detail...
Now imagine that instead of being educated awkwardly about sex, the class was about sleep instead. For one of the gym class electives I was able to chose 'relaxation' which was nap time in high school. That was great! However sleep education is a little different...



In the issue of Sleep that came out yesterday, the article Evaluation of a School-Based Intervention for Adolescent Sleep Problem, described how they went to schools, told sleep deprived kids that not getting enough sleep is bad, and that they should sleep better. Not surprisingly, being told that you should sleep better did not make students sleep more in the long run.

I remember the motto in middle school was "sleep is for the weak". In order to finish your work and have some fun in the day, there is no way you can sleep for more than 6 hours. Once we got to high school, it became "sleep is a luxury". Since I wanted to do well in class, and practice flute and piano and be class officer for multiple clubs, and do sports sometimes too there's no way I can go to bed before 3am or 4am everyday just to wake up at 7am to go to school again. (I couldn't even sleep in on the weekends...T_T) Then college came around, and well, sleep just didn't exist anymore if we just wanted to pass and do nothing else.
So now that I am a grad student researching circadian biology, even knowing all the horribly negative effects of circadian disruption and sleep deprivation would not have changed my sleep habits in the past.

Sadly, effects of aging is finally catching up to me. I can no longer stay up for 4 days straight and feel perfectly fine. But that's ok, as a grad student it is now possible to go home after 10pm, chill for a few hours and be in bed to sleep for a whole 7 hours. But wait, the journal tells me to sleep 9hrs a day? Damn, I fails at doing what I preach.