Sleep Education

A lot of us are well versed in many different subjects from poetic writing to organic chemistry (poetry in its own right), but how many of us can say we truly know what it means to be sleep literate at this age, let alone as kids and teenagers. But learning is only half the battle.

In the article Sleep Education they set out to seek out the effects of a large-scale multilevel and multimodal sleep education program that would be based out of primary and secondary schools that were located in Hong Kong to try and help educate adolescents and improve their sleep habits. The Asian students were known for having worse sleeping habits than those of us in America and those in Europe. Can you imagine that there are actually people that get less sleep than we do? BLEW MY MIND!

With a participant size of over 7000 students the experimenters broke them up into a control and an intervention group, from there they set up two 40-minute workshops dedicated to teaching the students about the importance of sleep, how it affects you, contributing factors, and practical skills to help improve your sleep. During the intervention the students were asked to keep a sleep journal, they were also given various questionnaires to subjectively assess their quality of sleep.

In the end the majority of student’s sleep habits did improve throughout the intervention but only 32% of students reported that the program would actually motivate them to change their sleep habits. Which reminded me of the sleep journal we had to do for class and it made me realize that the students who didn’t think they would really change their sleeping habits had a good point. While recording my sleep for my journal it was always in the back of my mind I felt that I had to go to bed earlier to make sure I had a decent night’s sleep, but after I quickly returned to my old ways of staying up a little longer than I probably should. Which begs the question what can we do to really get motivated to change our ways and not only create new habits but make them stick as well?

I thought this article was important because it brings insight to the sleep habits of those across the world and how sleep habits are affecting adolescents at a very young age. I think this is very valuable information for the parents of adolescents everywhere so that they could maybe make changes to when and how their children fall asleep.