We finally got our Barnes and Noble date, and used up my gift cards. I've been wanting to get, The Sleep Revolution. Bill thinks it's funny that I'm reading about sleep,(by Arianna Huffington) because we're usually getting enough sleep these days.
Reading about it, though, feels reinforcing, and it's important to spread the word, so we don't have too many permanently exhausted people screwing up all over the place.
Wish I'd taken my parents seriously when they advised against pulling all nighters back in the (college) day.
On our student trips back to Wisconsin from Iowa in our cars, we'd talk about a lot of things, like being well adjusted, but we'd vowed we'd never be adjusted to society, because society was screwed up. However, we'd already bought into one of the ways to get ahead by doing the finals week with very little sleep.
I can recall looking in at the front glass door of the lounge to the girls' freshman dorm at night and seeing girls in pajamas, having a pillow fight just to keep up.
Since history was loaded with facts, I'd study my lecture notes on note cards in a separate room from the downstairs dorm lounge, where others were eating popcorn, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarrettes, to keep up. I'd purchased some NoDoz, and studied all night, to go take the test first thing in the morning.
This practice contradicted what we'd learned in a psychology class called, the psychology of learning. To be effective, in the long term, learning and its retention has to take place bits at a time. Cramming didn't have that capability.
I tried the all nighter ten years later while getting more credits for teaching, and it didn't work, since I was older. I suspect my psychology test brought my good running grade down, and I know staying up brought my heretofore excellent characterization grade down, Acting was my forte, and I didn't do well in the finals presentation, because I was tired. The prof wrote, "Sorry you are tired, not up to your potential".
That probably affected his decision to let me go home and take a nap when I was playing the main character that evening the following summer. That nap made a world of difference in my performance.
Earlier in my acting avocation, I had mentioned to another actress/dancer that I'd managed to get little sleep and was still going. Her reply was, "Good, you're toughening up." I wasn't "toughening up"; I was exhausted. It affected my day job, my health, and sense of well being. It was more like feeling half alive.
Later, I applied her belief in toughening up to planning my Saturday morning theater classes, after a full week of teaching day and night classes. This was revised when I wasn't teaching regularly full time, because we had to get in our plans a little earlier along with most of our props. But when I retired, the last time I taught theater, the custodian asked me if I had morning classes. My reply was, "No, I'm retired. And now, it's on MY terms.
When it came to theater reviewing, my first in-town assignment required that I attend the performance in another town, then, get the review to the newspaper right away. At that time, I had a word processor, not a computer. I kept typing and typing until I was prone over my machine, but I knew time was growing short. I don't know if I slept 40 winks or not, but when the dawn was breaking, I had to get downtown and shoot it through the mail slot. I'd heard that someone was getting anxious in the office regarding the whereabouts of my review. It was my birthday, and I spent the whole celebratory day worried about how the whole county would judge my review. Fortunately, it was edited beyond recognition. The second review gave me a day's leeway, which meant there was time to sleep, even sleep on it, and the next one sent in came out nearly unedited. In fact, my sister-in-law caught the title as a little off, grammatically, but I hadn't written the title. The editor had.
Arianna Huffington, in the Sleep Revolution, quotes that "the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that middle and high schools NOT start before 8:30 a.m...When and how we start the day really matters, setting the stage for everything that follows...you can see why so many high schoolers resemble extras from The Walking Dead."
I tried many times to adjust to the early morning schedules for teaching, particularly substitute teaching, after teaching adult ed the night before. You get all hyped up in the evening (much like doing evening theater rehearsals) and try to sleep, tossing and turning, because it never was in sync with your body rhythm to get up for the inevitable morning call. I knew to start the day with meditation, in part, to make up the deficit.
Personally, I thought the change to early morning classes was not only hard on me, but hard on the kids, slumped over their desks in exhaustion. A lot of them had night jobs. In studying the chapter in the book wherefrom this is quoted, it is also detrimental, not just to their health, but learning.
Added to the fact I wasn't getting sleep, my husband in broadcasting, was often awarded the "double back", being up at night at the station and being required to return to the station for the early morning shift.
I'd talked to a nurse friend, whom I understand, also have crazy hours much like broadcasters, who said many of the mistakes made in hospitals were the result of assigning bad work/sleep schedules.
Another relative who worked in a restaurant, was often given something like a double back, which he called "clopening". That was a combination of the words, closing and opening.
Bill's grandfather, a foreman in the steel mill, joked about the same kind of schedule, where he got to the point where he didn't know if he was coming or going.
I don't like to put it this way, but WAKE UP, education, broadcasting, hospitals, restaurants, factories, offices, and society, to the importance of SLEEP.
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