Getting enough sleeping, a necessary element for one’s health, including but not limited to relief of stresses and anxieties, memory consolidation, and better function of the immune system and endocrine system is challenging especially for university students who are expected to work diligently every day. The primary obstacle that university students face is the difficulty of balancing study and rest time, in other words, how to efficiently study and eliminate procrastination, and meanwhile form a schedule for resting. It must be admitted that a scheduled life requires a lot of determination to persist in, a valuable quality that is yet hard to achieve.
My sleeping hygiene is composed by three factors: first, going to bed every night before 11:30 p.m. and falling asleep before 12:00 a.m., as this is the most suitable arrangement that I found so far to maximize my working time while fully preserve the optimal sleeping time from 12:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. ; second, keeping electronics away from my eyes, an effective measure that eliminates the impact of blue light to my sleeping quality and helps me not to procrastinate on my sleeping time; third, playing some white noise or sound of nature, such as birds’ singing and wind breezing, to help me fall asleep faster for it relaxes my nerve as if I am taking a bath in a tab of warm water.
Studying with a nocturnal schedule, I, waking up every day at 13:00 and going to sleep at 3:00, tried to change this sleeping hygiene after I entered Georgetown this August. However, I soon found the negative impact of this unhealthy schedule on my body. Besides becoming less energetic and moodier, I caught a cold in the third week in September and throw out for the entire weekend which almost made me dehydrated. I was told that the unhealthy schedule had influence my digestive system, because I ate at midnight as my “lunch”, but my intestine was not accustomed to digesting and absorbing nutrients at midnight, which was supposed to be its resting time. The doctor suggested me to change my life schedule as soon as possible, or my health might be worse in the future.
Therefore, I determined to maintain my old sleep hygiene, a proven-suitable, and successful schedule for my health. After all, I do not want to throw out on weekends and had to cancel all the plans that I previously made for Saturday and Sunday.
