Rest for Success: Sleep for Energy and Focus, Part 2

This post is the fourth in a series about some perhaps less obvious – but still vital – tools for success in graduate school. As a graduate student, you may feel like the most important part of you is your brain. But the truth is, we are whole people, not “brains on a stick” (Smith, 2016). What you do with the rest of your body, mind, and spirit is going to directly and deeply affect your academic success. In previous posts, I wrote about the importance of food for energy and focus and exercise for energy and focus. This post continues the discussion on sleep with some perspective and tips for yawning graduate students.

How to Prioritize Sleep

When I was a kid, we would vacation with my grandparents. They lived in one cabin, and we lived next door. I remember sometimes waking up in the middle of the night and looking over at my grandparents’ cabin. Often, no matter how late it was, I would see a light on. Then I would know that my grandmother was awake, reading, while the rest of the family was asleep.

It turns out that my grandmother was on to something. For people who struggle to sleep, one helpful strategy may be to get up and do something else for a while until drowsiness returns.

The last post discussed the importance of sleep for focus and productivity. Sleep is vital for daily functioning, health, and productivity. But if you can’t sleep, lying in bed worrying about it is the worst possible strategy. I recently finished a book called The Sleep Prescription: 7 Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest by Aric Prather. The book has helpful tips, and I’ll share a few in this post. But the best thing about the book is the wise perspective it offers on sleep. At the same time that Prather urges prioritizing sleep, he also advises those of us who struggle to relax a bit. A few bad nights will not ruin our lives.

What Can You Do?

For some students, sleep problems may be severe enough to require medical or therapeutic intervention. But for many people, there are things you can do on your own. While you cannot make yourself fall asleep (or stay asleep, which is my problem), you can try to create conditions that promote slumber.

First – Remember You Are Not Alone

 In the last post, I mentioned two studies on graduate students and sleep (Pallos et al., 2005, & Yang & Smallfield, 2020). These studies were fairly small-scale and focused on specific populations (occupational therapy students and study abroad students in Japan). A much larger study (Allen et al., 2021) surveyed 2,683 master’s, doctoral, and professional graduate students at two universities and found that they were getting, on average of 6.4 hours of sleep a night, with 62 percent reporting good sleep quality. Maybe that’s not terrible, but it’s also not great. So, if sleep duration or quality is a problem for you, you are in good company.

Next – Some Sleep Tips

If you want to get serious about your sleep, getting a copy of Prather’s book is a great idea. Here are a few of his suggestions that go beyond the usual advice to avoid caffeine and blue light (he says the bigger problem is the content on the blue-light producing device, which may be causing anxiety or engagement that’s getting in the way of your rest).

1. Don’t stay in bed sleepless. My grandma was right. If you can’t sleep, get up and do something relaxing. You want to disrupt the association of being in bed with not being able to sleep.
2. Get up at the same time every day. No matter how poorly you slept the night before, sleeping in usually further disrupts your body’s rhythms. Prather compares sleeping in to giving yourself jet lag; you are starting your daily clock at a different time each day.
3. Take breaks during the day. For busy people, the time before bed can feel like the only space you have for yourself. Some of us engage in “revenge sleep procrastination” in an effort to reclaim some control over our schedules. Instead, Prather suggests scheduling short (5- to 15-minute) breaks during the day. Take a walk, pray or meditate, listen to music or a podcast. These breaks may head off the feeling of frustration that leads to delaying bedtime.
4. Wind down. Our quest for productivity often leads us to work right up until we turn out the light for bed. Prather warns that most human beings simply can’t shut down that quickly. Give yourself time – he suggests two hours – to do things that help you feel calm and sleepy.

If you read the post on exercise, you might remember my friend Cari, who suggested a breathing technique for energy and focus. She also has one for relaxation, which might be a helpful part of a wind-down routine. The key, she says, is to exhale for longer than you inhale. So, breathe in while you count to six, hold for one count, breathe out while you count to eight, hold for one count, and repeat. The longer exhalation empties out your lungs so you can take in more oxygen on the inhale, and the pattern can help you feel calmer.

As humans, we are complex, interconnected beings. Prioritizing sleep may require adjustments to areas of life that seem unrelated to rest. And carving the necessary time for sleep out of an already overpacked schedule may seem both counterintuitive and impossible. But the benefits of sleep for both short-term success and long-term wellness mean that those adjustments are probably worth it.

References

Allen, H. K., Barrall, A. L., Vincent, K. B., & Arria, A. M. (2021). Stress and burnout among graduate students: Moderation by sleep duration and quality. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 28(1), 21–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-020-09867-8

Pallos, H., Gergely, V., Yamada, N., Miyazaki S., and Okawa, M. (2005). Exploring the quality of sleep on long-term sojourn: International graduate students in Japan. Sleep & Biological Rhythms 3(3),142–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1479-8425.2005.00183.x

Prather, A. (2022). The sleep prescription: 7 days to unlocking your best rest. Penguin Life.

Smith, J. K. A. (2016). You are what you love. Brazos Press.

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