Reflections on Module 3 · Physiology First University

Reflections on Module 3

Hey team,

Just figured out the discussion boards 😅

I went through the module, and I have a few sporadic thoughts I want to share while it’s fresh:

-I’m really excited to talk about how to educate kids on this. Sleep is one of those things we can’t really give them an experience with as we can with movement and breathing — and we can’t follow them home — but it’s the most important thing. Can’t wait to dive in to how we help them!

-I love sleep trackers/journals. As with other modules, I’m loving the simplicity around this (templates I’ve used for courses/carts around sleep science were great but cumbersome). Categorizing sleep blockers and starters is just so brilliantly straightforward, and focusing just on the most common ones removes a lot of the weeds.

-I wonder about your thoughts,

@David Bidler

, on the dangers of wearables interfering with self-trust, intuition, and/or interoception. I’ve very little experience with them, but I’ve read some recent articles about how your general evaluation on how you slept is a better indicator than wearable data. And I do have colleagues in the breath/sleep science space who have worn a different brand on each wrist and woke up to totally different data. In everyones’s experience, where’s the line between this being useful empowering data and it being sort of a crutch, especially for young people (again coming from someone with almost no experience using them for sleep)?

-Lastly, I’ll just add another sleep starter for anyone who’s interested, which is the idea of “state anchoring.” As the brain is a prediction machine, linking a specific stimulus to bedtime time can aid the brain and body in winding down. Example: If you turn off overhead light and put on the same relaxing music an hour before bed, you’ll begin to anchor a parasympathetic state to those stimuli (could be anything).

As always, looking forward to rich thoughts and discussions!

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Reflections on Module 3