Adam Ezekiel – PDHPE Teacher

The Sleep Connection

In the first few weeks of school, Year 11 students have undergone 2 workshops with Lisa Maltman from The Sleep Connection. In her presentations, Lisa stresses that humans spend about one-third of their life asleep. Sleep is vital for our physical and mental wellbeing. Despite people thinking of sleep as a time of rest, a lot of important activity occurs in the brain and body during sleep. The quality of the one-third of our lives spent asleep, greatly influences the quality of the two-thirds we are awake. Without adequate sleep our health, resilience and performance is greatly impacted.

Good quality sleep helps:

• Learning, memory and concentration
• Support our emotional health and wellbeing
• Positive behavior and decision making
• Improves energy levels and promotes healthy growth, metabolism and immune system.

After listening to Lisa present our Year 11 students concluded that:

• “Technology affects our quality and quantity of sleep. We need to put phones away before bed.”
• “We need to aim for more consistency with our sleeping patterns. Our technology affects our sleep making it harder to fall asleep.”

Our Year 11 students also identified a number of strategies to get more and better quality sleep, including:

• “No tech 30 minutes before sleep and turn off your phone and leave it out of the bedroom” 
• “Remove technology from the bedroom.”
• “Make a time to switch off technology and read before going to sleep.”

Lisa’s presentations were very valuable for our Year 11 students and will hopefully help them develop healthy sleeping patterns as they enter their senior years of study.