Students made physical vision boards to reflect on their sleep habits and environment – and how they can work to improve them – during an IU Student Wellness event Tuesday at the Wellness House.
The Peer Health and Wellness Educators gave students stickers, colored and patterned tapes and magazines to decorate their vision boards.
The educators had a paper with questions for participants to answer that could help them start brainstorming what to include on their vision board and discover personal sleep goals. Attendees could take home sleep masks, ear plugs, fidget toys and sleep and wellness resources to help them sleep better at night.
The Wellness House opened in January to provide students with four drop-in rooms to relax, collaborate, meditate and study. Students and campus organizations can also reserve space for events and meetings.
The Peer Health and Wellness Educators hosting “Sweet Dreams” wanted to create an event that wasn’t stressful or time-consuming during midterm exam season.
“I just think it was an interactive activity, and I feel like a lot of students are visual,” Peer Health and Wellness Educator and IU junior Alex Kiefer said. “It’s just kind of like a laid back, easy activity for students to do.”
Kiefer started the event with a slideshow presentation about healthy and unhealthy sleep habits, common sleep disorders and what an ideal sleep environment should look like for students.
Some of the healthy sleep habits the educators recommended were avoiding caffeine six hours before bed, making sure to be physically active but not too close to bedtime and keeping a consistent sleep and wake time schedule.
Kiefer displayed a QR code, which, after scanning, allowed attendees to answer questions. The answers to these questions then formed a word cloud where the more common answers appeared larger on the screen than the least common ones. For instance, Kiefer asked, “What keeps you awake at night?” The most common answers from the students in the room were roommates, stress and anxiety.
After the presentation, attendees reflected on their sleep habits, gathered materials and started cutting out images from magazines to place on their vision board.
“It’s almost normalized to have bad sleep in college, but I don’t think that has to be the case,” Kiefer said. “Some of the sleep programming that we do is to just get out the message that it doesn’t have to be normal or a common place for college to have to be like that.”
“Sweet Dreams” event organizer Peyton Jeffers has worked as a supervisor for the Peer Health and Wellness Educators for three years. Jeffers supervises a group of students and said there are about 14 educators in the department.
“We look at data all the time,” Jeffers said. “We recognize that sleep is something that students struggle with a lot on campus just due to your busyness in your schedules and a lot of the living situations.”
According to the IU Student Health Center, college students should get seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Students who sleep less than six hours per night typically have a lower grade-point average than those who sleep more regularly.
“We wanted to kind of come up with an event that allowed people to reflect on those sleep behaviors and their habits that they have,” Jeffers said. “And kind of start to pick away at some of the things that they might be able to change in their day-to-day.”
