How Time Zone Difference Has Affected my Sleep Habits

 

Hey everyone! This post is on my experience with remote instruction as an international student. I am currently writing this from my home in São Paulo, Brazil. Firstly, one of the negative things about doing UCSB’s school work from Brazil is the time zone difference, especially after the end of the daylight savings time which became five hours. It has been affecting me and my well-being since in some days of the week I end up finishing classes at 11:15pm. This might not seem late to some people, but I am not a night owl and dislike going to bed late. In fact, I would consider myself a morning person as I love to wake up early and get to work on my to-do’s. However, because of the time zone difference, my sleep schedule has been a mess. On Mondays, I end up going to bed after 12:30 am because of weekly club meetings and the next day, I have therapist appointments early in the morning. I wake up groggy and go through the day tired that sometimes I cannot even focus on the weekly school readings. 

Establishing healthy sleeping habits is important as many studies have found that sleep may affect your learning capabilities. According to Diekelmann and Bom, “sleep has been identified as a state that optimizes the consolidation of newly acquired information in memory, depending on the specific conditions of learning and the timing of sleep” (Diekelmann, 114). Diekelmann and Bom found that slow-wave sleep (SWL), which is level-3 of sleep, and rapid-eye movement (REM), a phase of sleep in which your brain is more active, affect memory retention in different but complementary ways. They suggest that SWL and REM “agree with the ‘sequential hypothesis’, which argues that the optimum benefits of sleep on the consolidation of both declarative and non-declarative memory occur when SWS and REM sleep take place in succession” (Diekelmann, 117). Therefore, having good quality of sleep is not just important for your health, but also for school performance. This concept is relevant to me since I care about my academic performance and actually learning the classes’ materials. I believe many international students may also feel the same way. I saw the effects of my sleepiness on my productivity when I attended office hours at 12 am. I switched words and could not focus on my words when asking a question so the professor called attention to my tiredness and advised me to schedule an office hours appointment for the next day so I could rest. 

I am still trying to find better ways to cope with the time-zone difference so that my sleep schedule can be less affected. Staring at the screen 20 minutes before bed and actively taking notes just makes it harder for me to be able to fall asleep, hence it is nice that some professors have been posting recorded asynchronous lectures.  Additionally, one of my finals was supposed to end at 3am BRT. Thankfully, after attending office hours, my professor allowed me to take the exam earlier than the rest of the class. I believe this will allow me to achieve a better performance. Therefore, it is important for us, international students in different time zones, to be aware of our sleeping habits so that we can optimize our productivity and feel better everyday. 

Source:

Diekelmann, Susanne, and Jan Born. “The Memory Function of Sleep.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 11, no. 2, 2010, pp. 114–126., doi:10.1038/nrn2762.