One of the first realities that confronts a medical student when he enters school is the volume of information to be consumed.
What makes it more challenging is the little time alloted for consuming this information.
Faced with the challenge of combining lectures, practicals, discussions & reading with other aspects of their normal life,the medic then realises that for him to meet up with 70% of his scheme or more, there has to be severe lifestyle modifications especially as regards time management.
The medic begins to cut down on the time alloted to events and sleep is the one first attacked.
He thinks that by cutting down on sleep time, he would be able to have more time for studies but this is usually fallacious as I found out within a very short time.
I developed a weird sleeping pattern during my early days in medical school consisting of 3 hours in the evening and 2 hours or less in the early hours of the morning.
I would read or attempt to read for the rest of the day barring the time I went to eat, bath or brush.
This was not just me, most of my colleagues adopted a similar pattern of reduced sleeping time with various approaches.
The result?
It was usually counterproductive, simply put.
You are too tired to read, you bend on the desk to get a nap with the associated back pain that comes with sleeping in such weird positions. You may end up not reading or reading with little or no concentration with various sleeping bouts in-between the short study attempts.
Some days, the tiredness is overwhelming and sleep overshadows the reading. On such days, nothing is read, nothing is assimilated.
Despite all these struggles, the time allotted to extracurriculars and socials were not reduced which meant that I kept engaging in my usual activities, my social life remained same but my night sleep was greatly affected.
At a point I had to devise another means, after careful introspection and realising that it was not beneficial to keep using such pattern of hypocritical study.
At about the same time of my introspection, a classmate dozed off in the presence of a professor while receiving a lecture (I need to add that this is a common side effect of our hypocritical study)
The prof had to use that opportunity and began to educate us on the importance of quality sleep and the side effects of not getting adequate sleep.
He encouraged us to ensure we get adequate sleep of at least 6 hours a day.
Now at the time, 6 hours appeared unrealistic because of the workload staring me in the face. It was then I began to think exactly how to be able to get adequate sleep and also study adequately.
I then realised that instead of cutting down on the sleep time, it was much more beneficial to cut down on time spent on extracurricular activities and social media screen time.
With this decision came many positives, one of which was increased understanding despite shorter study time as well as better time management and exam readiness.
I became an advocate of adequate sleep to fellow medics, never hesitating to inform the newly admitted and younger ones the importance of sleep.
Sleep is up there in the list of things everyone should prioritise, how much more a medic.
My mantra then became "better to have a peaceful sleep than a hypocritical study".
This has ensured that I maximise both sleeping time and study time without any being a hindrance to the other.
Source
So it's safe to say that I currently have a healthy sleeping pattern which ensures that my mood is optimal for studies and various other activities.
What about you? Have you had any reason to shorten your sleep time, either one off instance or consistently.
I would want to hear from you in the comments.
This is my response to the April inleo prompt day 14, feel free to join the fun by clicking this link
