I was in the U of A clinic this morning for my weekly hypochondriacal visit and there was a new show on the TV. Like everywhere now a days (Tim Horton’s, dentists, airport lounges), the clinic has TVs mounted from the ceiling for our viewing pleasure. Instead of showing their menu in slow motion a la Tim’s, or CTV NewsNet a la Terminal 3, it shows different slide shows of health-related facts and advice. I’ve become quite familiar with them and have my favourites. I find the one on relationship violence to be kind of weak and repetitive. However, I always look forward to the witty treatise on relaxation, “Stress Busting Rx.” Today they had a new show entitled “Nap Map.” In which they showed photographs of various benches and couches around campus and their locations (e.g., Pedway to Fine Arts) along with asterisks that I can only assume were a sleepability rating of some kind. One of the areas was a hallway in V Wing. The caption said something like, “no benches, but the hallway is plenty wide,” and I’m sure that statement had unnecessary exclamation marks. One problem with that (besides the obvious sanitation issue) is that V Wing no longer exists and I don’t think we should be encouraging students to sleep on the field of mud that stands in its stead. These images were interspersed with helpful hints, things like: only nap in well-lit and busy areas, hug your backpack while you sleep, and 15-20 minute naps are best. One of the hints was to carry an alarm with you so that you don’t sleep through classes or tests. The then hint continued with an “or” statement: or tape a note to yourself with the time you want to be woken. Seriously? If you see a note on a sleeping student are you going to read it and come back later to wake him up? Are you even going to read it? Chances are if there was some idiot sleeping on the floor of the V Wing hallway (say, 8 months ago, before it was rubble) with a note on his chest saying “Wake me up at 2:15pm,” people would kick him as they went by and he’d probably miss his class due to a concussion.
As absurd as this is, it bothers me that Health Services is encouraging students to take naps on campus during the school day. It’s great that we live in a society where students can doze off at a moment’s notice in public places with little fear of molestation or thievery. However, is this not a classic example of treating the symptom and not the illness? If people are so exhausted that they can’t get through the day without collapsing on a dirty vinyl couch in some random hallway for 20 minutes, than there are other things we need to worry about. Shouldn’t we be educating them on healthy sleep habits? (This is moot because they actually have that show at the clinic, and it teaches us that we should buy the best bed we can afford, and that beds are for sex and sleep and nothing else. It’s my second favourite show at the clinic).
There’s something else about all this that bothers me, and I can’t quite place my arthritic (or so I think) finger on it. Maybe it’s this image it gives me of the laziest fucking generation every to languidly crawl across the earth, or the fact that we’re happily encouraging this epidemic of torpor. I wasn’t alive in 1908, but I doubt the first cohort of U of A undergrads slept on the floor of hallways between classes. Or maybe they did and I’m being overly harsh because I dislike undergrads. When it comes to academia, I’m a Puritan; they should get off the floors and benches and sleep in class like the rest of us.
1 comment:
They didn't nap in 1908 because most of them did manual physical labour all day and just collapsed at night. We're talking chopping wood, hauling water, ploughing fields, and doing endless amounts of laundry by hand (I'm always amazed by how white they could get their clothes just by scrubbing them on wooden boards). They had no electric lighting, TV, or internet to keep their brains occupied all night, either. When the sun went down they either lit a candle and read a book, or went to bed. Thus they slept an average of 8.5 - 10 hours a night.
Nowadays, North Americans sleep only 6 - 7 hours a night. The average for the best-performing students, according to the Health Clinic's tickertape TV, is 7.5 hours. And other than field biologists during field season, I don't know many people who consistently do 10 hours of manual labour per day. Most physically-intensive tasks--farming, mining, construction--are now assisted, if not done entirely, with heavy machinery. So is it any wonder that people get less and lower-quality sleep now? Even if you run for an hour a day, you're still spending the rest of your daytime hours parked in front of a computer screen doing statistics, and that's not really physically exhausting work, is it? We're not physically tired enough at night to realize we need to go to bed, so we don't sleep long and well enough to make it through the day . . . and we skip going to the gym because "we're tired". Realistically the "napping syndrome" just perpetuates the not-physically-tired-enough-to-sleep-properly-at-night cycle.
Or maybe I just like to think my field work is good for something.
-Oz
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