In Honor 401 this week, we listened to a podcast episode focused on effective decision-making. One of the ideas really stood out to me: creating rules for yourself. The practice of making rules for yourself allows you to more easily make healthy decisions because you set a standard. The example given was making a rule that you go to the gym every day. After creating that rule, the decision is not longer “do I go to the gym.” The decision becomes “how long will I stay at the gym” or “what workout will I do today.”
Dean Mather encouraged us to consider the rules we have in our own lives, and I only had one personal rule that stood out to me: I get 8 hours of sleep every night.
I am sure I have written a blog in the past about the value I put on sleep, but I wanted to use this blog to analyze why I have that rule, especially since I do not know when that practice became a hard and fast rule, and why I have kept it as a practice in my life.
As some of you are aware (special shoutout to anyone who has ever had to be my roommate on a PLA trip) that I am a sleepwalker. I never grew out of the common childhood practice of acting out dreams, talking, and wandering around while asleep. It does not happen every night and I can usually track the patterns to predict when I will sleepwalk, but it is an odd safety concern that I have to consider. While this would seem like the reason I would have created that rule, I rarely think about sleepwalking when I make the decision to go to bed rather than stay awake at night or set my alarm to a later time in the morning in order to stay up later. Instead, my thought process is usually just that I know I not very productive at night, so the work I do late at night will often be worse quality.
My own rule is likely the result of a rule my parents had when I was in middle and high school: they did not go to bed before I did. I’m sure their intention was just to make sure I was not up alone at night (they know I prefer to have company), but that rule became especially important at times when I was highly stressed. If I wanted to stay up super late to study, they were also up. I would tell them to go to bed, but they told me that they would stay up with me until I was done. I am so appreciative of that rule because it helped me recognize the value of sleep by considering their wellness when I was at a point when I was willing to sacrifice my own wellness to study or work. When I got to college, I no longer had to consider my parents when deciding how late I would stay up working, yet I had already spent years learning how to prioritize sleep and making sure I got my work done in my 16 waking hours each day. It is certainly a rule I will have when I have children of my own!
As much as I value sleep, I feel that I must point out the glaring outlier to my 8 hours of sleep rule: staying awake for 36+ hours when I danced in THON last year!
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