Tuesday, November 3, 2009

final project posting~

2009.11.3- FINAL PROJECT POSTING~
My project is focusing on sleeping. Sleeping has been a really big issue. I find this project to be self-experimental and the goal was to observe the behavioral changes and stress levels, and if the attempted “forced schedule” to get more sleep failed or succeeded.

This experiment was documented for 2 weeks. One week was to A. document my normal daily schedule, and the other was to B. make an attempt to so “change my habits” and put myself in a forced schedule by trying out activities and/or others I normally wouldn’t do (and by this meaning activities that will bore me to fall asleep faster).

A. I documented my normal daily schedule and habits from October 15 to 22. This was just for me to observe how I’ve managed my time in doing things that week and to collect the total amount of hours I slept. (My schedule would’ve been more hectic if this project had started closer towards the end of the quarter. I would’ve slept after 3AM and get less hours of sleep a night.) Here are some of the things I’ve noticed on my habits after the 1-week documentation of my normal schedule was over.

1. Slept before 3AM on all 8 nights.
2. Spent my hours on useless activities on 4 of the 8 days.
3. Homework assignments not touched before 8PM.

I got
more sleep than what I had expected. If I hadn’t put off any reading, drawing or studio assignments till the evening time or pushed it over for the following day, I would’ve been able to sleep earlier and not have to worry about catching up on any schoolwork.

B. I documented my forced schedule from October 23 to 30. This part of the experiment could’ve been approached in many ways. My goal was to sleep by 12AM. That week was to observe if my time was better well managed and (if) sleeping earlier affected me in any way. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed on the 1-week documentation of my forced schedule was over.

1. Slept by 1AM on all 8 nights.
2. Slept by 12:30AM on 4 of the 8 nights (activities and/or other attempted: watched the discovery channel, read a book, drank warm milk, and took Benadryl 2 of the 4 days an hour before I forced myself to sleep)
3. Homework assignments touched before 12PM on 3 of the 8 days.
4. Homework assignments touched after 9PM on 4 of the 8 days.

I got
less sleep and I was surprised to see the results after totaling the amount of hours of sleep. I attempted to touch my assignments early during the day so that it would’ve given me more free time. Some of the problems encountered were:

1. Knowing my attempted goal to sleep by 12AM pressured me to complete everything on my “to-do list”.
2. Happen to have documented at the wrong week (
Midterms week).
3. (
Midterms week) = more stress = less sleep.

(Below) shows two graphs of the stress levels. Stress based on the thoughts, complaints, etc I’ve written in my journal daily.

A. This graph represents my stress level over the normal daily schedule. This week shows how my stress level is highest mid week and slowly decreases towards the end of the week.

B. This graph represents my stress level over the forced schedule. This week shows how my stress level slowly increases from day 1 to day 7. My stress level is highest towards the end of the week.

After comparing these two graphs, I was surprised that my stress levels resulted that way in the two weeks. I expected that my stress level each day on my normal daily schedule would be the opposite (stress level slowly increasing each day) because I tend to procrastinate and put things off till the very last minute, and that my stress level each day on my forced schedule would also be reversed (stress level high and slowly decreasing). Because I was on a forced schedule and pressured to get things done, I assumed I would be most stressed in the beginning of the week. My stress level went up day 5 (dark red area), which was the day I finally realized “I AM STRESSED.” I found that I experienced constant mood swings throughout the day, I was easily offended what people might’ve said to me and that my body was telling me to slow down on the loads of work I’ve been putting each day and rest. If this was a longer experiment, I would attempt to create a more structured schedule and try to follow that. Changing one owns habit isn’t that easy, especially if you only “attempted” to change your schedule for a week. My body couldn’t easily adjust to those changes and that's what had probably caused me to stress out early that week. But I definitely had fun with this project!

The red mark indicates my normal schedule. I got 62.5 total of hours of sleep. The purple mark indicates my forced schedule. I got 59.5 total hours of sleep.

and here is the poster!

TIME TO SLEEP! YEAH!


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