Sarah is a full time university student who also works a stressful part time job three days a week in the hospitality business. In her free time she plays a lot of indoor soccer in the evenings – sometimes the games are late at night. She also regularly buys a can of energy drink each night to help her stay awake while studying on her laptop. Usually she has no issues getting to sleep but over the past 3 nights because she's had to stay up late to finish assignments and then sleeping in, she’s been struggling to get to sleep.

What could Sarah do first to improve her sleep, based on what you have learned in this module?

Question

Sarah is a full time university student who also works a stressful part time job three days a week in the hospitality business. In her free time she plays a lot of indoor soccer in the evenings – sometimes the games are late at night. She also regularly buys a can of energy drink each night to help her stay awake while studying on her laptop. Usually she has no issues getting to sleep but over the past 3 nights because she's had to stay up late to finish assignments and then sleeping in, she’s been struggling to get to sleep.

What could Sarah do first to improve her sleep, based on what you have learned in this module?

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Question restatement: Sarah is juggling a heavy schedule with late-night study sessions, a stressful part-time job, and regular energy drink use, and she’s recently had trouble falling asleep. The prompt asks what she could do first to improve her sleep based on the module.
Option 1: Get a prescription for sleeping pills from her doctor. This is a medical intervention that typically isn’t the first step for sleep trouble, especially when behavioral and circadian factors are at play. Relying on medication as an initial response can mask underlying lifestyle or scheduling issues and may carry risks of dependency or side effects. Therefore, recommending pills as the initial approach would be inappropriate as a first move.
Option 2: Re-establish a routine with going to bed and waking up at the same time. This directly targets sleep hygiene and aligns with core sleep science principles: a consistent schedule helps regulate the body’s internal clock, improves sleep onset, and enhances daytime functioning. For someone with late studying and irregular exposure to screens and caffeine, normalizing bedtimes and wake times is a foundational step that can yield broad improvements without risks.
Option 3: Carry out meditation to help her wind down and relax. Meditation and relaxation techniques can be valuable aids for sleep, particularly in reducing arousal and anxiety. However, as a first step, it’s often more effective to address basic scheduling and environmental factors before layering in specific relaxation practices. It can be a helpful adjunct but not necessarily the initial primary intervention when circadian timing is disrupted.
Option 4: Continue with drinking energy drinks after dinner because it helps her study but avoid screen time at least an hour before sleeping. While reducing caffeine and screen exposure near bedtime is beneficial, continuing energy drink use after dinner may perpetuate sleep difficulties by maintaining arousal and delaying sleep onset. Since this undercuts one of the central drivers of her sleep trouble, it is not the most appropriate first move.
Overall analysis: The most foundational and broadly applicable change is to stabilize the daily rhythm by setting consistent bed and wake times, which addresses circadian misalignment caused by late nights and irregular schedules. Other options can be supportive but either carry risks (medication), are secondary strategies (meditation), or may worsen sleep if the underlying timing issue isn’t addressed (caffeine and energy drinks).

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