Snooze, Don't Lose!

Group Members:

Alyssa Rashid, 1941356; Yiqin Cai, 1666921

Eric Lin, 1717147; Glenn Song, 1734280

Snooze, Don't Lose!

Feeling Sleepy?

Ever find yourself yawning in class? Or even falling asleep during a lecture? You aren’t alone! Insufficient sleep is an issue for a majority of university students. More than 25% of students reported having less than 6.5 hours of sleep per night (H. G. Lund et al., 2010). The average bedtime for students is around 12:30-1:30 am, being even later on weekends (Tsai, L. L., & Li, S. P, 2004). More than one third of university students claimed they stay up until 3 am at least once a week (H. G. Lund et al., 2010), indicating that irregular sleep patterns are common amongst college students. 

Although sufficient scientific literature is lacking, our experience as university students tells us that bedtime procrastination is a common phenomenon for many people around us(Kadzikowska-Wrzosek, 2018). Bedtime procrastination, is defined by Kroese (2014) as the intentional delay of going to sleep without any external restrictions. It describes the tendency to put off sleep every night to watch that extra episode (or several), mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, etc. People who procrastinate before bedtime have lower self-regulation compared to those who do not (Kroese, 2014). Therefore, our project aims to teach our audience some behaviour change techniques and strategies to help better regulate themselves and say goodbye to bedtime procrastination.

Why Should I Care? The Significance of the project

“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” - Benjamin Franklin.

Getting into bed early has countless physical and mental health benefits.

Productivity

First, going to sleep even just an hour earlier can lead to increased productivity the next day, whereas drowsiness and fatigue causes a decrease in logic, reasoning, memory and concentration leading to a major decline in productivity. A study conducted by Diekelmann & Born (2010) found that participants performed better at a puzzle task after having had quality sleep compared to those who were disrupted in their slumber. They were also better at solving complex problems, leading researchers to conclude that sleeping earlier greatly increases productivity. Productivity has always been a crucial element for university students, because their learning outcomes and grades are largely determined by their productivity. Therefore, students should not underestimate the importance of sleeping early.

Physical health  

In terms of physical health, sleeping early promotes weight loss, subsequently reducing the risk of obesity and heart disease. Plus - who doesn’t want to lose weight? Several studies have examined the relation between sleep and weight and have shown that individuals who sleep later are 1.5 times more likely to be obese than those who go to bed early. (Olds, Maher & Matricciani, 2011) This is because our bodies crave more junk food in the later hours due to a hormone called leptin which is secreted to alter food intake and regulate energy expenditure. It has also been noted that there is a positive correlation between bad sleep quality and severe physiological diseases. The evidence collected in a large-scale study suggests that shortened or disrupted sleep is a predictor of many critical illnesses such as certain types of cancer (Lockley & Foster, 2012).

Mental health 

Ever find yourself getting annoyed by your coworkers? Irritated by your friends and family? Sleeping early and getting good quality sleep increases mood and leads to a more positive state of mind. A study by Nota & Coles (2014) investigated the association between RNT (repeated negative thinking) and sleep duration. Results demonstrated that individuals who sleep late and experience disrupted sleep are more likely to have negative and pessimistic thoughts. Authors also commented that creating a healthy sleep schedule and getting enough rest leads to better emotion regulation. Now you’ll be able to avoid those pesky arguments with your loved ones!

Our project also has educational significance for our audience. We taught our audience one of the most effective self-regulatory strategies: implementation intention (which will be mentioned later), that could benefit them for the rest of their life. Although in our project, implementation intention was only used to establish good sleep habits, this self-regulatory strategy can nevertheless be applied to achieve countless other goals by creating habits. Guiding them how to use implementation intention to form good sleep habits can familiarize them with this strategy and how it can be used for various other purposes. Therefore, our project can serve as a good starting point for our audience to understand and grasp the core of this important self-regulatory strategy.    

Our Intervention

We decided to help university students with bedtime procrastination, to become good sleepers and develop good sleeping habits. A good sleep routine consists of two elements: first going to bed early and second, getting enough sleep. The key is to figure out a sleep schedule that people can stick with every single night — even on weekends. Staying up late on the weekends can make it difficult to get back on track during the week. Therefore, if this schedule is to be kept in the long run (hopefully, for the rest of one’s life), it should be something that is simple and automatic, requiring no conscious effort. One way is to set implementation intentions, as previously mentioned. This is because, by doing so, actions are gradually integrated into a routine, eventually making the task automatic and turning the action into a habit.

We created two posters. The first one was to catch people’s attention and introduce the aim of our project. This was posted on our individual social medias, as well as handed out to our friends and flatmates. The second poster contained the specific instructions to be followed in order to establish a good sleep routine. The instruction poster was not posted on social media and was only given to students who showed interest in participating in our project.

In our first poster, we illustrate the effectiveness of our methods, and provided our email address for those who are interested to contact us.

 

In our instruction poster, we gave our audience step-by-step instructions to teach them how to set an implementation intention plan to form a sleep habit.

 

Implementation Intention

People generally have positive intentions, but can often fail to act on them (Orbell, 1998). Implementation intention is often used to avoid this situation. This is a self-regulatory strategy used to achieve goals in which people need to specify a behaviour that they will perform and a situational context (Gollwitzer, 2006). This strategy is usually presented in the form of an ‘if-then’ plan. For example: “if situation Y is encountered, then I will initiate goal-directed behaviour X”. While goal intentions are more vague and abstract, implementation intentions are much more concrete and procedural. The automatization of the behaviour in response to a situational cue can remove all hesitation and deliberation on the part of the decision maker when such a situation arises, and it can shield people from goal-threatening distractions.

We also  suggested to our participants to go to bed between 8pm to 12pm because the National Sleep Foundation indicates that it is best to fall asleep sometime within this time frame (Kristeen, 2019). We also offered some general tips to make it easier for our audience to form good sleep habits (see Fig. instruction poster).

In our project, for example, a participant wanted to form a good habit of sleeping from 11pm to 7am everyday. Through learning from our instruction poster, the participant learned to set ‘if-then’ plans as follows:

‘If it is 11pm, then I will put my phone into the drawer and be in bed.’

‘If the alarm goes off in the morning (at 7am), then I will go to my bathroom and wash my face’.

In the end, this participant would go to bed as soon as he sees that the time is 11 o’clock while ignoring all distractions and temptations.

How our intervention was tailored for our audience

Our project specifically targeted students as they are one of the most sleep deprived age groups due to stress from school, technology and poor time management. The Internet is a useful tool to spread information, especially targeting young adults. Young adults trust online information and consider the Internet as a valid source of health advice (Beck, 2014). Since they have the tendency to seek health information on social media (Zheng, 2014), we put our posters on various social media namely Instagram, Wechat, Whatsapp and Facebook to reach the maximum number of individuals possible. Due to the busy lifestyle, students may not always pay close attention to messages posted online, and may exhibit information skimming behaviour (Khoo, 2014).Therefore, we designed a poster that is used specifically for attracting our students' attention. In addition, we handed out the poster to our friends and flatmates as they are easily accessible and were more willing to participate in our project. We each handed a poster to a minimum of 10 friends and flatmates. The poster would have been seen by approximately 300-400 people on the Internet judging by the number of views it received, the amount of times it was shared, and the number of followers each of us have. In the end, we managed to get 15 individuals to participate in the project to date.

Persuasion techniques 

Audience’s attention

The first step to effective persuasion is to grab attention. Creating curiosity can help us to do that. People become curious when there is a gap between what they want to know and what they currently know. People would give their attention when others have information they are lacking (Schmitt, 2008; Gottlieb et al., 2013). Our subtitle ‘things a good sleeper will never tell you’ could induce curiosity in our audience, and thus getting our audience interested in what we have to tell.

Our poster could be one of the dozens of things they see in a day, therefore people could easily lose interest. In order to keep attention, instead of crowding all the information onto a single page, we put the instructions section onto another poster. By doing this, our audience’s attention is more likely going to stay focused on the first poster and therefore, would be more willing to carefully learn our methods later.

Commitment

Our implementation intention helps people form an action plan which then turns into a commitment. Since breaking a commitment would cause discomfort (Cialdini, 1984), our audience would be more likely to follow their plans than breaking them. In addition, by making a commitment publicly known, one is more likely to stick with the commitment and plan (Cialdini, 1998). For example, it was found that people who made a public commitment of recycling did more recycling than those who did not make the commitment (Burn, 1986). Inspired by these studies, we encouraged our participants to join our group chat on Whatsapp where our participants shared their own experience on forming a good sleeping habit. 

Yale Approach

Yale's approach suggests that people are more likely to believe information from a reliable source than a less credible source (Aronson, 2019). For example, Hovland and Weiss (1951) found that people are more likely to be persuaded by a prestigious journal than by an ordinary one. We made it clear that the efficacy of our behaviour change strategies were proven by a large number of studies conducted by experts. We also presented to our audience the quote of Thomas Hills, a Psychology professor of University of Warwick, “It (implementation intention) is one of the most important strategies that should be learned about behaviour change”. This is useful because a professor from a prestigious university is recognised as an authority figure, thus having effect on people’s judgement (Matthew, 2009). In addition, people are more willing to accept and be persuaded by those who are similar to them (Baskett, 1973). Students are more likely to relate to our posters because we all share the same identity as university students. 

Pressure inducing strategies and Effort heuristic

We market our behaviour change strategies as an limited-time offer, because we do not want to give the impression that our strategy is a free gift. Studies have shown that people tend to discount the value of something if it was given to them for free (Park, 2019; Priya, 2004). By presenting our behaviour change strategies in this way, we attempted to prevent people from discounting their value. What is more, limited offers can also induce pressure thus increasing people’s tendency to take action (Wearn, 2018). In addition, the poster advertised that only fifty people can get access to our methods. Limiting the number of offers could make people feel like they are competing with others and give them the impression that they are missing out if they hesitate. These pressure inducing strategies aimed to make people more likely to reach back to us proactively (i.e. emailing us to get access to our strategies). According to the theory of effort heuristic, people tend to allocate a higher value to things that they made more effort for, than those obtained with less effort (Kruger, 2004). Therefore, those who reached back to us through email —— which is seen as an effort made on the part of our audience —— would be more likely to treat our strategies seriously and follow our instructions.

How behaviour changes can be measured 

In a meta-analysis examining the benefits of monitoring goal progress, researchers found that people who engage in progress monitoring are more likely to stick to their plans (Harkin, 2016). This motivates us to encourage our audience to monitor themselves. Doing so has double significance, first, it gives us a chance to measure the extent of effectiveness of our intervention; second, it allows our audience to be consistent in maintaining good sleeping habits.

A sleep diary is a very popular tool used in research to measure sleep behaviour (Monk, 1994). In order to measure the sleep behaviour of our participants. We also used an extremely simplified version of sleep diary (Carney et al., 2012). The diary was designed to gather information about our participants’ sleep. Since our intervention is centred around bedtime procrastination, we focused on the two following aspects of our participants’ sleep:

1. What time do they go to bed without procrastinating (e.g. watching videos)? 

2. What time do they get out of the bed in the morning?

We suggest to our audience they can record their sleep in three ways,  record it in a notebook, record it on a phone or record it on Google Calendar. Google Calendar is very straightforward and one can easily see the trend of their sleep behaviour. We leave the question of which one to choose to our audience themselves as it is a matter of personal preference.

Future improvements

In addition to spreading information via social media, we can take more offline actions such as setting up posters in front of the library and other places where many students would pass by to attract more attention. A study identified that face-to-face communication can facilitate teaching, learning, motivation and persuasion (Kumar, L., 2013).  Therefore, we should interact more with students face-to-face in the future. Interactive video learning can produce higher learning effectiveness satisfaction than traditional ways of teaching (Zhang, D. et al., 2006). Thus, we should also attempt to improve our teaching quality and efficiency by creating a video or animation.

That being said: Snooze, don't Lose! 

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