Unit 2 Reflection

Health is a measure of how well your body can function, as well as its overall wellbeing. I think that I am relatively health in terms of nutrition, social, and exercise, but I do not get enough sleep and I get stressed out when I have big assignments or tests, or when I just have too many things I need to finish soon. Compared to the students at SHS, I think that I am slightly more healthy because even though we all do not get enough sleep and are stressed out, I can bet that I eat healthier than most of them. Here is a nutrition analysis I did: http://alexandriatso17.blogspot.com/2015/09/nutrition-analysis-using-supertracker.html . The post's graphs show that on most days, I would be quite close to the targeted levels in most of the nutrient categories. What should be done to promote better health on campus is obviously to reduce homework and have some of the teachers put less pressure on the students; some teachers on campus are really ruthless and don't sympathize for all the things students must get done and instead strictly enforce due dates of numerous assignments. Also, the cafeteria sells so many unhealthy processed foods, so they should work on selling healthier foods, including more veggies especially. Some essential themes and understandings from this unit would be balance, variety, and moderate. It is really important to have a balance of nutrients in your diet, as well as a balance in your life between all five pillars of health; if one pillar falls short, the whole "temple" of health collapses eventually. You should also include a variety of foods in your diet, but of course never overconsume, especially overcarbsume. 

I learned a lot about the different hormones that are involved in maintaing the body's health, including leptin, insulin, glucagon, and cortisol, and how it is really easy to create an imbalance in the hormonal levels and start a cycle of deteriorating health. I still don't fully understand REM sleep as well as I would like to, but that's probably because I am really interested in this area and would like to know all the details about it. for example, if you have multiple REM cycles in one night, why do you only remember one dream? is there a certain mechanism in the brain that controls which one you remember, or is it just the last one you have before you wake up that you remember? If it is the latter, then what makes you forget all the other dreams, especially since your brain is just as active? Is the ability to remember your dreams compromised by the REM stage?

In the next unit, I will improve by starting to study for the tests earlier, as well as making sure I date all my notebook entries the day we do the assignment so that I am not trying to fill in dates the night before the notebook check. As for a real world application, one of the things I found really interesting was an iphone app that acts as an alarm clock, and analyzes your sleep patterns. This app helped me analyze my own sleep patterns every night, and through the graph it shows me every morning when I wake up, i can see how many cycles of REM sleep I had at what time during the night, and what times I fell asleep and woke up. I thought that this was pretty cool because it differed from night to night; some nights when I was more stressed out there were a lot of fluctuations in my graph; there was not as much rem sleep, and there were more periods in nrem stages. Even if I didn't consciously know I was stressed out, subconsciously I was, and my sleep patterns reflected this, which I found to be extremely interesting. Below are three pictures that represent the sleep, social, and exercise pillars of the 5 health pillars.