Women Living Well: Mind/Body Connection - 2002
Student Papers
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Jennifer Prince
Women in Wellnes

The attendance of courses like this should be imperative for the Bryn

Mawr community. All Bryn Mawr students should be required to take one

of the seminar courses, whether it be woman living well or even women in

sports and film.The seminars foster the type of discussion that students

often avoid. The topics that were covered in the women and wellness

seminar could not have been better selected. I looked forward to each

new topic. The most informative ofcourse was the session on Sleep

Deprivation.

Unfortunately I share the sentiment that talking about Sleep

Deprivation at Bryn Mawr is like preaching to the choir. Its become quite

a redundant topic. We talk about it indirectly or directly everyday. It often

seems like there is a competition among students of who has gotten the

least amount of sleep with the most amount of work done. Everyday it s

the same lines - how are you?, Tired - I got like four hours of sleep last

night! Yikes!What were you working on? Well I had my stat problem set to

finish which is already six pages and I have three problems left; I have my

soc' paper, my spanish essay and workbook excercises, calc mathematica

assignments, and a thirty minute presentation in bilogoy at nine in the morning.

If you are lucky the dialogue will end there. However all too often the girls

keep it going by challenging each other to see who actually has the most

work to do.
We know that we don's sleep here. But not many college students

are sleeping anywhere around the county. Maybe we're just at that age.

But the speaker got me thinking about my own progression or regression

since I had been attending Bryn Mawr. Freshman year I still had the drive

from highschool in my blood. I could start my work at ten o'clock be

done by three and wake up at eight to shower and go to my nine o'clock

class. However after just a couple months here I started to become a little

more stingy with my time. I started to set a bed time for myself. I knew

that If I wasn't in the bed by a certain time, then wherever I was, I would

be falling asleeep. Making a schedule made sleep more fulfilling. I started

to stick to my schedule and found that waking up and even falling asleep

became easier. And then came the hell weeks - aka Bryn Mawr weeks.

These are the weeks that professors have preselected as the time when

they give everyone all the work they've been storing in their offices for

the past years. That's when the schedule is lost for ever. The committment

goes out the window and is back to four hour nights and two hour naps

during the day.

It doesn't help that I have been awake for more than twenty four hours right now. I've never done this before. In highschool I took naps in

between. I would do work and then wake up in the early morning to finish

and then end the night with an hour more of sleep if I am lucky. But from

elven o'clock in the afternoon yesterday to seven thirty this morning I

typed on the Guild computers. I left to eat lunch, eat dinner and get more

books. I close my eyes for four minutes and I'm fine. I don't feel perfect. I

actually feel a littl wierd. I don't have an appetite, my eyes hurt, and my

head is slightly throbbing. These all point to the fact that my body is ready

to rest.

And I will oblige. I feel what the speaker was talking about. I can feel

that this is not healthy and that my body needs a vacation from the

computer screens. I am thankful for the women and wellness seminaras

The speakers over all have been eformative. This was definetly worth the
time. !


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