Psych In Your Life

My life and my psychological experiences

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Sleepwalking Stories

My parents have told me many stories of when I have taken trips around the house completely asleep snoring away. The following are just some of my favourites.

The one that I have always found the creepiest but also the coolest (second to the Batman one of course) is something that only happened when I was 5-10 years old. My mom recalls many a night when she would wake up because she felt as though she was being watched. She was and it was my sleepy self staring at her from the foot of her bed. She said that I would stand there and stare at them, eyes wide open and staring into their souls. She has even went to the extent of saying it was like the girl from The Ring was standing at the end of her bed.

My parents had to keep a baby gate on the stairs until I was almost 10 years old because even though I could see souls in my sleep I just couldn’t master the stairs. It started when they found me crying at the bottom of the stairs one night and I had no clue how I had gotten there. The reality was that I had walked in my sleep to the top of the stairs and then proceed to launch myself off the top step. I guess the possible concussion woke me up. That was the day that my parents put the baby gate up and it proceeded to be there for another five years.

I am very surprised that I never learned how to climb over it, even though in the future I learned how to unlock a door and transform into Batman while sleepwalking. Oh well I guess there are just somethings we will never know and we just have to tolerate that uncertainty.  

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Natural Sleepwalking Prevention

         I have always dealt with sleepwalking the same way, I just have ignored it and hoped it haven’t done anything too stupid. After looking into it there apparently many different ways that are suggested as treatments to help to reduce the likelihood of sleepwalking in adults. I found a very helpful info graph that explains the different ways.

One of the things that I have done in the past and still continue to do is to “Sip sleep promoting tea”. I find that it does help to keep me asleep through out the night. Whether or not I sleep walk is something I couldn’t tell you but I have noticed a decrease in times that I wake up in the kitchen not knowing how I got there.

Rathus , S. A., Maheu, S. J., & Veenvliet, S. G. (2017). PSYCH Third Canadian Edition. Toronto: Lenore Taylor-Atkins.

Taylor, M. (2015, August 17). Early Bird . Retrieved from Amerisleep: https://www.amerisleep.com/blog/preventing-sleepwalking/

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Gender Roles and The Impact on Behaviors

Growing up in a culture where there have always historically been pretty strict gender roles its hard to stray away from that. My parents and grandparents have contributed over the years to the noticeable difference in the roles of men and women in my life. The men have always been given the dirty work like farm chores and fixing cars while the women have always been tasked with making dinner and cleaning the humble abode. It has definitely shaped my behaviours and the way that I view the different jobs in my household and just in general, at least until I went to school in town.

         When I was in elementary school I was surrounded by people of the same culture as me, so it was easy to just stay in line with those behaviours. It was easy to just sit back and be passive to the gender roles that were being placed on us. This isn’t to say that it was against the rules to break these gender roles but it wasn’t very common for any of us to do that. I kind of used it as an excuse when I was younger around home if I didn’t want to go out and do chores I was never asked so I never had to go. Like I said it wasn’t that I couldn’t if I wanted to I just was never asked because I had a brother.

         This all took a turn as soon as I started to go to school in town. I began to be exposed to many different cultures and different gender roles that I began to really question the ones that I grew up with. I seen people who’s mom’s worked out and their dad’s stayed at home and got them ready for their day. The infusion of other gender roles into my life helped me to form my behaviours into what they are today. That is the best example in my life that I can see a change in culture and views on gender changing my behaviours and mental processes.

         I whole heartedly believe that looking at the behaviours and mental processes through the lens of socio-cultural perspective is the best way to understand the human race. We center our lives around these things so it would only make sense for it to be the source of some of the core elements of our lives.

Rathus , S. A., Maheu, S. J., & Veenvliet, S. G. (2017). PSYCH Third Canadian Edition. Toronto: Lenore Taylor-Atkins.

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REM Sleep and Dreaming

Like I said I wanted to track my sleep cycles and see if there was any kind of pattern but, I also found out that being a college student I will never have a normal sleep schedule. So, what I have decided to do is see the difference between a night that I got only a few hours of sleep and when I had over 8.

The main difference that I can see is that I got a lot more REM sleep when I had more time to sleep. This does make sense because to enter REM sleep you have to be asleep for roughly 90 minutes and then have time to cycle back through to each stage. Another thing that correlates to the science behind sleep is the amount of time that I spent in the deep sleep stage. It is said that the first time that you enter the fourth stage or deep sleep it should be the longest of the night, which mine is. Every time after that it got shorter and shorter.

         Like I have said before REM sleep is the stage of sleep that is most closely related to dreaming so I thought it would be interesting to look at the amount of dreams that I had that night. So, when I woke up the morning after I immediately grabbed a random piece of paper and wrote down what I could remember. Surprisingly or not so surprisingly I remembered quite a few. I remember having a dream about my roommate being a neo Nazi and being murdered by my best friend. Now to say where those dreams came from, I have no clue but, that is two more dreams than I could recall from the night that I only got 4 hours instead of 8. Is it because I had more REM sleep? Science suggests that that would be the cause but it also could have been the rum and coke I had before bed.  

Rathus , S. A., Maheu, S. J., & Veenvliet, S. G. (2017). PSYCH Third Canadian Edition. Toronto: Lenore Taylor-Atkins.

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Sleep Walking Adventures

Sleepwalking also called somnambulism is something that happens when the person is in the 3rd and 4th stages of sleep. What happens is pretty easy to deduce from the title, but it is when people get up and walk around while sleeping. This could even include performing complex tasks, complex enough for someone who is asleep. I have experienced sleepwalking since I was old enough to walk and I have been told many stories about what I have done during my sleepy adventures. One of the most iconic stories that I can remember is a collection of stories that my dad told me about.

My house has a porch that is on all but one side of it and where it ends on both ends is about 3-4 feet off the ground. The first day my dad told me that he found me just before I went out the front door. He slowly guided me back to my room where he said I then just went back to sleep. The second day is where things got interesting. Dad wasn’t as fortunate to catch me before I made it out the door this time. He did catch me but just as I was running off the end of the porch screaming “I am Batman!” He grabbed me by the waste and surprisingly I didn’t wake up but he guided me back and put me to bed. The next day my dad told me about what happened and that night he locked the doors before we all went to bed.

We all thought that locking the doors would stop me, but my unconscious held that information and knew to unlock the door so, I ended up on the porch again with my dad trailing behind me. He didn’t know what to do because for some reason I had the undeniable urge to just jump off the porch like Batman and for obvious reasons that just couldn’t happen. He finally decided to just wait until I had been asleep for a while and then locked the doors. This actually worked because that night he awoke to me struggling to open the door to try to fulfill my dreams of being the next Batman.

Rathus , S. A., Maheu, S. J., & Veenvliet, S. G. (2017). PSYCH Third Canadian Edition. Toronto: Lenore Taylor-Atkins.

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Fit-bit Sleep Tracker

I thought that since I have been learning about REM sleep and the other stages of sleep I would take advantage of the sleep tracker on my Fitbit. It shows me the stages of sleep ranging from REM sleep to deep sleep.

The tracker also shows me the amount of time spent awake during the night (red arrow). You can see that I wake up quite a few times but only briefly but, there are two times during the night that I woke up for more than a few minutes. The “light” stage of sleep on this tracker encompasses the first two stages of sleep. In the first two stages of sleep you are still partially aware of your surroundings and your breathing begins to even out. This is the stage that Theta waves, slow brain waves, start to happen. The “deep” stage of sleep on the tracker is the third and fourth stage of sleep. This is when you become completely oblivious to the world around you and there is little muscle tension. In this stage Delta waves; strong and slow brain waves, start happening.

The Fitbit tracker also lets me get a bit more in depth look into my sleep by giving me “exact” times of how long I spent in each stage.

There is also a function that lets me look at what the recommended levels are for women of my age. As you can see in the photo above I met each of the targets for each of the levels except for the deep sleep category. This kind of surprised me because I always thought that I was a deep sleeper and since I have started to track these cycles the deep sleep is always the one that I am the farthest from the target with. 

Rathus , S. A., Maheu, S. J., & Veenvliet, S. G. (2017). PSYCH Third Canadian Edition. Toronto: Lenore Taylor-Atkins.

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Economic Status Affecting Behavior

         Growing up I knew that my family wasn’t rolling in money, but we weren’t living month to month either. My dad has been farming his whole life and that is just what my family has done for years upon years. My mother was working full time before I was born but as soon as I was born and my brother was born a little over a year later she stopped working. She didn’t enter back into the workforce until I was 8 years old. I was always taught the value of money when I was younger. I think that the culture that I grew up in definitely instilled it in me that money doesn’t come easy and you work hard for what you have. I don’t really know what you would call that culture maybe just an agricultural culture? 😉 See what I did there? But seriously I think that growing up in a rural area and culture effected my thought process and behaviours around working and my work ethic too. I don’t mean to brag but I have been told that I have a very strong work ethic and I actually do believe it myself. I think that I have always associated working hard with success and success with living how you want to. Having a good work ethic and working hard is also something that my family and the culture that I grew up in has linked to being well off and moving up that economic ladder. If you work hard then you can play hard.

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Sociology in Psychology ?

         The public school outside of town was a much more laid-back school. There weren’t very many “rules” that were set in stone. If you did something that was against those rules you could almost always talk yourself out of it or at least get a lesser punishment. When it came to academic things like due dates and deadlines they weren’t very well enforced either. I think that this came from the fact that we all grew up in a very rural area and in families that didn’t always put education above all else. Seeing as a lot of the parents of people that I went to public school had no more than their grade 12 diploma a lot of the kids of those parents were never very pressured into going on afterwards. That was a least the reality in my house.Have you ever thought to yourself “Well maybe they only did that because that is how they grew up?” or “That’s just something that is common in that culture.” If so, then you are trying to understand how a person works based on their sociocultural perspective. A sociocultural perspective is a view on mental processing and behaviour that centers around the impacts of someone’s ethnicity, gender, culture and their socio-economic status. A socio-economic status is where someone is on a social or economic ladder. So, when trying to understand someone’s behaviours they may look at where they are in their social ladder or their financial ladder, if they have a lot of social supports or if they are well off in the money department. Some where that I have seen the impacts of socio-economic status and the other factors that contribute to the sociocultural perspective in the people of my life is within my education system.

         I grew up in pretty small town rural Ontario. I lived about 15 minutes from the nearest town. Until I was in around grade 5 or 6 I had never really gone into that town for more than 10 minutes. I went to a public school about 5 minutes from my house and only had to move schools when they eventually closed it. The way that things were done at the public school I went to outside of town were vastly different to that of the school I had to attend when I had to go into town.

         The public school outside of town was a much more laid-back school. There weren’t very many “rules” that were set in stone. If you did something that was against those rules you could almost always talk yourself out of it or at least get a lesser punishment. When it came to academic things like due dates and deadlines they weren’t very well enforced either. I think that this came from the fact that we all grew up in a very rural area and in families that didn’t always put education above all else. Seeing as a lot of the parents of people that I went to public school had no more than their grade 12 diploma a lot of the kids of those parents were never very pressured into going on afterwards. That was a least the reality in my house. I think that living in a culture that valued the vitality of the farm and the family it made it easier for everyone to default to behaviours that preserved those values, even if they were the values that we personally held.  

Rathus , S. A., Maheu, S. J., & Veenvliet, S. G. (2017). PSYCH Third Canadian Edition. Toronto: Lenore Taylor-Atkins.

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REM Sleep

Dreams are something that all of us have probably experienced in our lives. I have always found it kind of weird the way that dreaming works. How sometimes I feel like I am awake and actually doing what is in my dreams but in reality, I am sleeping. After starting this psychology course, I have come to learn many things including why I feel like I am awake when I am dreaming. I always knew that there were stages of sleep and I thought I gained even more knowledge when I got my Fitbit (I read the little write up on the sleep part of the app). Now that I have taken a class and been able to ask questions and discuss the topic I feel a little more informed about my sleep. To address the feeling of your dreams being real you have to look at REM sleep. Now this is a term that I knew about before any of this, but I never really knew what it was or what it meant until now.

So, REM sleep stands for Rapid Eye Movement sleep or it can be called paradoxical sleep. The reason that it can be called paradoxical is when it is happening our brain acts like it is awake. The brain waves that are measured on a test called an EEG (electroencephalogram) are very similar to what can be seen when you are awake. REM sleep is the stage of the sleep cycle that is the most connected with dreaming; people reported dreaming 80 percent of the time when they were woken from REM sleep compared to 20 percent when they are woken from other stages.

Rathus , S. A., Maheu, S. J., & Veenvliet, S. G. (2017). PSYCH Third Canadian Edition. Toronto: Lenore Taylor-Atkins.