Understanding Your Sleep: The Science of Rest, Rhythm, and Recovery

This course tells a single, unfolding story: your body runs on a clock, that clock shapes the architecture of every night, and a handful of powerful levers — light, caffeine, movement, stimulation, and strategic rest — can shift, strengthen, or sabotage your sleep. Rather than presenting a grab-bag of 'sleep tips,' the course builds from biology outward. Students first understand the deep mechanisms (circadian rhythm and sleep-stage architecture), then learn how specific environmental inputs interact with those mechanisms, and finally apply that integrated knowledge to real-world decisions about naps, shift work, screen use, and daily routines. Every chapter revisits and deepens earlier concepts so that by course's end, students don't just know isolated facts — they hold a coherent, working model of how sleep works in their own bodies. Pedagogically, the course is grounded in five evidence-based learning principles. Spacing ensures that core ideas like the two-process model, adenosine pressure, and core body temperature reappear across multiple chapters with increasing complexity and application. Interleaving means that a discussion of caffeine also revisits circadian phase, and a chapter on napping requires students to synthesise sleep architecture, adenosine, and circadian timing simultaneously. Retrieval practice is embedded through prediction prompts ('Before you read on, estimate when your caffeine from lunch will reach half-strength'), self-assessment tools, and chapter-opening recall exercises that pull from earlier material. Concrete examples — from shift-working nurses to jet-lagged athletes to the Dunster et al. Seattle school start-time study — anchor every abstract mechanism in a lived reality students can recognise. Dual coding is achieved through interactive widgets that let students manipulate variables and see outcomes visually, from sleep hypnograms to caffeine decay curves to personalised light-exposure timelines. A guiding ethic runs through the course: scientific honesty. Where popular sleep advice oversimplifies the evidence — Matthew Walker's claims about cancer risk, the exaggerated vilification of blue light, or rigid '8-hour' mandates — the course says so clearly, citing the actual research. Normal sleep variation is respected, not pathologised. The goal is not to make students anxious about sleep but to give them genuine understanding and practical agency over one of the most important behaviours in their lives.

7 Chapters · 60 Sources

Understanding Your Sleep: The Science of Rest, Rhythm, and Recovery

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