Unit 2 Reflection

                  Health is the measure of the body's efficiency and overall well being. In order to be "healthy" there are certain pillars- nutrition, exercise, sleep, and social- that are necessary to achieve this. Going off of these pillars that are extremely important to maintaining a healthy lifestyle, most Saratoga High students, including myself, are often lacking in one or more pillar. As for myself, I struggle to receive enough sleep on a daily basis and often are stressed for a long duration of time. For the student body as a whole, many students are often not receiving enough sleep, are often stressed due to the major importance that is placed on grades, as well as the stress of the countless tests and quizzes. Teachers need to be more aware of how much pressure are on their students, coordinate when their tests and quizzes are so they don't overlap as often, and check in on the students more often to see how stressed or tired they are.
           The general themes that had great importance during this unit was what health is generally, what aspects of our daily lives impact how healthy we are, and going in depth with each of those aspects. If one of those "pillars" of health is being affected, it affects the entire health of the person, not just one single item in his or her life. Learning that often times the body is more affected by the pillars than I had thought, it creates a big change to what I believed was healthy. Having a poor diet could effect your digestion and bone growth; exercise can greatly benefit you by lowering the risk of chronic disease and improves mental and cognitive functions; sleep is extremely important to a individual because it rests the body, repairs and renews tissues and nerve cells, and organizes your long term memory; and finally, stress can be useful in some situations but if an individual is stressed for to long, it could be detrimental. One concept that I still am struggling to fully understand is how once you fall asleep, your body has an entire sensory shut down and can no longer be aware of its environment, yet our brains are still completely active especially during REM and can often have vivid dreams.
                    Moving onto the next unit, I will need to be able to go back and review all of my activities to make sure that I fully understand the concepts and be able to truly learn versus memorizing for the test. An realistic example of how a single pillar can truly affect an individual would be nurses. Nurses often are working long hours and rarely receive a sufficient amount of sleep, which increases their sleep debts throughout the work week. In the book, Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence Based Handbook for Nurses, written by Ann E. Rogers, conducted a study that showed that nurses who had received a sufficient amount of sleep made less errors than those who hadn't received enough sleep. This prolonged working hours without sleep, affects the nurses speed, accuracy, hand-eye coordination, and memory. These grand affects of the inability to fulfill a pillar, ultimately affects the nurses life as well as the lives that surround him or her. Being able to fulfill every aspect of the pillars of health is very important to the well-being of an individual, and as they are able to be more and more successful in each pillar, it will allow them to live a very healthy and happy life.