On Friday, April 8, DU will host the Sleep Revolution College Tour from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Driscoll Green, featuring a talk at 11 a.m. by Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.
The fair, held by Huffington and a team from the Huffington Post, will include various techniques and products to improve the sleep habits of students with an emphasis on how sleep affects health and academic performance. DU will be the first stop on the nationwide tour.
“The Huffington Post team reached out to us to see if we might be interested in hosting a Sleep Revolution event at DU. Arianna Huffington was scheduled to be in Denver as part of her book tour (for her newly-released book—” The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time”) and they wanted to provide us with an opportunity to be the first stop on their Sleep Revolution College Tour. We know that sleep concerns are a major issue for many DU students. As such, we were thrilled to be able to bring this conversation—and these resources—to the community,” said Sarah Belstock, director of health promotion at DU’s Health and Counseling Center.
According to a recent campus health survey, only 14 percent of DU students had gotten enough sleep to feel well-rested on the majority of days in the past week, 17 percent of DU students indicated that sleep difficulties negatively impacted their academic performance in the past year and nearly half of DU students indicated that daytime sleepiness had been a significant problem in the past week.
Belstock indicates that the quick pace of the quarter system and high involvement in extracurricular activities can result in the de-prioritization of sleep, which can cause a variety of health issues.
“The Sleep Revolution tour provides an exciting opportunity to bring this topic to the fore-front and to help students gain an understanding of the importance of sleep. We hope that many of our students will take advantage of this event and to consider the connections between sleep and success, while learning simple strategies for better sleep —and snagging some great free products,” said Belstock.
