How to GET MORE SLEEP in Nursing School

Do you feel like a walking zombie in nursing school? Like you haven't slept in an entire month and you are just trying to stay alive? In this video, I'm going to walk you through my top tips to help you get more sleep in nursing school so that you can finally start to feel like yourself again. Now hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell and let's dive in. I recently talked about this during an Instagram live and it was so such an important topic I wanted to cover it here. In this video, I'm going to share my top tips to help you get more sleep in nursing school. Because if you're like me, if you don't get sleep, everything else seems to spiral out of control. If I showed up to lecture class exhausted, I couldn't focus and forget studying. When I don't get at least eight hours of sleep a night, I am basically useless. I knew this about myself going into nursing school, so I committed from the beginning to get at least eight hours of sleep per day. That's the only way that I could function. So here's my top tips to help you make that happen in your own life. Tip number one don't work night shift if you can help it, and especially don't work night shift before you go to clinical or lecture class. The thing about night shift is that it's super difficult. It's the only opposite of what your class schedule will be, so you'll need to stay awake during the day for class and then you'll need to stay awake during some nights to work. This will seriously throw off your rhythm and cause your sleep schedule to be chaotic, which is not helpful when you're trying to get a good night's sleep during the week. So if you currently work night shift, ask your boss to switch to days and do your best to make sure that that can happen. Sure, they might say no, and if that happens, you'll need to decide if you or should cut your hours down or how to rearrange your schedule so you can get more sleep. This may mean taking a few naps throughout the day. Whatever you need to do to get through to get more sleep, do it now. Tip number two is to stop drinking caffeine at least eight hours before bed. And if you had a lot of caffeine, you should probably even extend that time out to maybe 10 hours. So if you had two or three cups of coffee in the morning, that's a lot of caffeine. So make sure that you're giving yourself plenty of time to Wind down before bed. I found this to be so true. For me, the more coffee I would drink in the morning, the longer it would take for all of that to get out of my system. Sometimes I would still be feeling a 9am coffee at 6pm at night. So make sure that you're giving yourself enough time to come off that caffeine rush. Let your body relax before bed. You don't want to lay in bed with your heart racing and unable to sleep when you have class the next day. Set yourself up for success and stop drinking caffeine at least eight hours before bed. Then the more sensitive you are to caffeine, or the more caffeine that you have during the day, the longer it might take to leave your system. So just keep that in mind. Now, tip number three is one of the most important things I can teach you and it is super powerful if you actually follow through and do it. But before we get there, I want to give a shout out to Bristol for our YouTube comment of the week, which says you are so helpful. Every day I watch at least two of your videos and write all of the information that you give me. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much Bristol. I love, love, love creating these videos for you and I'm so glad that you found them helpful. Good luck in nursing school, my friend. You are going to rock it. Now let's dive into tip number three. Like I said, this is seriously the most important things I could ever teach you and I hope you do it because it will change the game for you. Not just with your ability to sleep, but getting your time back and your life back altogether. And that is to plan your time. When was the last time you actually wrote down your schedule and exactly what you were going to do in a day? Maybe you're already one step ahead and you typically do write that down, but here's the next level. When was the last time you wrote down exactly when you should do those things? Just about never, right? I thought so, friend. This is a super powerful exercise for two main reasons. When you write down exactly what you're going to do in a day and when you're going to do it. You already know you'll have time to get everything done since you wrote it all down and planned for it. But it also frees up so much mental space since you're not going to be wondering what you need to do next. No more wandering around your house wondering what you should be doing. No more looking at your to do list and feeling overwhelmed by all the stuff you need to get done. No, that stops now. Take your to do list and schedule every single one of those items into your planner. And if you don't have a planner, go to Target real quick, find a fancy one and use it. If you're a nursing SOS member, I'll do you one even better. Log into your dashboard, click on bonuses and you'll find a printable nursing school planner already there for you. Print it off and use it. Seriously, plan out exactly what you're going to do and when you are going to do it. Now, you might be wondering what this has to do with sleep because it would be crazy to plan your sleep, right? I don't agree with that. I want you to write down exactly what time you're going to go to bed and exactly what time you're going to wake up. And I want you to stick to it when you do this and write all of your to do items. And when you're going to sleep, eat, shower and pick the kids up from school. Man, you are going to free up so much of your time and energy since you won't be worrying if you have time for things or when you're going to fit it all in. It's already done and and planned. Now it's just time to make it happen. Which leads us to step number four. Keep your bedtime and wake time the same each day as possible. Now this goes along with planning your time. Remember, you're in control of your schedule. No one else is. So you get to decide when you're going to go to bed and when you're going to wake up. And now that you've got that written on your schedule, all you need to do is make it happen. Keep your promise to yourself and go to bed. When you said you were going to go to bed. It's a super simple concept, but much more difficult to actually do. So I hope you'll practice this over and over and over again until you're able to stick with it. You will fail at it and fall on your face multiple times. That's totally normal. I did the same thing. But if you stick with it and keep going and keep planning out your schedule and doing what you said you were going to do, you'll get better and better at it and will feel so much more in control of your life and you will definitely feel more rested and ready to conquer nursing school. If you want a step by step guide for how to study in nursing school and save even more time, be sure to download the free nursing school study checklist that we have for you that walks you through how I studied to get straight A's in nursing school while also taking every single Saturday off and sleeping eight hours per night. Seriously friend, it's life changing. And in the next video, I'm gonna walk you through my step by step process for studying pharmacology in nursing school and the number one mistake nursing students make that is wasting hours of your study time. Don't miss that video. Now make sure to like, comment, subscribe and share this video with your friends. And click on one of these videos right over here so you can keep rocking nursing school and go become the nurse that God created only you to be. I'll catch you in the next video, my friend. Take care. Bye bye.