I’m From

Being too early for 

Wanting to sleep all-day

Staying up too late 

New York where its always busy

Where stress is in our blood

While also wanting to go home

Staying up late again 

Our eyes on the screen 

Backs are laying down 

Waking up early 

Back to eating whatever

Running around doing nothing

Panicking about assignments 

Doing them early or late

Then back to sleeping

And back to panicking

I Remember 

Being happy I getting candy 

Walking along the lines 

Through each street

Saying the words “Trick or Treat”

Going around to different places each year

With or without a costume 

Watching old specials on TV

Now sleeping though most Halloween nights 

Or watching scary movies 

Enjoying every costume 

In the end, it’s just another sleeping day

Because It’s Okay To

To always be quiet 

Embrace shyness 

Taking away nothing 

Being bored all the time

Waiting for a long time

Wanting to go back home 

Doing whatever you want

Having different emotions and feelings

Waiting for the next day

As your cycle of life continues

Dear Person Dealing With Stress

I understand the pain you’re going through and your not the only one that feels that way. There are so many ways to cope with stress being that it is important to have some sort of relief, an example being to play games or even working out. Some tips that can help relieve stress would be to do some breathing techniques or changing your current lifestyle for a bit so that you don’t feel overwhelmed and not too stressed some examples being the time you sleep or even changing your lifestyle to fit everything you do. Stress can lead to a lot of pent up anger it is good to try to take out that anger by doing some activities but it’s never good to bottle it up and there are always people to talk to when dealing with so much stress. When you bottle up that stress it leads to emotions that you can’t control leading to something hurtful that was never meant for that specific person. Knowing that your not alone in this world that is stressing about everything can help you feel a bit less stress and understanding how to cope and live with it. By understanding your stress you can become a better person in the future and help others that have the same feel as you did before. We are human and there are times when stress takes over but we learned to embrace it and evolve from it changing us for the better. 

Anonymous Friend 

Rossi Cao

Professor Gina Ryder

Writing For Science 

11/3/19

Topic Stress and Mental Health

                                           Connection of Stress and Sleep in Students

With the lack of sleep students get, we can factor out that stress is a part of the reason why some students have a lack of sleep. Having that lack of sleep can decrease motivation in classes causing them to drop their grades. Its found that freshman college students are more prone to stress because of the transition from high school to college by the research of Ross, Shannon E, Neibling, Bradley C and Heckert, Teresa M. Being that all transition from one thing to another leads to stress that would lead to one of the factors of insomnia or lack of sleep. The connection of insomnia can be different for each person both male or female. Other research will show the effect of these stress levels on students and their grades and the statistics on how other types of stress habits can fall into the connect of sleep and stress. Having this information at hand, many of the students don’t know how to manage both their levels of stress and sleep. 

Both male and female groups have different sleep patterns that lead to them being stressed out. One study that had a study with 237 students from 18-24 years old showed that there was a gender difference between female and male sleep patterns. Female students would have a poor quality of sleep more males because they would wake up earlier and more negative thoughts. There are many other differences between males and females is that males have a stronger sleep quality and rise time, time a bed and sleep were more efficient than females, meaning that they’re not as stressed out. It still leads to the idea that the lack of sleep can cause problems for both genders. Even with this difference, it all depends on what day it is or what they were currently doing before they sleep. Each grade is different being that freshmen students have less sleep time than other students on weekdays and that seniors have longer sleep latency on weekends. (Sleep patterns in college students: Gender and grade differences). 

Having that lack of sleep can lead to the potential effect of their grades dropping because of the lack of concentration in class. From the authors Mickey T. Trockel MS, Micheal D. Barnes Ph.D. & Dennis L. Egget Ph.D., where they sampled 200 students that live on campus where they learned that specific wake up times can have different effects on your grades. Being that particularly wake up time have been associated with higher grade point average while later wake-up time can lead to a lower great point average those being student who has volunteered or working. (Pages 125-131) The authors have pointed out different variables that can be associated with these late wake-up times being “exercise, eating, and sleep habits; mood states; perceived stress; time management; social support; spiritual or religious habits” (Health-Related Variables and Academic Performance Among First-Year College Students: Implications for Sleep and Other Behaviors) Understandably these activities can impact stress being that students don’t have time to study is that they stay up late causing them to have even more lack of sleep.

One of the top common sources of stress according to the research of Ross, Shannon E, Neibling, Bradley C and Heckert, Teresa M. showing the ratio of 20 males and 80 females that 89% had change of sleeping habits being at the top followed vacation/break 82%, 74% being change in eating habits and 73% being responsible and class workloads. In other words from these researchers, the change in these habits have a greater effect on students in college, with sleep habits being at the top it creates this domino effect that goes on into the other common sources of stress examples being workloads and responsibilities. These statistics can go into different levels of factors but sleep is one of the main reasons for these increases in stress levels. (Sources of stress among college students) 

Looking over all this research about stress and its connection to the lack of sleep it’s a common thing for students to have. Through all this information and the results of these experiments is that people need to be informed about time management. With the lack of sleep, these students have, and other factors like classes and work it would create this mental effect where stress can pile up and create an endless cycle when sleep and stress go back and forth on each other. There have been more experiments in the connections of sleep and stress being done on rats to compare it to humans in a real-life experiment where they would be sleep deprived for 72 hours showing that it has dropped memory levels. If this works on animals it would on humans staying up late to study without any sleep can make them lose focus more than remembering what to study for the next test. (Role of hippocampal oxidative stress in memory deficits induced by sleep deprivation in mice) 

There are many ways that college students combat stress by changing their sleeping habits, eating better or even exercising. Having said that there are still many that are less informed about how to manage their time. From this research we can conclude that there are many transactions from changing schools, a new job, doing something new can lead to the deprivation of sleep that would evolve into higher amounts of stress in these college students. To manage these levels of stress, they need to understand the source of it and take control and learn when they do make time by creating a schedule or doing it before the time that its due and learn of when and where they should do it. With this research in hand, it can create a difference in informing college students of how they can create a better time for themselves so they can decrease their stress levels, by doing so they can have more free time to do what they want instead of doing things last minute. 

                                                                References 

Shannon E., Ross, et al. “Sources of Stress among College Students.” College Student Journal, Project Innovation, 1 June 1999, www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-62839434/sources-of-stress-among-college-students.

Silva, R.H, et al., “Role of Hippocampal Oxidative Stress in Memory Deficits Induced by Sleep Deprivation in Mice.” Neuropharmacology, Pergamon, 6 Feb. 2004, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028390803004684.

Trockel, Mickey T., et al. “Health-Related Variables and Academic Performance Among First-Year College Students: Implications for Sleep and Other Behaviors.” Taylor & Francis, 24 Mar. 2010, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07448480009596294.

Tsai, Ling-Ling, and Sheng-Ping Li. “Sleep Patterns in College Students: Gender and Grade Differences.” Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Elsevier, 4 Mar. 2004, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022399903005075.

Rossi Cao

Gina Ryder

Writing For Science

10/2/19           

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-video-games-inspire-violent-behavior/

                                   Connections of Violence and Video games 

Violence and video games, may or may not correlate with one another and from the article called “Are Video Games Inspire Violent Behavior” by Greg Topp, we will analyze the rhetoric and how Greg conveys his point of view of the situation. With the increased amount of violent crimes that are happening right now, many people are pointing the blame on violent video games, even if it’s true or false. Greg Topp will talk about the past and present of how different forms of entertainment has been leading to an increase of violence in the world, and by backing up that information by using different types of research throughout the article. How does the author convey that violence inspired by video games, part of it or none at all? By using ethos and logos to get the audience of worried parents and caretaker’s attention into how the culture of violence has started with the past and how it has grown to influence adults and children throughout the years. 

The author’s perspective is that violent behavior does not only arise from video games, his tone though the article was calm and sarcastic. Within the brief that Greg provides, the beginning talks about the genre of the article and want it to be a summary of what’s to come when reading and give the audience time to think about what their reading looking over that brief. From that, we can see that stance and feelings towards this article is that Greg wants to let people know the difference between what is reality and fiction. By starting with something that is real to everyone knows about to get the reader in and then moving from that to show how we have past action from other types of entertainment such as films, books, and research that lead to different types of violent behaviors.

In this article, Greg wants to reassure parents that playing video games does not lead to violent behavior among children and adolescents. By applying etho’s, the author mentions in the beginning how Sandy Hook shooter would go to an arcade for 10 hours to play dance dance revolution along with other video games such as Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Although, the Sandy Hook Shooter for the majority of his time playing non-violent, through his horrific actions of committing such a heinous crime shows his violent tendencies. It’s as if he wanted the video games to become a reality so he’s able to be part of that experience. Therefore, conveying the idea that individuals need to differentiate reality from fantasy. People become obsessed with this virtual world that is created by video games and slowly becoming withdrawn from society to only devote your attention to a fictional story.

Greg uses logos to show the research of how video games would affect people that normally play and those that don’t play at all. In this section of the article “Deciphering the Data” Greg goes into detail about a study “ In 2012, Andr Melzer of the University of Luxembourg, along with Mario Gollwitzer of Philipps University Marburg in Germany” that show the good aspects and bad aspects of games. The study asked inexperience and experience people to play grand theft auto. It showed that more experienced players would go with driving while the other group picked up stuff. The conclusion that the researchers got was that “although drawing conclusions about small population subgroups—such as kids at risk of violence—from broad population trends can be dicey, it is still worth noting that as violent video games proliferated in recent years, the number of violent youthful offenders fell—by more than half between 1994 and 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. This trend is not what you would expect if these games had the power to make good boys go bad.” Universities have discovered that the increase in violent video games is linked to a decrease in violent crimes because of that they concluded that violent people are more into these games leaving them with less time to do crimes. What Greg wanted to provide using this research is that not everyone becomes violent when playing these certain types of games. 

The idea that Greg is trying to bring awareness to many people thinking that any or all violent video games cause mass shootings, violent outbursts or destruction. An example of this is in the section “Tradition of Worry” Greg talks about a toy experiment by a man named Bandura with preschoolers, where the adult would show aggression or ignore the doll name “bobo”. It would be a sort of monkey see monkey do experiments where the preschoolers would follow that aggression over the doll because they see it being abused. Bandura did this experiment twice to see if the same effects with film and cartoons show the mistreatment of bobo instead of an adult. “The conclusions seemed clear: watching unchecked aggression in real life, on film or in cartoons makes us more aggressive because it provides us with “social scripts” to guide our behavior. Bandura’s conclusions opened a floodgate “media effects” research that continues today.” What Greg wanted to let the audience know from this experiment is that it’s not just video games that influence these violent behaviors and outbursts.

In conclusion what Greg’s intake on the situation about violence and video games is that there is more to it. By using rhetoric techniques like ethos and logos to back up that information up with different types of research that would help ease the tension of the audience. With everything that is currently happening in our society, It is our culture to worry about these increases in violent crimes, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about banning all video games in general when there are more factors that lead to violent behaviors and attitudes. As Greg ends the article saying that we need to distinguish fantasy from reality.

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