Learn about sleep health equity

IHSI Diversity Committee Monthly Resources

Each month, the IHSI Diversity Committee shares resources and learning opportunities with the rest of the IHSI staff. Curating and sharing these resources allow us to educate ourselves on various topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. As an institute devoted to promoting all forms of health, we want to share these resources more broadly with our campus and community stakeholders. We hope that you will find them as useful as we have.

Sleep health equity: How we spend (ideally) a third of our lives!

This month, Maxwell Wallace, IHSI Visiting Research Project Coordinator, shares resources to help us better understand sleep, its impact on health, and the associated disparities around sleep linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status.

Let's talk about sleep! Sleep is a universal experience, the thing we do (or at least try to) every single night. I want to give a huge shout-out to Anna Horn, a research assistant on one of my projects, who  happened to have an internship where the capstone was all about sleep inequality! She provided many of the provided many of the articles below.

Something I learned from these articles are the terms used for describing persistent barriers to quality sleep; just like people experience food insecurity and food deserts, there are also those facing sleep insecurity and sleep deserts. If you have 10 minutes, please read "What Should a Public Health Approach to Sleep Look Like?" to learn more.

This is important, as sleep quality has so much impact on our health. Poor sleep isn't just about feeling tired. It's linked to increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, depression, and even earlier mortality. It affects cognitive performance, mood, and safety (drowsy driving, workplace errors). There is considerable evidence that many of these comorbidities are linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status, so if you have 15 minutes, read one of these articles: 

• "Sleep Health: An Opportunity for Public Health to Address Health Equity"
• "Sleep Health Disparity and Race/Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Gender: A Systematic Review"
• "Disparities in Sleep Health and Potential Intervention Models"

In case you've missed them or would like to watch them again, we've had some really wonderful Community Seminar Series presentations focused on sleep and ways to improve it. If you have an hour (or a few), you can watch these awesome presentations: 

• Corinne Cannavale - "Don't sleep on sleep: How sleeping can impact brain functioning" 
• Grace Clements - "Sleep: What it does and how to get more of it" 
• Stephanie Voss - "Mind-body strategies for sleep"

If you want to check out Anna's literature review on Sleep Inequities, you can find that attached here as well!