Kazakhstan 2023: Dinara Tastan | al-Farabi Kazakh National University

Delegate: Dinara Tastan

Affiliation: al-Farabi Kazakh National University

Short Bio: On Tuesday, March 14, the 1st Student Talk Forum “Hacking Sleep” took place at the Faculty of Medicine and Healthcare at the Department of Fundamental Medicine within the framework of the SDGs “Good Health and Well-being”. The program of the event dedicated to sleep included interesting mini-lectures, a short master class on muscle relaxation and breathing exercises to improve falling asleep, student speakers shared with their personal experience of solving sleep problems, and also there were group discussions of the most memorable and important moments.

Activity: The 16th World Sleep Day was March 17, 2023. World Sleep Delegates and sleep health advocates across the world took action to raise awareness of sleep health. We organized an event dedicated to World Sleep Day, namely its theme in 2023 – Sleep is Essential for Health. Our event was called Student talk Forum “Hacking sleep”.
In our event we started with providing a questionnaire about sleep patterns, sleep troubles and reasons for it among medical students of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. The participants were shown a QR code and each participant received a candy reward after passing the survey. During the Student talk Forum “Hacking sleep” the results of questionnaire were announced. During the Forum, students shared with their experiences about different sleep habits, tricky cases, dreams and nightmares. They have talked in next directions:
Why is Sleep Essential for Health?
Why am I not sleeping well?
How do dreams affect my life?
Then teachers provided mini-lectures about Sleep Physiology (Why do I sleep?), Why is bad sleeping unhealthy? How do dreams affect my life? and Tips to better sleep
Moreover, there was a discussion with guests of the forum by dividing them into different random groups. At the beginning of the event all guests were registered and divided into groups. In group discussions, participants discussed about increasing the awareness of healthy sleep and what to do to sleep well. All guests shared with their opinion and made a “must do list” to sleep better, to decrease the levels of blue light, endless thoughts and caffeine in their lives. Forum organizers provided master class to relax before sleep. During master class, different easy exercises were shown to do and how this exercises made us feel better, relaxed.
At the end all quests were asked to give a feedback for event, where they were asked Was an event useful for them, what did they like most in the event, and importance of sleep for health.

https://www.kaznu.kz/en/

Location: al -Farabi Kazakh National University, Campus on Tole bi street, 96, Assembly Hall

Date of Activity: 14.03.2023

Submitted by: Marina Nyu, Gaukhar Yeszhanova, Dinara Tastan, Irina Kumiskhodzhayeva