Hard at work scoring PSGs with some morning coffee.

Author: Koushik Thudi | Major: Psychology | Semester: Spring 2023

Hi! My name is Koushik Thudi. I am a part of the Fullbright College of Arts and Sciences. I am a psychology major in Dr. Ivan Vargas’ Sleep and Stress Research Lab. I have been working on my thesis project for 4 semesters. The first semester comprised of planning the projects as well as procuring supplies and getting IRB approval. The second and third semesters were all about data collection. This last semester was the most work. During this semester, I scored a lot of polysomnography data and completed writing and defending my honors thesis. I plan to apply to clinical or school psychology Ph.D. programs.

My thesis goes over the effects of mindfulness-based meditation on acute sleep disorders.

Specifically, can practicing mindfulness meditation before sleeping affect sleep that same night? I decided to use college students as my population as this specific group of people is the most prone to sleep disorders due to hectic sleep schedules and workloads. This research looks at an acute, time/cost-effective intervention that can help in fixing sleep problems in populations that can be constrained by time and financial resources.

I thought of this topic while reading through sleep literature in Dr. Vargas’ lab. Most of the papers that I have read concerning mindfulness meditation and sleep looked at the effects of long-term/group interventions, which made me curious about what the short-term effects could look like. I learned about Dr. Vargas’ and his lab during my Freshman year. After getting to learn more about his research and his passions, I saw the lab as a good fit for me and I became an undergraduate research assistant.

There is a lot I’ve learned about sleep and meditation. I learned the proper way to meditate and how to complete a full 30-minute meditation routine. I also learned that I am not the best sleeper. There are many practices that I engage in before sleeping that can actually disrupt my sleep, making it harder for me to fall asleep (i.e. using technology and eating food).

One of the biggest challenges I faced while completing this project was participant recruitment. Because of the time commitment that this project entailed, participant recruitment was low. As participants had to sleep in the Sleep and Stress research lab for 2 consecutive nights in order to collect all the necessary data, this deterred potential participants from signing up. To offset this, the incentive for completing the study was 8 SONA credits.

Dr. Vargas was my faculty mentor and the biggest helper in this endeavor. He helped me from start to finish, whether it be with planning the research project, approving IRB decisions, or teaching me how to score polysomnography data. While this was one of the tougher research experiments in his lab, he was able to answer every single question I had and assist in solving any problem that I encountered.

After the completion of this project, I will start applications to clinical or school psychology Ph.D. programs. I will also be working on research pertaining to mindfulness and its relationship with social media engagement and internalizing concerns.