Wong, Evangeline M.

BSA-3

Why there is a need for human to be moral?

Morality sets the principles that govern our behaviour and it has always been
important to the society. We as rational beings have our own opinions and
judgments. Given these differences, it usually results to conflicts and we need to
have a common ground and morality could greatly help us in achieving this. It is
for the reason that it sets rules on how people should act towards other people. It
helps to provide security to members of the community, create stability, foster trust,
and facilitate cooperation in achieving shared goals.
It is extremely important for our overall well-being because it actually gives
us meaning, purpose and energy for doing something meaningful. It helps us to
live together and, while doing so, improve the conditions under which we live.
Without this, it would be nearly impossible for people to be living with one another.
Personally, I cant really imagine a world where people live without following and
believing on certain set of rules regarding human conduct, it would certainly cause
chaos.
Morality impacts our everyday decisions, and those choices are directed by
our conscience. This would surely help us to choose the things that we do to be in
accordance with morality. When we are moral, we make better judgment and
eventually help us build a community where people choose to do well. For
instance, everyone has their right to live and all are expected to protect it. By being
moral, we often show our respect to others because this would lead to a
harmonious relationship. It could guide our life towards noble goals, rather than
our life being controlled by self-serving motives, bad habits or emotions.
Often they say that becoming moral requires enough sensitivity to feel guilty
when we do wrong, enough acceptance to embrace our responsibility for behaving
in agreed upon ways towards our group, and enough understanding to be able to
place ourselves in another person's shoes. One thing we should always remember
is that we need to be moral all the time regardless of the situation.
How Lack of Sleep Affects Your Social Life
The vicious cycle of sleeplessness and relationship conflict.

I spent most of my graduate-school years in a state of sleep deprivation.

There was just so much work to do tests to study for, papers to read, and a
dissertation to complete. At night, I stayed up as late as copious cups of coffee
would keep me awake, then set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. to get an early start on the
next day. After a few hours of pre-dawn study, I headed to my 8:00 a.m. statistics
class. Finding a seat in the back, I promptly fell asleep.
Since then, Ive learned the importance of a good nights sleep. Without it,
Im a lousy teacher, I understand little of what I read, and Im incapable of writing
anything coherent. Most people understand theyre cognitively impaired when
theyre not well rested. That groggy, listless, disoriented feeling is something weve
all experienced at one time or another as we try to slog through the day after a
sleepless night.
What most people fail to realize, however, is that lack of sleep can have
a subtle but important impact on their social life as well. In a recent article,
psychologist Amie Gordon and her colleagues at the University of California, San
Francisco, argue that our sleep life and social life are intertwined. As our sleep
suffers, so do our relationships; likewise, negative social experiences can
keep us from getting the sleep we need.
Many people think of sleep as a time when you recharge your batteries.
Just as you can still use your smart phone or laptop even if its not fully charged,
they believe, so you can function just fine through the day even if you didnt get a
full eight hours of sleep the night before. But this battery metaphor completely
misses the true nature of sleep. Instead of being a time when you lie passively in
the dark as your body replenishes its energy, sleep is in fact a highly dynamic
process. You may be unconscious, but your brain is very busy during those hours
sorting through memories and tidying up the clutter of the previous days
experiences. Instead of just recharging your battery, youre actually engaging in
mental maintenance.
Not all sleep is the same. As you go through the night, your brain cycles
through four stages of sleep. These include the light sleep of stages 1 and 2, as
well as the deep sleep of stage 3. But most important of all is rapid eye movement
(REM) sleep the stage when dreaming takes place. Most people need about
two hours of REM sleep per night to feel fully rested and cognitively alert the next
day, no matter how many total hours of shuteye they got. This is why people differ
in how much total sleep they need.
In fact, just considering the time between going to bed and getting up
isnt a good measure of how much sleep you actually got, or a good indicator
of the quality of that sleep. Some people take longer to fall asleep than others,
and all of us wake up several times during the night, whether to go to the bathroom
or just to shift position, even though we may not remember these waking episodes
the next morning. In the laboratory, researchers can measure a persons sleep
efficiency that is, the amount of actual sleep obtained during a period of time.
However, your own subjective perception of how well you slept is a pretty
good indicator of your sleep quality, regardless of how many hours you were in
bed.
Researchers have found that daily rhythms are important as well. Morning
people truly are more alert early in the day, while evening people are more alert
later. You should assess whether youre a morning or evening person and arrange
your activities accordingly, if possible.
Although the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation are widely known, few
psychologists or laypeople pay much attention to the social side of sleep, as
Gordon and colleagues call it. Her team points to three areas that are known to be
impacted by lack of sleep namely close relationships, person perception, and
social stress.
1. Close relationships. In Western culture, people prefer sleeping alone in
their own beds, with the main exception being romantic partners, who typically
sleep together. However, in other cultures around the world, communal sleeping
is common, if not the norm. An entire extended family may snuggle up to conserve
heat through the cold night. And even non-family members may sleep together
with none of the sexual connotations that term implies in the West. When I was
teaching in Japan, I went on a faculty retreat to a hot spring resort, and we all slept
on futon mattresses laid on the straw-mat floor of one large room. (Co-sleeping
promotes group bonding, I was told.)
Sleep has a big impact on our social relationships, especially our most
intimate ones. When one partner has slept poorly the night before, theres
more conflict in the relationship the next day. This is because we have less
empathy when were sleep deprived, and were less likely to engage in effective
conflict resolution. Whats more, even the well-rested partner will show a decrease
in empathy when dealing with a sleepless spouse, as if sleep deprivation were
contagious. Further, couples report having more difficulty sleeping when theyve
experienced conflict with their spouse, especially late in the day. Thus, couples
can easily fall into a vicious cycle of relationship conflict and poor sleep.
2. Person perception. To effectively interact with others, we need to
accurately read their emotional facial expressions. Yet people who are sleep
deprived have a lot more difficulty doing this. After a sleepless night, research
participants were less accurate at judging the emotions of happiness or anger
in pictures of strangers, compared with their performance on this task after
a good nights rest. In addition, people are more likely to engage in stereotypic
and biased thinking when they havent had enough sleep. The ability to read the
emotions of unfamiliar people and to inhibit prejudiced thinking is essential to
smooth functioning in most workplace environments, so not getting enough sleep
can impact your job performance as well.
3. Social stress. Negative experiences, such as conflict with a spouse or
family member, being discriminated against, or feeling rejected, can make a good
nights sleep hard to get. Although stressful social situations are inevitable, our
ability to cope with these experiences depends on how well rested we are. Emotion
regulation is a process in which we reevaluate our feelings and try to put them in
proper perspective. But it requires intense effort, which may simply be out of reach
if we havent been sleeping well. Once again, we see the vicious cycle of sleep
deprivation and social conflict.
According to Gordon and colleagues, more than two-thirds of American
adults dont get as much sleep as they need. Americans are busier at their jobs
than ever, but they also pad their time with leisure activities that induce more stress
than they relieve, like competitive sports, thrilling action movies, and high-
adrenaline online games.
The impact of sleep deprivation on physical and mental health has long been
understood. Now we know it can damage our social relations as well, sending us
into an even deeper spiral of conflict and sleeplessness. Its time to turn off the TV,
shut down the computer, put away the smartphone and get a good nights rest.

References
Gordon, A. M., Mendes, W. B., & Prather, A. A. (2017). The social side of
sleep: Elucidating the links between sleep and social processes. Current
Directions in Psychological Science. Advance online publication. doi:
10.1177/0963721417712269