A good night's sleep is essential for maintaining a healthy and productive lifestyle.

Many
people, however, are unaware of the negative health consequences of sleep deprivation.
There are a few possible causes for the high incidence of sleep deprivation, including the
lifestyle choices of an individual, work obligations, and even people who are medically
diagnosed with insomnia. Nevertheless, people should keep in mind that sleep is not a
luxury but a necessity for optimal function.
I. Health Belief Model (HBM)
Having an inadequate amount of sleeping hours may raise the negative consequences of
sleep deprivation in terms of psychologically and medically. In a psychological context, an
individual may experience symptoms such as inability to focus, emotional distress and mood
disorder. While in the medical context, having insufficient amount of sleep in a long run may
cause an individual to acquire medical illnesses including cardiovascular diseases, metabolic
syndrome, weigh related issues and type II diabetes mellitus, (Medic, Wille & Hemels, 2017).
The health belief model was initially developed in the early fifties by a social psychologist
Irwin M. Rosenstock and further study by others who are working under the U.S Public
Health Service. The aim of this model is to predict preventative health behaviours as well as
behavioural responses to therapy in patients who are acutely or chronically unwell, (Ogden,
2007).
The health belief model is segregated into 4 components which include perceived,
perceived severity, perceive benefits and perceived barriers.
Perceived susceptibility refers to a person’s perception of the risk of acquiring an illness or
disease. For instance, someone who believes he or she will not develop any psychological or
medical problem as a result of sleep deprivation has a low perceived susceptibility towards
the problem. However, every human is varied from each other, some may have high
perceived susceptibility to illness while others are low depending on the psychological
factor. There are few psychosocial factors that influence an individual to have low perceived
susceptibility towards illness such as their personality traits and family background history,
("Health Beliefs and Attitude I", 2022). For example, an individual may be absence minded
regarding his or her health while family dynamic also plays an important role as it influence
an individual way of thinking.
While perceived susceptibility refers to a person’s perception of acquiring an illness,
perceived severity refers to a person's sentiments on the seriousness of contracting an
illness or disease. To make it more coherent, when a person is having low perceive severity
of illness, he or she might have the mindset that it is fine to develop chronic illnesses or
disorder such as insomnia, cardiovascular disease, and inability to focus resulted from their
sleep deprivation. Having an individual to have low perceive severity towards illness may be
due to the social influence and how they view the health problem.
When low perceived susceptibility and low perceived severity of illness is amalgamated, the
individual will then be resulted to face low perceive threat. A low perceive threat refers to
the low likelihood that a person will take any actions to prevent them from acquiring the
possible health illnesses or diseases. For example, an individual will be less likely to adopt a
healthy sleeping routine as he or she does not have any perceive susceptibility nor perceive
severity to begin with.
Perceive benefits of health enhancing behaviour refers to a person's perception of the
effectiveness of various actions available to reduce the threat of illness or disease. In short,
it’s the process whereby an individual knows what the positive outcome will be if he or she
adopt a healthier sleeping habit. For example, if an individual adopts a healthier sleeping
habit such as having adequate amount of sleep, he or she will be at a lower risk of acquiring
serious health illness or dieses such as cardiovascular diseases, mood disorder, metabolic
syndrome, and type II diabetes mellitus.
Meanwhile, the term perceive barriers relates to how a person feels about the difficulties to
take the suggested health intervention. It basically refers to what makes an individual to
stop from adopting a healthy sleeping habit. Having a perceive barrier could be due to few
factors such as high level of dissonance rate and lack of motivation.
II. Cognitive Dissonance Theory
The cognitive dissonance theory was developed by a social psychologist Leon Festinger in
the late fifties. According to cognitive dissonance theory, when a person has two or more
conflicting cognitions, they will experience an uncomfortable state (dissonance) until they
are able to resolve this situation by changing their cognitions, (Hinojosa, Gardner, Walker,
Cogliser & Gullifor, 2016).
By using the cognitive dissonance theory, two ways that a healthcare professional can
change a person’s attitude to increase the likelihood of them to adopt a healthy sleeping
habit is by implementing decision making and effort invested. In the method of decision
making, if you force someone to choose between sleeping on time or having their phone
taken away, they are more likely to choose sleeping on time. Even if both options have a
level of dissonance, sleeping on time has a lesser level of dissonance than taking their phone
away. On the other hand, a healthcare professional could manipulate an individual way of
thinking. For example, a nurse could advice on the importance of having adequate sleep and
how sleep can benefit her in terms of her grades and level of focus. In a long run, if the
individual does not receive a good grade, he or she will then be realised that amount
invested in sleeping on time has wasted as the expectation in not met. Subsequently, when
the expectation is not met the level of dissonance will then increase. In order for her to
reduce the dissonance, she would do “effort justification”. Effort justication, is when