The Brunswick Trust

Series, which brings leading thinkers to campus for daylong visits that focus on wellness, insight, courage, and kindness.

Eat to Compete, a first-of-its-kind healthy snacking Snack Face-Off event for Upper Schoolers, took place in April.

Brunswick Health & Wellness took over the courtyard next to the dining hall during the lunch wave — setting up tables and streaming in some music to invite students into lessons about nutrition.

“The data is very clear. When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. When it’s not, they don’t.

“There is simply no aspect of your wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed,” he said. “It’s almost like a broken water pipe in your home. Sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology.”

Walker said there are a number of ways to improve sleep and offered two specific tips for students. The first is regularity; he told students to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, no matter whether it’s a weekday or a weekend. The second piece of advice he offered is to “keep it cool.” Brain and body temperature must drop in order to fall and stay asleep, he said, so the goal is to aim for a bedroom temperature of about 65 degrees.

Walker covered similar ground when he spoke to parents in an informal conversation moderated by Health & Wellness Director Marcie Molloy, M.D., in the evening, but he also further elucidated the benefits of the particular stage of sleep known as REM, or dream sleep, in both education and health.

“Dream sleep is essentially mental health,” he said. “It’s emotional first aid. REM sleep takes the sharp edges off painful experiences.”

In classroom learning, REM sleep is the critical difference between regurgitating facts and deep understanding of material.

“REM sleep is the difference between knowledge, which happens in the deep, non-REM sleep of ‘grabbing the facts,’ and wisdom, which is knowing what it all means when you put everything together.”

Walker is the author of the international best-seller Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams and founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley. The Stossel and Walker visits served as the third and fourth installments of the inaugural year of the ’WICK Center Speaker

Students had the chance to vote between two snack choices based on nutrition facts, ingredients, taste, and function — incorporating their preferences as well as nutrition literacy.

One goal was to educate students on exactly what makes a complete, healthy snack — including how combining a protein with a high-quality complex carbohydrate helps fuel activities on the practice fields and in the classroom.

“This works for both pre and post workout or practice — which is important to show grab-and-go options that will support academics as well as sports performance,” said Gianna Masi, Brunswick’s nutritionist.

Students learned how to read and understand nutrition labels, and how to use that information to select snacks that will better power their busy days.

They also had the chance to sample a no-added-sugar protein smoothie and entered a raffle to win gift cards to local healthy eateries.

“Overall, the event was a resounding success,” Masi said. “The students were fully engaged and actively participated in our wellness event, demonstrating a strong commitment to their overall health and well-being. It demonstrated the students’ strong commitment and curiosity.

Director of Aquatics Dawn Berrocal has had a busy spring teaching another cohort of Brunswick students crucial water safety skills through the American Red Cross Lifeguard Certification Program

Each spring, about 30 boys make their way through the course, many of them in preparation for summer jobs at continued on page 6