We’ve all been there. Maybe you spent all week going straight from school to work, and when you finally make your way home you’re too tired to study and you just need to relax. That paper due next week can be procrastinated. You’ve got homework due tomorrow that needs your immediate attention. But before you know it, that paper on processed foods and child development is due tomorrow. The only way you’re going to get it done is if you work nonstop through the night. But it’s fine, because you’re used to working in crunch time. You’ve got your Monster energy drink or maybe some Arizona Tea, and you’re ready to put in the hard work. Or maybe you’ve got a test tomorrow. You know you will just sleep through your alarm so you choose to stay up late, memorizing as much Russian as you can before your midterm.
Sleep deprivation can stem from a variety of reasons, some of them justified, some of them the result of plain negligence. Regardless, sleep deprivation has become quite a common phenomenon among college students. A study in 2000 registered that the average college student gets less than 7 hours of sleep a night. The current national average of sleep that college students get ranges from 6-6.9 hours a night. This borderline insomniac behavior has become the norm for college students.
College students sometimes feel the need to sacrifice sleep for study. However, if this were always the case, the national average would not dip into its current status. We deliberately let work pile up and work well into the night, much more than we should. The need to stay up doesn’t just stem from schoolwork. Puberty can naturally create “night owl” tendencies, causing young adults to feel more awake in the evening. We carry these patterns into college, which can create bad sleeping behaviors. Our sleeping patterns don’t normalize, meaning we can stay up later without feeling the need to sleep. We don’t naturally form a sleep schedule, meaning our bedtimes can be extended much later. A recent study found that the average bedtime for freshman college students is 1:58 a.m on weekends.
A major contributor to this problem is the induction of technology before sleeping. Interacting with any kind of glowing screen before lying in bed will increase stimulation and alertness. This, in conjunction with an unfocused sleep schedule, encourages sleep deprivation. Our eyes secrete Melatonin, which helps regulate our sleep rhythm to the environment. This substance is naturally suppressed by exposure to light. Even a dimly lit screen can suppress it with continued exposure.
There is a perceived gain of greater productivity with the increased time we’re awake. However, there are many consequences just from subtracting that extra hour or two from our sleep schedule. A recent study from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that sleep deprivation in college students has about the same impact on GPA as binge drinking and marijuana use. Another study in the Journal of American College Health found that freshman students staying up late on weekdays and sleeping in on the weekends was correlated with lower GPAs, averaging at a -.3 drop when compared to those who get eight or more hours of sleep. It’s also suggested that depression and sleep are interrelated: “In a study of female college students, sleep debt of two hours per night and/or a bedtime after 2 a.m. was associated with greater depressive symptoms.”
And these problems don’t just haunt us throughout college. Forty percent of adults report that they get less than seven hours of sleep a day. We’re staying up later in a critical time of intellectual growth. We compromise the exchange of productivity for sleep in this process, impacting our grades and our ability to learn.