If you often feel sleepy and have trouble concentrating during the day, you might be one of thousands of university students who are depriving their bodies of something as essential to their well-being as food and water. Because students' priorities often lie with grades and social lives instead of their physical and mental health, the basic need of sleep is put on the back burner. Fatigue and sleep deprivation in college students has become an unhealthy norm.
"Sleep is definitely on the priority list, but it always comes after schoolwork," freshman Arielle Jacobs said. "Sometimes I stay up just to sit around with people, but if I'm exhausted enough, sleep will come before friends - at least on a school night.
Julie Basset, a junior from Paris spending her year abroad at Tufts, says that dorm-style living encourages socialization, something that living at home and commuting to the University does not.
"Because I am up talking with people I am spending my time in a different way - talking instead of reading a book or watching TV," Basset said. "People are easier to reach here, but I try not to let it limit the amount of sleep I get."
Experts with the National Sleep Foundation say that feeling drowsy during the day, even during boring activities, is an indicator that you haven't had enough sleep. If you routinely fall asleep within five minutes of lying down, you probably have severe sleep deprivation, possibly even a sleep disorder.
The amount of sleep each person needs varies with age. As we get older, our bodies require less sleep; infants need to sleep about 16 hours a day, while teenagers need nine hours on average. For most adults, seven to eight hours a night appears to be the best amount of sleep, although individuals may need as few as five hours or as many as ten hours of sleep each day. Even as people grow older they still need about the same amount of sleep as they did in early adulthood.
The amount of sleep you need increases if you have been deprived of sleep in previous days. Too little sleep creates a "sleep debt," and eventually the body will need that debt to be repaid. No matter how acclimated you are to a specific schedule, you cannot force your body to adapt to sleep loss. Even when students get used to a sleep-depriving schedule, their judgment, reaction time, and other functions will still be impaired.
"Students should get organized by the time they're in college," supervisor of the sleeping disorders unit at Iowa Lutheran Hospital Dale Steffans said. "They should know what you have to do to cheat on a 24-hour day."
"Most college students don't get the amount of sleep they need because they have 'social insomnia.' They party or put off studying, get four or five hours of sleep, and build up a sleep debt which eventually has to be repaid," Steffans continued. "Sleeping in late on the weekends doesn't make up for the intermediate stages of rest they needed throughout the week."
Six to eight hours of sleep per night gets freshman Brian Costello through the week. "If I'm not getting enough sleep it's because I'm hanging out with friends, not because I'm doing work and staying up all night," Costello said. "If I get behind I can usually catch up on the weekends."
Other students make up for the lack of sleep with naps. "Without naps I wouldn't make it through the day," freshman Rhonda Barkan said. "Sometimes I take two a day."
But not only is there no guarantee that students will be able to "catch up" on sleep, but such disruptions in the cycle are unhealthy because they lower the quality of the sleep.
The type of sleep you receive matters as much as the amount. College students whose Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep (the deepest sleep cycle) is disrupted don't follow the normal sleep cycle progression when they fall back asleep, and instead they slip directly into REM sleep and go through extended periods of REM until they "catch up" on this stage of sleep.
Since sleep and wakefulness are influenced by different neurotransmitter signals in the brain, foods and medicines that change the balance of these signals affect the quality of your sleep. Caffeinated drinks such as coffee and drugs such as diet pills and decongestants stimulate some parts of the brain and can cause insomnia, or the inability to sleep. In fact, drinking caffeine three to six hours before going to sleep can double time it takes to fall asleep and quadruple the number of times a person wakes up during night.
But since caffeine keeps students up when they are doing work late at night, many drink a cup of coffee to help them make it through papers and stay up late to study.
"I use coffee to stay awake at night, especially when I have a paper due the next day or big test to study for," sophomore Jennifer Clark said. "I know it isn't a very healthy habit but I've found that I get headaches when I don't have caffeine, so a cup of coffee seems to be the way to go."
