Is College Students Losing Sleep?

Many times people think they can accomplish more if they could eliminate so much sleeping time.  However, they are only hurting their productivity if they lose sleep.  Two articles deal with the issue of sleep deprivation.  The College Student Journal published an article about the grade-point average of college students and sleep length, while U.S. News & World Report produced an article dealing with the lack of

The path to the college student with sleep deprivation, should include a screening process to determine if the patient’s sleep deprivation has a primary cause or if it is secondary. Some common primary sleep disorder as defined by the DSM-IV-TR, are divided into two categories, dyssomnias

Sufficient sleep is a biological necessity for the normal functioning of humans, it allows the body to rest and to replenish itself so that it is able to serve its function of living. In addition, mental and physical health depend on the amount of sleep we get. Most adults and students value work and college much more than sleep, this is due to the academic, career, and materialistic demands. Researchers have noted a positive correlation between lack of sleep and decreased physical health, mental health, and academic performance. Sleep consists of two cycles: non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM), which are sleep patterns that alternate throughout the night. Firstly, sleep begins with non-REM sleep lasting about 90 minutes followed by REM sleep lasting 10-30 minutes, then the cycle repeats itself. REM sleep is the most important phase of sleep because the body is internally awake, with waking-like brain activity, yet asleep and externally calm. Thus, an uninterrupted REM phase of sleep is necessary for integrating previously learned material, and giving the individual a feeling of being well rested and refreshed. Many individuals will put sleep off so that more work hours, and school work can be fit into the day in order to get a better outcome such as job promotions or better academic grades, but I believe that sleep deprived people show a low performance in daily tasks due to suffering from mental, and physical health disorders.

zzzzzz...are you tired? I know I am...of writing this paper! In fact most of the kids in class are probably tired too. Surprisingly, according to WebMD, about 20% of Americans get less than six hours of sleep on average a night (1).With all the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, it is understandable to push sleep off. Harvard University has conducted extensive research, discovering how sleep affects the brain; “given that a single sleepless night can cause people to be irritable and moody the following day, it is conceivable that chronic insufficient sleep may lead to long term mood disorders” (1). Just one night of not sleeping can put one in a bad mood, much less consistent loss of sleep. But how does lack of sleep affect others around us? Sleepiness and sleep deprivation can be accounted for roughly one million car crashes annually in The United States. (Harvard Medical School 1). It is easy to understand that sleep loss is something that affects a majority of the people living in the U.S. and sleep deprivation is something that not only affects us, but affects those around us. Scientists speculate that during the night various sleep cycles playa role on consolidating memories in the mind (Harvard Medical School 3). So knowing that sleep plays such a critical part in the growth and development of our brain, then why do we put it off in order to finish other tasks? And in doing so, what neurological

Sleep has been studied by people around the world to determine if it affects daily activities and personality, but as a college student who does not get the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep a night I thought it would be interesting to research if the amount of time a students is able to sleep on average affects their grade point average (GPA). Therefore the goal of this research will be to determine if students who get the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep have a higher grade point average than those who do not. This is important to know, to understand why students may or may not be achieving the grades that they are capable of. Through my research I was able to look deeper into the effect sleep has on a students grade

Sleep is something that is important for daily functioning, without it, we can feel irritable, confused, and of course, tired. However these are just the minor side effects, more serious are depression, increased risk of heart attack, and high blood pressure. Even though students are aware that a lack of sleep isn’t healthy for their bodies, they do it anyway. Although at times it’s beyond their control, there are also plenty of times when students voluntarily choose to get less sleep. For this study, we expected to find a relationship between the amount of sleep students get and the attitude they have towards their school performance. Simply put, if someone gets a lot of sleep, they’ll have a more positive attitude towards their performance. While side effects like tiredness and confusion are a bit more obvious, overall negativity may not be as obvious. Students getting a lack of sleep may be experiencing negativity and not even realize it. That being said, our results revealed that their wasn’t a relationship between the amount of sleep students receive and their attitudes about school. It did appear that the more sleep students got the more positive they were, but the it wasn’t significant enough to report.

William Kilgore’s article “Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Cognition” begins to explain effects of sleep deprivation and its power ability to attack the mind. One way sleep deprivation is successful in this endeavor is by interrupting normal cognitive function of a human being. This includes slowing down the minds ability to be alert and attentive. Sleep deprivation also has a major negative on perception and planned tasks that are important in a person’s life. This distorted perception opens people up to negative thoughts and actions, leaving people defenseless against themselves. Sleep deprivation is a silent killer when it comes to our minds, attacking the necessary tools in our minds to be productive.

We will use a simple questionnaire that was used in the Emmons and Mcullough (2003) study to operationalize the sleep variable. The questionnaire will ask participants three questions. The first question will be a close-ended question that asks participants to rate the quality of sleep they received the previous night on a scale of 1 (restless) to 5 (restful). The second question will be open-ended, asking participants to indicate the hours of sleep they had the previous night. Hours of sleep will be calculated as the total hours in bed minus time spent awake. Our last question will be an optional and open-ended question that will ask participants if they

It is 11:30 in the morning and the lecture started half an hour ago. The classroom is still half empty. Although half of the class is here, they don’t look like awake. Most of them look like zombies. The above scenario is a common condition taken place in colleges. A research done by Tsui,YY, et al (2009) shows that two thirds of the participating students reported sleep deprivation. The poor sleep quality results in their zombie looks and poor attendants in lectures.

Short and Luca studied the participants for three consecutive nights at the Sleep Laboratory of the Centre for Sleep Research, from four p.m. on the first day until eight p.m. fourth day (2015). What they found was that their analyses revealed depressed mood, anxiety, anger, confusion, fatigue, and energy were worsened after only one night without sleep when compared to the normal sleep pattern days, baseline days (Short and Louca 2015). Their research suggests that while mood worsens during the night, the participants’ mood didn’t seem to recover the following day; in fact, the mood seemed even worse about five a.m. and stayed low throughout the day (Short and Louca 2015). Short’s and Louca’s research suggests a surprising effect on adolescent females, as they showed a heightened sensitivity to mood deficits following the deprivation of sleep; particularly females had a significant elevation of anxiety and depressed mood after one night without sleep (2015). Short and Louca believe that this surprise may suggest that females are more affected than males to the deprivation of sleep on mood, which they believe may account for the higher amounts of anxiety and depressed mood in adolescent females than that of adolescent males (2015). This study done by Short and Louca suggests a causal relationship between sleep deprivation and depression. It suggests that even by one night of being not well-rested for an adolescent plays a huge role in

Sleep deprivation has likely harmed most people’s routine performance and interaction skills at least enough to alarm them of its profound impairment to their mental and physical state. Everyone knows the feeling of being short-tempered and irritable because they didn’t get enough sleep the night before, but many also know the feeling of delirium and decreased cognitive abilities associated with many frightening consequences such as surmountable drops in their ability to communicate well with others, lack of balance and motor skills, impaired reasoning and cognitive skills, and eventually involuntary bodily sensations, hallucinating and an inability to stay awake (nodding off). These symptoms can lead to substantial damage in people’s relationships, not only at home or with friends and family, but also at work which might eventually lead to employees being fired because they can’t reach proper levels of mental and physical function. They can also lead to the lack of awareness, control, and competence that affects driving ability and other activities that demand intense focus and involve high-stake dangers such as the operation of machinery. Lack of sleep can affect overall health as well by decreasing people’s immunity along with many other basic standards of well-being. People’s busy lives often divert their attention from dealing with all of these effects even though their presence and weight is vast and undeniable. The harmful effects of sleep deprivation, though linked

Sleep deprivation can lead to poor performance, whether it be in school or other activities. As quoted in an article on WebMD entitled “Sleep Habits: More Important Than You Think” by Michael

Sleep is very important to a human being’s health. The consequences of sleep manifest in both health and performance. The relationships between sleep and performance have been studied in many different fields including human science, medicine, psychology, education, and business and etc. Sleep-related variables for instance sleep deficiency, sleep quality, sleep habits have been shown to influence the performance of students (Lack, 1986; Mulgrew et al., 2007; National Sleep Foundation, 2008; Pilcher & Huffcutt, 1996; Rosekind et al., 2010). According to Weitzman et al. (1981) , Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS) was defined into three big categories which are long sleep latency on weekdays (normally fall asleep between 2 a.m. to 6 a.m.),

This study was a repeated measures design with an opportunistic sample that was two tailed with one factor, sleepiness, with two levels, good night’s sleep and a poor night’s sleep. The independent variable was the quality of sleep and the dependent variables were subjective sleepiness (KSS), subjective mood (PANAS) and sustained attention (TMT and DSST).

This article founded certain associations between sleep quality and temperament among university students. Seventy-one students chosen at random were asked to take the ESS (Johns, 1991) is an 8-item questionnaire that assesses current sleepiness by asking participants to report how likely they would be to doze if they were in particular situations that are differentially soporific, including those in which most people would be expected to fall asleep. The study found poor sleep quality was related to lower ratings on the effortful control factor score and on all three associated scales (activation, attentional, and inhibitory control). Poor sleep quality was associated with higher ratings on the negative affect factor score, particularly when considering the scales of fear and sadness but not discomfort or frustration (Lukowski F. A., & Milojevich M. H. 2013). This study found that sleep quality was very important in determining if the student could function in school and if the student was able concentrate on material given in class. The study also found that sleep quality was unrelated to participant-reported extraversion, which means the student would be just as outgoing even if there sleep quality was poor. Even though sleep quality is important in functioning in class and could lead to poor grades and a potential GPA drop; in terms of student success, the student would be just as outgoing and socially active which is an imperative factor in college