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Sleep Deprivation In College Students

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Walk into any college classroom and you will see the same situation: students and professors alike with giant mugs full of caffeinated beverages, coffee and coke being the most prevalent. If you look closely at the students, you will see huge bags and dark circles around their eyes, at least one-third of the class will be nodding off or staring in a daze; this state of being is not due to the content of the lecture not being stimulating, but due to a lack of sleep. A combination of late nights studying and doing homework, early morning workouts and eight am classes, in addition to long days filled with work or involvement in various clubs all act together to cause a case of sleep deprivation for more than half of the college community. There …show more content…

Sleep is a complex cycle generated by the brain that consists of 24 hours of regulated wake and sleep stages. This cycle is called the circadian rhythm which is mostly stable, but can be altered by light and individual differences; the individual differences are classified as an either/or dichotomy: you’re a morning person, or you are a not a morning person (Kalat 2013). In normal individuals, sleep is an automatic process; we can fight against it for a while, but eventually the sleep cycle will restore itself, causing the individual to fall asleep at inappropriate times, like during the middle of a lecture, driving down the highway, or while operating heavy machinery. To understand why the circadian rhythm works so hard to stay regulated requires knowledge about the way sleep works and its adaptive …show more content…

These studies involve depriving participants of sleep for various amounts of time; the time kept awake is determined by the dependent variables of the study. When measuring the effects of sleep deprivation, chronic and mild, you look at changes in eating habits or fluctuations in caloric intake, cognitive tasks usually mathematical in nature, reaction time, and memory tasks. For cognitive tasks, usually you would deprive participants of sleep for longer durations than you would for reaction time tasks and fluctuations in caloric

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