CASSIE ROBERTSON
Staff Writer
“I’m so tired” is probably the most frequently heard complaint on campus. Most people know the source of the problem and know how to fix it. But students all brush it off as a permanent inconvenience, because unless they all went home on permanent hiatus from college, they would never get enough sleep.
The second hit after typing in “Lack of Sleep” on Google is titled, appropriately, “Lack of Sleep.” The summary states morosely, “If you’re not getting the sleep you need, you may need help.”
Really?
It turns out that “Lack of Sleep” is just a Web site advertising Rozerem, a pill intended to help insomnia sufferers.
Next hit. According to Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago, a “lack of sleep disrupts every physiologic function in the body.”
OK, maybe this problem is a little more serious than we thought.
Getting sleep is right up there along with all of the body’s necessary functions like blinking, eating and drinking (water). For some people, it’s hard to fathom a life without sleep. But for some college students, it’s everyday life.
Students know that experts are always warning about the grave problems that accompany lack of sleep, including failing tests, being less productive, getting way too stressed, and even gaining weight.
But how do these rumors impact college life? For the most part, they are completely ignored. The University of Michigan discovered that most students only get about six hours of sleep each night, even though we all need about eight hours.
The bottom line is that we don’t get sleep — and we don’t care.
Many students consider sleep irrelevant to life. Stories are frequent about students who can party until 4 a.m. on a Sunday night, then shower at 8 a.m. on Monday morning and make it to class in time to ace a quiz.
This type of rare ability to function with no sleep is prevalent among more of Pepperdine’s population than one would think.
The incredible lack of sleep would be OK if we simply reversed our schedules, following in the footsteps of the famous Yellowcard song “Ocean Avenue,” and just “sleeping all day, staying up all night.”
But unfortunately, students’ weekdays are as frantic as their late-night study sessions in the library. The average student’s daily schedule involves two-to-three classes, a couple meetings about anything from Greek life to volunteer programs, working out at the gym, eating at the Caf, writing a paper, going to a sports event, and completing massive amounts of homework. Even superman would get tuckered out eventually.
So what causes students to stay up all night? Here’s the sad part: we procrastinate. Each student is as guilty as the next of putting off papers until the night before they are due. No matter how much students are encouraged by professors to get things done on time, procrastination is inevitable. It generally tends to take the place of some good dreamtime.
But there’s a problem getting too few hours of sleep. Even though we’re at the peak of our bodies’ health at this age, there is no such thing as a normally functioning human being who only gets a couple hours of Z’s each night. Even a college student.
Lack of sleep can lead to greater activation of the brain’s emotional centers and disrupt the brain circuits that tame emotional responses, according to the National Institutes of Health. It has also been known to cause high blood pressure, obesity, psychiatric disorders, automobile accidents, and even a greater risk for cancer, especially later in life.
A recent 60 Minutes about the science of sleep discussed a University of Chicago study in which perfectly healthy people were restricted to four hours of sleep a night for six nights. In just six days, they were in pre-diabetic states and a hormone called leptin told the brain that they were hungry, which may indicate a link between the lack of sleep and America’s obesity epidemic.
So how do we avoid this widespread and seemingly unsolvable problem? The obvious way would be to go to bed on time. Try to keep it consistent each night, even if some of your classes are earlier than others, so you fall into a pattern your body can rely on. This means that yes, you will have to do your homework on time.
The second best way is a personal favorite: naps. Before college, they seemed childish and even lazy, but they are sometimes necessary just to avoid falling asleep in class. It’s kind of sad that people literally get excited about naps now, but you do what you gotta do.
A recent phenomenon is the caffeine nap, a fifteen-minute sleeping extravaganza. It is the modern go-getter’s way to combat sleep deprivation and trick the body into feeling like it is rested. Here’s what to do: Chug a cup of coffee. Immediately lie down. Try to fall asleep as quickly as possible (not difficult if you’re actually tired enough to try this). Since caffeine takes about fifteen minutes to work through your bloodstream, you have fifteen minute of pure, uninterrupted, glorious sleep. Then your heart starts pounding and your brain starts zinging and your body is basically wired, so you get up feeling rested and ready to go.
I decided to try the caffeine nap because Cosmo said it was a good idea (please never take Cosmo’s advice to heart). Personally I’ve found that I’m so addicted to coffee that the caffeine nap can actually last about forty-five minutes before I wake up feeling refreshed. It’s probably not healthy and definitely not a substitute for real sleep, but I did find that it helped.
We all seem to have the strange notion that we’re completely invincible in college. Laughing off our missing hours of sleep or even seeing them as marks of achievement is the norm. We may be young, but we treat our bodies like crap and expect to get the most out of them. For some, this works.
But most of us should stop pretending and just admit that we need sleep. If procrastination equals a total lack of Z’s, then students should try just a little harder to get things done on time. Lack of sleep is a part of the college experience, but when it’s due to suicidal procrastination, it’s time to start using the daily planner.
03-20-2008