How many times do you get frustrated by not checking things off your to-do list? Do you equate “success” with “busy-ness”? Does it make you anxious to see other students studying all night at the library when you want to go to sleep?
C’mon body! Do you even need sleep?
For most students sleeping becomes a luxury in college. Once school starts, long gone are the days of curling up in bed until the sun warmly enters through the curtains swayed by the cool summer breeze.
College life harbors in it a whirlpool of activity. For the better part of your 4-year undergraduate career (and even longer if you are pursuing graduate school), decisions around when to wake up and when to go to sleep are usually determined by your class schedule. So, not only does your usual routine get a big shake but your physical body is also affected by the college life.
Unfortunately, one of the most common maladaptive habits that students seem to fall into is neglecting their sleep in an effort to study more and perhaps to squeeze in a little extra social time to their already jampacked schedule.
Why is sleep so important?
On a superficial level, sleep may seem like a useless and passive activity that gives us an excuse to simply ooze into la-la land when in fact, it is turning out to be one of the main building blocks of a successful and healthy life.
If sleeping were so useless, why don’t animals in the wild stay awake to protect themselves from predators?
Take honey bees, for example. If you think these “buzz-ers” dance around making honey all day, think again! When honey bees were sleep deprived using a magnetic contraption, Dr. Barrett Klein (Universität Würzburg, Germany) and colleagues found that sleepless honey bees were less efficient in the way they communicated with other sister bees. Since dancing is how bees communicate with each other, sleepless bees had trouble sending important signals to others regarding food sources.
To get a closer look into the function of sleep, a team of researchers from the U.S. (University of Rochester and New York University) studied the brains of mice and found striking evidence for the necessity of sleep in keeping the brain “clean.” The study suggests that brain cells (possibly a type of cells called, glial cells), shrink during the sleep to allow more fluid to be pumped into the gaps between brain tissue to wash toxins away.
In addition, exposure to bright screen light at bedtime can spell bad news for both the brain and body. According to Dr. Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, “people are exposing their eyes to this stream of photons that basically tells [their] brain[s] ‘it’s not time to go to sleep yet’” (Business Insider Video).
Furthermore, late night screen time suppresses the hormone melatonin that is necessary for prompting the body to go to sleep. In essence, scientific evidence shows that the accumulation of toxins due to insufficient sleep might be giving way to a host of issues with attention, memory, and the ability to think through problems.
Attending college and sleep should not be mutually exclusive
While college life is very demanding, human beings need sleep to function efficiently, effectively and most importantly, enthusiastically full of life and vigor.
If even honey bees have to sleep to dance efficiently, surely can the busiest students make time for sleep.
REFERENCES
- 1. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373
- 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1V0rDSTC9Ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1V0rDSTC9I
- 3. http://news.utexas.edu/2010/12/13/biology_bees