There is glory in the all-nighter. I don’t know if there is a college campus that exists without at least someone telling the tale of their endless night furiously writing an essay that had at least two weeks to complete. The conversation of procrastination and of getting less than 5 hours of sleep a night is common and accepted.
Since when has the image of the caffeine infused, zombie-like college student become okay and accepted? According to research completed at Brown University, only 11 percent of students reported the recommended amount of sleep every night. A survey conducted by the American College Health Association received 95,712 responses and most students reported feeling “sleepy or dragged out” most of the time.
So my question is: Why is this okay?
We all should know the whole gamut of issues that arise from not sleeping well: problems with memory, information gathering, and processing new things; a weakened immune system; troubles controlling outbursts of emotion; serious risk for things like heart disease or mental illness. The list could go on and on. I will go out on a limb and say that most of us college students are smart enough and have gone to enough health classes in their time to know that there are no upsides to sleep deprivation. So why do we allow ourselves to slip into late night study hours, Netflix binges, or midweek drunken parties?
Some of us may answer that there is not enough time in the day to do all the things we need to do to be successful in college. Stress certainly adds a lot to the lack of sleep equation. With all the assignments, extracurriculars, and personal time we need, how could we possibly get eight hours in? However, if we make sleeping well a priority, many of the memory problems we believe we fix by all-nighters will actually get better.
A lack of interest in getting a good night’s sleep can also be due to the freedom college presents. Though the adult population has problems sleeping, a lot of that is due to medical sleep disorders. Sleeping problems are exacerbated in college because of a certain lack of personal control when it comes to nightly habits (that same lack of control is why Ben and Jerry’s gets all my money). It is not to say we don’t know that sleep deprivation is bad, it is that many of us do not understand the real ramifications of working on five or fewer hours of sleep is. We may feel tired but prescribe ourselves some coffee in the morning to shake it off. The real impact of less sleep is often found in grades and performance in school, which many students attribute it to a lack of studying, which creates a cycle of less sleep, worse grades, and often a more negative outlook on things. A serious result of this cultural phenomenon are mental health issues, including depression and anxiety, which have become an all too common reality for many young adults. When we think that spending an entire night awake will be a fairly good idea in order to get things done, we end up hurting ourselves in ways that we generally don’t wish upon our worst enemies. At the heart of what has become so popular among students is a very real and often unrecognized threat of depression, bad grades, and ultimately unhealthy behavior that is not discouraged in any productive way.
We need to promote a sense self-care that we attend to when we take yoga classes or take time for ourselves. It is important that we recognize sleep deprivation as the health threat that it is and encourage ourselves and our friends to end the all-nighter. Take the time to not procrastinate (I know homework is lame and TV is great but we’ve all got to do it). Get in the extra sleep you need to be the healthiest and happiest version of yourself you can be.
