Recently, I have gotten less than 10 full hours of sleep every week.
The sad thing about this statement is that it probably isn’t very shocking to most readers. According to a study from Brown University, 73 percent of college-age students report having sleeping problems of some kind. We, as university students, are some of the most sleep-deprived people in the U.S. — and even the world.
This is old news though, isn’t it? People have been talking about the trope of the overworked student for longer than I’ve been alive. College students work hard. College students party hard. College students can pick two options out of the mocking triangle of life: Would you like to have adequate sleep, good grades or a social life? Usually, sleeping gets booted out of the equation.
I myself shouldn’t even protest; I pulled an extreme all-nighter only a few days ago.
The average college student treats the essential act of passing the heck out and recharging one’s stamina, brain cells and functional capabilities as optional. This mode of behavior has started to become more dangerous to us than the illusion that if we don’t stay up all night to finish studying for this exam, our GPA will inevitably suffer.
The idea that time spent avoiding sleep will benefit you in other aspects of your life, whether social or academic, is false.
Getting a few hours of shut-eye will probably help you remember more material on that next killer exam. Managing naps during the day will make you less crabby and probably more fun to be with.
Within the past three months, 30 percent of college women and 18 percent of college men have reported suffering from insomnia, a disease that is affected by the amount of sleep you allow yourself. Chronic refusal to sleep affects the natural rhythms of your body and can seriously mess up your development, energy levels and learning capabilities, destroying your potential to do great things. Even as I write this, my fingers typing heavily on keys that seem so suddenly difficult to press, I am scolding myself for hardly getting two hours of rest the other night: “Why didn’t you sleep, Sally?”
I think that we are often pushing against boundaries with our peers. We compare ourselves to one another: our work ethic, our drive, our qualifications, our grades. Often, the idea of not sleeping for an entire night in order to study might seem to give an individual bragging rights or an assertion of being a more dedicated student and harder worker. Sacrifice of well-being and mental health in the name of hard work is sometimes expected by organizations with extremely active members or in especially competitive or difficult classes.
This anti-sleep mentality is foolish. Sleep is essential to the quality and continuity of life. While every student will sometimes have to sacrifice their entire doctor-recommended eight hours of rest, it doesn’t mean that we should deprive ourselves of sleep. It doesn’t mean that sleeping less than a friend one night will make you a better, more serious student.
After our upcoming and much-awaited Thanksgiving Break, it will be final exam season, which is the time of long nights spent frantically studying at Library West and the time of tense nerves and frayed tempers. Sleep will be scarce. Let’s remember that when the next physics problem starts to blur in front of you on the paper, it’s probably time to call it quits for at least the length of a power nap. We should stop using sleep to compare our study habits with others and just go to bed for a few hours. We’ll feel much better when we wake up.
Sally Greider is a UF English and public relations sophomore. Her columns appear on Tuesdays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 11/19/2014]
