Students who wish to survive (let alone excel) must actively spend time on school assignments, extracurricular activities, and relationships with friends to be successful in higher education and beyond. What an irony it is, then, that The National Sleep Foundation and CDC state that students between thirteen and eighteen years of age need to fit 8-10 hours of sleep into their schedule, when sleep is the first casualty in the delicate act of balancing a student’s schedule. Has the CDC even considered that students hopeful of working to fight disease later in life will need to pad their resume with activities that sapped their total sleep count, exponentially adding to their risk of Alzheimer’s, heart failure, diabetes, and cancer in old age?
(CDC, that was a joke, I actually really appreciate you advocating for 8 hours of sleep <3)
In reality, no student wants to avoid sleep, but sleep has been framed to be at odds with academic and social success. You “choose” between getting an A on a test or sleeping. You “choose” between strengthening a friendship by answering a FaceTime versus sleeping. Yet, sleep has shown itself time and time again to bolster performance in all parts of the brain, from stress relief and creative thought to memory retention and critical thinking. It may be, then, that the overwhelming number of assignments you need to complete exist because sleep takes time away from working but rather because you don’t get enough sleep to work at peak focus. When you don’t listen to the eight hour mantra of sleep, you don’t give your body the rest it deserves to run at full capacity; your work is less efficient, you’re left with more things to do, and you feel less awake to boot.
What aspects of sleep, then, make it so critical to our happiness and success?
On a fundamental level, sleep is the ‘rest period’ of the body. It runs in cycles of approximately ninety minutes, broken up into phases of nREM and REM sleep. nREM sleep is where the body enters full restoration mode: a removal of metabolic waste, growth of tissue and bone, and a strengthening of the immune system. For the brain specifically, nREM sleep is the stage in which plaque and protein buildup is cleared, crucially decreasing the chance of disease and preparing the brain for REM sleep. To provide some perspective on its importance in the early stages of sleep, the first sleep cycle is an 80-10 minute split between nREM and REM sleep, while the final sleep cycle can go as far as a 30-60 minute split with REM sleep. You can thank nREM sleep for feeling fresh (at the very least, not feeling terrible) after a good night’s sleep. REM sleep, as a contrast, enters the domain of dreams: your brain sorts through ideas and memories, forming connections between rational and irrational sets of ideas. It is here you foster the creative spike to link ideas that would otherwise never be considered connectible. The key takeaway from the existence of these two phases is that both are crucial in staying sharp on a daily basis, and losing out on even one of them inhibits performance significantly. Being woken up by an alarm before the body gets a full night’s worth of sleep cuts out precious REM sleep, hampering your ability to make connections and develop creativity thinking.
This has been reflected in numerous studies. Matthew Walker, a British scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, determined that greater information retention occurred the more participants slept. It also found that the opposite held true- running on less than ideal sleep would reduce information intake, and after a certain point, concentration would be almost impossible. You may have felt this manifest as the experience of hitting a mental block when trying to study late at night, unable to cram more information into your brain. This line of logic can be extended to claiming that time spent sleeping would be more productive than continuing to study.
The argument against this in the context of academic success is that there may only be a one percent chance of retention by studying late, but a zero percent chance if one sleeps. And this is true for some cases, especially if a student had not studied at all beforehand. The department of psychology at the University of Minnesota, however, found a strong positive correlation between more sleep and higher GPA when testing its university kids- though this may have many other factors tied to it, the trend still shows itself to be true.
Of course, we as humans still function without getting a full 8 hours of sleep. If you spend the night working on a project, the academic results for that assignment will likely be better. And from a student’s perspective, there are always cases that must break the 8 hour mantra of sleep for immediate survival. What the first day of school looks like versus the week before finals goes to show how fickle a student’s schedule really is, and saying in absolute that a student must get at least 8 hours of sleep is unrealistic. What I hope you take away, however, is to be mindful of the eight hour mantra of sleep; in the craze that is school, a good night’s rest can take you far.
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