Staying up all night to finish a project or to study for a test may seem like the only option for many Ball State University students who feel like there are not enough hours in one day to get everything accomplished. But experts say repeated sleep deprivation could have adverse affects on your mental and physical health, particularly in the short term.
"When you're asleep, you are not totally inert," said Dr. Denise Amschler, a professor of health education. "You need sleep for your brain more than anything because your brain uses more than 20 percent of the fuel your body burns in a day."
Amschler said unlike other muscles and organs, which can restore and regenerate during a state of rest, the brain is different in that it requires sleep in order to recover. This is because different parts of the brain function at different levels and different stages of sleep. In addition, Dr. Amschler said a good night's sleep plays a role in health issues such as disease resistance and injury prevention, clarity of thought and stability of mood.
"People who are sleep-deprived tend to not focus as well on a task, and certain parts of the brain may be affected that help us with memory," she said. "Also, sleep-deprived people have difficulty thinking of imaginative ideas and words, and instead they are more repetitious when they are trying to express themselves."
Dr. Kent Bullis, the medical director at the Amelia T. Wood Student Health Center said students are also at risk of getting sick more easily.
"All of the normal restorative processes take place with the passage of time in the body during sleep," he said. "So recovering from physical exercise, recovering from emotional stress and trauma, recovering from being mad at your coworker and so on all take a hit when you don't get a good sleep at night. People tend to be more irritable, more cranky, and beyond that, I think people tend to have a lot more physical ailments when they don't get efficient sleep."
Although the recommended number of hours of sleep varies from one person to another, Dr. Bullis said students should sleep as long as they need to feel rested in the morning. While many people consider eight hours to be the "normal amount of sleep," Dr. Bullis said it is half an hour less than most people need to reach a deep, restorative sleep.
"Most adolescents need between seven-and-a-half and nine-and-a-half hours of sleep, and the median is probably right around eight-and-a-half hours," he said. "The amount of time you need to sleep is something you have to figure out over a long period of time, and it changes over the life cycle. You don't go to bed one night and see how long it takes you to feel rested. You have to get a feel for it because other things affect it like the amount of stress you are under and the amount of exercise you are getting."
Additionally, data taken from the 2002 Sleep In America poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, the average respondent reported sleeping six-and-a-half hours on the weekdays and seven-and-a-half hours on the weekends.
Just as there is a variation to the number of hours people should sleep, there is a plethora of reasons why students feel they need to burn the candle at both ends.
Melissa Borneman, a second-year graduate student majoring in journalism with a photography emphasis, said five hours of sleep constitutes a good night's sleep.
"I am a night person, so no matter how tired I am, I usually get my energy around 10 p.m.," she said. "That's when I start deciding that I want to work on a project or start my work. On a good night, I am in bed between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Every semester, I have a goal of going to sleep before midnight, and that doesn't quite happen. It is usually 1 a.m. or 2 a.m."
Borneman said although the late start does cause more anxiety, she has been unable to break the habit.
"Even in high school, my boyfriend and I would stay up until 3 in the morning talking on the phone and be up at 6:30 in the morning to go to classes," she said. "It causes more stress because I am not working on an assignment that's due the next day until 10, but really what it comes down to is it's just the fact that that is the time that I am energized and have more focus for it."
Other students find that they simply cannot fit everything that needs to be done into the day.
Pearl Rhein, a fifth-year senior majoring in theater, said the difficulty of juggling classes, work and a demanding rehearsal schedule control her erratic sleep pattern.
"I have responsibilities that need to get done that I did not manage to take care of during the day because my schedule is so busy," she said. "So by the time I can actually start studying, it is already late."
Rhein said although she averages between four and six hours of sleep a night, it would be unrealistic to sacrifice an activity in return for a few extra hours of sleep.
"It's not like I have 12 leisure activities that I don't need to do," she said. "I have to go to class to stay in school, and I have to work to pay for school."
While much of the research has focused on how sleep deprivation can affect immediate functioning, Dr. Amschler said there have been studies on extreme examples of sleep deprivation.
"The longest a person has gone without sleep is something like 11 days," she said. "But if you sleep-deprive laboratory rats for an indefinite period of time, the rat will die. That is the most extreme long-term effect. If the body is not allowed to sleep, it will die."
In addition, Amschler said studies have discovered that people who do not get enough sleep are more likely to gain weight.
"A lot of people assume if I lie in bed asleep, I won't burn any calories, and I'll gain weight." Amschler said. "But it doesn't work that way. When you are not as efficient at utilizing your sugar and you are converting it to fat more, you are more likely to have heart disease, and you are more likely to be diabetic."
In turn, being overweight could lead to sleep apnea, which is a sleeping disorder that causes a person to stop breathing during sleep and prevents them from reaching a state of restorative sleep.
Bullis said during sleep apnea, as a person starts to fall asleep, part of the process is that the muscles in their body begin to relax. He said this could cause problems in some people because the soft tissue in their throat collapses shut, which blocks their air passage and stops their breathing. He added as a person starts to suffocate, they wake up and the muscles start to tighten back up until the airway reopens and they start breathing. Gradually, they fall back to sleep.
He said in the college student age group, the condition is usually caused by enlarged tonsils and can frequently be cured by having the tonsils removed. It can also be caused by obesity. Dr. Bullis said people who have sleep apnea tend to snore badly and usually have short, thick necks.
Perhaps the most documented risk of sleep deprivation is the possible onset of insomnia.
"If you are constantly staying up, you are messing up all the body's normal regulatory mechanisms that help us fall asleep," Bullis said. "It puts all of those mechanisms into conflict, and, after a while, these mechanisms lose their ability to even attempt to reconcile the conflict, and then you have somebody who has no idea when it is time to go to bed."
To combat the practice of sleep deprivation, Amschler suggested educating students of the relationship between sleep and good health.
"We need to understand that sleep is essential, it is food for the brain," she said. "The proper amount of sleep for human beings ranges from seven to nine hours, and for most people, about eight or nine is really good, and most of us just aren't getting enough, and so we are settling for a poorer quality of life. We'd probably feel better, we'd have more energy, we'd probably perform better in the classroom and on the job if we'd have a little more sleep and not feel guilty about it."
Although late nights are a part of almost every college student's life, Bullis said evidence suggests going to sleep early is more effective than forcing yourself to stay awake to study.
"People who seem to get eight hours of sleep a night tend to do well on their tests, and they're able to get all their work done, and they never get stressed out," Bullis said. "More and more, I wonder if it's because they made the choice to get eight hours of sleep and then use the rest of their time to get as much as they could done. It could have been those decisions that actually made their life better and made them perform better in school, rather than the fact that they were just intrinsically smarter and more efficient than the rest of us."
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