“Sleep is for the weak!” is a phrase I hear all too often as a college student. We’re all very busy people — and with that, it is easy to see how adding two to three extra hours to your work day and losing that same time in sleep is a good solution to getting the job done. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead!” you say, defiantly cracking open your third energy drink on a dreadful Monday afternoon.
How can we remain optimally productive when sleep is taking up a whole third of our entire life? This can’t be a sustainable life for us college students! There has to be a better way! Think of all the assignments and studying (or partying!) you can get done with all that extra time! Is it even possible to be well-rested but also survive your most dreadful classes?
Well, lucky for you, it is entirely possible to get good sleep AND good grades — in fact, according to the National Institutes of Health, the two are even related. This study indicates a correlation between sleep duration and GPA, with higher sleep durations leading to generally better grades — but this does not paint the whole picture. I think a lot of people understand, even if they refuse to do it, that more sleep leads to better results in their day-to-day life.
Unfortunately, the arguably more important part of this sleep story goes under many people’s radar. The defining element is actually your sleep patterns. Within the same NIH study, the authors acknowledge a correlation between early birds and getting the worm, with the night owls having worse performance. This sounds totally normal based on a lot of common stereotypes surrounding sleep, but fundamentally, there’s no reason that early risers and late sleepers should perform differently, provided they are working in their preferred environment.
According to this data, our “nocturnal” friends have less consistent sleep schedules, going to bed at vastly different times each night, and this can have seriously damaging effects on your sleep. By going to bed and waking up late, it becomes much more difficult to sleep early on a Sunday night before school, for example. Caffeine plays a large part in perpetuating this cycle by further increasing the variance in your sleep times.
In a medical study by BioMed Central, they surveyed 486 undergrads and found that 96.5% of them consume caffeine in some way. This is a shocking metric to me, because I think that most of these people would actually find more success by sleeping more and “working” less. This sounds outlandish to the average energy drink spammer, who feels the need to stay up till 4 a.m. every morning, but if you look at how efficient your studying actually is, I think you will realize just how much time you are actually wasting by depriving your body of such an essential resource.
Sleep is vital for both memory and learning processes within your brain. By not sleeping, or sleeping poorly, you can decrease your capacity to learn by up to 40%, which can be detrimental to your academics and your time. Giving your body the time it needs to properly process and store information you pick up in class is extremely important to learning. While staying up til 4 a.m. to cram works for some people, just think of how much happier you’d be if you could turn that four-hour study session into a two-hour review with two extra hours of sleep as a bonus.
The fact that this can improve your performance is hard to believe, but it is true! By taking the time to listen to your body, you can save both time and energy on work. A lot of people would argue against me here, talking about deadlines, work overload and late penalties, but in my humble opinion, these either don’t matter or don’t become problems if you really build yourself a good schedule. I have found in my experience that it is always better to ask for that extension and get your rest than it is to push out a low effort piece of work when you’re tired and grumpy.
I think it’s important for us students to remember that these classes do not define our whole lives, and I think people should spend more time prioritizing their health. Remember, one late grade won’t kill you, but not getting enough sleep just might.
