I was tired. My eyelids had developed a mind of their own, and seemed to be losing their fight against gravity. It was Thursday afternoon, and while I sat in Perkins with my MCAT notes in front of me, sleep was awfully tempting.
I woke up after an hour. I looked up groggily around me. Still quiet. I started to kick myself. I had just wasted an hour on sleep. These MCAT notes weren’t going to study themselves. I looked at my watch. It was 2:30 p.m. Then I remembered that the Lupe Fiasco show was that night.
At that moment I was torn into three separate directions: I wanted to go to my room and curl up into bed. I needed to buckle down and finish studying my MCAT notes, and I also wanted to leave, meet up with my friends and go to the show. I realized that my predicament was indicative of the dilemmas many college students face.
Good grades, a good social life or enough sleep? Choose two of the three. At that moment I could have taken a nap, then studied. I could have studied then gone to the show. I could have taken a nap and then gone to the show. Not all three. The importance of good grades is obvious. At the same time, a social life is what college is supposed to be about—these are our years of irresponsibility, folks! After this, we can no longer party whenever we want or meet so many similar people in one place. I took a few deep breaths and got back to work. After struggling through a couple of hours of physics and organic chemistry, I packed up my things, put a hat on backwards and ventured over to Central Campus to see Mr. Fiasco, despite my aching eyes and a groggy mind. What would you have done?
Sleep has been identified as an important factor in memory function, concentration and motor skills. In fact, if you have gone 28 hours without sleep, according to a 2000 study published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, you could potentially have equally impaired cognitive and motor abilities as someone with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.1 percent. Should we have designated drivers in Perkins?
In 2009, a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health reported that 25 percent of 1,125 students surveyed got 6.5 hours of sleep or less each night. Many students wait until the weekend to catch up on sleep. Yet that beneficial catch-up sleep is almost negated if students drink alcohol. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol interferes with normal sleep patterns. This means that even if people fall asleep more quickly after drinking, they sleep more fitfully during the second half of sleep. This can occur even if you consume “a moderate dose of alcohol” six hours before you go to bed. The sleep after a night of drinking is not restful and doesn’t rejuvenate us the way a night of sober sleep would have.
College students are limited by time. It often appears that there is not enough time for us to do all that we want in a day. Most of us want to get all that we can out of college, and this includes making good grades while still leading fulfilling social lives. Sometimes our ambitions to have both of these means we forfeit important shut-eye. Although time is a major constraint, the fact that staying up to socialize with friends interferes with sleep, and it is pretty hard to study while sleeping, means that these three things are mutually exclusive.
Did you ever stay up late studying for an exam and then perform worse than you expected? You probably felt that all the time you spent studying went to waste. Instead, you should have cut your losses and gone to sleep. It has been shown that sleep allows us to consolidate information in our brains and to better retrieve that information when it matters.
Have you ever gone out one night or been around friends, because you wanted to “unwind,” only to find that you were cranky, negative and generally bringing down the mood of the group? Has this ever coincided with being tired from a lack of sleep the night before? Instead of going out with your friends, a better way to unwind would have been to jump in bed and get a good night’s rest.
We frequently forgo sleep to study or party instead, but a lack of sleep actually impairs our performance in either of these capacities. A rested, alert mind is necessary for success in any aspect of life, and sleep is necessary for maximum brain performance.
Balance is key in college, and it often takes years before we learn how to achieve an optimal combination of studying, socializing and snoozing. Many of you got about four hours of sleep last night—if you were considering going out tonight, or pulling an all-nighter, maybe you should think again. Get some sleep.
Milap Mehta is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Wednesday.
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