Sleep Deprivation Among College Students

Sleep Deprivation In high school I made sure to always have a perfect sleep schedule. I would make sure that I got my full eight hours, so I would feel renewed and vibrant the next day. Whenever college began I had that same mentality, however then the stress of becoming an independent adult hit me, and then it all fell apart. I became restless at night and my mind would begin to think about millions of things at once. Then the effects began to hit me, I become irritable, unable to focus, my body felt weak, and my eyes always felt heavy. Sleep deprivation is something that affects many people experience this at some point, whether it is from stress, college, personal problems, or work. Which creates a problem, as the effects of sleep deprivation …show more content…
For example especially in students they can struggle in classes from falling asleep. A study on what amount of college students reported sleep deprivation stated “Sixty percent of Ss [students studied] … reported having engaged in SN-TSD [single night of total sleep deprivation] at least once since coming to college” (Thacher 16). This statistic was the same across all four classes of seniors, juniors, sophomores and freshman; if 66% of students have experienced at least one night of sleeplessness then most of them would understand and have felt the effects of it …show more content…
This would especially affect a student as when they attend a class that is teaching something new that day their brain cannot fully comprehend and focus on what is being taught. Then they go home and try to do the homework and become frustrated as they do not remember what the steps are. I am currently in my first semester of college outside of high school and at the beginning I experienced this effect. It made a huge negative impact on my first college algebra test score. The more time I spent on my homework and studying the harder it felt for me to remember and complete the task. One study even found proof of this and claimed “A typical effect of SD is a time-on-task effect* the phenomenon that performance is initially largely intact but decreases across the time course of a task” (Grundgeiger et al. 683) Proving this wasn’t just an effect only I felt, but many people felt. This same study tested whether or not memory truly is affected by sleep deprivation. The study found “There was a main effect of SD [sleep deprivation] on posttask [sic] recognition memory for the PM [prospective memory] cues. Performance was higher in the no-SD group … than the SD group”. Showing that good sleep is highly important in relation to memory and focus, but those are not the only negative effects of sleep