Should college students be getting more sleep?

Sydney Waloven wakes up at 8:50 a.m. every Friday after going to bed just hours before. She tells herself she can catch up on the sleep later as she rushes across campus to get to class. Waloven is one student out of more than 8,000 at Oswego. Is her case rare, or are students really getting such poor sleep?

“College is a time where you don’t have a lot of options because you have to get so much stuff done, you want to have a social life and it turns out that it’s [balance] much more difficult,” SUNY Oswego professor Brian Rundle said.

Rundle earned his doctorate in Psychology with a focus in Behavioral Neuroscience from Baylor University. Currently in his first semester at the college, Rundle is teaching courses such as research methods, abnormal psychology and biopsychology.

“It makes sense that college students are struggling with it and don’t get enough sleep because there’s so much going on,” Rundle said.

To gain a better understanding of how much, or how little students are sleeping, a survey of SUNY Oswego students was conducted on how much students sleep versus how much they should be sleeping. Several volunteers were also selected to track their sleep progression for a month with the help of technology such as FitBits.

Waloven, a sophomore at SUNY Oswego, volunteered to track her sleep for the month of October.

“I usually sleep wearing a Fitbit anyway,” Waloven said. “I like to track how much sleep I get; it’s not a lot. I know it’s bad.”

During the month of October, Waloven averaged about 5.75 hours of sleep per night due to a range of factors including sickness, partying, hanging out with friends and studying.

According to survey results, 69 percent of responders sleep between six and eight hours per night. Out of these responders, 67.2 percent also considered “six to eight hours” a healthy amount of sleep.

While the appropriate amount of sleep has been under scientific debate in recent years, Rundle thinks a majority of people will fall within the scale of “seven or eight, plus or minus two.”

“The recommendation has always been, ‘get a good 8 hours of sleep’ but that can vary from person to person, I think it’s rare for people to be really really optimal at four to five hours of sleep, but those people do exist,” Rundle said.

Sandra Bargainnier, the department chair for SUNY Oswego’s Health Promotion and Wellness program, agreed with Rundle’s assumption and says most 18–24 year olds will require seven to nine hours, but also repeated the notion that everyone is different.

Bargainnier has a doctorate in Curriculum and Teaching with a focus on Human Movement in Health. Her degree focuses on teaching and researching subjects such as the human response to stress and mind, body and overall wellness.

“Some people don’t need as much sleep as others and some need more,” Bargainnier said. “I’m not so hung up on the hours of sleep as the quality of the sleep and the regularity of the sleep.”

A lack of sleep can contribute to a plethora of issues, which Rundle attributes to a lack of cognitive resources. Cognitive resources refer to, “the amount of what your brain can do and how much is available to think and make decisions.”

“As you go throughout the day as you do a lot of mental tasks and eventually you’re going to be like, ‘ugh my brain is tired,’” Rundle said. “You get exhausted and so you’re ready for sleep, so if you don’t get a lot of sleep, you’re not really replenishing your cognitive resources.”

Bargainnier asserted that a lack of sleep can lead to health issues, with cognitive problems being the first to appear.

“It’s more cognitive, you know you can’t focus, you’re irritable, you’re grumpy,” Bargainnier said.

Bargainnier also said lack of sleep can cause other problems though, including running down the immune system, getting sick more often or taking longer to heal.

Rundle also said there is research demonstrating a correlation between a lack of sleep and health issues such as high blood pressure and insulin issues.

“A lot of certain cellular processes have to occur when you’re sleeping,” Rundle said. “I wouldn’t say it’s quite brain damage, but its not giving your brain what it needs, so at a certain point you’ll hit a point of diminishing returns.”

The survey suggested there are a variety of factors that prevent students from reaching their desired amount of sleep. The most frequently mentioned factors were homework, work, studying, roommates, social life and weekend activities/partying, binge watching TV or playing video games, as well as a slew of mental health issues including depression, anxiety, stress or insomnia. Other factors mentioned by students were eating or drinking too late, the temptation of the internet and late night inspiration to draw or write.

Many students attributed their lack of sleep to poor time management or tendency to procrastinate so their work time ends up getting pushed further and further into the night. When asked how impactful these external factors were, 57.9 percent said “very much so.”

While students said they often skip out on sleep to complete work, it frequently results in a lose-lose situation where they become less productive due to sleep deprivation.

When asked about this topic, all three professors unanimously agreed that skipping out on sleep is not as good an idea as it might seem, and all nighters in particular can be more damaging than originally thought.

“It [sleep deprivation] affects your ability to remember and think, ‘I remember hearing that in class,’”Rundle said. “There’s lots of research that shows going to class, just by virtue of going and listening is going to help your grade versus never going and reading just the book, but by going and not hearing anything, you might as well have not gone, so staying up late to get work done will not be worth it because you can’t do good work running on empty.”

SUNY Oswego professor Samara Rice earned her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in Quantitative Psychology and Methodology. At SUNY Oswego, Rice focuses her research on utilizing statistics and statistical analysis of college students and various risky health behaviors.

“College students have the idea of staying up all night studying and working hard is a good thing but of course your cognitive capacity, when you haven’t gotten enough sleep for an exam, you might not be able to do as well had you gotten enough sleep the night before,” Rice said.

Rice recalled an instance in which she had a very diligent student miss an exam due to the negative consequences of an all nighter.

“She was not present for the exam,” Rice said. “I thought she must be really sick or something, it’s not like her for her to just miss and not email me. She then contacted me after and turns out she had been up all night studying for the exam, closed her eyes just for a second and slept through her alarm and missed the exam she stayed up all night studying for and ended up getting a zero on an exam when she was trying to get an A.”

In an effort to compensate for a lack of sleep, survey and sleep tracking results showed SUNY Oswego students heavily relied on the use of caffeine in coffee and energy drinks with the addition of naps to make it through the day. In Rundle’s opinion, the short nap is the best option if a full REM cycle can be achieved which usually occurs in an hour and a half.

According to the American Sleep Association REM sleep is the 5th stage of sleep, and it takes about 70 to 90 minutes to achieve. REM stands for rapid eye movement which is used to distinguish sleep patterns. When a person is in REM sleep, their eyes move rapidly in various directions, their heart rate increases, their breathing may become fast or irregular and their limbs should become temporarily paralyzed.

REM sleep is the final stage, and it is also the stage where a person experiences dreaming. It is believed that protein production increases during REM sleep and affects a person’s ability to learn certain mental skills.

“Things like caffeine only pharmacologically alter your state of mind, they are stimulants but they don’t necessarily mean that they are restoring you, they just get you motivated to keep pushing through,” Rundle said. “They’re helpful if you get a good night’s sleep and want to get motivated throughout the day, but I think doing the thing where ‘I’m not getting enough sleep so I have to have my coffee’ and using coffee as a compensation for sleep never works. You’re never compensating for sleep, you’re just helping yourself forget that you didn’t get enough sleep.”

Rundle said one of the fundamental rules he teaches is that there are no free rides in nature.

“You can’t pharmacologically give yourself what sleep can give you,” Rundle said. “You just can’t argue with it. You can’t eat processed food and say it’s going to be a good or better than natural whole foods. There are no free rides.”

In an effort to get more sleep and at a higher quality, there are various methods suggested by professionals.

Rundle suggested keeping a sleep diary, recording how much sleep a person had the night before and a small note on how they felt that day as a result, to try to find what he called the “sweet spot.”

“You definitely can have too much and you can have too little so you have to find that sweet spot in between and I think some people could have two very different answers,” Rundle said.

Bargainnier said ‘good sleep hygiene’ is also something to consider and consists of trying to create a routine and comfortable environment to increase the amount and quality of sleep each night.

“A quiet space, a cooler space rather than a warmer space, have a regular schedule — it’s really important to go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time,” Bargainnier said. “Even if you stay up late on a Friday night, get up at the same time, because you can’t bank it, there’s not a sleep deposit box.”

If someone is having trouble going to sleep or having good sleep, Bargainnier suggests getting rid of caffeine, having an hour of quiet time before bed, taking a warm bath, reading a book (not on an electronic device), eliminating TV, eating a lighter meal or meditating.

Rice emphasized that although sleep can be often overlooked, getting enough sleep is important, not only for academic performance, but also for overall health, citing poor mental health, especially anxiety, as another negative effect.

Rundle admitted he didn’t get very much sleep in college.

“I had my all nighters and stuff like that and so looking back I would say, ‘get more sleep because you’ll be fine,’” Rundle said. “It’s so much less serious than I used to think it was.”