Dylan Stoll | Health Editor
Featured Image: Experts recommend that young adults get seven hours on a daily basis. | Courtesy of Pixabay
If your sleeping habits have been put on the back-burner since you arrived at university, you’re not alone.
On average, 80 per cent of students get less than seven hours of sleep; the minimum required amount for young adults aged 18 to 25.
But how important is sleep? Researchers say that sleep is connected to mental health, emotional well-being, memory consolidation, and alertness. In addition to your physical health in general, acquiring the minimum amount of regular sleep is as necessary as getting a regular oil change for your car.
If you’re the type of person to sleep irregularly, or if you feel that you may not be getting enough sleep, you may recognize some of the symptoms associated with chronic sleep deprivation — symptoms such as a lack of alertness, impaired memory, relationship stress, or an overall decrease in the quality of your life in general.
This can cause even more problems, such as an increased risk for stroke, or high blood pressure.
Besides risking your life with every wink of sleep you lose, a lack of sleep will also adversely affect your grades. You may think you’re doing yourself a favour pulling all-nighters studying the night before an exam, but in reality, you’re just making circumstances more difficult for your brain.
While researching the relationship between exercise and grades, two MIT professors inadvertently gathered data on sleep patterns and discovered a not-so-subtle correlation between sleep and grades.
The students who received less sleep, or who went to sleep past 2 a.m., were found to have lower grades. This is a correlation that one of the professors, Jeffrey Grossman, describes as a “strong indication” that sleep “really, really matters.”
So how much sleep are you getting? A third-year biology student at York, who wishes to remain anonymous, explains how difficult it can be to get the sleep they require during the semester.
I’d say I get around six hours on average. I’m always doing something, whether it be studying or work so it gets kind of hard to sleep the amount that I’d like to.”
Despite what scientists say, sleep is still widely uncharted territory. Just last March, researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Oxford in England collaborated to finally determine the networks used by the brain during sleep.
The research, as stated by one of the researchers Angus Stevner, “provides a new and potentially revolutionary understanding of brain activity during sleep which can in turn lead to new forms of treatment of the sleep problems that affect far too many people.”
