With students quickly transitioning from a relaxing vacation to a stressful academic environment, an overlooked aspect emerges: sleep. The festive holiday season often translates into disrupted sleep schedules, which leaves students on the brink of a new semester with little energy. For this reason, it is important to recognize the importance of sleep and learn how to prioritize it.
According to the CDC, teens should sleep 8-10 hours a night. Teens require so much sleep because they are in a time of fast intellectual, physical, and emotional growth. Sleep aids the brain in a great number of functions, such as learning and memory, emotional regulation, and related brain structure development. Many of these brain functions are helpful to students’ academic success, and this correlation has been consistently demonstrated by research.
A two-year study analyzing 600 college freshmen concluded that sleep is directly correlated with their grade-point average. Students with lower average nightly sleep early in the academic term predicted lower end-of-term GPA than those who got sufficient sleep. This proves that the amount of sleep a student gets is one of the strongest predictors of academic success. Students who got the proper amount of sleep at night stayed focused, concentrated, and overall, improved their academic performance.
However, high school students are notorious for not getting enough sleep, with the average number of hours they get being between 7 and 7.25 hours. Students commonly face sleep deprivation due to various factors such as school work, social activities, part-time jobs, and extracurricular activities.
Since so many students (57.8%) report insufficient sleep, it is important to learn how to prioritize it by eliminating screen time and not pulling all-nighters.
A big way to prioritize sleep is to eliminate screen time before bed. With technology being such an important part of day-to-day life, 92.4% of participants reported using their phones at bedtime in a 2019 study. Screentime is proven to disrupt your body’s circadian rhythm, which inhibits your brain from producing melatonin, the sleep hormone. Powering your phone down an hour or two before bed will be beneficial when it comes to falling asleep faster.
According to Medical News Today, 20% of college students pull an all-nighter every month, and 35% stay up past 3 AM at least one night every week. Not pulling all-nighters is also an important step towards emphasizing sleep. Pulling all-nighters deprives the immune system and increases the risk of chronic illnesses. Maintaining a healthy body is important to academic success.
As students transition from the break, it is important to remember the importance of sleep and learn how to prioritize it by eliminating screen time and not pulling all-nighters.
