Sleep Debt for a College Student

Responsibilities, jobs, homework are a few reasons that college students do not get the amount of sleep they need to every night.

So many students have such big responsibilities that they are forced to stay up late at night to get their assignments done. Many students who are in college have no choice but to have a job and because of long and late hours students are often deprived of the sleep they are needing to fulfill the tasks they need to get accomplished.The passage “Sleep Debt and the Mortgaged Mind” refers to the Exxon Valdez and how that because of sleep debt we had to experience the worst oil spill America had ever experienced. The National Transportation Safety Board said that the very cause of the crashing of the Exxon Valdez had to do with sleep debt.

Sleep debt is caused when a person does not sleep the number of hours that is needed for a period of time and those numbers continue to go up the longer you go without having any sleep. For every two hours you are awake your body needs one hour of sleep to make up for it.This is a very good example of the damage that can be caused by sleep debt. “The Exxon Valdez disaster offers a good example of how sleep debt can create a tragedy and how the true villain sleep indebtedness remains concealed” (Dement and Vaughan 498). “An even more dramatic tragedy was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger” (Dement and Vaughan 499).

These two events led to so much destruction just for the simple cause that someone had not gotten enough sleep. In the passage “How Sleep Debt Hurts College Students” the effects of sleep deprivation was tested on forty-four college students.The participants either had to go twenty-four hours with no sleep or about eight hours of sleep. After they were done with the assignment they were required to take two questionnaires, one of them was testing the effort and concentration of the students and the other was testing off task ideas. Just like expected, the sleep-deprived participants did worse than the participants who had gotten the eight hours of sleep did. The participants who had gotten no sleep had a higher rate of concentration then the participants with sleep.

Another important consideration is the effect of sleep deprivation on an individual’s ability to accurately assess psychological variables, such as concentration, effort, and estimated performance” (Pilcher and Walters 514). Many college students are not aware of the damage being caused by sleep deprivation. This article helps readers who are in college to stop and think about what sleep deprivation is really doing to them and their ability to perform to the best of their ability in their own school work.By writing about the results of sleep a deprivation experiment we see that not getting sleep really is doing harm to what we can accomplish.

The article “A Greater College Debt” is about how sleep debt can be viewed as a load that is being carried around on your shoulders. The more you go without sleeping the bigger the load of sleep debt you are carrying around. “The most effective way to reverse the effects of sleep debt is extra sleep” (Ashton). Once your body reaches a certain point it can only carry so much and you are forced to sleep.

Sleep debt can cause your grades and you performance in your schoolwork in general to decline. Some students never notice they are carrying around so much sleep debt until they are sitting in a class and it is taking everything in them to stay awake and keep their eyes from shutting. When we know we are not getting the amount of needed hours of sleep we have to make it a point to make up those hours of sleep to get rid of that sleep debt. When we are well rested, we are able to get more work done and perform the tasks that need to be completed to the best of our ability.This is a very good way to look at sleep deprivation.

I have witnesses for myself as I get less sleep; it seems that like it takes much more of an effort to get the simple tasks that have to be accomplished during each day done. At some point we all start to carry to much weight on our shoulders and our bodies have no choice but to make us get some sleep. Each of these articles has a different way of representing the idea that sleep deprivation can cause many different things. They all say that sleep debt has to be paid back by getting more sleep then what was missed.There have been proven studies show that students who do not get the proper amount of sleep required for their body do not perform as well on daily tasks and assignments as those students who are getting the right amount of needed sleep time each night.

We never think about what staying up late trying to get the last minute assignments done without getting sleep is really doing to our bodies physically and our abilities to perform to the best we can. “Sleep debt affects everything from simple human performance to one’s mood” (Ashton).Sleep deprivation is something that we do not even notice at times, we skip sleeping one night and the next day ignore the sleepiness and this goes on for days until we finally collapse under the weight being carried around because of our lack of sleep. We all have to realize that we must find a way to manage our time better to get the things that are the most important done when we have time during the day instead of staying up late during the night when we should be getting sleep.We are not only putting ourselves at risk when we do not get sleep, but we are putting everyone that we are around or have contact with at risk also.

If we get in a car to drive and we have had no sleep in the past twenty-four hours we are putting everyone else on the highways at risk of us falling asleep behind the wheel. With all of the responsibility college students have they often put off doing assignments until the night when they should be sleeping. The long hours they work instead of doing the tasks they need to get done causes many students to be sleep deprived.We have to learn to manage our time in a better way to get the tasks done so that we can still get the sleep needed to maintain our health and our overall ability to perform in our everyday life the best that we are able to do. Sleep debt is something that is becoming more common in college students, if everyone can be aware of the problems that are causes by sleep debt then we have a better chance at sleep debt becoming not so much of a problem for college students.