A student’s brain is still developing and learning new information, thus sleep is vital for retention and application when needed; exams, homework, and quizzes. Sleeping is important for everyone, especially college students—the amount of stress and pressure faced is a leading cause for lack of sleep (Campbell et al., 2018).
The amount of freedom given due to being away from home is a vast adjustment for almost all students, it tends to take a toll on their grades and often enough their sleeping schedules (Campbell et al., 2018). As mentioned earlier, receiving an adequate amount of rest is vital to one’s well-being, not just for the present, since the future will come, and results are based on past decisions; diets, exercise, sleep (Hermann et al., 2018).
Students tend to lose sleep due to assignments, but that is not the only cause—technology, relationships, and extracurriculars take a huge part in this as well. While sleep is not thought of anything more than just something done prior to starting a new day, it has a lot to do with sex, stressors, and lastly emotions (Amaral et al., 2017).
Environmental factors also influence one’s sleep schedules, which can be either a positive or negative depending on how many hours of rest are achieved. Hershner and O’Brien believe that sleep is vital—not only for physiological reasons but also for psychological reasons as well (2018). Psychological reasons would include one’s attention span, overall mood for the day and how their daily tasks are performed, all of which are pre-determined by how much sleep is achieved the night before (Hershner & O’Brien, 2018).
Therefore, the future is laid out by prior health decisions—therefore, all the sleep that is loss affects vital organs; much like the heart (Gawlik et al., 2018). Many people tend to link depression with emotions being faced throughout one’s life yet fail to recognize its connection with sleep deprivation (Baroni et al., 2017).
Depression is not the only negative effect sleep loss could have, anxiety is another result that tends to overwhelm many students, especially while in college (Lao, Tao & Wu, 2016). College students are not provided with the same luxuries seen at home in most cases, this is a leading cause in connecting negative encounters with the overall time spent at college. Consistent issues can lead to only one stressor, many college students tend to link it to disliking college altogether; when in reality it is the lack of sleep that should be held accountable (Elias, Jechura & Woodard 2017).
Sleep deprivation is often a result of not managing time well, lacking balance when it comes to school work and relationships, along with various other instances. A perfect example would be not having a set bedtime, which sounds child-like, but is a serious issue because the total sleep one gets does not meet the suggested cycles for proper retention, development, and application (Liu et al., 2017).
Mental health is connected with the amount of rest a college student receives, many students fail to recognize the detrimental effects it has on them for the rest of their lives (Becker et al., 2018). To many college students sleep is just something they laugh at due to how much homework they have, along with the determination they have to achieve an A. What students fail to realize right now will only become a bigger issue in the future.