Renee Rosenow

It has been estimated by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) that nearly 40 million Americans are not getting enough sleep. I have found it to be a very dysfunctional practice to stay up late working on homework only to fall asleep in class tomorrow and end up staying up late trying to make sense of an assignment that would have been doable had I stayed awake during class. It’s a vicious circle resulting in a mediocre grade for the class.

According to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research (NCSDR), the direct cost of American sleep deprivation is approximately $15.9 million from incidences directly relating to sleep loss. Directly related costs can be attributed to workplace injuries, car accidents and machine malfunction cost.

The NCSDR continues to note that anywhere from $50 billion to $100 billion are paid annually for indirect and other related costs, and the Department of Transportation cites sleep deprivation as the cause for almost 100,000 car crashes each year resulting in 71,000 injuries and 1,550 fatalities.

These costs are important and tragic, but in this case we don’t really care; we are concerned about our ability to learn new information and be able to retain it at least until finals week. A Harvard study that measured the effects of fatigue on the human brain noted that sleep deprivation severely limited one’s ability to make sense of new information and inhibited the subject’s ability to remember the new information after a period of time. The study found that students who were awake for 35 hours before the test (viewing sets of images) scored up to 40 percent worse than students who had gotten a reasonable amount of sleep the night before. The same sleep deprived students actually scored 19 percent worse two days later after “catching up” on their sleep.

This tells us that the brain cannot retain information under highly fatigued circumstances. So to all you bobbing heads that I see in my lectures – you and your heavy-jumping eyelids – make a plan to get to bed earlier because the effects of sleeplessness are more long-term than many of us have wanted to believe.

We then might ask what it is that causes us to stay up until the wee hours of the morning doing nothing of importance. Well, it might be many things – the most commonly cited cause for sleeplessness is stress. In our college setting, we encounter this on a regular basis with multiple classes (each with their own set of rigorous demands) added to our attempts to have a social life.

It’s hard to believe that we get any sleep at all. But, as I said earlier, it is the vicious circle that starts with you losing sleep and ends with you being lost in a class resulting in heightened levels of stress further resulting in lowered levels of sleep, and further accumulation of stress. The one thing that can break this cycle is sleep. Start to love it and it will help you out.

Thompson is a sophomore environmental and public health major. This column appears biweekly.