It’s the night before the grade-determining paper/exam of the semester and you’re feeling woefully unprepared, a twinge of regret over that weekend you spent partying instead of studying creeping into your consciousness. As the night wears on, you gradually realize that if you want to have any hope of getting the grade you need, you’re going to have to sacrifice tonight’s precious pillow time. Pulling an occasional all-nighter doesn’t immediately strike any college student as detrimental to one’s health or education, but in fact, those sleepless nights can have a vast impact on your mental state and your body’s ability to function. Most people falsely assume that as long as they “catch up” on sleep the next day by spending the entire post-test period zonked out, they will not suffer the effects of sleep deprivation. The reality is that the majority of people who pull all-nighters (college students) suffer from at least a low level of chronic sleep deprivation that is acutely exacerbated by a night of no sleep. It has also been shown that those who pull one all-nighter are likely to pull several, and that all-nighters are not as occasional as people would like to believe.
We’ve all heard about getting at least eight hours of sleep each night and, as a general rule, dismissed such advice with a flippant, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” but I urge you to know your limits and not send yourself to an early grave. Lack of sleep can wreak havoc on your body and cause all manners of problems down the road; the following are just a few examples that most pertain to college students.
1. Depression: At a certain level of no sleep, the brain loses its ability to properly regulate hormones, including those that control mood. Unfortunately, the effect is not a prolonged state of euphoria but one of depression. It feels like that period of sleeplessness when everything seems hopeless, but extended. When you are able to get plenty of rest, your brain can control its hormones and prevent you from sinking into depression. The effect can be compared to having a horrible day one day and going to bed with the blues, but then waking up and realizing that whatever the situation, it’s likely not as bad as it seemed the previous night. When your brain rests, it can better function and sort emotions appropriately.
2. Illness: Your body is essentially inhabited by a small army of white blood cells and other germ-fighting cells that go to war with whatever invaders it detects, and when you sleep, your immune system army, much like a real army, is able to rest and recover in preparation for another day. Additionally, there is increasing evidence that lack of sleep now can contribute to the development of health problems later in life, such as heart disease and obesity.
3. A waste of time: Staying up all night does not benefit your mental function either. While you think you are cramming in enough extra information to put you over the bar for the grade you need, you’re actually impairing your brain’s abilities to concentrate on the task at hand and remember those facts you hope to shove in at the 11th hour.
4. Weight gain: Sleep deprivation has been shown to contribute to weight gain because, as with depression, it leads to an imbalance of hormones in the body, specifically ghrelin and leptin that deal with appetite and satiety, respectively. When you don’t get enough sleep, the body produces more ghrelin, which stimulates appetite, and less leptin, which tells the body it is satisfied after a meal. In a chronic state, this cycle leads to increased weight and, eventually, obesity.
5. Emotional lability: This refers to the general sense of crabbiness and moodiness that accompanies exhaustion. When your brain is tired, it is unable to control your emotions and causes you to be happy one minute and sad the next, or having a nice conversation with a friend at one point and yelling at them for being a terrible person the next. It is the state of mind where you blow up at whoever happens to be nearest, whether it’s friends, family or a significant other. I find it often ends with me overly dramatically accusing someone of wronging me in some way that I’ve made overly significant, and then me crying about it until I am able to fall asleep and then waking up feeling slightly foolish. Again, this has much of the “morning after” affects that alcohol can induce (noticing a pattern?), but unfortunately, there are no cocktails on which to blame your crazy mood.
6. Death: While this final point may be overly dramatic, it has actually been demonstrated that lab rats that were prevented from sleeping died within two to three weeks. Additionally, I wanted to reiterate the point that the immediate effects of sleep deprivation can eventually lead to death, such as a car accident from driving while tired or the development of a serious infection (meningitis perhaps) from a weakened immune system or the onset of a chronic illness such as heart disease later in life.
All-nighters are not benign episodes of no sleep. They disrupt your thinking, your ability to control your emotions, your circadian rhythm and your immune system. If you do find yourself in a desperate bind to minimize your sleep and maximize your studying, studies have shown that short bursts of sleep (30 minutes to an hour at a time for a total of 3 to 4 hours a day) throughout the day are the best way to keep your body rested and allow your mind enough reserve to power through those lost hours of sleep and truly benefit you when it comes time to demonstrate your knowledge on the test the next day. Also, after you’ve completed your test, it’s okay to take a short nap (no more than an hour), but try to get your body back on its normal schedule as quickly as possible, even if that means going to bed a little earlier if you feel tired — it’s more beneficial in the long-run than spending the entire day napping. Finally, avoid procrastinating in the future, so that you can sleep before you’re dead.
Katie McBeth is a University Medical student. She can be reached at k.mcbeth@cavalierdaily.com.
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