Sleep During Finals Week

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During finals week, students often forgo sleep to prepare for their exams. All of a sudden, the night is seen as a potential study period, and students start to treat sleep like it is a luxury. Little do they know, sleep is not only a necessity, but it is one of the factors that promote academic performance. 

The article “The Eight Hour Sleep Challenge During Finals Week” written by Michael K. Scullen, delves into a study conducted to track sleep–and the lack thereof–and its effects on students. The article states that adults need 7-9 hours of sleep each night, and teenagers need 8-10. When students cut these hours short, they tend to see negative effects past the obvious of being fatigued and lethargic throughout the day. Lack of sleep affects your immune system, increases stress, promotes weight gain, promotes depression, decreases athletic performance, impairs cognitive performance, and–arguably the worst for this topic–reduces concentration and memory retention. The lack of sleep actually ends up hurting students, rather than helping. 

There are four stages of sleep: N1(light sleep), N2 (body relaxing), N3 (deep sleep), and REM sleep (rapid eye movement). Out of all of these stages, REM sleep is the most important for exams, but it is, unfortunately, the sleep that is missed out on the most when students cut sleep short for studying. REM sleep is the stage of sleep where we dream, this is the time our brains use to process new information and commit it to memory. This is the stage where things you have studied are transferred from short-term memory to long-term memory, the stage where studied material is transferred to knowledge. 

In the aforementioned study, eighteen college students were given a grade incentive to sleep for 8 or more hours a night during finals season. Researchers then took the results and compared them with a recent study done at the same university in a different department. At the beginning of the first study, researchers found that fewer than 10% of students sleep eight hours the night before their finals. They also found that students who slept eight or more hours before the final did better than their counterparts. Both studies came to the conclusion that students who sleep eight or more hours do better in exams, and students who restrict their sleep have difficulty sustaining attention and do not retain information as memories.

Students should also ensure to have restful sleep. Take naps during study breaks, follow a sleep schedule, sleep in dark, quiet, and cool environments, and restrict screentime. Students should do everything to ensure a good night’s sleep. That being said, sleep is extremely important for academic performance and should be treated as such. Students should try to study during the day and get a good night’s rest at least a week before exams because it is important to have consecutive good nights of sleep to fully function.