Sleep Well, Do Well
Written by Tina Pan
Edited by Miriam Bermejo
September 27th, 2023
Edited by Miriam Bermejo
September 27th, 2023
Health and Wellness
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Ever wonder how important sleep is especially for college students? A good night’s sleep is one of the most common recommendations made by health professionals. Many of us know how important it is to get adequate sleep every night but it can be hard sometimes to get the sleep we need. A research study looked into the sleep quantity and variability of students in their first semester of university and how that affects their well-being, academic performance GPA, and happiness.
There is an association between having average weekly sleep with greater weekly happiness and less anxiety. Then weekly sleep variability, meaning the lack of consistency, is associated with lower happiness and more anxiety which the researchers hypothesized. In a study, a group of 97 students in their first-semester psychology course at college was assessed for 15 weeks. The students used weekly journals which were part of the introductory psychology course. The journals were based on their well-being which would later be mapped onto the research and presented in the class. To measure their weekly happiness and anxiety students reported on a form how often they experienced an emotion (happy/anxious) each week on a scale that ranged from “Not at all (0)” to “Extremely (6)”. To measure the sleep amount and variability, each week students recorded how much sleep they got each school night. Then the researchers took the standard deviation of the amount of sleep they got per week to find the sleep variability throughout the semester. Each week on Sunday mornings, students were emailed a link to a form where they recorded their sleep amount along with how they felt during that week. Although compliance was high, there was an average of 14.40 out of the 15 students completing their forms. Through this study, the results showed that the higher variability in sleep throughout the semester was predicted to show lower end-of-semester happiness and GPA. Researchers received written consent from the students to obtain their GPAs from academic records. This also applies to lower weekly average weekly happiness and higher anxiety. There are limitations to this study such as how the data was tracked and recorded, and the sample size of students. These results point out that having consistent sleep may be beneficial to students.
In the end, this gives us just a slight insight into how the importance of sleep affects college students, especially during an important transition period like this. This research study is on the smaller side there could be other limitations that could affect the data such as the group of students in this study, the environment they were in, and is the college in a quarter or semester system. Hopefully, in the future, we can see more studies on the importance of getting a good night's rest to see how the variability of sleep affects college students.
Ever wonder how important sleep is especially for college students? A good night’s sleep is one of the most common recommendations made by health professionals. Many of us know how important it is to get adequate sleep every night but it can be hard sometimes to get the sleep we need. A research study looked into the sleep quantity and variability of students in their first semester of university and how that affects their well-being, academic performance GPA, and happiness.
There is an association between having average weekly sleep with greater weekly happiness and less anxiety. Then weekly sleep variability, meaning the lack of consistency, is associated with lower happiness and more anxiety which the researchers hypothesized. In a study, a group of 97 students in their first-semester psychology course at college was assessed for 15 weeks. The students used weekly journals which were part of the introductory psychology course. The journals were based on their well-being which would later be mapped onto the research and presented in the class. To measure their weekly happiness and anxiety students reported on a form how often they experienced an emotion (happy/anxious) each week on a scale that ranged from “Not at all (0)” to “Extremely (6)”. To measure the sleep amount and variability, each week students recorded how much sleep they got each school night. Then the researchers took the standard deviation of the amount of sleep they got per week to find the sleep variability throughout the semester. Each week on Sunday mornings, students were emailed a link to a form where they recorded their sleep amount along with how they felt during that week. Although compliance was high, there was an average of 14.40 out of the 15 students completing their forms. Through this study, the results showed that the higher variability in sleep throughout the semester was predicted to show lower end-of-semester happiness and GPA. Researchers received written consent from the students to obtain their GPAs from academic records. This also applies to lower weekly average weekly happiness and higher anxiety. There are limitations to this study such as how the data was tracked and recorded, and the sample size of students. These results point out that having consistent sleep may be beneficial to students.
In the end, this gives us just a slight insight into how the importance of sleep affects college students, especially during an important transition period like this. This research study is on the smaller side there could be other limitations that could affect the data such as the group of students in this study, the environment they were in, and is the college in a quarter or semester system. Hopefully, in the future, we can see more studies on the importance of getting a good night's rest to see how the variability of sleep affects college students.