I’m so sleepy right now. In fact, I’m so sleepy that I can barely keep my eyes open as I write this blog.
It’s 9:33pm, I took three tests today, and had an ear-piercing music rehearsal for two hours. Oh, and not to mention the ubiquitous stress that eats away at my soul every passing second.
Funny enough, these thoughts are nothing new. As your stereotypical stressed-out high schooler, sleep is on my mind from the moment I wake up to brushing my teeth.
It looks like I’m not alone when I say I’m always stressed. In our generation, students are more anxious and sleep-deprived than ever.
The thing is, though, I hardly manage my time in a way that maximizes my sleep time. Ironic, I know, but I still waste hours on social media and video games despite my constant craving for rest.
I know for a fact that it’s not just me, however. While there is no doubt in my mind that many of you reading this have superior time management skills, there’s that impulsive side of us that sacrifices our sleep time for something else.
Maybe it’s that one friend who’s always begging to hang out, or that episode of The Office that you can’t wait to rewatch for 8th time. Regardless of the scenario, we’re always finding ways to replace a chunk of sleep to do something else—that’s the mentality that plagues us all as students.
We’ve all been here, at one point or another
Let me explain. We undeniably love sleep. We understand its importance. We know it’s critical to our health and cognitive prowess. And yet, we’re so ready to sacrifice it for something far less important. In a sense, it’s quite paradoxical: we hold sleep so dear to us and yet we’ll sacrifice it in a heartbeat.
Okay, maybe you’re not convinced at how ridiculous this situation is. Perhaps a couple analogies will help.
I gotta look good in public. I need to take care of my skin, brush my teeth, and work out… Wait. What’s this? The new season of Stranger Things? I’ll skip the gym and eat a bag of cheetos so I can binge this all night!
I love my dog. It’s so fluffy and cute, and an integral part of my happiness. Let me just throw it out the window so I can text my friends instead of walking it in this weather.
I’ve been friends with this guy for over 10 years. He just called me three minutes ago saying how he was burning in a wildfire and needed my help, but I hung up so I could go play Xbox!
Maybe some of these were over the top, but you get the point. Appearance, pets, close friends—all of these are things that we strongly value and would never throw away for the sake of something insignificant.
So why should we neglect our sleep so willingly? A couple days ago, I came across this popular reddit post analyzing the long term effects of sleep deprivation, and that was enough to knock me awake at 1am.
I’ll let you take a closer read of the article here, but I’ll still cover the main takeaways from this crucial post.
For all you biology buffs out there, we know how important telomeres are. They’re extensions off the tips of our chromosomes, and regulate how fast we age. Over time, these telomeres shorten, resulting in the typical effects we experience as we grow older. You know—wrinkles, aching bones, all of that good stuff.
Visual representation of telomere shortening
For people that sleep 7 hours or more on a daily basis, their telomeres shorten as a natural, healthy pace. For people that sleep 5 or less? Unsurprisingly, their telomeres shorten at a much faster rate. According to a publication from PubMed, “telomeres were on average 6% shorter in men sleeping 5 hours or fewer compared with those sleeping more than 7 hours per night.”
Now, I know what you’re thinking. 6%? That’s practically nothing! Well, percentage off a test? Yes—it’s whatever. Percentage off your lifespan? That’s quite a bit.
As the sleepless nights rack up gradually, our biological age increases at a pace that’s in complete discord from our actual age. We may look fine now, but we could end up looking like we’re 45 by the time we’re 30.
Let’s look at the bigger picture. If we continue our habit of sleep neglection and all-nighters, we could be suffering some serious problems down the road. The appearance we tried so hard to maintain will be inevitably ruined by wrinkles and creases. Our hyperactive dogs will be too much for our constant back pain.
What I’m trying to say is: the things we value so strongly could suffer serious collateral damage from our sleep neglection. You probably chuckled at the ridiculousness of my previous analogies, but the message remains clear. Treat your sleep the same way you treat your friends or your appearance, because our current mentalities are pretty ridiculous themselves.
And to those who still don’t believe me, perhaps a TED video explaining of effects of sleep deprivation is enough to make you reconsider.
Would you look at that—11:20pm already. It’s about time I get to bed myself.
Works Cited
https://www.inverse.com/article/60883-fitbit-sleeplessness-aging-telomeres
Marta Jackowska, Mark Hamer, Livia A. Carvalho, Jorge D. Erusalimsky, Lee Butcher and Andrew Steptoe
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3483149/
Yup, I completely agree with this sentiment. In sophomore and (especially) junior year, I was consistently getting around 6 hours of sleep during the busiest part of the year, with speech competition and other, less-important commitments eating away at my rest. Now in senior year, though, I think I’ve figured out how to prioritize the really important things: I’ll set strict timers for myself, and sprint to finish my homework and obligations before that time. As soon as the clock strikes, I shut off my computer and head upstairs.
Surprisingly, in perhaps the busiest time of my high school career, I’m getting the most sleep I have since freshman year.
Yet, like everyone, I still wish I could have more.
It’s really interesting to see the scientific reasons behind why we need sleep and what its absence can do to our body! I’ve always been super interested in the proccesses of aging and our telomere progression, but I had no idea that sleep patterns could be a direct cause of aging, beyond some wrinkles and bagginess. I know that, historically, scientists used to believe that going to sleep was basically just an off switch for your body, and thus not all that important health-wise, but it’s kinda cool to see how much actually takes place in the hours when we are lost to the world.
As someone who regularly gets less than half the reccomended hours of sleep a night, thank you very much, your post launched me into an existential crisis–I really need to better plan out my time haha.