Stress and Sleep Deficits in College

According to a new study published by in the Journal of Adolescent Health (via Inside Higher Ed),  “stress” is the most significant factor that inhibits normal sleep patterns in college students. The thousands of Cornell students who have taken Psych 101 with Maas already know that eight hours of sleep is necessary for optimal function during the daytime. This study investigated the factors that drive irregular sleep patterns:

Sixty-eight percent of the college students surveyed reported that “stress” was the factor that “most interferes with initiating sleep.” The next most popular rationales identified were “temperature” at 10 percent and “light or noise” at 8 percent. More than half of those who reported that “stress” kept them awake at night clarified that the stress was “academic” in nature as opposed to “emotional.”

This strikes me as a bit odd. From my personal experience, there are several reasons why college  students stay up late in dormitory settings and don’t get enough sleep: 1) Lots of interesting people to hang out with after “bedtime”;  2) Finishing assignments that could have easily been done earlier in the day. 3) Not feeling tired because of irregular sleeping patterns on the weekends, which are caused by some combination of drinking and sleeping in. Maybe my sample of Cornell friends are more “mellow” than the average group of college students, but I’ve never heard of anyone having sleep problems because of overwhelming academic stress.

Two observations. First, all of the research was conduced at one “unidentified ‘urban Midwestern university.'” There’s a lot of room for error when you use data from one university and treat it as a representative sample for all college students across all universities. Second, stress was concluded to be the thing that most interfered with “initiating sleep.” Perhaps the way in which the question was phrased altered the students’ responses. It is possible that the normal dormitory distractions that I mentioned accounted for later bedtimes, but the students responded that “stress” was the actual thing inhibiting immediate sleep once they got into bed.