Polls

So I surveyed a total of 33 college students from various college campus's about sleep deprivation and here are the results!

A majority of students need 8 or more hours, but they are only getting an average of 5-7. Students are clearly not getting as much sleep as they personally need and there are various negative consequences to this.

It looks like the issue of sleep deprivation is pretty common amongst college students. What can be done to improve this issue?

A majority of these college students are getting an average of 5-7 hours a night. This is below the recommended need of 8 or more hours. Whether you want to label this a sleep deprivation or just  insufficient sleep, it's not good for your health to be getting this little of sleep.

Consequence number 1. A large majority of students feel that their energy and motivation levels are lower when they don't get enough sleep. Studies have shown that this leads to decreased academic performance and overall students aren't capable of functioning as well as they could.

Consequence number 2. A majority of the students claimed that they experience negative mood and behavorial changes when they suffer from a lack of sleep. This has also been proven to lead to decreased academic performance.

A majority of students feel that stress is interfering with their ability to sleep at night at least 2-4 days of the week. Studies have shown that stress is one of the major factors of sleep deprivation. Clearly, it is a pretty common sleep deterrent in college students on various campus's.

 I think it's important to note what's interfering  with college students ability to get sufficient sleep beyond stress. "Out with friends/socializing" and "up late studying/doing homework" are the most common reasons and this is very significant to  the issue of sleep deprivation in college students. Clearly, college students have priorities and those tend to come before sleep.  The need to socialize in college is very important to college students  and they are consciously sacrificing sleep  for it. As far as homework being a factor, something could be done about this. Universities could make the effort to change the level of workload they give to students so they don't feel so overwhelmed with homework every night. Also, students could avoid taking too many courses in a semester so they don't have such a heavy workload.

A majority of the college students surveyed feel that their academic performance is suffering from a lack of sleep. Further actions should be taken to improve the quality and quantity of students sleep. Poor sleep hygiene can lead to things far worse than having low energy, negative mood/behavioral flucuations and hindered academic performance. Overtime, students who are sleep deprived are at risk for serious health conditions such as depression, substance abuse, insomnia and various other sleep disorders. The negative events that occur from sleep deprivation all influence one another to produce a "domino effect". One bad thing leads to another!