The Importance Of Sleep On Sleep

Introduction
It is generally understood that getting enough sleep plays an important factor as people go through their day to day lives, nevertheless many people do not rank sleep as one of their top priorities. In many cases, people prefer to use the time spent on getting the proper amount of sleep on other activities such as finishing a report for work or doing some last minute studying for a midterm. However, reducing the amount of sleep one gets not only affects one’s academic performance, but their physical health as well.
Using secondary sources from academic journals, as well as other peer-reviewed materials in the science of sleep medicine, this report outlines how academic performance and physical health is affected by chronic sleep

However, not everyone gets the 7-9 hours of sleep they need on a regular basis. In a study done by the National Institute of Health, one-third of Americans get less than 7 hours of sleep and more than 70% of high school students are not getting enough sleep on a school night (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute 2012). Sleep deprivation is slowly becoming a global issue that the general population, especially students, are not very concerned about. This lack of concern is worrisome because sleep deprivation can have negative effects on a person’s lifestyle, especially on their physical health and their performance in

That is because sleepiness slows down the brain’s thought process, making it difficult for students to pay attention to the material being learnt, as well as performing tasks in school. In an experiment done by Dawson and Reid, they found that sleep deprivation affects psychomotor skills in a way very similar to being intoxicated. 40 participants were repeatedly tested for hand-eye coordination at half hour intervals when sleep deprived for a 28 hour time period, and on a different day the same group of participants repeated the test while intoxicated. The results showed that being sleep deprived for 17 hours had the same effect on the participants as having a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.05%, and at 24 hours had the same effect of a BAC of about 0.10% (Dawson and Reid 1997). A graph correlating hours of sleep deprivation with BAC and mean relative performance can be seen in Appendix A. This experiment shows how sleep deprivation can affect a student’s ability to perform physical tasks in school, since their level of performance decreases significantly after 13 hours of being awake. If a student is expected to perform tasks requiring precise motor skills, such as doing precise measurements in a practical lab for example, they are less likely to do as well since their performance level would be impaired by lack of