Compare/Contrast Two Articles on Sleep Deprivation
Many times people think they can accomplish more if they could eliminate so much sleeping time. However, they are only hurting their productivity if they lose sleep. Two articles deal with the issue of sleep deprivation. The College Student Journal published an article about the grade-point average of college students and sleep length, while U.S. News & World Report produced an article dealing with the lack of
sleep in America and its effects on performance. The articles gave different types of results from different kinds of data with different degrees of definiteness. In spite of their differences, both articles showed that lack of sleep is a cause for decreased performance and a detriment to a productive and healthy lifestyle.
First, the article on college students showed that a correlation
existed between different length of sleep time and grade point average.
Students who were self-evaluated as long sleepers reported a mean grade
point average .5 higher than those who were considered short sleepers (3.24
to 2.74). The article produced by U.S. New & World Report gave a similar
situation. A recent study showed that people who had been awake for the
last nineteen hours had scored the equivalent of a person with a blood
alcohol level of .08 (the legal limit in some states) on performance and
alertness tests. In other tests, people that slept four hours a night
scored lower and made more mistakes on judgment, response time, and
attention tests. Each article gives evidence that reduced production is a
result from deprivation of sleep.
In addition, U.S. News reported many health concerns based on sleep
experiments. Th...
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...formats. U.S.
News might have given a more comprehensive look on the issue but the
outcomes were corresponding. Lack of sleep lowers intellectual performance
and general health. If future data show similar results, people might have
to change their current sleeping patterns to perform at their highest
level. It might take serious dedication to set a schedule that allows one
to go to bed on time. Over time it is well worth the effort. Changing
one's sleeping patterns is a difficult task, but it is important to a
healthy, productive lifestyle. The only lifestyle we can change is our own.
Works Cited
Brink, Susan. "Sleepless Society." U.S. News & World Report 16 Oct. 2007: 62-72.
Kelly, William E., Kathryn E. Kelly, Robert C. Clanton. College Student Journal. Mar. 2008: 84-86.
Ed. Ed. Judith A. Stanford, Ph.D. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1996. 1212-1213. The.
Armstrong, Stephen. Student Handbook: 4: 5 Steps to a 5. New York: Southwestern Co, 2004. 1389-257.
Sleep is more important than we believe. Just one hour of extra sleep can do so much for a growing child. A team reported that sixth grade children were performing as if they had the same cognitive development as fourth graders because they didn’t have that extra hour. And, another team reported it affected their IQ as much as lead exposure. (32-33) Sleep is affecting the children that we put in our education system. The children themselves are only functioning at half maybe even a fourth of what they are capable of. The children who are falling behind are being blamed for laziness or just being called stupid or not very smart, but the actual reason is sleep
Imagine being awake for at least a week straight. In the US military, many actions of suffering are given to their prisoners. These can include punishments such as sleep deprivation are put upon the prisoners until they crack under the pressure. During this punishment the prisoners are not given any food, humiliated, threatened, and mentally tortured. This action mentally and physically “destroys” the person. So, the question is, why are teenage students being treated the same way? All around the world high school are suffering at some point in time of sleep deprivation. They go to school for 8 hours, come home, do some homework, go to extracurricular activities, and then go home and do more homework. Then before they know it, they look at the clock and it is already
Lack of sleep will affect any human’s life mentally, physically, and shockingly, even emotionally in their everyday normal life and make it not so normal. “The quality of your sleep can affect your waking life, including your mental sharpness, productivity, emotional balance, creativity, and even your weight” (Smith et Al.). For example, say a student had a test in the morning, as well as his friend, one student got 5 hours of sleep and the other got 9 hours of sleep, the one with 5 hours is bound to do worse than his friend, because he didn’t get enough sleep. In other words, the mind feeds on rest, and can’t function correctly without it, so it’s best to get some rest after a hard day of work. As a result of low resting hours, it can feel almost like drinking alcohol, the body will feel sick and drowsy and not want to do anything (About). Whenever someone tries to do a high-level thinking task, with not enough sleep, the mind won’t function properly, and the person will most likely end up confused and might as well give up on what they are doing. And when the mind is confused it’s just hard to do anything. Basically, without a well-rested mind it will not work to its full po...
Sleep deprivation has become a major problem with Americans. Over 100 million Americans today suffer from lack of sleep. This has been an ongoing problem throughout the centuries. People owe their bodies sleep and scientist are calling it a “Sleep debt”. An average American owes their body at least thirty hours of sleep. This lack of sleep is as hazardous as drunk driving.
[Accessed 21 January 2004] www.kettering.edu [Accessed 21 January 2004]
Productivity of a person with sleep deprivation tends to be on the low side of most scales. People with sleep deprivation produce worse results in the classroom, worse within the work place, and worse in their personal lives. People with sleep deprivation struggle to produce proper results, “products are like humans, if you can’t take care of them you can’t sell them” (Alsaggaf, 175). If people can’t sell themselves in life, they limit their options to succeed. Life is all about how well a person can sell them self to their desired objective. If a person isn’t capable of being them self throughout life, then they are limiting their opportunities to
“Study: Many high school students don’t get enough sleep; performance suffers.” Health & Medicine Week 19 May 2013: 58. Academic Universe: Document. Lexis-Nexis. 13 Nov. 2013
If all of these important activities occur during sleep, why is it that people are so willing to short themselves of this vital activity? Although much about sleep still remains a mystery, research and experiments continue to show how important sleep is to each and every person. Throughout this paper, I will discuss sleep and the effects that it has on performance and health, especially among college students. A college student’s sleeping pattern is a reliable indicator of their level of performance in the classroom and other school-affiliated activities, as a lack of sleep leads to decreased performance. Sleep is directly related to the level of performance and health of an individual; the more rested a person is, the better that person will perform and feel (Dryer, 2006).
Sleep loss and shifting sleep patterns are known to be widespread across college campuses throughout the United States and the world at large. Yet, while many studies exist relating sleep to performance, a much smaller amount of studies focus on the Through analysis of these sources as they would prove useful when researching and writing upon the idea of sleep and its correlation to academic performance it was found that a paper titled “Sleep-Wake Patterns and Academic Performance in University Students”, which was presented to the European Conference on Educational Research, is overall the most useful source represented to research the topic.
In the world of higher education, students at the collegiate level are highly likely to be overwhelmed with course load, in addition to sports and extra-curricular activities (Jacobs & Dodd, 2003). These factors have the potential to lead to various amounts of sleep deprivation, and as the research of Nilsson, Sunderstrom, Karlsson et al. (2004) has shown, sleep deprivation is correlated with higher levels of fatigue, impairments in speed and accuracy as well as limitations in cognitive and physical performances. One way to cope with this fatigue that has shown to have very positive results on people of all ages is taking naps. In addition to reducing sleepiness, Milner & Cote (2008) have determined that “napping may lead to considerable benefits in terms of mood, alertness and cognitive performances”. It is these benefits that nappers seek when engaging in napping activities.
Important public policy issues have arisen in our modern 24-hour society, where it is crucial to weigh the value of sleep versus wakefulness. Scientific knowledge about sleep is currently insufficient to resolve the political and academic debates raging about how much and when people should sleep. These issues affect almost everybody, from the shift worker to the international traveler, from the physician to the policy maker, from the anthropologist to the student preparing for an exam.
Think for a moment about the world; think about our faced paced environment, about how we work ourselves away, about those soldiers who have to stay awake all night surveying a hostile environment. Now consider the United States’ sleeping habits in general, people try to last day to day on five or less hours of sleep a night. Society is pushing a sleepless workplace; actually, depriving one’s self of sleep is one of the worst possible things that can be done. Sleep loss affects everyone; it will dull the focus and gnaw at the logic of even the most intelligent individual.
Sleep has a very important role in a person’s physical health and wellbeing, yet in the U.S., only 56% of Americans get recommended amount of sleep. The average sleep requirement for students in college is around 8 hours. If students don’t reach that amount, they have created a sleep debt. A sleep debt is when all lost sleep accumulates to create a larger sleep indebtedness. The sleep debt does not disappear or decline; you can only reduce your debt by obtaining extra sleep above the daily requirement.