Lack of Sleep

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Talking with different people one notices that a lot of them consider they can accomplish more if they could waste less time sleeping. However, they don’t realize they are only hurting their productivity when they lose sleep. I’ve read two articles that 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 show different results from different types 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. Thomas Wehr, chief of the section on biologica...

... middle of paper ...

...how 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. October 10, 2000. Web.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/001016/archive_010779_3.htm.

Kelly, William E., Kathryn E. Kelly, Robert C. Clanton. “The Relationship Between Sleep Length And Grade-Point Average Among College Students - Statistical Data Included”

College Student Journal. March, 2001. Web.

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