College students are famous for being labeled with anxiety, depression, physical health problems, and academic troubles. "When you find depression, even when you find anxiety, when you scratch the surface 80 to 90 percent of the time you find a sleep problem as well," said University of Delaware psychologist Brad Wolgast. Campus life is a trap for sleep deprivation with irregular schedules, freedom and social interactions, noisy and crowded housing units, late nights of exercise, food washed down with booze, coffee, and energy drinks to help power through vigorous nights of long study sessions. Technology has added to the distraction, with wireless internet and attachment to our cellphones. Some counselors and health officials have been trying to get the message out at many colleges. At Hastings College in Nebraska student educators lied in a bed in the middle of the commons and dressed themselves in pajamas as they talked to passers-by about sleep. At Macalester College in Minnesota they offer seminars on napping. The University of Louisville planned a campus wide "flash nap." Awareness is growing at many college campuses but according to the National College Health Assessment found about three quarters of the students have indicated occasional sleeping problems and about the same amount of students reported receiving no information from their school about sleep habits. "The average student is functioning with a clinical sleep disorder," said Lee Ann Hamilton, assistant director of health promotion and preventive Services at the university of Arizona. The average amount of sleep a college student receives at night is 6.5 hours, thus Hamilton's office began to spread "snoozeletters" around campus with sleep tips. James Maas evaluated his student by asking them to wear sleep monitoring headbands and showed them the images of their sleep deprived brains. "You can see that nothing is going on in their brains, literally nothing," Maas said. These types of sleep behaviors have become routine for many students, and informing the youth of the risk giving them the information to change their behaviors might result in a transformation for academics.
Harrington, Rebecca. "Colleges Open Their Eyes: ZZZs Are Key To GPA." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 31 Aug. 2012. Web. 29 Apr. 2013.
