( Photo: Kevin Gurr )

“Bedrooms are for sleep and sex only,” Patty Allen, a health educator and registered nurse at Carleton’s Health and Counselling Services, tells me.

Dr. Judith Leech, a sleep medicine specialist at the West Ottawa Sleep Centre, agrees.

“In a dorm I know it’s hard to designate your bed as a sleep and sex zone only, but try,” Leech says. “The psychological underpinning of sleep therapy is stimulus control.”

Yet even for an open-minded student attending university in the 21st century, I still can’t help but look aghast at either’s bluntness. I can just imagine my parents’ reaction: they’d probably much prefer that I cure my sleep disturbance by taking my laptop and a cup of tea with me to bed.

But both Allen and Leech are adamant on the restriction of activities that go on in bed — they both agree there needs to be a place where the body knows it can shut down.

According to Allen, students often come into the clinic on campus and the counselling office in residence worried about disturbances in their sleep patterns.

“They tend to self-diagnose,” Allen says. “They say, ‘I can’t sleep; I have insomnia.’ But they don’t have insomnia. Very few people do.”

Still, we’ve probably all had our share of sleepless nights — sometimes consistently within the same week. You have an early class, an early appointment or an errand that needs to be run first thing the following morning. You decide to go to sleep at 10 p.m.  — OK, 11 p.m. by the time you’ve finished up your instant messaging conversation and checked Facebook one last time.

You change into your pyjamas, turn off the light and wait for sleep to come.

But it doesn’t. Not right away.

Twenty minutes pass by, then 30. You roll over and check the clock. Midnight turns to 1 a.m. and 1 a.m. turns to 2 a.m.

You don’t have any desire to get up. You’re not hungry or thirsty or restless. You’ve just resigned yourself to the fact that you’re not going to fall asleep anytime soon.

And that’s when the stress kicks in: “If I don’t fall asleep soon, I’ll be so tired tomorrow,” you tell yourself. “I’ll be useless.”

You start to do the math in your head to calm down. “If I fall asleep in 10 minutes, I can still get five hours. If I fall asleep in an hour and 10 minutes, I can still get four hours in. I can totally function on four hours.”

Eventually sleep comes, but you wake up at 6 a.m. and every hour on the hour after because you’re worried you’ll oversleep your alarm. Allen calls this a catch-22. Students are stressed, which makes it harder to sleep and then they stress more that they can’t sleep.

“Sleep deprivation has increased among university students with technology now being available 24/7,” Allen says. “And that technology used to be in the living room but now it’s available in the bedroom — students study on their bed with their laptops and can check Facebook and go on the Internet.”

According to Leech, as much as it may bother parents, professors or employers, the common sleep pattern for youth aged 15 to 25 is to stay up late and wake up late.

“It’s the natural tendency of the body’s clock for that age,” Leech says.

Still, she says a number of factors can throw it off: the stress and anxiety that comes with beginning a new school year, and over consumption of caffeine and energy drinks which, while they may have been consumed during the day, may not take effect until later that evening.

“There are slow and fast metabolisms,” Leech says, adding that you shouldn’t try to adjust your own sleep pattern to emulate that of your peers. “Just because your roommate can function on five hours of sleep doesn’t necessarily mean the case will be the same for you.”

Allen adds living in residence, or living downtown when you’re used to living in a residential neighbourhood, to the list of sleep deprivation causes.

She says noise levels, time zone changes, or even just the unfamiliarity of sleeping in a new environment can trigger poor sleep. In either case, these professionals will recommend a lot of different habits before prescribing any sort of drug.

“Of course it has to do with the individual,” Allen says. “When I’m speaking about how to treat perceived sleep disturbances I’m speaking to the large majority of students — there are always exceptions.”

Leech adds that only if the problem persists should students consider going beyond their family doctor or campus clinic to seek an appointment with her.

“Students at this age tend to think of themselves as immortals,” Leech says. “They figure they are now free to control their sleep in whatever way they want and it doesn’t matter. But when sleepless nights become a regular occurrence, you may need to see someone like me — even if all I do is show you fancy ways of counting sheep,” Leech says.     y

Sleeper’s Checklist

Don’t drink caffeine, eat heavy meals or exercise two to three hours before bed.

Try not to study, watch television or eat in bed, as it should be used for sleep and sex only.

If you can’t sleep after 20 minutes, read or listen to music. Don’t check Facebook or do anything that involves looking at a bright screen.

Sleeping when you’re drunk, or passing out after smoking pot, is not good sleep. While you may find you sleep longer, you do not get good rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage in which you dream.

Arrange your sleeping patterns so you go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time: start by waking up earlier each day in 15 to 30 minute intervals until you reach your desired wake up time.

— Source: Carleton.ca/health & The Canadian 
Sleep Society