Simply sleepy: Students’ struggle to snooze 

Between staying up all night partying and studying through the final six hours before an 8:30 a.m. exam, university students often have a rocky relationship with sleep.

In fact, around 60 per cent of students aged 17 to 24 have poor quality of sleep, according to a study from Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Insomnia, which is essentially a lack of sleep, can affect people in a wide range of ways. Sleep loss affects memory and attention, making it difficult to study and retain information for a midterm or exam. 

Poor sleep can make transitioning to a post-secondary lifestyle that much more challenging, but experts say there are many strategies to overcome restless nights.   

Insomnia and stress 

Misha Sokolov, a PhD psychology student at Carleton University, explained that insomnia often stems from stress, anxiety and other mental health troubles that come with being a student. Sokolov taught a course on sleep and dreams through Carleton’s Lifelong Learning Program during the winter 2020 semester. 

“Insomnia is almost entirely caused by people’s anxiety about their absence of sleep and is also usually caused by pre-existing medical conditions and mental health problems,” Sokolov said. 

Meggan Porteous, a PhD student at the sleep research unit at the University of Ottawa’s Royal Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research, mentions four types of insomnia.

 “[With insomnia], it’s either hard to fall asleep when you’re tired, you wake up in the middle of the night or you wake up early in the morning and you can’t fall back asleep,” Porteous said. “There’s also another kind of insomnia, paradoxical insomnia, where people don’t have those issues but when they wake up in the morning they’re still exhausted.”

Chronic insomnia, or insomnia that appears many nights in a row, is often seen in patients with anxiety or depression, Porteous said. 

According to Sokolov, insomnia also often accompanies other injuries and illnesses, however on its own, insomnia is usually a result of stress. Chronic insomnia can start when an outside factor—such as a stressful day—causes one night of bad sleep, he said. Then, anxiety about not sleeping develops.

“What then happens is that you become extremely stressed out … and then you can’t sleep because you’re too stressed out about your absence of sleep,” Sokolov said. “That basically creates a self-perpetuating cycle of absence of sleep, which is then termed ‘insomnia’.”

Stress impacting sleep for students

Mariam Daneshgar, a clinical social worker who specializes in treating students with anxiety, stress and insomnia, said university and college students often experience insomnia.

“When [students] come to university, there’s a lot of things they need to learn and adjusting to being an adult can cause a lot of stress,” Daneshgar said. “That stress and anxiety can impact their sleep.”

“For upper to middle year students, issues can be keeping up their grades, or ‘what am I going to do with this degree that I’m getting?’”

Golnoush Zeidabadi is a PhD student studying marketing at the Sprott School of Business. While Zeidabadi said she did not have trouble sleeping, she said international students have unique struggles that may stress them out. 

“[We are] far, far away from my parents in Iran,” Zeidabadi said. “This is the first time that my husband and I have lived alone by ourselves.”

Zeidabadi also said moving to Canada during a pandemic made the adjustment even harder.

“[Quarantine] was terrible. We didn’t have a credit card, so getting food and groceries [was] difficult,” Zeidabadi said. She added it was hard to understand English when everyone is wearing a mask. 

However, not all people who struggle to sleep or who experience stress have chronic insomnia. Just less than eight per cent of university students have diagnosable insomnia, according to a study from the University of Tübingen and the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany.

What happens when people sleep

Different mental processes are practiced through each phase of sleep. During deep sleep, the brain practices menial actions necessary for survival through dreams called “mentations,” Sokolov said. 

“[Mentations] are active cognitive processes, but they’re very simple. So, an example might be if you are opening cupboards in your kitchen, and then a can is falling down, [‘dream you’ catches] it in your sleep,” Sokolov said. “This is done almost entirely without emotions, it’s just a rote behaviour.”

Humans actually experience the actions they process during mentations, Sokolov said. Therefore, they may help the brain coordinate certain actions while asleep so they can be better performed once awake. Sleepwalkers, for example, often act out their mentations. 

“[A sleepwalker] might pick up a carpet and put it in your fridge. There’s no reason for it but part of your daily life is picking stuff up and moving them around and opening doors,” Sokolov said. “Putting a carpet in your fridge is not very useful, but each specific behaviour in itself is useful.”

During Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, the brain experiences more complex dreams. Sokolov said humans in REM sleep have the same brain wave activity as someone who is awake. The benefits of REM sleep are still relatively unknown.

Depending on sleep habits, different people can miss out on specific parts of their sleep cycle, according to Sokolov.

“The stereotypical pattern is that you have more deep sleep at the beginning and then more REM sleep at the end of the night,” Sokolov said. “Say you’re somebody who needs about eight hours of sleep, but you only sleep six, then you are actually sleep-debted specifically on REM sleep.”

What happens when people don’t sleep

During sleep, Sokolov said the brain reviews all the information it took in that day and commits the important parts to memory. Due to this, both Sokolov and Porteous said someone who is sleep deprived would have a worse memory. 

“You need to sleep before and after learning to be able to really encode [it],” Porteous said. “So, for students it’s going to be really hard to study for your exam if you’re not sleeping enough because you’re not going to have the capacity in your brain to take in new info.”

Losing sleep makes it harder for the brain to commit information to long-term memory, according to Porteous. She also said the immune system, reaction time and attention suffer when humans lose sleep. Sokolov agreed.

“If you’re [losing sleep] on a chronic basis, you’re going to be consistently performing much worse, in your school [work] or anything else that you’re doing,” Sokolov said.

Sokolov said he never recommends staying up all night to study for an exam.

“If you want to cram for an exam and you pull an all-nighter, then you’re not actually helping yourself… usually you’re far better off just getting six hours of sleep,” Sokolov said.

Emma, a master’s student at Carleton whose last name is withheld for privacy reasons, said all her professors during her undergrad were emphatic about the benefits of good sleep. 

“Across the board, professors from day-one, year-one encouraged students not to cram. It’s not going to work,” Emma said. “Do your preparations but sleep is important.”

How to develop healthy sleeping habits

About a quarter of university and college students use alcohol, marijuana or over-the-counter medications to fall asleep, according to a study from Syracuse and Yale universities. However, the study concluded that use of sleep aids only leads to further drug abuse and insomnia.

“The reality of the sleep aids is that they’re not a long term solution because you’re always going to be having to take those pills [or] take more,” Porteous said. 

Drinking alcohol to fall asleep alters the natural sleep cycle and results in a poor quality of sleep, Porteous said. Binge drinking also causes sleep disruption, according to another study from the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital.

Instead, Porteous said improving sleep hygiene is the easiest and most effective way to build good sleep habits.

Porteous recommends removing visual distractions such as lights, phones or even digital clocks. A white noise machine could also mask distracting sounds such as a drunk roommate. Keeping the bedroom cool, around 18℃, can also help with sleep, she said. 

“Your body needs to cool down in temperature so that you can fall asleep, so having a room that’s colder can actually help you [fall asleep] and also stay [asleep] during the night,” Porteous said.

Maintaining a regular sleep schedule is also very important, which can start with managing stress, Daneshgar said. 

“If you’re stressing or having anxious thoughts, get away from the bedroom … so that when you’re sleeping, it doesn’t feel like you’re in a stressful environment,” Daneshgar said. 

Emma said she focused on sleep hygiene and listens to podcasts to help her fall asleep at night.

“Often I’ll put in a podcast and just try to focus on that—it’s like the new ‘counting sheep’—I just listen to the voice,” Emma said. “I’m not a big television [watcher] before bed and I try not to eat or drink anything too close to when I’m supposed to hit the pillow. I make that unwinding process a priority.”

Emma also said it took time to learn good sleep habits.

“I understand that sleep helps fuel me the next day and so I’m pretty good at making it a priority, but that came after four years of doing my undergrad. [There] is a learning curve” she said.

Resetting the body’s natural clock

If improving sleep hygiene fails, Porteous said a professional should take insomniacs through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) before prescribing any medication.

“[CBT-I] will take you through the different steps to consolidate your sleep, and it’s actually super effective,” Porteous said. Daneshgar also recommended CBT-I.

The therapy process involves cognitive restructuring therapy and learning relaxation techniques to help manage stress, Porteous said. She also said insomniacs might have their sleep restricted, which sounds counterintuitive but will increase sleep quality.

“The idea is that you’re reducing the amount of time that you spend in bed so that when you are sleeping, you’re sleeping through the night,” Porteous said. 

Ultimately, getting enough sleep should be a priority. Teenagers and young adults naturally fall asleep and wake up later than adults and children, Sokolov said. The offset sleep schedule can often interfere with the typical nine-to-five workday, so teenagerss who try to function during “normal” hours often lose valuable rest. 

Getting about eight hours of sleep at an unnatural time, such as napping in the middle of the day or sleeping late after staying up late, is much better than constantly losing the fight against the body’s natural clock, Porteous said.

“Your best bet is to find the eight-hour period that works best for you,” Porteous said. “If that doesn’t work with your outside obligations, like work and school, try to find a way to change that outside stuff because your sleep is so important.”

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Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.