While awareness is growing, at most schools sleep efforts amount to a few posters on campus or perhaps a few lines in a quickly forgotten talk during orientation week.
While about three-quarters of college students have indicated occasional sleep problems, the latest National College Health Assessment found about the same proportion reported receiving no information from their school about sleep (though it’s possible, in their sleepiness, some forgot).
“The average student is functioning with a clinical sleep disorder,” said LeeAnn Hamilton, assistant director of health promotion and preventive services at the University of Arizona (UA), describing research conducted on students there.
They average about 6.5 hours per night (though students tend to over-report in such surveys). But sleep time and quality measurements declined over the course of the academic year, while anxiety, depression, and conflict with family, friends, and roommates all rose. Hamilton’s office has been sending students a “Snoozeletter” with sleep tips.
As described by junior Sara Campbell, residence hall life at UA makes it hard even for students trying to sleep—constant late-night chattering, visitors coming and going, early morning cleaning crews running their vacuums. She aims to be asleep by 12:30 or so but was dumbfounded to find girls on her hall regularly pulling all-nighters for papers and exams—basically, academic suicide, the research shows.
“Not to speak bad of them, but a lot of them are freshmen and just decided to wait ’til the last minute,” she said. Her big challenge was managing with a roommate who tries to keep earlier hours; this year the pair are moving off-campus together, where they’ll have separate bedrooms.
Still, Campbell is applying what she’s learned about sleep as a psychology major. This year, she’s arranged her schedule to have classes and work start at 8 a.m. every day of the week. That will be tough, but it commits her to avoiding the destructive pattern trapping many college students—getting up early one day, then sleeping late the next.
“Regularity is key,” Campbell said. “You can pick a schedule here and have a different time to get up every day, but going to bed at a different time every night, it wears on your body.”
College mental health professionals increasingly are asking students about sleep right away, finding it’s often the low-lying fruit for helping students with a range of issues.
“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. Many students who think they have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are often just sleep-deprived.
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