College Students
The schedule most college students keep can be brutal – all nighters spent writing papers and studying, followed by early morning classes. Coupled with living in noisy student housing, it is no wonder many students are suffering from a sleep deficit. However, using Speed Sleep regularly can relieve many of these common sleep problems (as well as boosting creativity and productivity) by making high quality sleep easier to attain.
More Sleep Improves Athletic Performance
Five healthy students on the Stanford University men’s and women’s swimming teams maintained their usual sleep-wake pattern for two weeks and then extended their sleep to 10 hours per day for six to seven weeks.
After more sleep, athletes swam a 15-meter sprint 0.51 seconds faster, reacted 0.15 seconds quicker off the blocks, improved turn time by 0.1 seconds and increased kick strokes by five kicks. Mood and alertness improved as well.
A sleep deficit has detrimental effects on cognitive function, mood and reaction time.
“These negative effects can be minimized or eliminated by prioritizing sleep in general and, more specifically, obtaining extra sleep to reduce one’s sleep debt,” said Cheri Mah of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic.
--from UPI NewsTrack
Emma Lantini is tired.
“The professors obviously don’t care. They stack us with homework and tests. You can’t help but stay up all night working,” the first-year liberal arts student said.
Out of the 24 hours in the day, most college students report they only spend six sleeping. The Journal of American College Health has noted the average bedtime for college students is 11:40 p.m. on weeknights and 1:17 a.m. on weekends, and an average waking time of 7:42 a.m. on weekdays and 9:45 a.m. on weekends.
--from The America’s Intelligence Wire/ April 20, 2004
A study published in the December 18 issue of the Nature Neuroscience Journal examined how memories are processed in the brain during sleep. During the nondreaming portion of sleep the brain replays the day’s events, helping people reflect on recent happenings and learn from them, said Matthew Wilson, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
The bottom line: Information crammed into the brain during a sleepless night has less chance of sticking. When deprived of sleep, students may be able to regurgitate information they’ve memorized overnight, but they have decreased their ability to understand its meaning or to apply it to future experience.
--from Chicago Tribune 29-Dec-06
