What the Research Says about Sleep and Creating Your Schedule as A College Student
Emerging findings have suggested that short sleep duration can cause reduction in physical health such as “increased blood pressure” and mental health such as “increased risk of bipolar disorder” (Fischer et al., 2019). Undergraduate students, not only have shorter sleep duration, also have highly variable sleep patterns. Fischer and his colleagues aimed to explore irregular sleep patterns’ effect on student wellbeing, relations between irregular sleep patterns and irregular first scheduled event (such as go to class), and combination effect of irregular sleep patterns and event schedule on student’s wellbeing (Fischer et al., 2019).
The researchers used a metric called Composite Phase Deviation (CPD) to measure the irregularity of sleep pattern and
event pattern. The data of this study was collected for “about 30 days by 223 full-time undergraduates between 2013 and 2016 at a midsize private university in Massachusetts, United States.
This result is significant in undergraduate wellbeing research because it highlighted not only the effect of irregular sleep pattern but also irregular first scheduled event. It is useful to serve as a suggestion to undergraduate that they should arrange their first scheduled event at approximately same time every day. For example, this study can help students in making decision on course registration. This also encourages students to schedule constant morning events, such as eating breakfast and doing exercise for a better wellbeing. Also, the study signifies that there is no association between irregular sleep pattern and irregular first scheduled events. This warned students that they still need to pay attention on maintaining a regular sleep pattern even if they already have regular first scheduled events. By maintaining regular sleep pattern and first scheduled event pattern, undergraduates are more likely to be physical healthy, mentally healthy, and academically successful.
Author:
Teddy Chen, Emory University
Editor:
Elaine Johnson
Article Reviewed:
Dorothee Fischer, Andrew W McHill, Akane Sano, Rosalind W Picard, Laura K Barger, Charles A Czeisler, Elizabeth B Klerman, Andrew J K Phillips, Irregular sleep and event schedules are associated with poorer self-reported well-being in US college students, Sleep, Volume 43, Issue 6, June 2020, zsz300, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsz300
