Sleep Debt for a College Student

Sleep Debt for A College Student

Responsibilities, jobs, homework are a few reasons that college students do not get the amount of sleep they need to every night. So many students have such big responsibilities that they are forced to stay up late at night to get their assignments done. Many students who are in college have no choice but to have a job and because of long and late hours students are often deprived of the sleep they are needing to fulfill the tasks they need to get accomplished.

The passage "Sleep Debt and the Mortgaged Mind" refers to the Exxon Valdez and how that because of sleep debt we had to experience the worst oil spill America had ever experienced. The National Transportation Safety Board said that the very cause of the crashing of the Exxon Valdez had to do with sleep debt. Sleep debt is caused when a person does not sleep the number of hours that is needed for a period of time and those numbers continue to go up the longer you go without having any sleep. For every two hours you are awake your body needs one hour of sleep to make up for it. This is a very good example of the damage that can be caused by sleep debt. "The Exxon Valdez disaster offers a good example of how sleep debt can create a tragedy and how the true villain sleep indebtedness remains concealed" (Dement and Vaughan 498). "An even more dramatic tragedy was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger" (Dement and Vaughan 499). These two events led to so much destruction just for the simple cause that someone had not gotten enough sleep.

In the passage "How Sleep Debt Hurts College Students" the effects of sleep deprivation was tested on forty-four college students. The participants either had to go twenty-four hours with no sleep or about eight hours of sleep. After they were done with the assignment they were required to take two questionnaires, one of them was testing the effort and concentration of the students and the other was testing off task ideas. Just like expected, the sleep-deprived participants did worse than the participants who had gotten the eight hours of sleep did. The participants who had gotten no sleep had a higher rate of concentration then the participants with sleep. "Another important consideration is the effect of sleep deprivation on an individual's ability to accurately assess psychological variables, such as concentration, effort, and estimated performance" (Pilcher and Walters 514). Many college students are not aware of the damage being caused by sleep deprivation. This article helps readers who are in college to stop and think about what sleep deprivation is really doing to them and their ability to perform to the best of their ability in their own school work. By writing about the results of sleep a deprivation experiment we see that not getting sleep really is doing harm to what we can accomplish.

The article "A Greater College Debt" is about how sleep debt can be viewed as a load that is being carried around on your shoulders. The more you go without sleeping the bigger the load of sleep debt you are carrying around. "The most effective way to reverse the effects of sleep debt is extra sleep" (Ashton). Once your body

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