LIFESTYLE: Restless students, unhealthy sleep patterns

Tom Yannone is looking for a hyperbaric chamber. "I heard that Michael Jackson sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber to allow him to sleep one hour a day, and feel as if he had slept a whole night," said Yannone, an Engineering junior. "Unfortunately, I never found one." Yannone's desire for a miracle time-saving device such as the gloved one's is a common one among active students -- for there simply are not enough hours in a day for a student to get enough rest and fulfill the many social and academic obligations that campus life demands. "I find that I don't have enough time in a day too complete my studies, so I encroach on my sleep time with studying," said Yannone. "This makes it harder to study the next day, which makes the problem worse, and the whole vicious circle repeats itself." According to University researchers and psychologists, the rigors of campus life often exact a dangerous toll upon students' sleeping patterns, causing them to adapt erratic sleep habits, thus neglecting an important aspect of their mental and physical health. Dinges, who did sleep research on over 7000 University students during the 1980s, said that students have been sleeping less and less. "From the 1950s to the 1990s, the trend is to sleep less each decade," said Dinges. He attributed this to changes in society, including the fact that it is easier to do things at night, and a priority in college life of participating in many activities. Dinges described a frequently occurring pattern among University students in which they stay up too late, get up early for classes, and overall suffer a "significant" loss of sleep over the week. Violet Kron, assistant director of psychiatry at Student Health, said that students' active lifestyles often cause them to adapt bizarre and irregular sleep patterns. Kron said that some freshmen she spoke with had not slept for up to four nights in a row. Kron also described several students taking an Art History final exam who were so stressed by the prospect of the difficult exam that they couldn't sleep, and yet were exhausted while studying. Andrew Winokur, a professor of psychology and pharmacology, described two major eccentric sleep patterns among University students. In the first, students neglect sleep during the week, staying up late and waking up early, and then "crash" on weekends. In the second pattern, students stay up late and then make up for the sleep by napping in the late afternoon. "With the exception of medical students, undergrads have the most bizarre sleeping patterns," Winokur said. Yannone described one eccentric sleep pattern he devised so that he could squeeze 20 hours of engineering classes and ROTC responsibilities into the short 24-hour day. "Since 1:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. is the quietest time of day, it is the best suited for homework, 1:30 a.m. being the time that Letterman is over," said Yannone. "From 8 a.m. to noon I would go to classes, relax in the early afternoon, have 'dinner' at 3, and then sleep until 12:30 for Letterman." Yannone lamented that his new sleep schedule didn't work out too well. "Initially, it worked for about three days, and I was highly productive," he said. "Eventually, I started getting tired earlier and earlier each day, and started sleeping through classes . . . it lasted about a week." Experts also said that many students take chemical stimulants either in order to fall asleep or to wake up. Kron said that when used occasionally, stimulants such as No-Doz would not have any serious health effects, but he did not recommend it. Kron warned against the common practice of drinking alcohol in order to fall asleep, saying that it was a "bad remedy for sleeplessness." "Although it is a depressant, alcohol is metabolized quickly, and within a short time of sleep it will make you wake up, and you will be awake and agitated as well," said Kron. In order to fall asleep, Kron recommended an old wive's tale that he said actually works -- drinking warm milk before going to bed. "A hot cup of milk will release an amino acid called tryptophan, which is a fine sedative that occurs in milk and milk products," Kron said. University Counseling Service Psychologist Leonard Miller said that erratic sleep patterns are potentially dangerous. "It is not a healthy pattern to be tired all the time," said Miller. "When tired, you have a weaker immune system, you get a lot of colds and are more open to germs." Other than health reasons, the most common negative effect of unhealthy sleep patterns is that it interferes with the learning process, experts said. Dinges said that it is difficult to learn when students do not get enough sleep, since it decreases their attention span. "Sitting and intaking information is most difficult when sleepy," he said. Dinges said he would advise students to take sleep far more seriously, as it affects the main activity of University life -- learning. "It is unfortunate that sleep is treated as a joke by college students," said Dinges. "Sleep, as much as anything else, tremendously effects one's ability to acquire knowledge, and they are paying a lot of money and putting a lot of time into just that." But Miller said that not all people require the same amount of sleep. "It depends on the individual, not the number of hours of sleep," said Miller. "There is no rule." Yannone said that he recently discovered a new sleeping schedule. "I go to bed at 9 p.m., and I feel great," said Yannone. "The 'early to bed, and early to rise' theory seems to work, but the one flaw in Ben Franklin's maxim is that you can't watch Letterman."

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