Schaff: Make sleep a priority

If, instead of reading articles like this in The Pitt News, you slept, would you be better off? If, instead of reading articles like this in The Pitt News, you slept, would you be better off? No offense to my beloved newspaper, but the question is intriguing — which deficit is ultimately more damaging to college students: ignorance about the surrounding world or a growing abstinence from the formerly most popular bedroom activity?

Although I usually shy away from apples-and-oranges arguments, if you do doze off somewhere down the page, perhaps all would not be lost — this column’s about promoting sleep after all.

But if you’re sipping coffee or happen to be among the few naturally awake persons, you’ll find I’m not wasting time chastising my peers for behaviors they’re going to maintain anyway. Instead, I think it’s time to call on universities to do something about their students’ sleep deprivation.

Look at the reality. The number of hours college students spend sleeping has been falling for decades — today, according to the Associated Press, the average student can expect six to seven hours a day in bed, when experts at the National Sleep Foundation suggest up to nine. Study after study has linked deprived or irregular sleeping habits to lower GPAs and diminished intellectual capacity. And don’t even ask about sleep deprivation’s cardiovascular and immune effects.

From my experience, collegiate sleep shirking stems from two interconnected problems: incentives and distractions. And it happens that these are both areas a university sleep policy could tackle.

At a university as large as Pitt, it’s difficult to detect an incentive for sleep. After signing those first tuition checks, parents throw their kids into an environment bloated with ways to potentially burn time, and each activity carries its own incentive. From fumbling with textbooks, partying with friends and attending professors’ office hours to filling out their first tax forms, students organize their schedule based on how straight a line they can draw from Activity X to their goals. Given how hard it is to connect sleep with success — American capitalist culture has taught us to include “tireless” when reciting the self-made businessman’s defining qualities — sleep seems an obvious loser in the incentive war.

But the paltry incentive salience of bedtime cannot be the only reason sleep has become so unpopular. The competing desires to land jobs, to be accepted by hoards of friends and to get unabashedly wasted have always displaced sleep schedules on college campuses. What’s actually changing is technology — and with it, the availability of infinite distraction.

The Internet age has streamlined much of how academics are administered — think of checking grades on Blackboard or posting essay assignments on professors’ Facebook profiles. But in the midst of arming classrooms with such tools, the 21st century has simultaneously armed students with smartphones and iPods and Netflix accounts. In consequence, millions of unwitting student victims regularly drop their attention span into a widening sink hole of digitalized distraction. From countless stories of others and from my personal experiences of staring zombie-like at eHow.com articles hours after I planned to climb into bed, I can confidently assert that the Internet-based distractions are, in large part, pulling the pillow from under our heads.

So to return balance to their students’ sleep lives, universities can either boost the relative incentive of sleep or take aim at distractions.

One hypothetical incentive system would reward students with free Market Central passes if they, during a selected week, can prove eight hours of sleep for five out of seven nights. Much in the same way that Dean Kathy Humphrey offers food-based incentives to lure students to her office hours, free food will always galvanize cash-strapped collegians. In a perfect world — one which showers infinite funds on university initiatives and ensures that only genuine sleepers get their reward — such a system would prove immensely successful.

But funds are never infinite and installing cameras in campus bedrooms is too Orwellian for my taste. So outside of regular scientific studies, it seems such incentive programs are probably ill-suited for practical application.

Fighting the ubiquitous late-night distractions, however, might not be out of a university’s territory. As a barrage of new media hijacks students’ attention, perhaps making sleep command a greater share of students’ attention at the right time could bear fruit, at a low cost. Based on Pitt’s Emergency Notification Service model, students could receive automatic reminder texts at the bedtime of their choosing. Mass texting is inexpensive, and healthy-sleep-habit-desiring victims of Internet distraction could use something to shock them out of replaying videos of feline pianists at 2 a.m. People these days ignore emails and screen phone calls, but they religiously open texts. If text-casting “Mark Nordenberg wants you to catch some zzz’s” can help some students become healthier sleepers, wouldn’t it be worth it?

Perhaps this would all be different if employers would take a sleep resumé seriously. But that would mean I’d be out of a job.

If you can think of a sleep incentive program that wouldn’t cause an administrator to burst into raucous laughter, email Matt Schaff as soon as possible at matthew.schaff@gmail.com. You can also contact him at that address for less urgent matters.