Thinking of pulling an all-nighter? Keep dreaming

Pitt sophomore Leann Smith did something last Wednesday night with which most college… Pitt sophomore Leann Smith did something last Wednesday night with which most college students are familiar: She didn’t sleep.

How could she? Considering she had to work at her job Tuesday and had two finals to study for on Thursday, she said she just couldn’t find the time to study.

The accounting major has pulled three “all-nighters” this year, but she has no complaints.

And with final exams this week, Smith isn’t alone in overlooking the importance of sleep.

Just 11 percent of college students nationwide get enough sleep, according to a 2001 Brown University study.

Not to mention the 73 percent of students who reported having occasional sleep problems that prevented them from retaining information and staying awake throughout the day.

Karen Gannon, manager of the Sleep Disorders Center at St. Clair Hospital, said that there’s a point where your brain just shuts off, and staying up all night before an exam isn’t a good idea.

“All-nighters are probably the worst thing you can do,” Gannon said, “because there’s a point where you’re not thinking anymore. It’s better off to shut the book, go to bed, sleep for a few hours then get back up and start studying again.”

She said that your body can’t function well if you’re suffering from sleep deprivation, in which case you lose concentration and have trouble retaining information.

Smith admits she’d like to change her studying habits and spread it out over a period of time, but it never ends up working.

“It gets stressful when I get down to the end,” she said.

“I freak out and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not going to get it done.’ But I always do get it done, so part of me would want to change and start studying earlier, but I can’t do that, it’s not how I study. I procrastinate and then I cram, that’s just what I do,” Smith added.

And although Smith said she does well on her exams, it might not be true for everyone.

A study from the Cyclotron Research Center in Belgium shows that pulling an “all-nighter,” instead of spending the night sleeping, will most likely result in lower test scores.

The study — according to an article on the National Sleep Foundation Web site — demonstrates that during sleep, the hippocampus in the brain joins the spatial memories, allowing the brain to remember more information that was absorbed in pre-sleeping hours.

Philippe Peigneux, a researcher involved with the study, said in the article that a human’s hippocampus is activated when awake and then again during the following sleep period.

He added that the amount of hippocampal activity during sleep after study is directly related to the performance level the next day.

“Our findings essentially mean that the information [students] have processed during their study will be better stored for the long term if they sleep normally at night than if they stay awake,” Peigneux said on the Web site.

“But of course, sleep will be useless for unprepared information,” he added. “Sleep can consolidate only the information that has been already worked on during daytime.”

Pitt freshman Christina Vollmer said that she tries to spread out her studying over a period of time.

But she added that it wouldn’t hurt to pull an all-nighter every once in a while, even though she’s never done it.

“I feel like if you can do it, then do,” she said, “but I’d pass out during the exam.”

Vollmer said that when final exams come around, she tries to get a good night’s sleep before, and doesn’t pull all-nighters.

“I refuse,” Vollmer laughed. “It’s not worth it.”

Senior Justine Fraser, a psychology major, agreed.

“I don’t stress myself out with that stuff,” she said. “If I’m not done studying, I just go to bed.”

But poorer performance is not the only side effect of losing sleep over an extended period of time.

Depression, fatigue, confusion and generally lower life satisfaction are just a few of the other symptoms, according to the NSF Web site.

“There are folks out there that have stayed up for an extended period of time and they become delirious,” said Jeff Lang, manager of the Sleep Disorders Center of the Lifeline Specialty Outpatient Centers.

And Gannon said sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the symptoms from the sleeping problem itself.

“There’s many times that you’ll treat somebody who has depression, and you’re not sure whether the depression led to the sleeping problem or the sleeping problem led to the depression,” she said. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

On average, college students should be getting much more than eight hours a night, yet the majority of students do not meet this requirement, according to a Stanford University Center of Excellence article written by William Dement.

“When you don’t get the sleep that you should, you build up a debt,” Lang said.

But it is impossible for an individual to reduce his sleep debt unless he exceeds his daily requirement of sleep.

“If you should sleep eight hours a night and you’re only sleeping four over the course of say five days, that’s 20 hours less sleep that you didn’t get,” he added. “And you’re going to have to make that up at some point. It’s going to take eight or 10 hours at some point for you to become refreshed again and have all your senses work the way they should.”

Not only that, but reduced physical health can also result from lack of sleep, according to the McKinley Health Center Web site.

Insufficient sleep can cause the immune system to deteriorate, leading to greater health problems in the future.

“I would think the possibility of illness dramatically increases over a period of time of lack of sleep,” Somerset Community Hospital respiratory supervisor Dan Miller said. “Just because you are, so to speak, rundown, you are a lot more susceptible to getting sick.”

And while it’s not uncommon for students to try to catch up on sleep through weekends, the irregularity of these sleeping patterns may only contribute to the side effects, according to the Brown University health education Web site.

Kim Clawson, clinical educator at the Memorial Medical Center, agrees, and said that the decrease in daytime function only increases with sleep deprivation.

“You’re definitely going to have excessive daytime sleepiness. You’ll fall asleep during class, fall asleep while you’re driving, headaches, the obvious side effects,” she said. “Obviously during the weekend, you’re going to want to sleep the whole day to make up for what you missed.”