Reasons and Solutions to Sleep Difficulties

On average about 25% of Americans experience acute insomnia compared to 65. 6% of college students. According to research a multitude of physical, psychological, and behavioral issues can explain why college students have a larger chance of developing insomnia compared to the average American. College students are more prone to develop mental issues from lack of sleep along with a lower grade performance. Environmental impacts can explain why some college students struggle with developing good sleep patterns. Staying up late studying or doing other things that are detrimental to academics can have a great impact on your sleep patterns. Through intricate research we come to find numerous reasons and solutions to limit sleep insomnia. Some ways to limit sleep insomnia includes limiting certain substances along with managing stress and anxiety along with staying in a normal routine.

A leading scientist at Madonna University, James Sawyer suggests a number of creditable reasons that explain the overall struggle of sleep insomnia in college students. Sawyer suggests that behavioral reasons conclude his study and finding. One of sawyer biggest findings suggests that insomnia is a clinical condition which can be influenced from certain adolescent activities. He suggests that alcohol is the biggest underlying reason. Sawyer says “we often meet with cases of insomnia in which alcohol alone is the cause of shortened and disturbed sleep. ” Shannon R Kenney from the department of phycology at the University of Loyola Marymount examines the effects of drinking on college students. Her research also complies that alcohol can motivate and heighten the overall risk of sleep insomnia. Nearly 80% of all college students have used or will use alcohol according to Kenney. Alcohol is not the only thing that can cause sleep insomnia.

A study done by J. R Morrison claims that sleep patterns are an exponential growth of sleep insomnia. Morrison claims the time you go to bed and the setting are very important to a more sound sleep. Research was done about adolescent insomniacs with the idea of learning to adjust and better manage their sleep environments. Morrison believed that poor sleep was a habit rather than a condition. He reported a case were a 15 year old male student learned to adjust form his 18 month sleeping routine. The student would wake up at 2 A. M every morning. He was told to write down ever worry he had when he would wake up. Within five weeks his habit of waking up at 2 A. M was eliminated and he slept soundly until his 7 A. M alarm. Morrison also claims that there is no single cause to insomnia and no constant way to fix the problem.

Multiple psychological reasons are to blame for sleep insomnia. Angelika Anita, from the department of Clinical Psychology for Children and Adolescents at the University of Bielefeld in Germany claims “sleep problems in university students are often connected with mental health issues. ” Anita also states that students often sleep worse when stressing about a life event such as a presentation or exam. Shelly D Hershner from the University of Michigan with a degree in neurology states that daytime tiredness is highly prevalent among college students. Hershner also states that college students are more likely to have lower academic scores. Through research 60% of students reported that they had experienced daytime tiredness. Studies show that only 4% of students actually sleep for 7 hours or more at night Hershner states. She also states that most college students are sleep deprived because they go to bed late at night and then wake up early causing inadequate sleep. Karen E. Till from the University of Arizona also does studies of insomnia and sleep tiredness in college studies. Through her research she explains that most students are often over-scheduled. This then causes them to stay up all night doing homework or coping with their issues. She also states that it is a risk and dangerous behavior and causes students to cope with alcohol which leads to poor self-respect and daytime tiredness. Insomnia can negatively impact your learning, memory, and performance. In a study done by Hershner, the correlation between sleep and memory formation are dependent on each other. Some students pull all-nighters in hopes of improving grades, however, Hershner claims that this is the wrong plan to improve grades and learning.

To completely understand the correlation between good sleep and learning, Hershner conducted an experiment in which “Subjects were taught a visual discrimination task to identify the presence of ‘T’ or ‘L’ and the orientation of three diagonal bars on a screen. ” Then a group of subjects that were sleep deprived for 30 hours were tested and showed no improvement. On the other hand, the non-sleep deprived students improved every day in the same memory training. Hershner explains that sleep plays an integral part in memory consolidation. Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Andrew J. K. Phillips claims short sleep durations are associated with cognitive impairment. Phillips also states that the time of day sleep occurs can negative effect your performance in academics. Waking up in the middle of the night can cause routine instability Philips states. Findings have shown that sleep insomnia causes students to perform at much lower levels compared to students with a sufficient amount of sleep at night Phillips states A medical cardiologist, Richard N. Fogoros studies the link between insomnia and heart failure. Also 75% of people who have heart failure have experienced insomnia Fogoros states. The common symptoms of heart failure correlate to sleep insomnia Fogoros also states. People with heart failure are as prone to the usual causative factors of insomnia as anyone else. In fact, because they are under the stress of having a chronic illness, and because they are especially likely to develop depression, the “usual causative factors” of insomnia are often increased. But aside from being at least as likely as anyone else to experience the usual causes of insomnia, people with heart failure are subject to several additional problems that often produce sleep disturbances.

Students find it very hard to preform when they lack sleep, J. R. Morrison examines this in his adolescent insomnia study. A graduate student at the University of Penn State, Jensen Sneeringer claims the lack of sleep from insomnia is not only harmful for your own body but is also dangerous to people around you. Sneeringer states it’s a huge problem among college students and it’s getting worse.