Cole Mayer

What is the one thing students prize most, the holy grail of college? What is it that every student wants to get every night but just is not successful at it?

No, it is not a one-night stand; get your mind out of the gutter. I am talking about sleep.

Picture this scenario: It is finals week, you have to go to work for the majority of the day and have an essay due the next day, of which you have only done half. You reach for your second can of Red Bull, gulp it down and look at the clock. It is 4:03 a.m. This is really starting to wear you down, especially since you did not sleep the past two nights, studying for other finals and finishing that essay on economics.

After some frenzied writing, you look back at the clock and now it is 7:46 a.m. You have just finished writing and it is time to go to your 8 a.m. class. As you get up from your desk, you grab a third Red Bull, ignoring the dark circles under your eyes as you pass a mirror on the way out. There is no way losing this much sleep can be healthy.

Kalyn Coppedge, a health educator at The Health Center in the Well, said thinking processes slow, attention spans become shorter, students lose concentration more easily and they become easily confused.

But wait, if you keep pulling all-nighters, there is more!

“Not sleeping can lead to mild cognitive impairment, emotional issues, being more reactive to stressors, becoming sick, exhaustion can become a problem and your body will find a way to shut down,” said Kelly Cotter, professor of psychology. “It leads to poor test performance and risk behaviors, like sleeping while driving, which leads to accidents.”

Fine, mostly everyone knows what happens short-term. But what happens when you pull consecutive all-nighters for the horrible end-of-the-year gauntlet of tests, projects, papers and anything else professors love to throw at you?

Coppedge said that not getting enough sleep in the long-term can increase the likelihood of developing depression and anxiety, things that can mentally break a student preparing for finals. The risk of other diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity is also increased.

Do I really want to increase my chances of becoming a depressed shut-in, having to prick my finger every morning with blurred eyes and growling at my visitors?

Knowing this, let us return to your hypothetical situation during finals. After you have finally finished your finals, your friends invite you over to play video games all night. This new game came out and you are just dying to play it. One more sleepless night with friends cannot hurt, right?

But oops, on the way there, you die in a car accident after you fall asleep behind the wheel. Seriously, just get some sleep. Do not let that happen to you.

Cole Mayer can be reached at [email protected].