After the first week of college, the average amount of sleep college students get decreases to like four to five hours max. And you're probably like ok, yeah, college students don't get sleep. It's true and we all know it, let's move on.
But, we can't.
We need to fix this.
College students are still growing, we come in at 18 years old and graduate at around 22. Even when we graduate, our bodies and minds haven't fully developed yet.
We do a lot of our growing when we sleep. Our bodies heal themselves as we sleep. All the energy that went to keeping you balanced as you walk or to focus in class is now able to towards fixing and stabilizing your body from the inside. Do you see the problem?
If we aren't sleeping enough then how can the body fix itself? The answer is: it can't.
We spend our day running from class to class trying to understand our professors who usually don't make any sense. We shove something barely edible into our mouths as we try to finish the homework due at 12 that night and then when we finally get to go to our rooms we need to study for the back to back midterms we have next week.
And we all this while trying to manage some sort of social life because God knows that if you don't just speak to a normal human being for a few minutes you will explode!
We beat out bodies up, mentally and physically every day and don't have time to sleep and allow all this damage to be fixed.
Whose fault is this? Is it yours? Is it your professor? Or is it university culture?
The world is an extremely competitive place. Now more than ever. Everyone is aiming high and working their butts off to get somewhere. Why is it so?
Society has created and very successfully spread the message that only one person can be at the top. Only one person can be successful. Society has limited the meaning of success to mean just one thing. Whoever has the best position and can buy the biggest house and can afford the latest iPhone is the only successful person.
It is this ideology that has to lead to the ultimate demise of the college students' amount of sleep and their health.
It isn't going to be easy but we can start fixing this problem by seeing that there is no single definition of success. We need to see that everyone can achieve success. There is enough to go around. We also need to put our health before our grades. We need to take time off of our days to just sit down and relax. And most importantly, we need to start getting seven to ten hours of sleep. It will only benefit us in the long run.
