Sleep deprivation is a rebounding mental state produced when you give yourself less-than-optimal sleep.

It's been shown through research that sleep deprivation in individuals can translate to negative aspects of society.

Studies show that sleep-deprived people show similar symptoms as people with social anxiety. Sleep loss is linked to everything from car accidents to weight gain, and the journal Nature Communications found that sleep-deprived people felt more lonely and less social around other people.

Matt Walker even stated on his TED Talk "Sleep Is Your Superpower" that men who sleep 5 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more.

In this Ted Talk, Walker categorizes the detriments of sleep-deprivation on the individual in two main categories: One being the good and bad impacts it has on the brain, and the other being that of the body.

To sum his words up in short, he makes the analogy that a person's physiological response to the amount of, and quality of, sleep it gets is similar to the raison d'être of a sponge; of the functions of a sponge.

He states that, over the past 10 years or so, that you need sleep after learning to essentially hit the "save button" on those new memories so that you don't forget.

"We recently also discovered that you need sleep before learning to actually prepare your brain – almost like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information – and without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new memories."

Through this 'sponge' model, he also challenges the idea that pulling the "all-nighter" is a good idea, by proving that it's actually a really, really bad idea because of how drastically better your brain performs with proper sleep and sleep schedule.

For those reading who are not aware, the optimal amount of sleep a person should give themselves per day is 6-8 hours and on a consistent schedule.

The reason why this issue is extremely relevant is because of how many people today work two jobs and/or jobs with less traditional, "shift work," schedules. Also, sleep deprivation could be the nucleus for the reason why the college population is experiencing a surge in depression, prescription drug abuse, recreational drug use. Why?

Half of these issues could be a result of college students not getting enough sleep at night as a result of the work piled on them – keeping in mind that college students are also people – people who work, partake in extracurricular sports/activities, party, etc. – and the cultural grip that prescription drugs have on the youth of America.

Not only are prescription drugs like Xanax and promethazine presented to the youth as 'cool' or even helpful in the media by rappers who are very popular among college students, many college students turn to these drugs after subconsciously convincing themselves they experience the symptoms that these drugs ease.

In other cases, college students can make these symptoms up just to get prescribed a drug they want to try!

To conclude, I want to state that I, personally, find it to be necessary for pharmaceutical legislation to enhance the analytical process in prescribing young people medicines as well as the efficiency of the processes individuals who've been cleared for prescribed medications must go through.

These need to be organized better so that every person who needs them can obtain the medicine for themselves and for the people they care about, not just for the people who can afford it and not for people who lie to get it just because they want it or think they need it.

More awareness on the detrimental side effects that sleep deprivation has on a person's mind and body could decrease not only medical misdiagnosis, but could be an influential factor in society to developing a general increase in social awareness, cooperation, and overall satisfaction as well.