Could sleep deprivation be to blame for the “freshman 15”? Sixty percent of our nation is overweight with nearly 30 percent being obese—and it affects health care costs, productivity and overall well-being. More than a dozen studies have confirmed that our nation’s weight problem is tied to insufficient sleep, including a study of nearly 70,000 people, where researchers found that sleep habits had a greater long-term effect on weight gain than eating or exercise.*
When students are sleep deprived, there is evidence they simply burn fewer calories during the day. On the metabolic level, hormones that regulate appetite are disrupted when we sleep less than we should. The signal for hunger is artificially higher than normal and the signal for satiety is lower—we’re always hungry and never satisfied. When we’re tired, our brains compensate by consuming unnecessary calories that quickly turn into unwanted pounds. Research also confirms that when sleep deprived, we tend to abandon our dietary choices, gravitating from healthier foods to those with more sugars and starches.†
Lack of stamina. Sleep has many functions, but fundamentally it’s designed to provide us with about sixteen hours of sustained, alert wakefulness. From the second we wake in the morning “pressure” begins to build to go back to sleep. If you didn’t start the day with a good 7.5 to 8 hours of quality sleep, you begin the day with a sleep debt that will reveal itself early in the afternoon. That insuppressible urge to yawn or feeling of nodding off right after lunch is a tell-tale sign of inadequate sleep. Many suppress it with caffeine—but that introduces a classic vicious circle. Caffeine has a half-life of up to seven hours. Half the caffeine you consume mid-afternoon will still be affecting you at bed time, diminishing the quality of your sleep creating even more sleep debt as you begin the next day.
Your college kid is likely sleep deprived and may not understand or appreciate sleep’s importance. We talk a lot about diet and the role of exercise with our children, but often overlook sleep. As a sleep researcher for Select Comfort, I often witness poor sleep strategies that result in a diminished quality of life. Insufficient or in adequate sleep not only affects how we look and feel, it also has far more dire consequences. Research firmly links poor sleep with many cardiovascular and metabolic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity.
To help your college student stay healthy, encourage them to try going to bed a little earlier (even 15 minutes earlier will help), and make sure they’re sleeping on a quality mattress and with high-quality bedding. In research conducted at Stanford and Duke Universities, subjects fell asleep faster, spent less time awake in bed and experienced a better quality of sleep on the Sleep Number® bed.
*American Thoracic Society, International Conference, San Diego, May 19-24, 2006 Annals of Internal Medicine, December 7, 2004, Volume 141 Issue 11, Pages 846-850
† Annals of Internal Medicine, December 7, 2004, Volume 141 Issue 11, Pages 846-850
