Effects of Sleep Deprivation

Joey Hernandez
Boston
ENGL 1301.6020
2 November 2012
The most beautiful thing on the earth… Sleep. Procrastination, the biggest downfall of the students across the educational world, many people joke on the subject, such as high schools throughout America claim to have a “procrastinators unite club” the joke being that the club is always uniting tomorrow. Every student has procrastinated at one point in their studies, whether it is last minute cramming for a big test or writing an explanatory synthesis seven hours before it’s due, pulling these all nighters as a developing young adult usually lead to negative side effects, just as Paul Martin says in the Passage A Third of Life. Pulling all nighters are mistakes we make because the lack of sleep impairs our performance of simple tasks, another side effect is that throughout the duration of the day, you will be drowsy, which has the potential to be extremely dangerous and finally, pulling an all-nighter causes stress and mood depressions. First, I think that any sleep at all is better than none; even as little as 5 minutes can make a difference in attitude, mood and stress “Simple task as that you would normally have no trouble accomplishing start to become difficult” (Epstein 479) including tasks such as getting through the day, or even morning, with a good mood. Many people boast about being able to do anything and everything with very little to no sleep, which isn’t something that should be a social status. The national sleep foundation took a poll that showed “only 20% of adolescents get the recommended nine hours of sleep on school nights, and nearly on half (45%) sleep less than eight hours on school nights” (483); as the average teenage student life progresses different things become important to them; social gatherings, sleep and school begin to pile up. The National Sleep Foundation clearly discovered that students are choosing to cut down on sleep. College students, high school students, and even younger kids are beginning to think that they don’t need sleep because, time is essential to them, whether they are playing video games, Facebooking, or actually studying and doing homework; even national organizations realize this “the poll finds that adolescents aren’t heeding expert advice to engage in realizing activities in the hour before bedtime” (National Sleep foundation 485). Ever since the world of the internet began rapidly increasing, college students and many others have lost grand amounts of sleep due to busy schedules. Secondly, pulling an all-nighter is dangerous, especially for those who drive. No sleep obviously makes you extremely tired and drowsy, Christopher Vaughan has had a first person view as a fellow professor of his went through the horrors of falling asleep on the road “as he drove on, it became harder and harder to keep his eyes open and he began to be concerned” (503) his car drove off 30 ft ledge after falling asleep at the wheel. The reason being for his dangerous accident was his lack of sleep during a bicycle race around Lake Tahoe, which shows that not only adolescents need a priority check when it comes to your personal health. He planned on taking a break for coffee only twenty minutes farther down the road. “Sleeping deprivation also leaves you prone to two potentially dangerous phenomena, microsleeps and automatic behavior, which play a role in thousands of transportation accidents each year” (Epstein 480) if only Vaughan’s cyclist friend had realized that dangers of driving deprived of sleep, it is just as dangerous as driving under the influence of alcohol. One way of making the roads safer in the morning, with school traffic and all the student drivers would be to have the school day start and hour or even thirty minutes later, Fred Dannner and Barbara Phillips did studies and took polls of students in a county where the school started an hour later than others across the state and the results were “ moving the school start time 1 hour later for all of the adolescents in 1 large county school district resulted in meaningful increases in sleep time, an increase in the percentage of students who got an adequate amount of sleep, and a decrease in catch-up sleep on weekends” (Danner Barbara 527). Lastly, the lack of sleep effects peoples moods and attitude throughout the day on different levels of intensity with the different levels of sleep deprivation. As a person continuously receives insufficient amounts of sleep day after day, they begin to suffer “after two or more nights of short sleep, people usually show signs of irritability and sleepiness.” (Epstein 480). As the sleep wars are going on the adolescents of today are losing the battle, and the price everyone else has to pay is to deal with some hormonal, sleep deprived moody teenagers, as if we weren’t hard enough to get along with. In addition to the previous poll, the Nation Sleep Foundation found that “Among those adolescents who report being unhappy, tense and nervous, 73% feel they don’t get enough sleep at night and 59% are excessively sleepy during the day” (NSF 483). To wrap it all up, the lack of sleep that the teens today go up against affects them in several ways, all bad. The sleep lost by our adolescents’ today cause, stress, mood swings, dangerous driving and the ability to perform simple tasks. Honestly, who wouldn’t go for a good nap every once in awhile?

Works Cited
Martin, Paul. “A Third of Life.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 462-470 Print
Epstein, Lawrence. “Improving Sleep.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 471-481 Print
National Sleep Foundation. “America’s Sleep-Deprived Teens Nodding Off at School, Behind the wheel” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 483-488
Vaughan, Christopher. “Sleep Debt and the Mortgaged Mind.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 497-505 Print
Danner, Fred and Phillips, Barbara. “Adolescent Sleep, School Start Times, and Teen Motor Vehicle Crashes” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 522-528 Print

Cited: Martin, Paul. “A Third of Life.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 462-470 Print Epstein, Lawrence. “Improving Sleep.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 471-481 Print National Sleep Foundation. “America’s Sleep-Deprived Teens Nodding Off at School, Behind the wheel” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 483-488 Vaughan, Christopher. “Sleep Debt and the Mortgaged Mind.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 497-505 Print Danner, Fred and Phillips, Barbara. “Adolescent Sleep, School Start Times, and Teen Motor Vehicle Crashes” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Lawrence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 522-528 Print