Effects of sleeping hours on academic performance

The primary objective of this research is to argue students to employ proper sleeping habits to ensure that they can efficiently perform in class. Biologically, sleeping is very important, and it enables people to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Adequate sleep allows people to work at the maximum level possible, and this is essential for the functioning of the brain, it also helps in cognitive functioning of the brain such as learning, critical thinking and decision making. Despite this, it has been proved that lack of enough sleep has been affecting some members of the society especially college students lack adequate sleep has therefore been affecting their performance researchers have confirmed that some of the factors that are causing poor performance of college students are due to sleep deprivation.

This is in addition to stress that causes sleep deprivation. Suboptimal sleeping time is considered to be a national crisis with a population that is more than a quarter of the total American population not receiving the recommended sleeping time, which is at least seven hours per night. To improve the productivity, quality living style as well as ensuring that there is prosperity in the society, it is therefore vital to provide that the society is aware of the importance of adequate sleeping time. Cognitive performance is one of the factors that are affected by inadequate sleeping time. Cognitive functioning is essential to any students to ensure that they are in apposition to efficiently perform. Research on sleeping patterns has mainly focused on teens, adolescents, and young children with it ignoring college and other higher learning students who are also affected by this.

It has also been proved that psychiatric disorder; some types of dysfunctions such as learning disability as well as reduction of work efficiency, and psychosocial stress are some of the problems that may be caused by insomnia. Sleeping is considered to be an essential aspect for any student who wants to prosper in education as well as college life. Despite this, there is very little attention that has been applied in coming up with the appropriate sleeping pattern. The research, therefore, will focus on college students and how lack of adequate sleeping time has led to them having poor performance in their academics. The study will aim at finding a relationship between sleeping pattern and academic achievement. It also claims that sleep allows the brain to prepare the body for the other day to come.

It also claims that rest enables the brain to cement things that we learned during the day in the long-term memory. These theories are believed to be correct since their views are somehow similar. Methods and techniques The findings found in this writing was a cross-sectional study which was carried out on different levels of education in AUST medical students who were yet to graduate back in February 2015 to April 2015. Universal sampling technique was used in the process of selecting the group that was used in this study. Results 190 students responded out of the 200 students that were involved in the study. The response rate was therefore 95%. The percentage of the male participants was 26% while of the female participants were 74% which kept the distribution of the students in the college balanced.

Out of that population sample, 19% were residents in the campus while 81% were residents outside the university. On weekdays, 37% of the residents slept for less than six hours, 55% slept between 6 to 8 hours while 8% slept for more than eight hours. Other ways in which poor sleep affects the performance of the students include decreasing their level of motivation, causing daytime sleepiness as well as compromising their health (Wheaton et al. 40% of the respondents were found to have day napping while 6% were found to have weekend’s depression, as showed in table three. This, therefore, means that respondents that have less than six hours sleeping time daily on weekdays are likely to have significantly lower CGPA as compared to the respondents with six to eight hours sleeping time or those with eight hours resting time, as shown in table four.

Many factors sleep deprivation in college students. According to the research that was carried out by Arlberg et al. According to the same research, first-year college students also tend to have less sleeping time than senior students in both genders. This is due to factors such as first-year students having little academic work that they have to attend to and more relaxed attitude of the senior students since they have their life balanced outside the school as compared to the freshmen that they are trying to figure out their lives. There is more likelihood for the freshmen to have more stress than the senior students who already have their social and educational experience balanced. Due to this, sleep deprivation may be caused due to gender differences as well as grade differences.