Sleep cycles matter more than eight hours
Recently, I have discovered that the fundamentals of a subject are the key to mastery in any field. Even everyday life can be improved by attempting to improve at menial tasks like sleep.
Most college students aren’t lucky enough to have schedules without an 8 a.m. class (I am one of the lucky few). Logically, as the clock strikes 1:58 a.m., most people would think it’s time to go to sleep.
Yet for one reason or another I usually choose to stay awake for a while longer. Scrolling an extra reel, completing an extra assignment, studying for an exam — night turns to dawn, and sleep becomes an afterthought.
Whenever this phenomenon strikes me, I decide that it's probably better to get some sleep than none. Predictably, waking up after a few hours feels like a baby elephant is resting on me as I roll out of bed to get assailed by complicated theories and lectures at a perfectly reasonable time: 9 a.m.
However, looking back at these assaults, sometimes it seems like three hours of sleep makes me feel fresher than nine hours. The constant buzzing of my alarm wakes me up at 8:30 a.m. and I feel like nothing can stop me. Then the voices in my head tell me class is at 9:00 a.m., and I end up sleeping the extra fifteen minutes. As a result, I wake up with brain fog and walk into class as a corpse by 9:05 a.m.
Healthy sleep is necessary to function at an optimal mental capacity. For example, when your professor launches into a spiel about why a particularly complicated theory makes sense and it still makes no sense, the root cause behind a lack of understanding may lie in the improper optimization of sleep. Or it may be that the theory simply makes no sense. (Or maybe you’re a super genius who understands everything perfectly.)
Whatever the case, healthy sleep can make the difference when trying to live life to the fullest. But it doesn’t always look how we usually think. Many people have the misconception that if you aren’t getting eight hours of sleep, you aren’t getting enough.
According to the Harvard Medical School, if you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to attack the day, there are bigger issues to worry about — like the state of Augustana after Michael Mullin goes on sabbatical next year.
While eight hours as a number isn’t wrong, what matters as much as if not more than the number is the quality and consistency of your sleep.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is the state within our sleep where our eyes go full “Exorcist” and move rapidly; our muscles go numb, allowing the mind to enter a state where one can dream without acting out those actions in real time. Getting to this state is most beneficial for us, as it usually occurs at the end of a sleep cycle.
On average, sleep cycles are around an hour and 30 minutes, although they vary per individual. When I wake up feeling ready to write a dissertation at 8:30 a.m., it’s because even though I haven’t slept enough, I have still managed to wake up at the end of a sleep cycle, allowing me to be in a state where my mind is ready to go.
When I decide to sleep an extra 15 minutes to get closer to that eight-hour mark in the name of my health, I essentially transform myself into a zombie. Instead of being in prime condition, my mind becomes a foggy mess when I wake up in the beginning of a sleep cycle or in the middle of REM sleep.
Those 15 minutes don’t have any benefit to anyone: not to me, and not to my morning professors who now have to deal with a late student with cloudy eyes and sub-optimal mental capabilities.
For college students, sleeping eight hours every day can feel like an impossible task. Failing to achieve that isn’t the end of the world. Sleeping six hours and waking up at the end of a sleep cycle is far better than being overly cautious and sleeping for six hours and 15 minutes.
