Academic pressure, compiled with extracurricular activities and social life, is a real issue. At Oak Park High School, with many students taking challenging classes, students may spend hours every night on homework and studying for tests.
To stay on top of it all, students may decide to sacrifice their sleep for extra work time. The most extreme version of this is pulling an all-nighter. However, are those additional hours of sleep-deprived studying really worth it? All-nighters are really more harmful than beneficial as they impair cognitive function during the day, worsen your test scores and in the long run disrupt your health.
Anyone, after zero hours of sleep, will be fatigued throughout the day. This can result in microsleep, which are periods of sleep less than 30 seconds, which can mean you aren’t aware of something that happened and have difficulty processing information. Other effects include trouble concentrating, increased poor decision making, difficulty thinking creatively, inability to form memory and more.
When you are in class trying to listen to the teacher, you will ultimately have more difficulty learning anything than if you hadn’t pulled an all-nighter. And if you pull an all nighter to perform better on an exam, you may actually perform worse due to lack of sleep, negating the sacrifice you made.
In a study done on the correlation between the sleep behavior of undergraduates and their test scores, it was found that an extra hour of sleep resulted in a 15% increase in the odds ratio of correct answers. So, it’s probably best to go into the classroom well-rested and less studied up than with a full night of inefficient studying.
However, all-nighters may have some small benefits. According to Northwestern University, a sleepless night can increase dopamine release and synaptic plasticity, which will maintain your cheerful mood for longer.
“Chronic sleep loss is well studied, and its uniformly detrimental effects are widely documented,” Professor Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy said. “But brief sleep loss — like the equivalent of a student pulling an all-nighter before an exam — is less understood. We found that sleep loss induces a potent antidepressant effect and rewires the brain.”
While that may encourage you to skip a night of sleep, consistent lack of sleep will not help improve your mental state and instead leads to long-term mental disorders such as depression, anxiety and mental distress.
Further, sleep deprivation can disrupt the central nervous system and lead to more severe issues such as hallucinations, mania and bipolar mood disorder. It can cause issues with physical health by impacting numerous other systems of your body, increasing risk for minor illnesses like colds, chronic cardiovascular and respiratory disease and conditions like obesity.
In order to avoid pulling all-nighters, you can improve your time management by planning out your days and knowing deadlines. If you find yourself constantly pulling them, you may reconsider how full your schedule is and whether the stress you are under is too much.
So, the next time you think of sacrificing your sleep and health for an A on the test tomorrow, or staying up late to finish a few of those assignments, think of the short-term and long-term impacts. Then you’ll realize that the best choice of all is to hop into bed and give yourself that much-needed rest.
