Our Most Neglected Extracurricular

It is your twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth hour without sleep. Only sheer force of will and caffeine drive you from page three to page 20 in your 25-page paper. In the library, you awake suddenly in a puddle of your own saliva at 4 a.m. A “few winks” became a six-hour slumber.

Every Harvard student knows too well these fatigue-sodden experiences. Such moments should remind us how our bodies can break down when we ignore our need for sleep. Yet, when Microsoft Word opens again and we see page 10 rather than page 25, all we feel is guilt or anger that we succumbed to sleep. Here we glimpse one of the most destructive pathologies of our student culture: Sleep has become just another extracurricular—and an undesired and maligned one at that.

Most Harvard students do not have healthy sleep patterns. In this regard, we do not differ from most of our peers at other colleges. In a 2004 book titled “College of the Overwhelmed” Chief of Mental Health Richard D. Kadison of Harvard University Health Services (UHS) cites reports in a 2004 book titled that less than 11% of college students nation-wide were getting “a good night’s sleep” on a regular basis. Harvard, in particular, fosters an exceptionally insidious anti-sleep culture that compounds the conventional collegiate obstacles to sleep with demands arising from its ultra-competitive environment. This culture—or our sleep patterns—cannot be changed by a few well-meaning seminars and pamphlets. The problem is vast, but the solution is simple, sweet, and already known: Each of us must make a proactive decision to reform personal sleep habits and thus recreate the culture of sleep at Harvard.

While we cannot blame all our problems on a lack of sleep, many are certainly exacerbated by it and some are generated directly by it. Sleep deprivation and irregular sleep—as medical phenomena—connect to almost every sphere of student life. Lack of sleep can lead to depression, lack of intellectual concentration, weakened immune systems, and heightened anxiety, all of which can create dire consequences for intellectual and social life.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, college-age students should be sleeping between seven and nine hours each night. Sleep is vital as it allows the body to physically repair tissues as well as effectively process thoughts and memories. In order for these processes to work frequently and effectively, sleep must be regularly scheduled and tied somewhat to the patterns of natural light; varying sleeping and waking times by more than two hours a night—the nearly universal practice of sleeping in on weekends—can lead to clinical anxiety issues.

These factoids have long been available to students on the UHS Web site and through laundry room pamphlets with superbly campy photos. No doubt, every call from home includes some sort of parental plead to “get more sleep.” So why don’t we balance our lives around something so obviously important? The pervasive problems of chronic fatigue at Harvard are perpetuated by a student culture that dismisses and denigrates sleep.

Harvard students not only regularly pull all-nighters for papers or parties, but we also boast aggressively to each other about how little sleep we need. Relative degrees of lack of sleep constitute a main stain of Harvard casual conversation—something we can all “understand.” Peers, professors, and club leaders can sometimes reinforce this culture further by expecting top-notch work, accepting only grave illness as a reason for lateness or inadequate quality.

Yet, more often than not, we as individuals are the primary culprits of our sleep deprivation. We load up on too many classes and activities, factoring in sleep—if at all—as an annoying afterthought to be squeezed in. No one makes us pile on these commitments, but anything less feels “below average.” It takes a courageous (or utterly detached) Harvard student to risk “inferiority,” especially in the name of sleeping well. So when we look around and begin to consider the Harvard sleep culture, “normal” is anything but; consecutive days of barely sleeping are not viewed as dangerous, but as a laudable mark of strength. We envy peers that can somehow thrive on three hours of sleep and an unlimited number of espressos a day, wondering why we cannot do the same without crippling sleepiness.

In this efficiency-driven environment, sleep is viewed as a time-waster demanding minimization. The rare night of more than six hours of good sleep leaves us with a nagging sensation that we could have better spent our time. When weighing the marginal utility of an hour of sleep against powering through the rest of that Ec 10 problem set, you know which option always wins. Even if all those graphs and data have evaporated from our sleep-starved brains the next week, at least we got a check plus.

We know the facts. Sufficient, regular sleep is a vital part of life. Chronic sleep deprivation can never be a means to our ends. Well-rested, we might even be able rejuvenate much of the Harvard experience and our lives. Lectures would feel more stimulating, our papers would be more refined, and our conversations with friends would better remembered. We would look, feel, and act better in every sense of the word. And all we have to do is to dream it, eight hours a night.

Paul G. Nauert ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House.