HMS Prof Discusses Sleep

It’s probably not news to you that sleep matters. Students heard this advice yet again last night, but this time a Medical School professor told them the science behind all-nighters and snooze buttons.

At a Dunster House dinner discussion called “Why Sleep?” that was sponsored by Harvard University Health Services (HUHS), Assistant Professor of Medicine Steven W. Lockley answered questions for a group of about 18 students.

“The bad news is, there’s no way around it,” he said. “There’s no magic pill to allow yourself to work on less sleep.”

Lockley said that even six hours of sleep can be detrimental to a day’s work. Lack of sleep can cause obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, increased risk of accidents, and poorer learning and memory, Lockley added.

“People really need eight and a half hours a night, on average,” he said.

This average refers to per night, Lockley said, meaning that students cannot make up for lost sleep on the weekend.

“There’s really no good way to store or pay back sleep,” Lockley said. For those pulling all-nighters, the news is more sobering: staying up all night is the equivalent to flying to Australia, and it takes at least 12 days for a body’s internal clock to reset.

Though Lockley did say that neither napping nor hitting the snooze button is useless, he stressed the importance of long, undisturbed blocks of sleep at night.

“The first four hours of sleep are characterized by slow eye movement, and the second half by rapid eye movement,” he said. “It’s important to fully get both.”

“Set your alarm for the final hour, and get up right away,” Lockley suggested, causing the students to laugh.

In the end, he said, getting enough sleep is a matter of setting priorities, but there are also unavoidable obstacles to getting that full night’s rest.

“We need to educate people to bring about institutional changes,” he said, adding that it is biologically more difficult for young adults than for older adults to get up early in the morning. According to Lockley, asking young adults to attend an eight o’clock class is equivalent to requiring older adults to go to work at 3 a.m.

David Mou ’08 said that he found the presentation interesting.

“I’m taking a class on sleep right now. So [the discussion] was really helpful,” he said. As he rushed out the door to get to lab on time, he added that he’d try to follow Lockley’s advice.