The installation of a sleeping pod in the University of Manchester library follows hard on the heels of the University of East Anglia’s sleep room, and no doubt heralds a new era of beanbags, futons, and chaises longue (Russell Group only) popping up on campuses across the UK. But does this mean we are finally taking care of our students’ sleep, or is it an indication that students are now so chronically sleep deprived that universities are having to provide for those who cannot get through the day without forty winks?
The cognitive benefits of a nap are well documented, most notably in Sara Mednick’s popular book Take a Nap! Change Your Life. We know that as little as six minutes sleep can not only sharpen thinking, but improve memory, mood and mental flexibility. Leonardo da Vinci famously lived on 20-minute naps for weeks at a time while oil painting to avoid the paint drying. Based on this evidence, fashionably progressive companies such as Google and Ben & Jerrys have installed sleeping pods or created sleeping spaces in the workplace.
The danger of such a benevolent approach, apart from the growing evidence of higher mortality in habitual daytime nappers, is that it masks, and even contributes to, a problem with overnight sleep. The benefits of a full night’s sleep are similar to naps, but on a much larger scale. Deep sleep, REM sleep and even lighter non-REM sleep have all been firmly implicated in learning and creative thinking, to the extent that parts of the brain responsible for memory, facts and events are known to shrink with chronic sleep deprivation.
In 1978 just 24% of students reported sleep problems, compared with 68% in 1992 and 71% in 2007. Evidence suggests that this is not solely down to greater awareness and an increased willingness to report problems. In 1969 college students in the US got a healthy 7.5 hours of sleep per night; by 1989 this was just 6.5 hours.
Sleep quality is also suffering. Some 60% of students in one 2010 survey showed poor sleep quality (as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index – the most widely used measure of its kind), a finding echoed in other recent studies. The problem is not limited to the Western world; groups as diverse as business students in Hong Kong and medical students in Saudi Arabia report a lack of good quality sleep.
Even more concerning for educators is that poor sleep is inevitably accompanied by poor academic performance. The most sleep deprived Saudi Arabian medical students were also those who showed the lowest academic performance on all tests. A recent US study showed that university grade point average (GPA) scores were related both to sleep duration and quality, with more than half of the students in the study exhibiting clinically poor sleep.
The response of universities, students and in some cases parents to this growing problem has been curious. In the competitive educational atmosphere of China, where even primary and middle school students are chronically sleep deprived according to recent reports, the culture remains firmly of the view that time asleep is time wasted. “Wake-up clubs”, in which students wake each other up with an early morning phone call, are endemic, with one student remarking of her colleagues, “if I am able to wake 10 minutes before them, then that’s 10 extra minutes I have in my day”.
In the West, the situation is characteristically more contradictory; the University of Southampton has recently followed the lead of the University of Bath in announcing 8am lectures, something American students have long taken as the norm. By contrast, the University of Oxford has arranged for 32,000 teenagers to have an extra hour in bed in the morning (no recruitment problem on that trial, I would imagine), with the expectation that their GCSE grades will improve as a result.
Despite efforts to improve the situation in universities, there are systemic problems. Franklin Brown of Louisiana Tech University has developed the Sleep Treatment and Education Program for Students (Steps), which has shown promising results. It is has not been widely adopted in the UK, however, not least because its recommendations for good sleep hygiene – associating the bedroom with sleep rather than work or entertainment – don’t sit easily with the bedsit accommodation routinely found in halls of accommodation.
In the era of students as customers, this situation is only likely to get worse: while university health centres publish leaflets telling their students to get a proper night’s sleep, university libraries feel compelled to open 24/7 during exam periods.
In the end, the sleeping pod is that quintessentially British compromise: the university can feel it is taking action to help, and the student can feel empowered to stay up later. It is certainly helping someone to sleep more soundly – whether that is the student or the university management remains to be seen.
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