= Premium Content

  • Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Previous

Next

Students With Later Classes Get More Sleep, but Also More Booze and Lower Grades

June 14, 2011, 12:01 am

College students whose classes start later in the day tend to sleep more, but also consume more alcohol and have lower grade-point averages, according to study findings that will be presented today at Sleep 2011, a meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. The study, led by two psychologists at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y., surveyed 253 students about their sleep and class schedules, substance use, and mood, among other data. It found that “night owls” were likely to get more sleep than “morning types,” but were also more likely to binge drink, and that their grades were moderately lower. The authors speculated that drinking more alcohol reduced the benefits of getting more sleep. An abstract of the study is available here.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

  • Print
  • Comment
  • smac5

    It seems to me the causality is the other way ’round.  I posted this to a couple of former students, one now getting a PhD in the biology and the other with a Masters in Humanities.  They both are morning people, which doesn’t really prove anything.  Then I think of my own daughter who is a night person and a science person currently in a prestigious grad school.  Still anecdotal, I know.  But they all agree that being a night- or day- person seems to be congenital, part of them.  It seems much more likely that the people who binge drink (and related to that, get lower grades) would also tend to like to sleep late.  Let’s get the post and propter correct here (said the classics professor who is also a night person).

  • coco_rico

    ROFL. The scientists who got paid to do this study must go to bed at night thinking, “I have the sweetest job in the whole world.”

  • cp3242

    It’s important to note that the researchers are not suggesting that their study proves causality — only a correlation between variables. I believe the point they’re making is that binge drinking decreases the quality of sleep, if not the quantity. Quality of sleep (amount spent in different stages of sleep, which serve different purposes) has been shown to impact cognitive ability. What we obviously don’t know is whether students decide to binge drink more because they don’t have to worry about getting up so early in the morning for classes (and would refrain from that behavior if they knew they had to be at an 8 am course), or if the binge drinkers purposefully register for later classes so that they can have more time to drink in the evenings. 

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.