A popular question people tend to ask is do I really need so much sleep? When we sleep, it seems that we are actually not accomplishing anything during those 7-8 hours, lying on a comfortable bed, snoring (most people do!!) and dreaming. For us engineers, we know how it is; there is never enough time in a day to get all the things we want to or have to get done, well DONE!! From homework, to the gym, to studying for these blasted exams, partying hard during the week, there is no time left over especially if 7-8 hours of the day is dedicated to sleep. That’s why we cut down the time to 5 hours, hell maybe a nap instead to get us through the night and to the next day where we have even more tasks to complete. However, our view of the need of sleep is completely wrong: If we want to study harder, party harder, get more work done, those 7-8 hours of sleep are crucial to completing those tasks!
So why is sleep so important, for us since we are always so tired, stressed, and possibly hung over? We don’t notice the difference from 2-3 hours of sleep a day to 7-8 hours cause hell, there are so many other things to care about. In reality, without the crucial 7-8 hours of sleep a day, our brain doesn’t really function properly. It has been proven that it results in poor decision making, difficulty solving problems, controlling your emotions, behaviour and coping with change. Sleep deficiency has also been linked to depression, suicide and risk-taking behaviors. This will explain our stressed out behavior and our panic attacks when the professor pulls out some long, fancy, complicated equation, and our continuous thought that every course is hard and life really sucks. This also explains the reason why we make such careless mistakes on exams and face-palming when we hand in an assignment or exam realizing that impossible equation we were trying to solve was actually solvable.
Lack of sleep causes affects daytime performance. This means that your body will involuntarily make one less productive and undergo a state of microsleep. We all have the effects on our productivity on the days that we are not rested, we just sit around and do nothing and on the days where we are full of energy we are jumping, skipping, studying and getting things done. But microsleep what is that? Well, most of us have felt this once before. It is where we essentially involuntarily sleep when we are awake. Imagine you are in class, so very exhausted and your eyelids are drooping. Then the next thing you know, you are in your third class studying a completely diferent subject and possibly in a entirely different classroom and you can’t recall how or what you’ve done from the first class until that third class. That is microsleep. It completely screws with us and can be very dangerous. Imagine if this happened while you were driving, or walking in downtown Kitchener where traffic is very heavy, you would not know what you are doing until you snap out of the microsleep naturally or if you get hit by some vehicle or mugged by some person without knowing. Now that would be dangerous.
So the ultimate lesson to take from this is that sleep is important and not just to get 1 or 2 but at least 7-8 hours in order to be your most productive state, study better, and be a better engineer.
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