Wake Forest students are among the most sleep deprived in the country

As college students, we are always being graded, even when we are sleeping

Jawbone, a the fitness monitor, came out yesterday with a fascinating study of student sleep habits across the country, and Wake Forest is one of the schools studied.

Students at over 100 universities, totaling 1.4 million nights of sleep, were examined.  Steps, waketime, bedtime, and total hours slept during the week and weekends were tracked and then displayed on this interactive map.

Wake Forest student’s sleep patterns tracked by Jawbone

When compared to other colleges around the country, Wake Forest’s students take more steps and wake up earlier, but go to bed at an average time, which is quite surprising consider “Work Forest” keeps most of us late at night in ZSR. Wake Forest students and other college students, unsurprisingly,  go to sleep later and wake up later on the weekends than on weekdays.

On the weekdays, we on average sleep 7 hours and 8 minutes, and catch up on our zzz’s on the weekend, sleeping almost thirty minutes later. Compared to other universities in North Carolina, like Duke, UNC, and NC State, we sleep almost twenty minutes more during the weekday.

Jawbone discovered “on weeknights women go to sleep on average at 12:23 AM and wake up at 8:09 AM, while men go to bed 39 minutes later and sleep for 22 more minutes. On weekends the effect is even larger: women go to bed at 1:01AM on average and wake up at 9:07 AM, with men going to sleep 42 minutes later and sleeping in 28 minutes more.”

School ranking and sleep patterns are closely related.

The website also tracked the sleep habits of colleges, while taking into consideration their US News and World Report Ranking. This chart tracked the interactive relationship between sleep and academic performance. The report said: “There is a strong relationship between a school’s average bedtime on weeknights and their US News and World Report’s 2016 college ranking. The tougher the school, the later the students go to bed.”

On their website, Jawbone explains that “good sleep is strongly linked to learning, memory, creativity, and problem-solving. However, poor sleep habits notoriously plague college and university students, depriving them of performing their best when it matters the most.”

Wake Forest tried to remedy our chronic lack of sleep by setting up nap and meditation pods on Lower quad yesterday

As we head into exam week, sleep will be lacking, so this map may look slightly different in the next two weeks.

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