With homework, study sessions, volunteering and extracurricular activities including field hockey and viola, freshman Kinsey Erickson said she is only able to squeeze in around six hours of sleep per night. Her solution: repaying this so called “sleep debt” by sleeping extra on the weekends.

“The fact that we have a big workload and early hours makes it hard to sleep enough, which is a problem,” Erickson said. “I definitely could do more to stick to the same sleeping plan as the weekdays; I don’t think I can help but go to bed and wake up late on the weekends.”

However, Erickson said that she does not believe her sleep debt is truly repaid.

“Sleeping for 12 hours straight is great,” she said. “It almost makes me more tired when I know I can’t sleep this much every day.”

Erickson’s situation is a common one. According to the  2010 article “Sleep Debt Hard to Repay” in WebMD Health News, researchers have found that while one long night of sleep can temporarily hide the effects of sleep deprivation, this may lead to a hazardous situation in which individuals do not realize their degree of sleep deficiency. The lingering effect of chronic sleep deprivation is an increased risk of fatigue-related errors the longer the person stays awake.

According to a January 2010 study published in Science Translational Medicine, sleep deprivation affects the brain sleep patterns in at least two different ways. One sleep regulatory process builds up over hours spent awake and another accumulates over days or weeks of not getting enough sleep. Consequently, though individuals try to catch up on short-term sleep deprivation with one good night of sleep, the effects of long-term sleep deprivation persist.

CHS Nurse Althea Albritton said that this is a persistent problem at this school due to academic, extracurricular and family demands.

“A lot of reasons that students come down (to the nurses office), I’ll say 25 percent, is because of fatigue, no breakfast and ‘I’ve been up all night,’” she said.

Albritton said the short-term effects include concentration, performance in school, paying attention to instructions and safety on the road. She said that the most profound long-term effect, however, is on the
immune system.

“The body does not repair itself well; you need sleep to repair cells and muscles,” she said. “This is a main problem for your immune system.”

Erickson said she can feel the consequences when she pulls all-nighters in the forms of exhaustion, an increase in jumpiness, sickness and an aversion to bright lights.

Senior Harrison Kim said he experiences a similar dilemma. He said he sleeps as little as three hours on average during the weekdays and then spends 10 hours sleeping on the weekends. He said although he spends much of his time involved in orchestra and working on homework, he also spends what he considers to be most of time social networking instead of sleeping. According to Kim, sites like Facebook often distract him from getting work done and cause him to lose sleep.

“Nowadays, it is just out of habit,” Kim said. “It started because of schoolwork, but now I just use the time for talking with other people or anything else I would do in my free time. I don’t think I can just stop.”

Unlike Erickson, Kim said he does believe that sleeping extra on the weekends is an effective solution.

“I think I am repaying the debt because I don’t think I could sleep so little if I didn’t have a couple days to catchup on sleep,” he said.

Albritton said she does not believe the validity of this solution mentioned by Kim.

“My understanding of the need for sleep, especially for growing students, is that once you’re sleep deprived, there’s no such thing as catching up on sleep. There needs to be adequate amounts of sleep,” she said. “The only cure is to get consistently eight hours of sleep. However, I think students need to get even more than that.”

Nevertheless, with all the work on her shoulders, Erickson said she can not help but go to bed late on the weekdays and catch up on her sleep debt over the weekends, despite the negative riskiness of this habit.

“It’s wonderful, waking up on your own accord on the weekends rather than a horrible alarm clock,” she said. “I just feel a bit bitter, knowing that my next sleep will probably be a lot shorter.”