With greater pressure to get the best grades or perform well at school, many students have been staying up later and later to study.
All-nighters can make it hard to remember new information and form new memories the next day. Along with that, they can also make it difficult to go to sleep in the coming days and greatly affect one’s mood. Should students pull the all-nighter and risk forgetting the material they’ve studied and ruining their sleep schedule for a better shot at passing?
Freshman Frida Sanchez has only pulled one all-nighter, a night that ruined her sleep schedule for weeks to come.
“I did not pay attention the whole week in class and when we had a major unit test [so] I panicked,” Sanchez said. “I said I was going to study for two hours. I stayed up all night studying, and I ended up acing that test. I was really proud.”
Despite passing the test, the night made her feel moody and exhausted, a common side effect of all-nighters.
“I suffered really badly,” Sanchez said. “I couldn’t really go to bed at night anymore…working out did not help. It made me even more tired, but I was too tired to sleep… [I just couldn’t] relax anymore.”
For some students, it’s common to pull multiple all-nighters a week.
“My dog was sleeping and I thought he was a goat,” freshman Jade Diaz said. “[That] was on the third day I hadn’t slept.”
Pulling all nighters can be a huge trigger for hallucinations. One researcher found that around 80% of sleep deprived people have experienced hallucinations.
According to school nurse Nanette Pasion, sleep and nutrition are the two most important things for health.
“Sleep is really important,” Pasion said. “It is the time that our body can rest and recharge from whatever stressors we’re under during the day. If you go through all day of work or school and then go home and you don’t allow your body any time to decompress, you’re running in a state of stress. [This] increases your cortisol levels, a stress hormone that also adds to how you feel the next day, which is really crappy.”
Yet another issue with pulling all nighters is memory loss. According to The National Library of Medicine, not sleeping can cause it to be hard to remember things and affect how well you can form new memories.
“If there’s [a way] to prevent all nighters, I would go with that,” Pasion said. “Try to just be a lot better about being more time efficient, prioritizing your assignments and studying to where you can at least get some sleep.”
