Promote good sleep hygiene - Essay Example

The National Sleep Foundation (2011) also lays down that inadequate sleep contributes to different problems related to depression. UMass Boston should keep all these problems in sight before implementing an educational program for the students regarding sleep hygiene. UMass Boston health office should ensure that the students are getting an excellent sleep before coming to the school. This would help in improving the academic performance of many of the students in the college. Frederick Danner and Brandon Phillips (2008) in “Adolescent sleep, school start times, and teen motor vehicle crashes” state that adolescents are not getting enough sleep as they are growing up and this leads to several problems in the society.

Teenagers tend to drive while being drowsy and this leads to many traffic problems in the society. Keeping this in mind the UMass Boston health office can provide the students with the information about driving without sleep. Driving while being drowsy poses the risk of accidents to these teenagers and the health office should inform the students about the risks involved. Mary Carskadon in a research at Brown University found that students who got enough sleep in their daily routine were able to perform well in their academic settings.

The research clearly showed that students who went to bed earlier in their daily routine were able to grasp A’s and B’s whereas the ones who slept less were amongst the low achievers in the class (Carpenter 2001).Moreover Kyla Wahlstrom (2002) stated that students who did not get enough sleep showed signs of inattentiveness and poor performance in the class. All these signs clearly show that the UMass Boston health office should take a step to inform the students about the possible consequences that they may face if they do not get enough sleep.

Sleep is also related to the cognitive skills of an individual as shown by many researches. June Pilcher and Walter (1997) carried out an experiment to find out the relation between the cognitive skills and sleep. The experiment was conducted on 44 college students who either were sleep deprived for 24 hours or slept for 8 hours. These college students were asked to perform a cognitive skill test after which they had to complete 2 questionnaires with regard to the efforts that they made during the test.

The result clearly showed that the individuals who did not get sleep properly were not able to perform well in their academic settings. The cognitive skills of the ones who slept properly were higher than the ones who did not sleep properly. The students who did not sleep properly were not able to perform at the cognitive task whereas those who slept well were completely different as they were able to perform well. Moreover the questionnaires helped to assess the awareness of the students and it was found that the sleep deprived students rated their performance to be high than the non-deprived ones which clearly means that they are not aware about the effects of sleep on their academics.

Sleep education at UMass Boston can help the students to get over these common problems so that they can concentrate on their skills and improve upon their cognitive performance (Pilcher & Walter 1997). Maintaining Sleep hygiene is a solution to all the problems that individuals in academic settings suffer from. Sleep related problems are seen to be suffered by many students because of which they cannot perform well in th