Sleepless students, risky behaviour
November 3, 2025 6:56 PM
The study remains elusive, but if you ask anyone on campus if hours of sleep and proximity of mid-terms have an inverse relationship, you’ll find they do. “But it’s just sleep right? Who cares? You can just catch up.” Loss of sleep has been shown in recent years to have a much more significant effect on our brains than previously understood. Dr. Wright of the psychology department explains, “Sleep deprivation is a huge global problem, way worse than people recognize.” In fact, he states “[It is] hard to find a psychological disorder that isn’t caused by [sleep deprivation], or at least exacerbated by sleep deprivation, especially ADHD, anxiety, and depression.” So in this vein, sleep is very important. Furthermore, a psychological study in Sleep Journal has found that for an average person that requires eight hours sleep, if the participant drops down to seven hours for three days in a row, their performance drops by over 50 per cent. Have you ever under-slept one night but woke up feeling full of energy that carried on throughout the day? You’re not alone. A fairly recent discovery has shown that by missing just one night of full sleep, your brain may go into a hypo-manic state, increasing your mood. However, if you try this again the next day, the positive effect will be replaced with a largely negative one. Perhaps in one of the most interesting recent studies, researchers set up a gambling experiment to test sleep deprivation on risk-taking behavior. The abstract is telling: Following sleep deprivation, choices involving higher relative risk elicited greater activation in the right nucleus accumbens, signifying an elevated expectation of the higher reward once the riskier choice was made. Concurrently, activation for losses in the insular and orbital frontal cortices was reduced, denoting a diminished response to losses. This latter finding of reduced insular activation to losses was also true when volunteers were merely shown the results of the computer’s decision, that is, without having to make their own choice. Neurological evidence now shows that our sleep-deprived judgment errs towards the risky in not just one but two ways. Make sure you forget that wake-up call next time you go to Vegas. So in those sleep deprived periods of mid-terms and Christmas finals, our judgment no doubt becomes cloudy. Third year business student Jordan Banyan explains that his risk-taking behaviour changed when he was sleep deprived last year. While usually more cash cognizant, he says, “When I was working full-time at Tim Horton’s, I wasn’t sleeping a lot, and I never had any money. I always just spent it all.” With almost all of the student population becoming sleep deprived around exams, perhaps the administration should look into amending the schedule to be more sleep friendly. As a result, physical and mental health and the academic performance of students are bound to increase.
