To say college students* aren’t well-known for their efficient sleep habits might be the most dramatic understatement since Washington observed that Valley Forge winters are “a bit nippy.” I can remember dozing off with my head in a pile of books at the library when I was in college, then waking with “The Riverside Chaucer” imprinted on my face in mirror-image.
Undaunted by college students’ reputation for irregular sleep, a group of researchers conducted a large study of Ohio State University students’ sleeping habits. Among the many questions they attempted to answer was a simple one: how does loneliness affect sleep? Certainly loneliness is an important issue for college students, and focusing in on this aspect of the sleep data was a team led by John T. Cacioppo.
Their study design was simple: before enrolling in the sleep study, the participants were given a battery of tests, one of which was a loneliness scale: a 20-question measure developed at UCLA and demonstrated to be a reliable indicator of loneliness. The top fifth, middle fifth, and bottom fifth were selected for further study.
Cacioppo et al. further narrowed the field by eliminating people who scored high on an index of clinical depression, who were in their first or last term in college, or who weren’t enrolled full-time. Participants spent one night at the research center on campus, where they were fitted with a device that monitored head and eyelid movements. These measures were used to create a sleep efficiency score. Then the students monitored their own sleep using the same device for five more nights. Here are those results:
People with high loneliness ratings had significantly lower sleep efficiency ratings than less lonely people, both in the lab and in their own beds. They also spent more time awake after they had initially fallen asleep:
Cacioppo et al. claim that this is the first study that has found that lonely people do not sleep as well as non-lonely people. Whether loneliness causes poor sleep is not answered by this study, which can only show a correlation between loneliness and inefficient sleep. Perhaps poor sleep causes loneliness, or perhaps some other condition causes both loneliness and poor sleep (though individuals suffering from depression, possibly the most likely culprit, were excluded from this study).
Do you have any crazy college sleep / sleep deprivation stories? Share them in the comments (which may also be used to comment on the study)!
Cacioppo, J.T., Hawkley, L.C., Berntson, G.G., Ernst, J.M., Gibbs, A.C., Stickgold, R., & Hobson, J.A. (2002). Do lonely days invade the nights? Potential social modulation of sleep efficiency. Psychological Science, 13(4), 384-387.
*or university students, as they’re called outside the U.S.