Point of View: Dreaming of Better Grades?

Intro: [music] Welcome back to The Daily Utah Chronicle’s opinion podcast. I’m your host, Estella Weeks, and you’re listening to Point of View.Steven Carlson: My name is Steven Carlson. I am a clinical psychology PhD student here at the University of Utah, and I am in the health psychology specialization, which means that my research, or my clinical work, focuses on the behavioral and biological processes that might undermine sleep health, as well as other kinds of medical issues. And so my research right now for my dissertation focuses on the role of bedtime procrastination, on circadian rhythms and Cardiometabolic Health, but really I am interested in all things sleep, and I'm really happy to be here. Estella Weeks: Thank you. Okay, why don't we start with the basics? What is sleep like what does your body do during that time. What is your mind doing, and why do we need it? And like, why isn't it even important for us to sleep?Steven Carlson: Sleep is really a unique process in that we often think of it as this kind of inert state where we just black out for, you know, seven or eight hours, nothing really happens, and we just wake up the next day and, you know, get on with our lives. But what we really know about sleep is that it's a really active process, and so we know that there are physiological and neurological processes that happen during sleep that really don't take place at any other time during the day, right? And so sleep is a really important process for us to be able to repair our bodies, prepare our minds for the next day, as well as to do a lot of really important processing of information that we may have learned over the past day, and so it's a really important time during our lives where we are preparing for our days, as well, as you know, repairing damage that we might have done to our to ourselves, to our tissues, to be able to preserve health and well being. It's quite a lot that happens during sleep. And so the question of, you know, what is it for? Why is it important? You know, it's really difficult to find something in our lives that isn't impacted by our sleep. You know, for better or worse.Estella Weeks: So how long should you be getting sleep every single night? And does that have factors of like, age, gender?Steven Carlson: Yeah, absolutely. So there, it's a really great question, and it's honestly not a very straightforward answer. So the National Sleep Foundation put together a consensus panel of sleep experts to try to determine what is the quote, unquote, correct amount of sleep. And so the experts came together in a panel to discuss, you know, what factors might influence recommendations for sleep duration. And what they concluded is that predominantly, age plays a really significant role in the recommendations that we might make for sleep duration. And that makes sense, right? We kind of have this intuitive sense that children and infants require quite a bit more sleep than adults do, and so their recommendations for adults. You know, through young adulthood and middle adulthood is about seven to nine hours per night. There is some evidence to suggest that older adults do tolerate sleep deprivation better than young young adults and middle aged adults. Do you know they have fewer lapses in attention or difficulties with reaction time or things like that after sleep deprivation than than younger adults do, and so you know it really varies across your...