Dr. Jesse Mindel, a physician at the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State who specializes in sleep medicine, said students should be mindful of how they take naps to avoid negative side effects such as confusion and grogginess. Credit: Mackenzie Shanklin | Photo Editor
With many classes online and sometimes asynchronous, students’ sleep schedules no longer revolve around getting up and walking to class — some are napping less, others are napping more and waking up worse off than when they fell asleep.
Dr. Jesse Mindel, a physician at the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State who specializes in sleep medicine, said students should be mindful of how they take naps to avoid negative side effects such as confusion, grogginess and throwing their sleep cycles even further out of whack.
Mindel’s advice: take naps less than 30 minutes — and sleep when it’s nighttime.
“If you’re sleeping a long time, it’s probably because you were too tired to start with; you’re trying to recover. You can’t recover from sleep deprivation in one night — it takes multiple nights,” Mindel said.
Mindel said people with healthy sleep schedules typically only sleep at night. The human body’s 24-hour circadian rhythm, the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle, creates a dip in energy overnight to allow people to fall asleep, Mindel said. Most people fall into this category.
However, depending on people’s sleep schedules, Mindel said the circadian rhythm can cause a second dip in the early afternoon, allowing people to easily drift off for a nap.
Waking up from a nap, however, is a different story.
Mindel said long naps cause the body to produce excess tryptophan, an amino acid normally consumed through protein. Tryptophan is a building block for serotonin and melatonin — neurotransmitters that influence sleep, according to the Healthline website.
Mindel said students should avoid staying up all week and trying to catch up on their sleep over the weekend.
For students having trouble falling asleep, Mindel said putting away the screens can help repair their sleep cycle. Mindel said the long periods of blue light exposure — the type of light from electronic screens — from online classes can contribute to sleeplessness.
Another way to help counteract increased screen usage is a blue light filter, such as blue light glasses, Mindel said.
“[Using a blue light filter] has a lessened impact on your circadian rhythm, but it doesn’t eliminate it completely,” Mindel said.
