By MIRIam farias, JRN 111 Student
You stay up all night, doing your homework. Your body feels drained, your mind is numb, and there’s a pulsating sensation in your head. You start to hallucinate, struggling to distinguish reality. You can’t function properly. Yet, people still expect you to be attentive and give your best at school or work. But how can we do that when we feel like zombies? This is the raw reality of insomnia that no one talks about.
Insomnia is a disorder that many people struggle with, especially college students. Many students stay awake because they have to study for an exam, can’t sleep due to environmental issues at home, or face mental health challenges.
According to Cleveland Clinic, “ Insomnia is when you experience disruptions in how you feel or function because you aren’t sleeping well or sleeping enough. About 10% of the world’s population experience insomnia that qualifies as a medical condition.”
One Moraine Valley student, 22, has been struggling with severe insomnia since she was a teenager.
The longest she has stayed awake was three days straight, which caused her to hallucinate. Her brain was shutting down, and she felt like a switch slowly turning off. Suddenly, while she was sitting awake in her bed, she noticed that her room looked different.
“My brain was literally like I was at work,” said the student, who requested anonymity. “I was in my store working, my hands were moving as if I was working, and I was putting away clothes.”
Not only was she seeing her store in her room, but she was also seeing other things.
“I remember how my cat on my bed turned into a customer,” she said. “I’m not seeing my cat, I’m seeing a customer, and my hands are moving, handing her the items while I’m talking to her.”
Dr. Madhuri Uppalapati, a sleep medicine specialist who works at Olmsted Medical Center in Minnesota, believes that the Moraine Valley student must have been entering into her real sleep due to her sleep deprivation. Her lack of sleep was causing her to feel like she was either dreaming or seeing things.
“That may probably be REM sleep entry or REM intrusion,” Uppalapati said. “That’s more common in people with narcolepsy, who are chronically sleep-deprived, which is a disorder of hypersomnolence or excessive sleepiness that comes from the brain.”
Narcolepsy is a “ different disorder but yeah, it’s a possibility,” Uppalapati stated.
According to Mayo Clinic, “ Rapid Eyes Movement (REM) Sleep Behavior Disorder is a sleep disorder in which you physically act out vivid, often unpleasant dreams with vocal sounds and sudden, often violent arm and leg movements during REM sleep.”
Insomnia wears down our brains over time
Most college students go through the same routine: sleep late, wake up early, take a nap after coming back from school or work, and then pull an all-nighter once again. This routine starts to feel like a clock, with the numbers repeating themselves, but the battery in that clock will wear down day by day. Metaphorically, the same thing happens to our brains.
“Your cognitive skills are going to be diminished or impaired if you’re not having good sleep,” Uppalapati said.
This is why many college students don’t give their full attention in class, participate, show up to class, or even stay awake during lectures. Students who don’t get enough sleep will have a foggy brain.
“Your brain is not going to be clear or be able to focus and form those cognitive connections without having good sleep,” Uppalapati said.
Tracy Hall, a sleep technology instructor at Moraine Valley, recommends students to watch the movie Awoken. She describes how the movie portrays a family in Italy struggling with Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI) disease, eventually leading them to death due to the lack of sleep.
“It’s about a real disease that’s out there. Some kind of genetic thing where they have insomnia to where they can’t sleep for weeks, days, and months,” Hall said. “If your brain is not sleeping, we’re not getting the proper amount of oxygen or blood flow. There are different sleep stages: There’s one, two, three, and three is the deepest sleep.”
Three is the same stage you reach when you are put under anesthesia for surgery. When we sleep we have a cycle and our brains have different amounts of blood to different areas.
“If we don’t get the proper blood flow that we do in proper sleep stages, it can affect not only our cognition,” Hall says. “It can affect every functioning part of our body until death.”
Students shouldn’t suffer in silence, expert says
Moraine Valley has yet to find ways to help students struggling with insomnia.
Director of counseling Jessica Contreras stated, “At the moment we don’t have counselors that specialize in insomnia treatment,” Contreras said. “We do encourage them to meet with a counselor and talk about some of the challenges that they are facing. They can work collaboratively with the counselor to see what’s a good referral to off campus support.”
How can professors recogonize insomnia and realize that a lack of class participation is often a result of insomnia and its fatigue?
“Advocacy, advocacy, advocacy,” Hall says. “ Students and instructors like myself have to get together.”
Hall struggles with insomnia too sometimes, and she believes that instructors and professors should know how to work with students who struggle with this disorder. Just because they went through the same thing in college does not mean that their students should suffer in silence too.
“We should want the next generation to learn from what we’ve been through and make things better for them.”
Tracy Hall, sleep technology instructor
“We should want the next generation to learn from what we’ve been through and make things better for them,” Hall said.
She wants Moraine Valley to support education on insomnia and believes getting the college involved will help promote change.
“We have to advocate sleep hygiene for college students,” Hall says.
Students can work to manage insomnia at home. Crimson Care recommends students to watch what they eat or drink before bed, exercise, turn off technology and meditate.
Hall has advice about what’s best for students: “Knowing their limitations when it comes to social media,” Hall says. “ Knowing the effects of caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and prescriptions.”
Hall wants students to know how medication can mess with our sleep cycle.
“College students believe that melatonin is a sleep aid,” Hall says. “ You ever take a Benadryl and in the morning when you wake up you feel kind of groggy? You can have the same effect with melatonin.”
Hall said that melatonin should be consumed properly and suggests taking it a couple hours before your bedtime: “That way, it’ll give your body enough time to cycle through the natural melatonin stage and then cycle through the synthetic melatonin stage.”
If you are a student who is sleep deprived and might have insomnia, Hall will be happy to take you as a volunteer in B227 to come in for a sleep lab. In the lab you will take a nap for approximately four hours. Through the test, Hall and her students will be able to see your EEG.
“If somebody’s interested in doing that next semester, they can contact me and we’ll schedule the time for them to come in.” Students can email Hall at hallt63@morainevalley.edu to make arrangements.
If you are not comfortable taking the test in the lab, or you think you won’t be able to fall asleep there but still want to take the EEG test, Hall will provide you with a home test and a video guide. The home test involves placing wires on your head and legs. A monitor will be placed on your chest along with another band wrapped around your waist recording your sleep.
College students can also ask their primary doctors for this sleep study.
Uppalapati says students should prioritize sleep for their overall well-being and should practice good sleep habits.
“I’m not saying go to bed at nine o’ clock, everybody,” Uppalapati says. “People have different times, but no matter which timing, they should have six or seven hours of bedtime. Expose yourself to bright lights in the morning for 15 to 20 minutes.”
If all else fails, you might just want to watch your favorite episode of The Office before going to bed.
“I just read an article that said laughter before bed helps with insomnia,” Hall said. “So watch something funny every night before you go to bed, if you can, because it releases the endorphins and melatonin that helps you get to sleep.”
Find out what your brain is doing while you sleep
Sleep technology professor Tracy Hall is always looking for volunteers to have their heads examined with an EEG while they sleep.
If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in your brain while you are sleeping, turns out you can find out, for free, at Moraine Valley.
As explained by Better Health Channel,” The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a medical test used to measure the electrical activity of the brain.” The test “can help diagnose a number of conditions including epilepsy, sleep disorders and brain tumours.”
After interviewing Hall for a story on insomnia, I decided to undergo the test so I could report what it was like.
Hall placed several wires on my head, using paste to hold them in place. I had two wires on my chest and two on my legs. A nasal cannula–a thin, flexible tube–was placed in my nose to monitor my breathing while I was sleeping. I also had some bands around my body–one in my chest and one on my waist, to record the sleep study.
Hall told me I had to sleep on my side or back and was not allowed to sleep on my stomach because of the monitors. This was new to me, so I felt very weird but curious at the same time to see how this would play out.
When I got home, I worked on my homework while having these monitors on me. I did not go to sleep until 3:30 a.m. that night due to how much homework I needed to finish.
When I went to bed, I felt very dizzy from being sleep-deprived. I plugged the band on my waist to start the recording and closed my eyes, and a couple minutes later, I felt my hands and legs twitching. I woke up 30 minutes later because light was starting to come into my room. I closed my curtains and went back to sleep.
When I woke up at 9 a.m., the first thing I noticed was that the nasal cannula was no longer in my nose, but everything else seemed to be fine. I slowly started to remove the pieces and put them in the box Hall had given me.
Later, I would go back to see Hall to find out the results of my test. I recorded our conversation as part of the video you see here.
This exam is interesting and not painful. If you are a student like me who stays up late due to homework or any mental health issues that are affecting your sleep, you might want to take this exam to see how your brain is doing.
Doing so will benefit you as well as the students in Hall’s sleep technology class. For more information, email Hall at hallt63@morainevalley.edu.
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