Sleep also relies on some social situations and is influenced by several factors and periods of a persons life. These factors include care-giving/parenthood, widowhood, co-habitation. For example if you have recently had a child, your sleeping patterns will be disrupted frequently as babies oftentimes awake multiple times in the night. Sleep is not static and changes in consistency and quality depending on the state in which your life is in and the situations around you. Sleep also differs between genders and ages, for example a middle aged man would not sleep as often as an elderly man or infant.

Many factors influence your sleep and the quality of sleep. There is a relationship between your socioeconomic status and how well and often you sleep. For example if you are of a higher class you would generally not have as many problems of someone in a the low class that’s struggling to make ends meet everyday. When you have money, you can use that money on investments that produce more money for you, this way you don’t physically have to work and have and have more opportunities for consistent sleep than someone in the middle class that works overtime to try and reach the high class.

Sleep among humans is universal, every nation, every religion, every race, and every tradition incorporates sleep. However, some cultures differ from when and how long they sleep. For instance, people in western developed culture usually sleep monophasically, one continuous portion of sleep with no breaks. However in some parts of the world like Tibet, polyphasic sleep is practiced in which they sleep multiple times throughout the day in short breaks. The same can be said for our prehistoric ancestors who also broke up sleep in to two or more chunks, waking up to be aware of possible danger in the night then returning to sleep.

It is a known fact that almost all animals need sleep to function properly. We tend to think as sleep as a time where the mind shuts down, however sleep is actually an active period in which essential restoration, strengthening and processing occurs. While we sleep, experiences throughout the day solidify as memories. Our ancestors used sleep as a way to learn from mistakes and experiences and improve the way the behave the next time they are in that situation as we still do to this day. Because early humans could learn from their mistakes it helped to advance evolution to modern homo-sapiens. The body requires sleep to grow muscle, create hormones and repair damaged tissues. This is why it is important for young adults who are still developing to get 8-10 hours of sleep per day.

In addition to the use of the internet and cellphones late at night, the everyday cycle of life can cause also students to lose hours of sleep. The accumulation of stress throughout an average students day can catch up with them when they are trying to fall asleep. Especially in the lives of young adults who are trying to discover and pursue the careers the will be doing for the rest of their lives. A lot of students lack an outlet to get rid of their stress, things like playing sports, time alone, and activities. This stress can definitely cause problems falling asleep, staying asleep and getting good quality sleep. At first it sounds reasonable and even tempting to stay up later in order to have more free time in your day, however the consequences outweigh a couple extra hours.

In my social science culminating performance task I investigated the question of do student’s hours of sleep affect their overall performance in their daily lives. In the end, the results showed that 75 percent of the class got less than 8 hours of sleep, the recommended average for young adults. Looking at this from a psychological perspective, what are some of the reasons for this lack of sleep in the general student classroom. One of these reasons includes the entertainment humans have at our disposal, at any given time we have access to the biggest source of entertainment, the internet. Keeping this in mind, its hard for some students to put down their phone and start the process of going to sleep. The endless supply of entertainment that is the internet triggers the release of dopamine, at this point it is easy to choose to stay up and be on our phones, however teenagers pay the price the next day.