Please do not be alarmed – this is not a RomCom-themed blog post. However, the idea of being sleepless is not just for Seattle. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, more than one-third of North Carolinians report fewer than seven hours of sleep, on average, in each 24-hour period. Only about one in five NC adolescents are getting eight hours or more of sleep on a typical school night (Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance, 2023).

So yes, that means four out of five NC adolescents are not getting enough sleep. We are sleepless here in North Carolina.

Prioritizing good sleep habits can improve mental health. For example, a 2021 meta-analysis of randomized control trials published in Sleep Medicine Reviews found that improved sleep led to an improvement on composite mental health, depression, anxiety, rumination, stress, and more, with greater improvements in sleep quality leading to greater improvements in mental health.

Other studies have made connections between sleep and various mental health challenges. In other words, intentional actions to improve sleep can help improve mental health.

Sleep is not just good for mental health, it’s good for the brain and body too. In June of 2022, the American Heart Association added sleep to its list of “Life’s Essential 7,” renaming the list of factors that support cardiovascular health “Life’s Essential 8.”

A 2023 study associated too much sleep or too little sleep with specific neuroimaging markers in the brain that precede stroke and dementia by several years. This evidence and more shows that working on sleep health can have a positive impact on brain health and potentially reduce the risk of stroke and dementia among middle-age adults who do not have a history of stroke or dementia, as well as supporting cardiovascular health.

High-quality sleep is also associated with longer life. According to a 2023 study, developing and maintaining good sleep habits from adolescence onward can increase life expectancy among men by an average of 4.7 years and 2.4 years for women. According to one of the study’s authors, it’s never too early or too late to start good sleep habits. This study defined “good sleep” using five factors.

According to a 2019 MIT study, nearly 25% of variance in academic performance could be attributed to sleep. “Better quality, longer duration, and greater consistency of sleep correlated with better grades.” In this study, earlier bedtime, earlier wake time, and a longer duration of sleep was associated with overall better academic performance.

Even more interestingly, sleeping less during the weekdays and accommodating by oversleeping on the weekends was associated with poorer academic performance. One night of cramming before the exam did not have a relationship with the academic performance; the long-term pattern of sleep behavior mattered the most. Further, multiple studies demonstrated that sleep deprivation led to slower reaction times with negative implications for both athletic performance and workplace performance.