Sleep Is Not a Luxury: What Students — and All of Us — Are Getting Wrong
- Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A.
- 9 hours ago
- 8 min read
There is a question that comes up often in discussions about student life and sleep deprivation, and it carries a quiet assumption that most people don't examine: if someone finally gets one good night of sleep after weeks of deprivation, have they caught up?
My answer, which I gave with a laugh during a recent interview on MBC1's Sabah Al Khair Ya Arab, is: not really. Not in a single night.
This matters more than it might seem. The belief that sleep debt can be repaid — that we can simply borrow against our rest during the week and refund it on the weekend — is one of the most consequential misconceptions in modern life. And among students, for whom sleep is often treated as the first negotiable in a crowded schedule, it carries serious consequences.
Why the Student Brain Needs Sleep More, Not Less
Students are often imagined as young, resilient, and capable of functioning on very little sleep. The neuroscience tells a different story entirely.
The adolescent and young adult brain is not finished developing. Regions governing planning, impulse control, emotional regulation, and complex reasoning — primarily the prefrontal cortex — continue maturing well into the mid-twenties. This is not a slow background process. It is active, metabolically demanding work, and much of it happens during sleep.
During the deeper stages of sleep — slow-wave NREM and REM — the brain is not resting. It is consolidating the day's learning into long-term memory, clearing metabolic waste through the glymphatic system (Xie et al., 2013), and engaging in active neurogenesis: the formation of new neurons in the hippocampus, the region most closely associated with learning and memory.
Disrupting this process does not simply make someone tired. It compromises the actual biological infrastructure of cognitive development. A student who chronically undersleeps is not just surviving on less rest — they are operating with a progressively impaired brain.
The Difference Between Surviving and Developing
There is a distinction I make regularly in my clinical work — and one I raised in the interview — between someone who is merely surviving their day to day and someone who is actively nurturing their neurological development.
Most of us, when we are sleep-deprived, can still function in a surface sense. We show up. We complete tasks. We communicate. But the quality of our functioning is profoundly diminished in ways we are often not even aware of.
Chronically elevated cortisol — the stress hormone that rises sharply with sleep deprivation — directly suppresses neurogenesis (Bhagya et al., 2015). It also impairs the prefrontal cortex, reducing working memory capacity, increasing emotional reactivity, and narrowing the range of solutions we can generate for any given problem. The research is consistent: sleep-deprived brains show reduced activation in areas associated with complex thinking and increased reactivity in the amygdala — the brain's alarm centre (Yoo et al., 2007).
This is not a temporary inconvenience. In a student during a critical developmental window, sustained sleep deprivation is a meaningful impediment to the realisation of their cognitive potential.
Sleep Affects More Than Academic Performance
One of the things I emphasized in the interview is how far the consequences of disrupted sleep extend beyond academic output. Sleep touches virtually every domain of human functioning.
Weight and metabolism. Sleep deprivation disrupts the balance of ghrelin and leptin — the hormones that regulate hunger and satiety. When we are underslept, ghrelin (the hunger signal) rises while leptin (the fullness signal) falls. The result is increased appetite, stronger cravings for high-calorie foods, and a slowed metabolic response (Spiegel et al., 2004). Weight gain, in this context, is not a lifestyle problem. It is a sleep problem.
Relationships and conflict. Research consistently links poor sleep to reduced emotional regulation, increased irritability, and diminished empathy — all of which directly affect how we engage with the people closest to us. Kiecolt-Glaser and colleagues have demonstrated that couples who slept poorly showed significantly more hostile and less supportive behaviour during conflict discussions the following day. Conflict and lack of sleep are not just correlated — they amplify one another in a cycle that can be very difficult to interrupt.
Productivity. The irony of sacrificing sleep for productivity is well-documented. Performance on cognitive tasks — reaction time, accuracy, decision quality, creative problem-solving — degrades sharply with insufficient sleep, and people are generally poor judges of their own impairment. Those who believe they have adapted to running on five or six hours are, in most cases, significantly less effective than they perceive themselves to be (Van Dongen et al., 2003).
When Does Disruption Become a Clinical Concern?
One of the questions I was asked in the interview is how we distinguish normal sleep disruption from a pattern that warrants clinical attention.
The threshold I use — which aligns with diagnostic criteria — is this: difficulty falling or staying asleep, occurring at least three times per week, for a period of at least three months. A single difficult week, a period of stress, a shift in routine — these are part of life. They are not, in themselves, a sleep disorder.
What I see in clinical practice, however, is different: people who genuinely cannot remember the last time they fell asleep easily, slept through the night, and woke feeling restored. Not for days — for years. This is a pattern that has reorganised their entire nervous system around a chronic state of underrest, and it requires careful, sustained attention.
If you recognise yourself in that description, it is worth speaking to a professional. Chronic insomnia is among the most treatable conditions in mental health — but it responds poorly to being ignored.
Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science: The Ayurvedic Clock
In the interview, I was invited to explain a practical framework I use with many of my clients — and one that I came to through my own postgraduate training. I hold a Master's in Vedic Sciences in addition to my clinical psychology qualifications, and within the Vedic tradition, the Ayurvedic system offers one of the most elegant and actionable models for understanding the body's natural rhythms.
Ayurveda — the ancient Indian science of life and health — describes the body and the surrounding environment as governed by shifting qualities across the hours of the day. The goal is not to fight these qualities but to align with them: to do each type of activity when the physiological conditions make it easiest and most effective.
What makes this framework compelling today is how closely it maps onto contemporary chronobiology — the scientific study of biological rhythms. The Ayurvedic clock is not superstition. It is an ancient observation of patterns that modern science has since verified.
Here is how I explain it to clients:
6:00 AM – 10:00 AM: The time of Kapha — heaviness and stability. The atmosphere and physiology carry a quality of groundedness during these hours, which makes them ideal for strenuous physical activity. Exercise in the morning works with the body's natural cortisol curve, which peaks in the early hours, priming us for movement and physical effort. Sleeping past 6 AM, by contrast, pulls the body deeper into this heavy quality — which is why long lie-ins often produce that thick, foggy sensation rather than genuine rest.
10:00 AM – 12:00 PM: The time of Pitta — sharpness and fire. This is the window I consistently recommend for the most demanding cognitive work: analysis, decision-making, problem-solving, strategic planning. The fire quality that builds in the physiology during these hours increases mental acuity and precision. Working with this window rather than against it is what produces what I describe to clients as frictionless flow — the experience of doing difficult work without undue effort.
This maps directly onto research on diurnal cognitive performance, which shows that complex executive functions typically peak in the mid-to-late morning for most adults (Anderson et al., 2014), before thermal and fatigue effects begin to accumulate.
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM: The main meal window. Ayurveda describes the midday hours as when digestive fire (agni) is at its strongest — the optimal time for the largest meal of the day. The physiological logic is sound: the body has been active and warming for hours, metabolic rate is at or near its daily peak, and the digestive system is primed to process food thoroughly and without leaving residue. The contemporary research on time-restricted eating and chrono-nutrition supports this: eating in alignment with the body's metabolic peak is associated with better glucose regulation, lower inflammatory markers, and more stable energy levels throughout the afternoon.
2:00 PM – 6:00 PM: Winding down and connecting. Ayurveda recommends completing heavier work tasks in the early afternoon and shifting toward social interaction and lighter activity as the day progresses. Again, this aligns with what chronobiology shows: cognitive fatigue accumulates across the day, and social-emotional processing is often better sustained in the afternoon than the kind of focused, analytical work that benefits from the morning's sharpness.
Before 10:00 PM: The sleep window. This is perhaps the most important instruction the Ayurvedic clock offers — and the one most people in modern life consistently violate.
Between approximately 8:00 and 10:00 PM, Ayurveda describes a quality of Sattva — happiness, lightness, and natural calm — arising in the physiology. Falling asleep within this window allows the body to enter deep, uninterrupted sleep: the slow-wave NREM sleep that is most restorative for the brain and body.
After 10:00 PM, the Pitta quality re-emerges — the fire and heat that sustains wakefulness. Anyone who has pushed through 10 PM intending to sleep and found themselves suddenly alert, hungry, or energised at 11 PM has experienced this directly. The system has simply entered its second wind. Sleep initiated after this transition tends to be lighter, less restorative, and more easily interrupted.
The practical implication is simple: winding down before 10 PM is not about rigidity. It is about working with your nervous system rather than against it.
Aligning With Nature's Rhythms
The through-line across all of this — both the neuroscience and the Ayurvedic framework — is the same: the body is not a machine that operates at uniform capacity regardless of conditions. It is a living system embedded in a web of rhythms — daily, seasonal, hormonal, neurological — and its performance at any given moment is a direct expression of how closely it is aligned with those rhythms.
The practical implications are not complicated. Sleep before 10 PM. Exercise in the morning. Reserve the sharpest cognitive work for the morning hours. Eat your main meal at midday. Connect socially in the afternoon. These are not dramatic lifestyle interventions. They are small alignments that, over time, produce what I tell my clients Ayurveda promises: less effort, more accomplished, with less internal friction.
The students who sleep late, eat erratically, work at odd hours, and wonder why they feel perpetually depleted are not failing because of a lack of discipline. They are often simply operating in profound misalignment with their own biology. Reorienting — even gradually — can change that.
References
Anderson, C., et al. (2014). Deterioration of neurobehavioral performance in resident physicians during repeated exposure to extended duration work shifts. Sleep, 37(6), 1105–1114.
Bhagya, V., Bhaskaran, D., Bhagya, B.V., & Kumar, N. (2015). Neurogenesis and depression: The role of glucocorticoids. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 57, 263–280.
Kiecolt-Glaser, J.K., et al. (2015). Marital distress, depression, and a leaky gut: Role of the intestinal epithelium in couples' conflict and relationship satisfaction. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 63, 174–185.
Spiegel, K., Tasali, E., Penev, P., & Van Cauter, E. (2004). Brief communication: Sleep curtailment in healthy young men is associated with decreased leptin levels, elevated ghrelin levels, and increased hunger and appetite. Annals of Internal Medicine, 141(11), 846–850.
Van Dongen, H.P.A., Maislin, G., Mullington, J.M., & Dinges, D.F. (2003). The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness: Dose-response effects on neurobehavioral functions and sleep physiology from chronic sleep restriction and total sleep deprivation. Sleep, 26(2), 117–126.
Xie, L., et al. (2013). Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain. Science, 342(6156), 373–377.
Yoo, S.S., Gujar, N., Hu, P., Jolesz, F.A., & Walker, M.P. (2007). The human emotional brain without sleep — a prefrontal amygdala disconnect. Current Biology, 17(20), R877–R878.
About the Author
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist based in Dubai and the UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization. She holds postgraduate qualifications in both clinical psychology and Vedic sciences, and has been featured on MBC1, BBC Arabic, Sky News Arabia, and Kalam Nawa3em.
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