Analyzing How Sleep Duration and Sleeping Quality Affect the Health of Lingnan University Students

Analyzing how sleep duration and sleeping quality affect the health of Lingnan University students

RESULTS

1. Times waking up during sleep

Among all the 80 participants who took part in the questionnaire survey, 82% of the respondents said that they have times waking up during their sleeps. The results collected from this survey have revealed that there is a divergence between male and female respondents. Out of all 66 respondents who have woken up once or more during their sleep, 54% of them are females. As shown in figure 1 below, for those who have chosen that they have woken up once during sleep, 28 of them (53%) are females while 25 of them (47%) are males. And for people who have woken up over 2 times, 75% (3 respondents) of them are found to be females. Overall, it shows that female respondents tend to have more times waking up at night during their sleeps, and it seems that most male respondents are having a better sleeping quality than females as more males do not wake up during sleep.

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Fig.1 Times of waking up during sleep

1. Reasons for waking up during sleep

Furthermore, respondents were also asked about the reasons why they woke up during sleep. As shown in figure 2 below, there are various reasons for why people experienced times waking up during nights. It appears that most of the respondents attributed the top reason to “Noisy sleeping environment”. Among the 16 respondents that have chosen this reason, 10 of them are females and 6 are males. Followed by this, 23% of the respondents of this question said that they wake up during sleep due to anxiety and nervousness. Female respondents were found slightly more affected by this reason than males. In addition, there is a similar distribution of 15% and 13% respondents each choosing the reasons of “Full bladder” and “Nightmares” respectively. There are also other reasons that have been added by several respondents (10%) including feeling thirst or hunger and feeling too hot or cold.  

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Fig2. Reasons for waking up during sleep

1. Depth of sleep

Another question relating to the depth of sleep of the respondents was also asked in the questionnaire survey. Respondents were asked to rate the depth of sleep from 1 (the lightest) to 5(the deepest).  Showing in figure 3 below, 32% of the respondents choose “rate 3”, having the highest votes among 1-5. If comparing separately for females and males, most males would consider their depth of sleep as rate 4 (41%) and most female have chosen rate 3 (37%). Followed by this, rate 2 and rate 5 have both 15% and 14% of respondents respectively. The least being chosen category was rate 1, only 7.5% of respondents have selected it.

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Fig3. The depth of sleep.

DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION

The overall result of the questionnaire survey indicates that 82% of respondents often have insufficient hours of sleep. The biggest reason for them having not enough sleep was doing homework (52%), followed by studying (41%). It seems that students are either having a very heavy work load on their academic studies, or they are not having good time-management skills. Without having the supervision from parents, students may work till very late at night with less efficiency. Therefore, their duration of sleep may decrease as they will have to spend more time on completing their academic works. In order to improve the situation, the university may organize some ILP workshops or talks on improving time management to raise students’ awareness on that. Also, if heavy study load would be a cause to insufficient sleep, students may discuss the problem with their professors to reduce the work load reasonably.