You're back at school and juggling a busy schedule of classes and study during the week, and getting less sleep as a result. Then, at weekends you're snoozing for longer to try and make up for the lack of school day ZZZs.
Sound familiar? You may be a student who's experiencing social jet lag. It's a term that was coined in 2006 by researchers and refers to what happens to our internal body clock when there is a difference in weekday and weekend sleep patterns.
One 2022 study of almost 300 university students found that they "present social jet lag, shorter sleep duration on school days and longer sleep duration on free days."
Here, we'll explore what social jet lag is and why it happens, why it can have a negative effect on your studies and share some student-friendly products that can help you combat it and improve your sleep.
What is social jet lag and why do we get it?
A consistent sleep schedule (sleeping and waking at the same time every day), promotes a healthy circadian rhythm (our internal body clock) which means we're producing hormones essential for sleep (like melatonin) at the correct time.
Social jet lag occurs when there is a mismatch between our sleep patterns during the week (governed by our 'social clock' which is based on, for example, work and school commitments) and on the weekend (when we revert to our internal body clock, or 'biological clock').
Till Roenneberg, a professor who coined the term social jet lag, explained in a paper that in modern times, inside work limits light exposure and artificial light prevents darkness, meaning our body clocks have shifted to become later. However, our 'social clock' is earlier.
This means, he wrote, that "over 80% of the population use an alarm clock and accumulate a sleep debt over the course of the working week."
Studies have estimated that around 70% of students and workers experience at least an hour of social jet lag each week, while half experience 2 hours or more.
How does social jet lag impact grades?
While accumulating a few hours of social jet lag might feel like an inevitable part of juggling student life, studies show that social jet lag can lead to "chronic sleep deprivation, poor sleep quality and cognitive performance."
Writing about social jet lag and sleep in adolescents, Dr. Liji Thomas, MD explains that it disrupts our circadian rhythm and leads to less sleep, with each exacerbating the other, and that this can lead to issues such as "an inability to learn well, poor memory, and decreased ability to solve complex problems."
Sleep plays a major role in learning, and in memory specifically. In fact, not sleeping can decrease your ability to learn by as much as 40%.
“Being sleep deprived means the part of our brains that process memories and enable us to store and retrieve information simply don’t perform as well,” Heather Darwall-Smith, a psychotherapist who specialises in sleep and author of How to Be Awake, previously told us.
What's more, research directly shows that social jet lag can mean your grades take a hit.
One study published in Nature looked at data from nearly 15,000 university students and found that 60% of students experienced an average of 30 minutes daily social jet lag, and that greater social jet lag was associated with lower performance academically.
Another study looking at undergraduates showed that social jet lag had a negative impact on average weekly grades during the lecture term, when there was a busy teaching schedule, but that this disappeared during exam time, when students didn't have the same schedule.
5 products to help you sleep better this semester
It might seem like there's no escaping social jet lag, but experts have suggested adopting countermeasures, including "improving sleep hygiene [and] maintaining consistent sleep schedules."
So, we've rounded up some useful products that can help you sleep better at college and reduce the impact of social jet lag.
