7 Ways to Get Better Sleep in College

College life is demanding — between classes, exams, work, parties, and student orgs, it’s tempting to skip sleep. After all, you’ll sleep when you’re … graduated (that’s how the saying goes, right?).

But before you pull another all-nighter, you should know that sleep is vital to your college life. “The data is very clear that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning,” says Dr. Aric Prather, renowned sleep scientist and author of The SLEEP Prescription. “On top of that, I think there's good evidence that sleep loss makes it hard to deal with stress. It impacts our mood, it impacts our ability to make wise decisions, and so all of those things in combination really put the sleep-deprived student at a disadvantage.”

Then again, maybe you already know how important sleep is, but you can’t manage to get any. Stress, noisy dorms, and roommates can make snoozing scarce. If so, we’re here to help: We’ve compiled advice from sleep books, plus Prather’s interview with us.

Let’s get started on seven tips to get better sleep in college.

7. Know Why Sleep Matters 

Most young adults should get between seven to nine hours of sleep a night. This feels like a lot, especially when you realize this means we spend a third of our lives, or 25 years, asleep! (Fun fact: humans sleep less than many other animals. If you were a lion, you’d be catching zzzz’s for 13 hours a day.) 

But this time is well spent. Even though we often think of sleep as “powering down,” it’s just the opposite. Sleep is a busy, active state for your body. In fact, during REM sleep, the emotional regions of your brain are 30 percent more active than when you’re awake, according to Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

Here’s just a few ways sleep helps you:

Sleep Boosts Your Immune System

Sleep helps you fight off germs. After being exposed to a cold, study participants who got less than six hours of sleep were four times more likely to get sick than those who slept seven plus hours. A good night’s rest also produces more antibodies after a vaccine, giving you stronger protection against viruses. 

Sleep Cleans Your Brain 

Your brain produces literal waste that needs to be removed. While you sleep, chemicals wash your brain clean from debris build-ups that have been linked to developing Alzheimer’s.

Sleep Acts as Overnight Therapy

Sleep bathes your brains in soothing neurochemicals that “modify painful memories,” according to Walker’s book. Think of it as overnight therapy: Your brain uses dreams to work through emotional trauma so that you’re better able to cope the next day.

Sleep Cements Learning 

Want to remember what you learned in algebra class? Clock a full eight hours. Sleep sorts through your day’s events and puts important memories in long-term storage. Without enough sleep, you don’t remember information as well.

Sleep Helps You Function 

Feeling cranky after an all-nighter? That’s because the parts of your brain that regulate emotions don’t talk to each other as well without sleep. (You can read more about this in The Mayo Clinic Guide to Better Sleep by Timothy I. Morgenthaler and Bhanu Prakash Kolla). 

6. Embrace Your Sleep “Chronotype” 

Now that you know why sleep is important, let’s figure out how you can get more of it. One of the first steps is learning your sleep schedule.

What’s a Sleep Chronotype?

Your sleep chronotype determines when your body naturally likes to fall asleep and wake up. Which type are you?

• Early bird: You go to bed early (e.g., 9 p.m.) and wake around dawn (e.g., 5 a.m.).

• Night owl: You go to bed late (e.g., 1 or 2 a.m.) and wake up late (e.g., 9 or 10 a.m.).

• Conventional bird: You’re somewhere between these two extremes. 

Why do people have different sleep schedules? It’s an evolutionary advantage. Back when humans slept in groups, there was almost always someone who could keep watching during the dark: The early birds rose just a couple hours after the night owls roosted.

Finding Your Sleep Schedule

Many teens prefer going to bed late and staying up late. That’s because teenagers go through a “delayed sleep phase,” making them temporary night owls. Eventually, your preferences may shift — but this timeline is different for everyone. In college, pay attention to your body and what it needs.

Prather suggests people ask themselves: “When do they feel best in the morning? Is it around 7:00 and 8:00 [when] they start to feel perked up, or does it take until 11:00 or 12:00 until they start to feel like themselves? In the same way, noticing when you get tired at night is always a good indicator, as long as you're doing the right things to allow your body to wind down.”

Match with a Sleep-Compatible Roommate

“When I was in college, my first roommate that I had in the dorm was a clear, extreme night owl. I was mismatched,” says Prather. He describes his sleep schedule as “vanilla” (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.) while his roommate didn’t crawl into bed until 4 a.m. “That really created some challenges … to my opportunity to get sleep.”

If you have a say in choosing a roommate, be sure to explain your own sleep habits so you can find someone on the same page.

5. Create a Healthy Daytime Schedule 

We know that a good night’s rest helps you prepare for the next day. But the opposite is also true: how you spend your day determines how well you’ll sleep that night. 

Get Outdoors and Exercise

Soak up sunshine in the morning to regulate your body’s circadian rhythm. Exercising (so long as it’s not right before bed) also has big benefits. College students felt less tired after they did a low-intensity walk or ran three times per week, according to a study cited by Jade Wu in Hello, Sleep. (At USF, students can check out free kayaks and paddleboards, swim in our pools, bike around campus, and join fitness and recreation classes.) 

Practice Healthy Eating 

Regular mealtimes help your body get into a steady rhythm and sleep better at night. Try to eat healthy (like the Mediterranean diet often recommended by experts), and remember that high-fat and high-protein foods can keep you awake if you eat them right before bed. 

Minimize Alcohol

“Substance use is, of course, something that can be problematic during college, like excessive alcohol and drugs. They work on your brain, and that's where sleep lives, so it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that [substances] can impact your quality or quantity of sleep,” Prather says. “If your sleep is something that you feel like you need to work on, then maybe [minimizing substances is] an easy win to start with.”

Manage Caffeine Intake

It’s usually safe to drink 300-400 milligrams (mg) of caffeine a day, or about 3-4 8oz cups of brewed coffee. But you may want to cut back even more if you’re having trouble sleeping. Caffeine lasts in your system a long time, so stop drinking coffee before 5 p.m.

Keep a Consistent Sleep Schedule 

Try to go to bed and wake up around the same time every day. Getting consistent sleep is better than a “seesaw” routine where you get four hours one night and ten hours the next. If you’re having difficulty sleeping, avoid the temptation to nap during the day (or at least, don’t nap after 3 p.m.). 

Build Breaks into Your Day

If you constantly push yourself to go, go, go, your body won’t know how to rest when it’s time to hit your pillow. Instead, train yourself how to rest by taking at least five breaks throughout your day. “They can be short [5 to 15 minutes], but they should be screen-free, phone-free, and something that’s relaxing, refreshing, or joyful,” explained Prather in The SLEEP Prescription.

Here's a few activities that are naturally soothing because they involve rhythmic, repetitive motion:

• Walking

• Drawing or doodling

• Coloring

• Listening to music

• Dancing/ drumming
• Stretching 

4. Learn How to Manage Stress

“Sleep and stress are cyclically related,” Prather says.

If your body thinks a tiger is ready to eat you, you don’t want to be nodding off – so your body delivers chemicals that keep you awake. But the problem is that we don’t face many literal tigers these days: instead, it’s “thoughts about the future or the past that end up keeping us awake,” Prather says. Unlike a tiger, those thoughts might pester you every night.

During the day, because you’re sleep deprived, it will be harder to get through life, which leads to more stressors. That’s why it’s a cycle.

There are two ways to break this cycle: get better sleep (which you are reading about now) and learn how to manage stress (you can read about college mental health resources here). Let’s dive briefly into how to manage stress. 

Practice Mindfulness

“Rumination is the tendency to get caught up in thinking, typically around things that have happened in the past or things that you wish had gone differently. People have a tendency to get caught in a loop … and relive a lot of those things,” Prather says.

You can train your brain to stay in the moment — without ruminating on the past or the future — through mindfulness. In fact, mindfulness actually can shrink the “fight or flight” part of the brain and strengthen the part that make decisions, according to Scientific American. Practicing mindfulness during the day improves your sleep, because it shows your body how to relax. Here’s a simple exercise you can try.

First, find a comfortable position. Now identify:

• 5 things you see

• 4 things you hear

• 3 things you touch

• 2 things you smell

• 1 thing you taste 

Try to observe these experiences without judgments: they’re not good or bad, they simply exist. If you find your thoughts wandering, gently acknowledge that’s a thought, and then bring your attention back to the present.

Schedule Time to Worry 

Do you ever notice that your mind starts racing as soon as you go to bed? You might’ve been so busy during the day that your brain didn’t have time to worry until tonight. One solution is to schedule an intentional “worry time” during the day.

Block off a chunk of time (10 to 20 minutes) every day where you do nothing but worry. Don’t try to problem solve, but instead focus on one individual worry at a time. “The expectation is not that you come out of this with everything solved. Your entire goal is just to worry,” Prather wrote in The SLEEP Prescription. When you go to bed and anxious thoughts pop into your mind, remind yourself to think about them at your next worry time.

You can also practice simply writing down your feelings and worries. “Journaling can be really helpful,” Prather says. “There's something about writing that allows people to organize their thinking and see things a little bit more clearly…. To write in language, you actually have to be a…. little bit more thoughtful and coherent. Our brains don't always work that way.” 

Wind Down Before Bed

“People often treat themselves like they're computers that could just be turned off, and [they don’t give] themselves the opportunity to wind down and begin to let [their] body transition to a time of restoration and sleep,” Prather explains. 

Giving yourself time to “wind down” helps your mind and body transition from your busy day to a restful night.

• Create a relaxing ritual, like drinking herbal tea. 

• Turn your phone on “do not disturb.” 

• Practice meditation or mindfulness exercises. 

• Read a book or listen to a podcast. 
• Play relaxing music. 

3. Create a Sleep-Friendly Environment 

When you have a big exam the next morning, it’s tempting to try to force yourself to sleep. But sleep isn’t something you can control; it’s something that happens to you. You just have to create an environment that invites it to show up, according to Wu’s book.

Make Your Room a Sleep Cave

Our bodies are supposed to automatically know it’s time to sleep when the world goes dark, cold, and quiet. But today, we live in artificial bubbles where we can simulate day/night with a flick of a switch. This confuses our bodies. Luckily, we can re-create these signals:

• Dim your lights (including your screen lights) two hours before bed. 

• Take a warm shower or bath an hour before bed. This cools down your core body temperature, signaling that it’s time for sleep. 

• Keep the room cool: An ideal sleep temperature is 60-68°F. If your roommate likes it warmer, use a fan on yourself. 
• Block noise from the dorms or your roommates using earplugs and a white noise machine.  

Don’t Lie Awake

Waking up in the middle of the night can be frustrating, especially if you have a big exam the next day. But don’t simply lie in bed worrying about your sleep loss. Remember: You can’t control sleep; you have to create conditions that invite sleep to show up.

Give yourself 20 minutes to doze off. If you can’t, then get up and do something relaxing, like reading a book, listening to soothing music, or another of your pre-bed “wind down” activities. Only go back to bed when you start to feel drowsy again.

If you find that anxious thoughts are keeping you up, and mindfulness exercises aren’t helping, try a simple distraction. You can use your phone to stream a TV show (ideally something calming that you’ve seen before), but Prather cautions, “Don’t use it to scroll social media before you watch a show, don't read the news, and [don’t] doom scroll for the next 30 minutes.”

2. Make the Most of Dreams

Now that you are getting better sleep, let’s have some fun with dreams.

Dreams are more than random hallucinations in your brain. In fact, they’re like a virtual reality where you can find creative solutions. When you dream, your brain applies your past experiences to your present problems. And this all happens in a trippy, surreal space unconstrained by logic, so you get more imaginative answers. For example, study participants tasked with solving a maze could find their way out faster after they napped and dreamed of the maze.

Write Down Your Dreams 

Did you know that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after a vivid nightmare? Keeping a dream journal might just lead you to your next brain blast. When you first wake up, lie quietly and see if you can recall any images or emotions from the dream. It might all come rushing back. If it does, write down everything you remember about your dream. 

Ask Dreams a Question

To use your dreams as problem-solving incubators, think about your problem before you go to sleep, suggests Deirdre Barrett, author of The Committee of Sleep. Tell yourself what you want to dream about: e.g., “I want to dream about what I should paint for art class.” You can also put something by your bed that reminds you of this problem, like a blank canvas. Or try looking at a picture that represents what you want to dream of.  

1. Use Campus Resources 

If you’ve tried our tips and are still having trouble sleeping, don’t worry. Sleep is a complicated process, and what works is often unique to each individual. Reach out to your college’s health and wellness center for personalized help.  

Are you a USF student? We’re here to help you.