Tag Archives: mental health

Are all-nighters really that bad for you?

 

University students always seem to have endless deadlines but not enough time to complete them. A strategy that many students use to combat this problem, is to pull an all-nighter to catch up on their work. Adults are supposed to have at least 7 hours of sleep each night so this sleep deficiency may help get work done, but students need to consider the detrimental effects that may occur as a result.

The video attached below discusses some of the main effects sleep deprivation has on not only your mind but also your body. Sleep deprivation affects your learning, memory, mood and reaction time. All of these factors can impact your ability to study and therefore negatively affect your grades. 

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 A study conducted on university students, compared the actions of pulling an all-nighter with depression and academic achievements. Those who pulled all-nighters were seen to have higher tendency of depression symptoms, which can negatively affect their academic performance and mental health. Students often do all-nighters to finish work and study for exams but the study also shows that staying up all night correlates to lower academic achievements as seen in their GPA’s. Along with these factors, sleep deprivation can greatly impact your brain.

University students tend to pull all-nighters without thinking about the negative impacts on their mental health and body. These factors include depression, grades, memory and health. Next time you plan to pull an all-nighter to finish that essay, you may want to consider all the risks you are adding to your body due to sleep deprivation.

Written by Jocelyn Benji

Mental Health is your Physical Health

The National College Health Assessment surveyed in 2016, that 1 in 5 Canadian postsecondary students are depressed or battling other mental issues. Knowing how to maintain mental health is especially important for University students. Without having it in check, it will affect every aspect of life, regarding academic performance, social aptness, and general outlook to life such as self-efficacy.

At first glance when people mention mental health, most think they’re not a real illness and it’s just an excuse for poor behaviour. Other myths include “people experiencing mental illness are those who are weak and can’t handle stress” or “it’s just part of the aging process.” Well, those statements are not true, and believing in it only fuels the stigma and discrimination making it harder for people to reach out for solutions!

What is mental health and mental illness?

Mental health is your ability to handle and cope with stress and to enjoy daily life, it includes the way you feel, act, and relate to others. If people experience inabilities to perform these ordinary tasks, they are experiencing poor mental health and could be diagnosed with mental illness. Having mental illness means there is physical altering to your brain because different cognitive abilities are controlled by different parts of your brain. Just think of your brain as a machine, if something is not functioning as usual then something needs maintenance. Mental illness is a brain disorder that is caused by things like stressful life events, brain injury, irregular hormones, addictions, and imbalance of chemical messenger in the brain.

How does the brain work?

Neurons, which are cells designed to transfer information, are the basic workings of how different parts of the brain talks to each other. If there is an imbalance of chemical messenger in the brain, the neurons will have trouble transferring messages. Serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine are common chemical messengers, having a deficit of these will have you experience symptoms of poor mental health.

These are only a few of the components that make up your entire brain:

Prefrontal Cortex – Recalls memories, make decisions, problem-solving, and your response to situations

Amygdala – Controls fear; helps you avoid harmful and dangerous things

Cingulate cortex – Controlling emotion and concentration on tasks

Hippocampus – Makes and store new memories

How Neurons Communicate

So how does your physical health affect your mental health? Well, you will experience mental illness in two ways:

  1. If you lack a sufficient amount of chemical messengers needed to communicate with different components of your brain. 
  2. If you suffer brain damage, the damaged part of your brain will not work properly even if you have a sufficient amount of chemical messengers.

If you experience mild symptoms of poor mental health, most likely your chemical messengers are lacking. A quick fix for students is to exercise regularly because it’s proven to boost metabolism to counter this kind of health deterioration. The physical health of your brain is the health of your mind! That’s the connection where mental health goes hand-in-hand with physical health! 

Social Media! How Harmful can It possibly be?

It’s being preached about everywhere, having an online presence is directly associated with plummeting mental health… Right? As seen on platforms such as Instagram they have completely removed the ability to view the number of likes on another user’s post in efforts to stifle the issue. A similar matter is explored in the article written by Scientific American, concerning a study conducted by Jensen et al. ,on a group of young teenagers to determine if being in front of a screen has harmful effects on their mental health. To summarize, the study found no correlation with the duration of screen time and negative mental health. Furthermore, there was no negative effect if there was less time spent on screen either. However, the study did find that teenagers who exchanged more messages online were more likely to feel more connected to their friends, and generally happier. This study lacks expansion on what the teens are doing online as there are varieties of different outlets on screen. Ranging from video games, the browsing videos, to different social media platforms.

This then prods the question, if screen time is not the factor that is making teens more anxious and depressed, then what is? I feel that perhaps this study was not in depth enough because it did not measure what the teens were doing specifically. Perhaps if the study was conducted with different control group and there was a comparison between different control groups on varied media platforms, there would be a correlation found. 

A different look at this issue is presented by Bailey Parnell, who stresses that social media does having long lasting implications on society. She expands that over 70% of Canadians use social media. Canadian voter turnout is not even near 70%. Further more, users are on their phones for an average of 2hours per day. We typically are not even eating for that long in a day. She justifies that anything that we do this frequently most definitely has an impact on our lives. In addition, she states that social media allows for constant comparison towards someone else’s highlights. Which can have detrimental effects on one’s own well being.

From these two sources, comes two opposite results. With my own experience with social media, my support stands behind Bailey’s. Social media usage is becoming more of an epidemic. With the users becoming younger every year, this subject should not be glazed lightly over. The initial study done was too simplistic, and further research should be conducted to truly evaluate the exact impacts of social media influence on our lives.

 

Written by Molly Fu