The A, B, C's and Zzz's of Sleep Health Education in a College Population

College students are highly vulnerable to sleep disturbances. The current study, conducted within a sample of undergraduate students attending a private university in an urban, northeastern city, was designed to establish the nature and prevalence of sleep disruption among college students and examine the impact of deficient sleep on daytime functioning. The study further sought to evaluate the impact of sleep education on students’ sleep habits, beliefs, and patterns by evaluating the feasibility of implementing an online sleep education program within this unique population. As predicted, it was found that students with poor subjective sleep quality reported decreased daytime functioning; and this relationship was, indeed, mediated by excessive daytime sleepiness. It was also predicted that students with shorter nighttime sleep duration would demonstrate decreased alertness on a psychomotor vigilance task the following morning; however, this relationship was not established. Failure to demonstrate this relationship was, perhaps, due to a lack of experimental control over PVT timing and decreased participation in the daily measures that comprise this relationship. As such, it was found that, contrary to study predictions, the implementation of an online sleep education program involving the daily collection of subjective sleep data is not feasible for implementation within this population. It was, however, determined that removal of the daily data collection resulted in satisfactory completion of the sleep protocol. It was further found that both sleep education and control participants significantly improved sleep knowledge, sleep quality and daytime functioning from baseline (Time 1) to immediate follow-up (Time 2). However, improvements in the intervention group did not significantly exceed those found in the control group.