By Lerraine Neo (26A01A) and Koh Shin Robbie (26A01A)

Picture this: It’s the June holidays, and despite being on vacation, you’re staying up to finish some work. You glance up at the window, expecting to be greeted by the blinking lights of streetlamps and billboards, only to see… sunlight? 

Oh. It’s probably time to go to sleep. 

To be fair, it had only been around 3.30 am. This had just been a part of Japan where the sun rose incredibly early, and back in Singapore the sky was still dark. So really, not that bad. 

According to a 2023 study, Singapore is extremely sleep-deprived. Only a quarter of residents met the recommended seven hours of sleep, and a mere 17% slept through the night. Two years later, the statistics don’t seem to have changed much. Scroll through your contacts on any social media platform at 1 am, and odds are a good number of your friends will be online. 

But is this really a problem? Sure, sleep deprivation might increase your chances of developing cardiovascular disease, but it also means you have time to text your friends, doomscroll, and finish that weighted assignment due the next morning. Three for the price of one seems like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it? 

In order to investigate the true effects of sleep deprivation, we set out to conduct an experiment. Over the course of two weeks, the two of us steadily decreased our sleeping hours by two hours a night. We started off with a healthy eight hours, counting down the days (with trepidation? Excitement? We were too tired to tell) until the penultimate all-nighter. 

Night 1: 8 hours

As the recommended number of hours of sleep, you’d think sleeping eight hours would be easy. And sure, the actual sleeping part was simple enough, but the lead-up to bedtime was a mad scramble of homework, socialisation, and worrying about not being able to finish our homework. 

The great thing about RI is that you can have a vibrant school life. The terrible thing about RI is also that you can have a vibrant school life. After lessons, CCA, and/or other enrichment programmes, most RI students find themselves leaving school anywhere between 4 pm to 7 pm. Factor in travel, and some students may only reach home around 8 pm. 

To get a full eight hours of sleep, we had to be in bed by about 10.30 pm. That left us with a measly two and a half hours to finish all our work. And not just work—any miscellaneous activities like eating, showering, or checking in with our friends also had to be completed in a hundred and fifty minutes. 

Students may be familiar with the JC triangle, which dictates that you cannot maintain a healthy sleep schedule, social life, and grades at the same time. 

In order to finish our work, we basically had to give up on socialising for the night. No hour-long chats, no sending our friends reels, nothing beyond a quick “can you send me question six” or “idk”. Even then, time was tight, and we had to reschedule our first attempt because there was simply too much work to complete. 

Knowing we could go back to our unhealthy sleep schedules and chat all we wanted the next day, it wasn’t too difficult to ignore the texts and notifications pinging our phones. But even then there was a slight sense of FOMO–all our friends were staying up, texting and indulging in their hobbies, carving out time for themselves after a busy day at school, and we were… sleeping. 

It wasn’t an easy process, though. With the regular conditioning of JC students to sleep deep into the night, adjustments from the usual 1am to 10pm came as a huge power trip for one’s circadian rhythm. Tossing and turning over and over, fatigue did not set in as readily as it should have, and falling asleep became a challenge in itself.

Waking up eight hours later, we definitely felt more energised than typical mornings. Energised by almost double the amount of sleep, the day went on more than smoothly. Classes felt less dreary, and the need for walking around between lessons or getting coffee was immediately less pressing.

As much as we may find sleeping eight hours an impossible task, its benefits to your body and energy levels throughout the day are undeniable. Beyond this, our experiences with disrupted circadian rhythms only revealed how extreme we had deviated from healthy sleeping schedules amidst the hustle of school.

Night 2: 6 hours

For most students, six hours can be considered the average for days without piling work. With CCAs ending at 6pm, the commute home and time for dinner leaves us to get cracking with homework at about 8pm. For us, six hours of sleep meant going to bed at 12am, and thus having four hours to do work. Finishing everything wasn’t a challenge, though there wasn’t much time for leisure and socialisation. 

Returning to school the next morning, the joys and sunshine from our day with eight hours of sleep were notably absent. Days went about how you would probably have experienced yours: Drowsy mornings, before your mind largely clears up at midday, before returning to drowsiness by mid-afternoon. This is where another key dilemma occurs.

For many, afternoon naps have become a mechanism to overcome the previous night’s sleep deprivation. However, people differ on whether napping before doing work is better or doing work before napping. We observed the merits and trade-offs to both. 

When taking the nap first, you would wake up with a clearer mind, and may progress through homework faster than when groggy. However, when workloads are poorly estimated, it may spill over into the late night, perpetuating your sleep deprivation. When doing your work first, you avoid the risk of your nap becoming a full on sleeping session, though you may doze off or lose focus midway.

Observing our actions on the nights with six hours of sleep, we paid more attention to how these situations happened. The key culprit? WhatsApp and Instagram. While the short timeframe for work did not allow us to fully commit to another activity, such as watching a YouTube video, we were still susceptible to messages from friends or short reels sent.

Night 3: 4 hours

Four hours. The halfway mark of our experiment, and the number which tipped the scales from vaguely acceptable amounts of sleep to sleep deprivation. Unfortunately, this was a very easy night, because it’s not that far from the amount of sleep we usually get. 

We went through the school day feeling quite alright, functioning normally and successfully staying awake throughout all our lessons. Even after school, late into the afternoon, we mostly felt fine—a little tired, but nothing out of the ordinary. When the evening hit, however, the drowsiness started to set in. There was a lot of yawning, rubbing our eyes, and contemplating if we really needed to finish our homework.

A quick search on the internet will tell you that four hours is not enough sleep for the average human being. Most RI students will tell you that four hours is an okay amount of sleep, especially near TPs and promos. What the RI student doesn’t know is that they’re wrong. 

Sleep is like money. It’s necessary for survival, difficult to acquire, and you can never quite seem to get enough. And just like with money, it’s easy to go into debt. 

Sleep debt happens when you sleep fewer hours than your body physically needs. For every extra hour you stay awake, you owe yourself one hour of sleep. One hour of sleep debt a day doesn’t sound too bad, but the hours add up, and by the end of the week you’re missing seven hours—a full night’s worth of rest.

While some studies suggest it isn’t possible to catch up on sleep debt at all, new research shows that this isn’t the case. A 2020 study found that catch-up sleep produces better health outcomes than just giving up and staying sleep deprived, while another study in 2023 suggests that catch-up sleep might have a protective effect on adolescents. But just like with monetary debt, sleep debt comes with interest– no matter how much you sleep on the weekends and during the holidays, you’ll never be able to completely pay it back. 

The effects aren’t always immediate. With time, your body can adapt to chronic sleep deprivation, allowing you to feel less tired despite a subpar amount of sleep. This doesn’t mean your body needs less sleep, more so that you’ve grown numb to the effects. Yet, regardless of whether you know it, your sleep debt is slowly trickling in, growing longer and longer until it seems impossible to pay back. 

Night 4: 2 hours

This was the night we faced a slight issue. When we planned this article, we’d envisioned a self-aware, introspective discussion on why sleep deprivation was bad, accompanied by our own terrible experience during this experiment to really sell our case. But this? Well, this was actually kind of fun. 

A stark contrast to Day 1 of this experiment, we kept noting how much time we had. We finished our work, chatted with our sleep-deprived friends and each other, and still the night was young. One of us started watching shows, another scrolled the internet, and there was a genuine sense of relaxation and quiet peacefulness as we waited for the rest of the world to wake up. 

And then, of course, we had to go to school. School was not fun.

The first few hours were fine, but once the afternoon hit, the drowsiness began to set in. We still had quite a while before we could go home, so it was time to activate our secret weapon: caffeine. 

According to Wikipedia, caffeine is the most commonly consumed psychoactive substance in the world. It’s known to reduce fatigue and drowsiness, and even improve concentration and motor coordination. There are several ways to consume caffeine, be it through matcha or sweets, but it’s most commonly consumed through drinking coffee—which RI has no shortage of. 

We tested every type of coffee found in Y56 Chill, ranking them in terms of taste, coffee concentration, and price. 

At $1.60, Nescafe’s bottled Cappuccino seemed to have the strongest coffee taste, followed by their bottled Chococinno, and then their canned Cappuccino. For those with a sweeter tooth, their  canned Mocha and canned Caffe Latte both tasted more sugary than caffeinated, while Pokka’s Premium Milk Coffee struck more of a middle ground. As for caffeine content, while not all drinks stated their caffeine concentration, those that did have the information were pretty similar, at about 1.2 – 1.5%. 

But of course, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. A caffeine overdose can cause anxiety, insomnia, or digestion issues. In the long run, it can lead to high blood pressure or a rapid heart rate, which can increase the risks of heart disease or stroke. 

Most of us already know caffeine isn’t good for us. Yet we keep consuming it anyway, either to keep us up at night, or to stay awake in class. Is it a necessary evil, or a crutch we’ve grown over-dependent on?

Night 5: 0 hours

The night had come. This was the zero-hour challenge spoken of in hushed voices by our peers. Approaching this challenge, we had mixed emotions towards the idea of absolutely not sleeping. On one hand, it was interesting to see how a true all-nighter would feel when going through a full school day. On the other, more pragmatic hand, it was a poor life choice nonetheless.

With this much time to spare, productivity was through the roof as we caught up on lectures and did work in advance. We even managed to watch a couple episodes of shows or have extra long chit-chats with each other, something you don’t always get to do during busy school seasons. Minute by minute, hour by hour, the night went by for ages (way longer than expected!), until finally, the sun rose.

An interesting observation was made as we went through our lessons that morning. Comparing this morning to that of our day with two hours of sleep, the initial fatigue we experienced was significantly lower. We believed that it was due to us not having had to fall asleep and wake up, and hence there was no withdrawal from our body’s “power-saving mode”.

However, the two-hour difference definitely started to manifest by the afternoon. Yawning non-stop, we struggled to not doze off in class, and found the need to walk around between lessons to stretch and stay awake. Soreness was another key thing that occurred, perhaps due to our muscles’ inability to relax after the previous day-and-a-half’s exertion.

While the productivity and companionship was fun, the zero hours in itself were mildly torturous and definitely unhealthy. The next night, we slept early like logs. As a matter of fact, we slept like logs for the next couple of nights. As it turns out, sleep debt takes more than the principal number of hours lost, easily encroaching into the rest of your weeknights. 

Conclusion

With all our challenges complete, we were able to consolidate the general trends we observed when sleeping less and staying up more. Energy levels dwindled, while sleep debt definitely increased exponentially.

While we did consider if the additional work completed and fun with friends were worth losing sleep over, we disregarded these factors due to a couple of observations. Firstly, work completion was not a given when faced with fatigue and temptation from social media. Secondly, companionship was not guaranteed when staying up, with some calls going quiet as everyone’s energy dipped.

This brings into question the larger issue we observed that hogged up time. While we may have the discipline to not do other major activities such as going to play a video game, we were still highly distracted by the small activities, such as grabbing a snack from the kitchen or responding to the latest BeReal trigger. These little pockets of time were what added up to big delays in our work, easily denying us of another hour or two of sleep.

Our conclusion? Maybe try being more conscious of the small distractions you have. You can put your phone far away from your desk, or put it on Do Not Disturb mode.

Sure, maybe we all need a snack, but you sure can reduce the walking time by having some biscuit packs lying around on your desk. At the heart of it all, we’ll still recommend taking all the steps you can to maximise your sleep hours. 

To prescribe a strict number of hours would be illogical given the nature of our hectic lives. Nevertheless, we can instead look towards starting small and improving on our existing sleep hours bit by bit, perhaps adding thirty minutes gradually. Sure, you may still not get your eight hours, but at least it’s closer to a sleep debt you can rebalance over the weekend.

Picture this: It’s a school day, and despite yearning to scroll TikTok, you endure the toils of finishing all of your work first. You glance up at the clock, expecting to see it’s 1am and a new day has begun, only to see… 11pm? Congratulations, reader. You earned yourself some time to scroll.

Shout out to Lee Zhi Ying (26A01A) and Liu Zhishan (26S05B) for staying up with us!