Opinion: Sleep is part of a liberal arts education
Scarlet & Black 2026-05-11
It is hardly uncommon to hear Grinnellians talking about sleep. All across campus, students and professors alike talk about how little they slept last night or how late they have to stay up tonight. It’s become a source of pride to some people — a means of demonstrating how hard they work.
I think this is awful and needs to change.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that they should be getting better sleep. That’s not really the problem. I think the bigger problem is people at Grinnell don’t believe they can fit good, regular sleep into their schedules. I’m going to try to convince you that A) good sleep is worth it, B) good sleep can be sustainably achieved and C) good sleep is actually a fundamental part of the liberal arts education at Grinnell.
As we’ve all heard, getting eight hours of sleep is great for your health. So to avoid beating a dead horse, I’ll just give one example of how sleep can aid productivity. Say you decide to sleep from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. every day this week. You will quickly be forced to learn that if you want all your work done for the following day, you have to begin it earlier. You might not have enough time after classes and dinner to get it all done, so you realize that you have to allocate time to these assignments earlier in the week. Simply, sleeping well counters procrastination.
Sleep is a skill. You work to develop skills. They take time and effort.
— Ilem Leisher
There are two assumptions here. The first is that you have the motivation to have your work completed on time. The second is you’re in bed at 11 p.m. every night. This takes active work to implement, but over time it becomes habitual, and you will eventually wonder how you ever used to stay up so late. My point is that if you can be honest and strict in your motivation to work and your dedication to good sleep, many parts of your life will become easier, less stressful and more efficient.
You might be thinking — I know sleeping more would be good, but I don’t believe that it would work for me. I’m just too busy to get more sleep.
If you spend more time sleeping, you will literally need to spend less time studying. The reality is, an assignment you normally would spend an hour on when you’re tired and unfocused might take you half the time when you’re the opposite. You may not even realize that you’re doing work sleep deprived if you don’t know what the opposite feels like. It is actively beneficial to your studies to replace some studying time with sleeping time if it will improve your sleep.
Maybe you feel that you need the amount of time you currently have being awake so that all of your work can get done. But I promise you, if you dedicate yourself to improving sleep, you’ll find that your work is getting done even with the reduced awake hours. You may even have more free time.
Maybe you don’t believe me. Fair enough. Maybe you’re thinking, “surely if everyone gets poor sleep at Grinnell, there’s a reason for it.”
I would guess that around 95 percent of bad sleepers at Grinnell — excluding those who have regular sleep difficulties, like insomnia, night terrors or chronic pain — could be getting good sleep with a net benefit on productivity.
I believe this because it’s true for me. I think my time at Grinnell has been both busy and successful, and I think generally people would agree. I’m a physics major graduating with honors, having averaged 19 credits a semester. I’m a dedicated, relatively accomplished athlete. I also do plenty of extracurricular activities — I work two jobs on campus, play in bands and play too much pool. And honestly, I’ve never had to stay up past 11 p.m. or wake up before 7:30 a.m. to do work.
During my first year at Grinnell, someone told me that there are three parts of life here — sleep, social life and school.
— Ilem Leisher
I was lucky that my parents ingrained strict sleep habits in me from a young age. I hated it when I was younger, but in college I immediately saw the benefit of getting regular, good sleep. Obviously not everyone had this ingrained in them growing up, but the point is that Grinnell is offering you the opportunity to learn how to sleep well.
Sleep is a skill. You work to develop skills. They take time and effort. Being at Grinnell, we all work daily to build skills. In the liberal arts, we build critical thinking, communication, writing and general working skills. The goal of the liberal arts is to build skills that will lay the foundation for a multidisciplinary, successful life and career. It’s right in the mission statement — “the College aims to graduate individuals … who are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their abilities to serve the common good.”
Sleep is crucial to a successful life. To be “prepared in life and work,” Grinnellians need to learn to sleep.
Here are my tips for anyone brave enough to take this opportunity.
- Make sleep your priority. Over homework, over watching shows, over everything within reason — and over time, figure out what that means to you.
- Go to sleep and wake up at roughly the same time every day.
- Be off all screens and away from bright lights 30 minutes before going to sleep — try reading in bed!
- Don’t eat within two hours of going to bed.
- No caffeine six hours before bed.
On the first tip, the “everything within reason” is essential. I certainly don’t follow all these rules every single day. I’ve figured out what things are reasonable to prioritize over my sleep every now and then. For example, I go out and stay up late almost every weekend. To me, being social with my friends is worth losing some sleep once a week. At the end of the day, improving your sleep is a means of improving your mental and physical well being, not a source of stress in your life — though it may be initially as you work to implement it.
During my first year at Grinnell, someone told me that there are three parts of life here — sleep, social life and school. They told me that you can only have two. I hope I’ve proved them wrong.
Go to sleep.
Ilem Leisher is a fourth-year physics major from New Jersey.