Running on one hour of sleep and a few V8 energy booster drinks, I recently embarked on a weekend trip to Floydada with my friends. Like most college students, functioning on minimal amounts of sleep has become second nature. In fact, for the first few hours of the trip, my exhaustion was suppressed by copious amounts of caffeine and the fact that my body had not yet realized its one hour of sleep was actually not a nap, but all the rest it was going to get for the day.

However, after tiptoeing up a precarious stack of boulders to a waterfall, weaving our way up the side of a cliff and hiking up a canyon wall adorned with cacti, my eyes began to close themselves for me. Realizing I had thoroughly fatigued myself with all of that adventuring, I resigned to the back seat of my friend’s car for a nap.

We college students often do this same thing to ourselves throughout the week, and frequently do not get enough sleep for everything we try to do. For example, after pulling an all-nighter studying, probably for that one test that makes us want to cry for a while and consider dropping out (this happens to everyone, right?), we do much more than our body has the energy for. We go to class, study for quizzes, put in some hours at the gym, yawn though our shift at work, clean ourselves up for a mixer at some bar, sleep for maybe four or five hours and then start all over again the next day. College in a nutshell, right?

Eventually, however, this catches up with us. It catches up with us when we call our mom sobbing about how the world is officially ending because we forgot to submit something major on Blackboard. It catches up with us when we groggily silence the alarm that was supposed to wake us in time to take that pass/fail determining midterm, leaving us to rush to class, heart pounding and vision blurred as we throw on real pants and yank our backpack over our shoulders. It catches up with us when we realize that even though we just stayed up studying for 12 hours straight, we still do not remember enough about the classical dynamic of spinning tops to answer that one physics free response question.

This is why we need sleep. Even though it seems like investing as much of our time as possible in being awake and “productive” is the admirable thing to do, studies show our productivity is greatly lessened in more ways than one by depriving our bodies and brains of sleep.

A U.S. News article titled “College Students Not Getting Enough Z’s,” quotes doctoral health student and author Adam Knowlden, saying sleep is “key for memory consolidation,” which is probably why we have trouble remembering the information when we sacrifice our sleep for staying up. In addition, he explains how “during sleep, the brain acts like a hard drive on a computer. It goes in and cleans up memories and makes connections stronger and it gets rid of things it doesn’t need.” If we are not letting our brains complete or, in some cases, even start that process, then we are seriously compromising our memory’s integrity.

Knowlden goes one step further to add, “if a student is sleep deprived, it affects the whole (learning) process. Students aren’t able to learn, they’re not able to remember, it’s harder to concentrate and it affects mood. They’re working their way through college and not maximizing their learning potential.” If this is the case, our attempts to work harder by sleeping less might actually be undermining our goal of reaching our full academic potential.

In an article by The Huffington Post’s Tyler Kingkade titled “College Students Aren’t Getting Enough Sleep,” Kingkade quotes Shelly D. Hershner, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, who says, “a lot of students realize they are sleepy, but I don’t think they understand the ramifications.” The consequences of playing loose and fast with our sleep are heavy not only in the immediate future, but also years and years and years down the road when we have almost forgotten what an exhaustion headache feels like.

For example, health journalist Carrie Arnold reports in a Prevention Magazine article that regular sleep-deprivation could “‘speed up the development of Alzheimer’s Disease,’ according to a study published in the Neurobiology of Aging.” So, while remembering some abstract theory for one of our many tests may seem important now, when we’re 75 and can’t remember the name of the college we attended, much less the name of our husband or wife, it just doesn’t seem quite as important.

Roxanne Prichard, assistant professor of psychology at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, is quoted by ABC News in an article titled, “Stressed Out College Students Losing Sleep,” saying college students, “forgo sleep, not realizing that they are sabotaging their physical and mental health.” She goes on to elaborate on potential health risks from lack of sleep, which range from “problems with a person’s immune and cardiovascular system” to substantial weight gain.

Therefore, next time we elect to burn the midnight oil instead of counting sheep, college students should remember when we sacrifice our sleep, we are sacrificing so much more than a few hours of rest.