Eat, Sleep, or Study: Redefining Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for the College Student

Gregory Micek

As college freshmen begin their lives away from home, they learn to live on their own. They learn to deal with academic pressures in their own ways, while at the same time they are exposed to many distractions that prevent them from being efficient with their schoolwork. According to USA Today, “all-nighters have become a habit in higher education.” Students spend all night working on academic work because they try to fit in both time for social events during the evening while still finishing all their work at night. In doing so, they sacrifice the amount of sleep they obtain, in some cases staying awake all night to work.

According to Janet A. Simons, et al., from the University of Hawaii, Abraham Maslow was a humanistic psychologist that created a theory of personality that set up a hierarchy of the “five levels of basic [human] needs.” The first level of the hierarchy is physiological needs, which includes eating, sleeping, breathing, and necessary bodily functions like those. After the first level is achieved, an individual seeks the second level, which is safety of a person’s body. The third is the need of love, affection, and belongingness, the fourth is the need for self-esteem and the need for others, and the fifth is the need for self-actualization, such as achieving what that person was “born-to-do.”

College students that pull all-nighters neglect sleep because they consider their social lives and academic work more important. Thus, they deem academics and social lives as more important than sleep and, in some cases, eating well. This level of priorities goes against Maslow’s hierarchic theory of needs, and therefore students who pull all-nighters are acting abnormally in reference to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. These students seek academic needs and social needs before they seek certain basic physiological needs such as enough sleep.

Therefore, students that pull all-nighters act against basic human needs according to Maslow. By acting against the basic hierarchy of needs, students suffer consequences such as not working efficiently, lower immune levels, and emotional issues. Overall, students need to sleep the required amount of time, not pull all-nighters, eat appropriately, and keep in mind that their physiological needs are a greater priority than other parts of their lives.