Stress and sleep quality in students of the Higher Education System (case: Canton Milagro)

Abstract

Stress is considered as a mechanism that is affecting the health of people in modern society, stress processes produce neuroendocrine, immunological, emotional and behavioral responses to situations taken as threatening by humans. Conditioned by external factors that require our capacity for adaptation and tolerance of tense situations. Currently in institutions of superiors, the necessary importance of the predisposition or exposure in which students find themselves to academic stress is not being provided.

By continually staying at high levels of stress, changes in the physiological well-being of people with individual physical, behavioral, and psychological responses arise, having a close relationship with the quality of sleep that is intervened by the stressful times of the students. Being the indispensable dream for the functioning of the organism since it intervenes in the teaching and memory process.

For this research a survey was carried out to a total of 500 students corresponding to the Universities of Canton Milagro, the State University of Milagro and the Agrarian University of Ecuador.

93.5% of the students evaluated claimed to have presented stress levels, 31.70% considered that academic overload was the main cause of their stress, added to more factors and 96.25% indicates that stress directly affects the quality of sleep.  

In conclusion, stress is intimately linked to our sleep / rest pattern, if the need to sleep is not met, the development of our natural functions will be affected.