You’ve probably noticed the signs around your residence hall listing the hall’s quiet hours. They are the same for every building on campus: 12am to 8am on weekdays, and 2am to 8am on the weekends. It may not seem like a problem if you’re the type of person who likes to stay up late, especially on the weekends, but if you like to go to be early, these hours are definitely not early enough.
I am a person who values my sleep a lot. Of course, that’s not saying much; everyone likes sleep, and by now we should all know just how necessary getting enough sleep is to our productivity and health. However, many of us still ignore this need—with the amount of work we get here at Kenyon, on top of balancing extracurriculars and a social life, sleep is often the first thing to be discarded. But sleep is crucial to our well-being, because everything from your immune system to your hormones to your ability to learn is affected by how much sleep you get, according to the NIH. And according to Stanford University, college students should be getting roughly 8 hours of sleep each night, give or take an hour.
If we followed quiet hours exactly during the week, one might get precisely eight hours of sleep. However, what if someone has to get up for an 8:10 class? I tend to set my alarm for an hour before my first class so that I have enough time to get ready and go to breakfast. If I had an 8:10, I would therefore have to wake up around 7am, leaving me with only seven hours of sleep according to quiet hours, below the recommended amount of sleep. And some of us need more sleep than others—I know I tend to feel much better if I get nine hours instead of eight, and I aim to get that much sleep every night. If I have to get up at 8am, I try to be in bed by 11pm.
It’s even worse during the weekend, when quiet hours don’t start until 2am. The school expects people to go out and stay up late on the weekends, which is totally valid. But what about those of us who are exhausted by the week, or sick, or have to get up early on a Saturday or Sunday morning for a job? What about those of us who simply enjoy getting up early or who would like to maintain a regular sleep schedule by going to bed and waking up at the same time every day? I don’t think that people shouldn’t be allowed to have fun and stay up late on the weekends, but I do think that people could maybe recognize that some people do go to bed early on the weekends and try to be courteous when passing other people’s rooms.
Sound carries very loudly in our dorms, and going to bed early can get tricky when many people are still up around this time, especially if your room is close to the common room, like mine is. Yet, the common room is a place where people are supposed to be allowed to talk and hang out. So what’s the solution here? I could argue to amend quiet hours to start earlier, like 11pm instead of midnight, or for midnight to start quiet hours every night. But I think the larger message is to just remember to be courteous to your fellow dorm-mates. You may not have to get up early the next morning, but someone on your hall might. As my freshman year CA told me, quiet hours are at certain times, but it is always courtesy hours. We live very much on top of each other in our dorms; a little respect and acknowledgement of our volume as it starts to get late can go a very long way.
Image Sources: Rebecca Frank, National Sleep Foundation