"Sleep? What's that?" UA sophomore Jackson Wray jokingly replied to a reporter's question. Wray, 20, studying for a final exam in research methods at the UA main library, guesses he gets about 6.5 hours of sleep a night trying to keep up with the workload required of a psychology major.

Jeffry Scott / arizona daily star

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Ben Franklin once advised that healthy, wealthy and wise follow from early to bed, early to rise.

Given our burgeoning waistlines, abysmal savings rates and stagnant test scores, it looks like we're a society in need of some shut-eye.

Never mind that we spend a third of our lives doing it.

Never mind that drowsy driving, blamed for 100,000 car crashes a year, is starting to get the buzz previously hogged by drunken-driving warnings.

Never mind that only 9 percent of high school students are getting optimal sleep, according to a 2006 National Sleep Foundation study.

Despite all the energy we spend worrying about diet and exercise and brain function and self-actualization, sleep remains about as sexy as, oh, Simon Cowell.

So when University of Arizona health officials set out two years ago to learn more about snoozing trends among college students, they weren't expecting the enthusiastic response they received to a poll they sent to about 6,000 undergraduates living in student dorms. More than 1,800 responded.

The UA Student Quality of Sleep Project made a surprising discovery: The average student living on campus suffers from sleep quality poor enough to be the equivalent of a clinical sleep disorder.

Turns out that bad sleep may be having an effect on academics. When researchers correlated the students' sleep scores with their grades, they found that students reporting low sleep efficiency and later bedtimes had lower grades.

That matches a 2001 study, published in the American College Journal, that found students who reported sleeping six or fewer hours had the lowest grade-point averages. Students who slept nine or more hours had the highest.

"As a culture, we don't value sleep much," said Lee Ann Hamilton, an education and outreach manager for the UA Campus Health Service who helped with that first survey and three ensuing ones. "Americans pride themselves on being busy and there's this idea that sleep is expendable."

It doesn't help that there are just so many other competing demands on our time, given our 24-hour culture, she said.

Hamilton's upbringing didn't match that of our agrarian forebears, who followed more natural cycles, replete with rooster crowing and candles. Even so, her television turned to test patterns at midnight. Phones were used for talking, not typing. And they had cords. Social networking had to be done in person. There was no Internet shopping, no Netflix. "There's all this extra stuff that we do now and I can see that in my life," she said. "If I wanted to play a video game, we had Pac-Man. My son has a Wii."

Sleep issues are ubiquitous among all age groups, said Kathy Rucker, director of health services for Tucson Unified School District. "This whole nation is lacking in sleep. It's 3:15 on a Friday afternoon and I am having a hard time keeping my eyes open," she said, only half joking.

Usually, the complaints from tired schoolchildren are heaviest on Mondays, she said. Sometimes it's just because they had too much fun over the weekend. Sometimes it's because they've split their time with mom and dad in different homes so their schedules are off. To the degree she can, without insulting parenting abilities, she encourages families to set regular sleep patterns.

"Families' lives are complicated, with busy schedules and after-school activities, but there is just tons of literature showing that whether you're 5 or 50, your ability to focus is diminished if you're tired."

To help educate UA students on campus, health educators hung posters in the residence halls, telling students that more sleep translates into less stress, better grades, better health and better moods. In follow-ups, 75 percent of students reported seeing the poster and indicated they generally appreciated the reminder.

UA sophomore Jackson Wray, 20, was waiting for a study partner outside the psychology building when he was asked about his own sleep patterns. "Sleep? What's that?" he joked. He guesses he gets about 6.5 hours of sleep a night trying to keep up with the workload required of a psychology major.

"It seems like the professors all get together and decide that they're going to have papers due in every class in the same week," he mockingly complained. "In the beginning of the semester, I don't notice it so much, but it starts taking its toll later, and particularly after midterms."

Andrew McGhee, a 22-year-old English major, has learned to be disciplined about getting sleep. It helped that he moved off campus his junior year because there were more social distractions in the residence halls. "When you first get to college, you're free to make your own choices and you're not living under the strictures of your parents anymore," he said.

Once he decided he'd had enough of feeling fatigued, he changed his priorities. "I had to force myself to do it at first, but now I've gotten in a rhythm," he said.

Indeed, going to sleep at the same time and getting up at the same time, seven days a week, is the No. 1 tip from Richard Bootzin, a professor in the UA department of psychology and Sleep Research Laboratory.

And it's probably the No. 1 most difficult thing to do, especially with the temptation to drop in on holiday parties or pull all-nighters to ace exams before the holiday break.

Other tips: avoid long naps, exercise regularly, steer clear of stimulants like caffeine after lunchtime and consume alcohol in moderation, because even though it works as a sedative initially, it tends to disrupt later sleep cycles. Another big one: Do all of your mental planning for the next day before you go to bed. That way, you aren't tossing while planning last-minute changes in your upcoming PowerPoint presentation.

We think sleep is expendable because we're so adaptable, Bootzin said. We can skip some sleep some nights and then recover, although that gets trickier with age. "From a survival perspective, that's a useful adaptation because if you're running for your life, you'll want to be alert and monitoring the environment for as long as possible," he said. But if that pattern continues, he said, a wealth of subtle, but bad, things begin to happen, ranging from lower cognitive functioning to decreased immunity to illness.

How will you know if you're getting enough sleep? The average range is 6.5 hours to 9.5 hours, but a better gauge is if you can get up without setting the alarm clock, Bootzin said.

Maybe night-shift workers can get a pass on this one. For the rest of you, if you're still shopping for a New Year's resolution, there are worse places to start.

On StarNet: For more health stories online, visit azstarnet.com/health