Baltimore Magazine publishes an in-depth story on how the consequences of poor sleep can go far beyond irritability, potentially driving significant physical health issues. 

Gretchen Sims couldn’t get to sleep at night. A diligent Towson University freshman, she’d spend her lonely, insomnia-filled hours doing her homework, inevitably falling asleep in classes the next day. Despite completing her assignments, professors assumed she was either uninterested in the lecture material or wrung out from late-night partying — not uncommon for college students.

She’d taken AP classes in high school, played volleyball, sung in the choir, and worked during the summer, and she wanted to pursue vigorous academic and extracurricular activities in college, too. But she struggled now merely to function each day. “If I went to hang out in a friend’s dorm, went to the library or a movie with a group of people, I was always the person that fell asleep,” she says. “The things I wanted to do, I wasn’t engaged in them—I was too tired or couldn’t focus.”