Next time you think about setting your alarm to 8 a.m. so that you can make your early morning workout, consider this: Lack of sleep can help you make fat, give you diabetes, and make you prone to injury-causing accidents.

In fact, students who are sleep-deprived also have a harder time determining just how tired they are, according to a recent study by the NU Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology.

The study showed that rats that were restricted in their sleep patterns for a long period of time lost the ability to make up that sleep in both quantity and quality, a phenomenon that has also been observed in humans.

This kind of sleep loss causes “significant changes in cognitive performance and vigilance, even when subjects give self-reports of not feeling tired or cognitively impaired,” said Assistant Professor Aaron Laposky, co-author of the study.

Besides negatively affecting mood and contributing to those unsightly dark rings beneath the eyes, chronic partial-sleep deprivation can lead to serious consequences, even in the short term.

“Many instances of disastrous industrial accidents are due to impaired judgment or decision-making or clear errors in performance caused by sleep loss,” Laposky said.

While not everyone has suffered a sleep-deprivation-caused car accident, many a Northwestern student has fallen victim to the siren call of the snooze button, with unfortunate results.

“My friend missed an Orgo lab because he was asleep. He was taking a nap and had to call Health Services claiming he was sick so he could make it up,” said Brett Margolis, a Weinberg freshman.

Insufficient sleep habits can also have serious, long-term consequences, like a weakened immune system and cognitive impairment, Laposky said. Those can also lead to poor performance at mental tasks, more frequent illness, and even predispositions towards obesity and heart disease.

Some students have taken these findings to heart, and are trying to get more sleep.

“I have heard these facts before and I’m trying to develop sleep habits that I will maintain for the rest of my life,” Margolis said.

Others, however, are not as concerned.

“I know plenty of people who go around on about three hours of sleep,” William Chang, a McCormick freshman, said. “My friend used to be the No. 1 piano player in Taiwan, and she managed to get by in high school on about four hours of sleep per night. I know the work she produces isn’t superior… I personally have to get 8 hours of sleep, or else I get really grumpy.”

Unfortunately, the less you sleep, the less you notice how groggy you are, meaning people don’t realize how much they’re impaired by sleep loss, Laposky said.

“That girl I mentioned tends to fall asleep at random moments – just conk out – but then say she doesn’t feel tired,” Chang said. “She doesn’t remember being asleep, and she wakes up disoriented.”

Fortunately, your sleep habits won’t make you fat, sick or accident-prone forever. Laposky said that with sufficient sleep, these risks disappear.

How to attain these elusive sleep habits? Recommended methods include sleeping enough so that one wakes up naturally, exercising regularly (so long as it’s not too close to bedtime), and maintaining a regular schedule of going to bed and getting up in the morning.

While Laposky admits that this might be difficult with the many obligations students face, he said that it is vital that they make sleep a priority.

“Chronic partial sleep loss is considered a health epidemic in the United States,” he said. “Sleep is not a luxury and is not dispensable – it is a critical aspect of physiological regulation and of health maintenance.”