Sleep patterns affect student grades

Researchers at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty found that reg­u­lar stu­dents with con­sis­tent sleep sched­ules aver­aged high­er grades and were more sat­is­fied with their lives than stu­dents who suf­fered from occa­sion­al sleep depri­va­tion.

The study, which was con­duct­ed dur­ing the first semes­ter of study, involved 97 first-year stu­dents. At the end of the semes­ter, sci­en­tists assessed their progress.

It turned out that stu­dents with the most sta­ble and con­sis­tent sleep pat­terns aver­aged 3.66 points, while stu­dents with the most unsta­ble sleep aver­aged 3.21 points. Sci­en­tists empha­size that sleep­ing 4 hours today and 12 tomor­row is not at all the same as sleep­ing 8 hours every day. It was the sta­bil­i­ty of sleep that turned out to be a key suc­cess fac­tor.

Also, sub­jects from the group with sta­ble sleep more often not­ed their good health and over­all sat­is­fac­tion with life. And when asked to iden­ti­fy fac­tors that affect their aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance, sleep prob­lems were cit­ed more often than home­sick­ness, dif­fi­cul­ties with room­mates, health prob­lems, and even depres­sion.

Sci­en­tists explain that mem­o­ry con­sol­i­da­tion occurs dur­ing peri­ods of rapid eye move­ment (REM) sleep, and these peri­ods become longer dur­ing the night. There­fore, less sleep tricks our brains into the most pro­duc­tive peri­ods of sleep.