There are many different factors that contribute to the increase or decrease in grades. One of these factors is the amount of sleep that a student may get in a night or over a period of time. In order to be at peak cognitive performance, a longer duration of sleep often helps this.
Oftentimes, students will stay up during the weekdays and sleep in on the weekends as much as possible, though this is correlated with worse academic performances. There was, however, a positive correlation in a study done in 2019 about the effects of earlier bedtimes, waking up earlier, the duration of sleep, and the sleep quality. All of these factors helped improve grades overall in the class taken by students. As stated in the article, “One good night of sleep can’t fight a whole semester of inconsistent sleep, which entails all the components of a single ‘day’ of sleep, but day-in, day-out for weeks and weeks.”
A sophomore at HAHS, Lydia Fultz, agrees with this research. She expressed, “I have always noticed when I get a lack of sleep night after night, I struggle to focus in school.” She finds it difficult to take in information as well as she may have before when she does not sleep as much. “I have to put in more work studying on my own,” she said. This necessarily is not a bad thing, but school already can take up a large portion of a students’ day which renders them less time to relax before bed or after school. This is important so they are not getting too stressed out from working and worrying constantly about school or sports all the time which could lead to more disruptions in their sleep than there already are.
Sleep is important for so many different reasons. Grades may not be a top priority for some students, but health should be. For more information on this topic visit https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/01/10/
