You Need To Know How Important Sleep Is For Your Learning

Lack of sleep does not do your body good. And worse, it has a reverse effect on your brain and makes cognitive functions much more difficult. Both your body and mind need sleep to rest and recuperate from the day’s work.

Research has shown that students particularly university students are one of the most sleep-deprived populations. When it comes to learning, sleep deprivation impairs spatial learning including memory and simple tasks like how to get to a specific destination.

Fictitious Peter drifting off to sleep while a class is going on.

Average adults need about seven to eight hours of sleep daily but Peter prides off thinking he only needs five hours of sleep a night. He claims to get more done after everyone else is asleep. What he doesn’t realize is that in the first few waking hours of the day, his cognitive function already starts to dissipate.

He hunkers down for a few more hours, grabs three more cups of coffee and gets back to study. In this stage his mind and body start to shut down, reserving energy for core body functions, not including learning or remembering.

Peter, you should know, is a poor student. He has C’s and D’s at best in all his courses. Two more hours of sleep a night would easily bring his grades up one to two levels. Tomorrow, Peter might end up washing cars for a living, alienated from the dream of ever being able to drive one, let alone own one in his life. What does Peter need to do? He simply needs to go to bed!

Even though, that example is rather extreme, it’s a fact that sleep deprivation can affect important aspects of your mind and body such as your mood, energy, ability to learn, memory, good judgment, reaction time and efficiency.

How Sleep Helps

“Sleep is a fascinating field. Every single organ in the body is affected by sleep and can be improved by sleep.” – Jaime Boero, M.D., Ph.D.

Sleep is a process with several distinct phases. At each phase, different physiological processes take place:

• Deep and restful sleep helps to restore energy you expend during the day.
• Your brain is actively working while you sleep to create new pathways for areas such as learning, memories and new insights.
• Good sleep helps your body to fight off common infections by releasing key hormones while you sleep.
• Sleep gives your heart and vascular system a rest by reducing your heart rate and blood pressure.

Sleep directly affects your learning. The more you sleep (7½ hours or more), the more ‘cognitively awake’ you are and the better you can perform. By losing sleep, you learn less, make worse decisions, accomplish less, are more rude and angry, eat poorly, are more prone to major errors and completely undermine your intellectual power.

A detailed 2002 study done by the Harvard Medical School demonstrated the effects of lack of sleep on some participants. They concluded that a good night sleep results in a 20% increase in motor speed without loss of accuracy, while in the same period of time during wake provides no benefit.

Since sleep helps keep new brain cells alive in the hippocampus, a deficiency would ultimately impact overall cognition and eliminate the potential benefit of new learning, therefore decreasing the ability to learn and retain information.

And since we are all lifelong learners, the more information we can retain, the larger our capacity to learn and do.

REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement), one of the deepest parts of sleep you experience typically during the last two hours of sleep enhances emotional memory and learning retention. For those who cut their nights rest shy by about 2-3 hours lose out on REM sleep and ultimately their chance to learn and remember throughout the day.

Credit: Udemy Blog, Campusmindworks