Students need more sleep

When I was a medical student, it was common practice to cram and study up to 3 or 4 in the morning before an examination. We believed that by doing so, we would perform better in our semestral tests.

But in the past couple of decades, sleep studies conducted in the laboratories of psychologists have been showing the opposite. Students need about eight hours of sleep before an examination for better performance. Adding a nap in the afternoon will also improve memory.

In one study according to Medical News from the United States, school stress keeps 68 percent of students awake after their head hits the pillow. Only 30 percent of students sleep eight hours a night, the average recommended amount of sleep for young adults. Twenty percent of students pull an all-nighter at least once a month.

In a study of soldiers operating complex military hardware, it was shown that one night of sleep loss resulted in about 30-percent loss of cognitive skills and a drop in performance. If they are deprived of two nights of sleep, the outcome is a 60-percent drop in performance.

A study had a group of students being given a series of math problems with some tips on how to solve these. They were told that there was an easier way or shortcut to solve the problems that they should discover during the process. They were tested 12 hours after the training. Among the students who were not allowed to sleep before the math test, only 20 percent discovered the shortcut. However, those students who were allowed eight hours of sleep performed much better. Sixty percent of them found the shortcut.

In a study of 3,000 students by Wolfson and Carskadon using a behavior survey with self-reported grades, students with higher grades reported more sleep and earlier bedtimes on school nights and reduced weekend delays of sleep schedules than students with lower grades. Other studies showed similar results.

In a study conducted in 15 countries among students between 9 and 11 years old taking math and science tests, the American students topped all of them with 73 percent reporting enough sleep. The average of the 15 countries was 46.5 percent. Kazakhstan reported the lowest at 12 percent. But BBC reported that more technological countries like the United States topped the sleepless-night scores among students because of cell phones and other mobile gadgets.

“Having a computer screen that is eight inches away from your face is going to expose you to a lot more light than watching television on the opposite side of the room,” said Karrie Fitzpatrick, sleep researcher at Northwestern University in Illinois. The light from the tablet or laptop, held close to the face, is physically disruptive to the natural onset of sleep. Many of the students used technology at night, not studying but messaging their friends using the Internet.

Sleep loss affects also how we utilize food. When people are sleep-deprived, their ability to use the food they have eaten is reduced by about 30 percent, which also results in decreased insulin production as well as extraction of energy from glucose, a critical brain food. While this metabolic process is going on, the body is stressed and increases the production of cortisol, which further complicates the body chemistry and results in a faster aging process.

If a healthy 30-year-old is not given proper sleep time for six straight days, his body chemistry displays that of a 60-year-old. It will take him about a week to get back to his “younger” blood metabolism.

The more we study the effects of sleep loss, the more we will find that the purpose of adequate sleep is to maintain better memory and boost learning. Sleep loss means mind loss. It shackles learning in many ways. It curtails critical thinking, messes up memory and mood, retards reasoning, and shutters quantitative skills.

And if we research the discoveries and innovations in arts, math, and sciences, we will find that many of them were the product of the expression “Let’s sleep on it.”

Take the story of the Russian scientist Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev. If we had enough sleep the night before the lecture on the Periodic Table of Elements, we will recall that Mendeleyev single-handedly and systematically organized the whole science of chemistry. One night as he thought about the nature of the universe while playing solitaire, he nodded off. When he awakened, he came up with how all the atoms in the universe were organized and created the now universally used Periodic Table of Elements.

Why then are we giving lectures in school soon after lunch when science is telling us that most of the mental alertness of students are down? We have to change our educational processes in order to improve learning. If we continue with the current timing of lectures, we will be wasting the precious time of both teachers and students.

Dr. Leonardo L. Leonidas (nonieleonidas68@ gmail.com) retired in 2008 as assistant clinical professor in pediatrics from Boston’s Tufts University School of Medicine, where he was recognized with a Distinguished Career Teaching Award in 2009. He is a 1968 graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Medicine and now spends some of his time in the province of Aklan.