You've probably heard it a dozen times by now. But here it goes again: Sleep is important. Your mental health and immune (免疫时)system are connected to your sleeping habits. So are your grades, a new study finds. Sleep accounts for nearly one-fourth of the difference among students' grades in a class. So even if you spend hours studying for a test but get too little sleep, you might still do poorly.
Typically, people's sleep schedules are messy and can not be known in advance. Professor Jeffrey Grossman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge wanted to see if sleep links to people's learning performance even when a study was done with people who kept such true-to-life schedules at home. So he turned to Fitbits, which can check how long people sleep and how frequently they wake up. And the researchers looked for 100 students. They focused on these students' sleep patterns in the days and weeks before exams and then compared them to these students' test scores.
"How much time a person sleeps the night. before an exam doesn't affect that person's grade," Grossman says. "A student who sleeps 7 hours every night will do better than a student who sleeps 7.5 hours one night and 6.5 hours another night."
"It's important for people to know that if their Fitbits tell them that they have terrible sleep, that may not actually be so," Michael Scullin, a sleep scientist at Baylor University says. Grossman also raises this point. Fitbit, Inc. makes this advanced tool. But it doesn't share how its tool works. This leaves a question about whether the tool is really correct when checking a student's sleep. Even so, Scullin emphasizes that there are enough data supporting ties between sleep and how well someone performs.
"Students need more sleep and less late evening use of phones and other screens. Even with after-school activities and schoolwork, they need to get enough sleep," Grossman says.
Dr The necessary amount of sleep depends a lot on people's health.
