Don't Sacrifice Sleep for Studying

Sacrificing sleep time for studying may seem like a good idea at first, but the results of a new scientific study come to disprove this bit of popular wisdom. In the long run, this habit may lead to lower academic performances.

When students sacrifice their sleep for studying, their academic performances decrease the following day. Since kids do this very often, especially in the last two years of high school, the trend continues at an accelerating pace, depending on how much sleep they lose every night, Science Blog reports.

Details of the study, conducted by a team of experts from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), appear in the latest issue of the scientific journal Child Development.

“Academic success may depend on finding strategies to avoid having to give up sleep to study, such as maintaining a consistent study schedule across days, using school time as efficiently as possible, and sacrificing time spent on other, less essential activities,”UCLA expert Andrew J. Fuligni says.