The Importance of Sleep for College Students
College can be demanding. Many students focus on spending more hours at their desks, watching video lessons, doing exercises, reading handouts, writing papers, studying, and reviewing mock questions. As a result, they forget the importance of sleep for learning and end up sleeping less than recommended.
Besides helping the body rest, relieve stress and regain energy, sleep is essential for memory and reasoning. Even if a person knows the best study and concentration techniques, the study will be seriously impaired if they don’t get enough sleep.
With that in mind, the following article shows the importance of sleep for learning so that students can boost their productivity and focus.
Sleep filters and consolidates the memories of the day gone by.
Contrary to what many people think, it is not just when we are in a class, solving a question in a book, or reading a handout that we are learning content and strengthening our memory.
Sleep plays a crucial role in filtering and consolidating memories of the past day. For example, while sleeping the mind chooses what is useful and what is useless to keep in the long run.
This dynamic occurs throughout all sleep stages through the transfer of information in the hippocampus, which is located in the lower central part of the brain and to the cortex. If students don’t sleep well, they retain less information. This, in the long run, dramatically reduces the motivation to study.
Sleep increases concentration and reasoning.
In addition to being fundamental for consolidating memory and learning information, sleep is a vital part of keeping our concentration and reasoning sharp. When people sleep less or have poor sleep, they score lower on IQ and reflex tests than they would if they had slept longer and better. It is no wonder that great scientific geniuses, with impressive powers of concentration and reasoning, valued their hours in bed. Albert Einstein, for example, slept about 10 hours every day.
This effect also goes for naps throughout the day. In addition to promoting rest and energy recovery, naps also help increase focus and consolidate the memory of what you just studied. So, it is wiser for students to nap before a test or before writing an important paper.
Sleep increases creativity.
It is not just logical reasoning and concentration that sleep positively influences. Good sleep also helps improve creativity and divergent thinking.
This happens because when you sleep there is a reordering of electrical signals between neurons with intense communication with each other from separate and distant parts of the brain, strengthening specific neuronal pathways and stimulating the connection of new synapses.
Many artists knew how to take advantage of this characteristic of sleep very well. Salvador Dalí, for example, took several naps throughout the day, keeping a notebook by his bed to write down the new ideas that came to him as soon as he woke up. Other research shows that sleeping poorly significantly affects our attention. People who had not slept for 19 hours had lower results than those who consumed alcohol.
From improving concentration and memory to increasing reasoning and creativity, sleep is of great importance to the success of a college student.