This study is examining correlation, not causation, and it doesn’t appear to provide any evidence to support the article title’s claim that changing one’s sleeping habits will change one’s college grades.
The study provided evidence that people who have good grades on average tend to get “better” sleep on average (according to whatever criteria FitBit’s sleep tracking feature uses) than those who have worse grades. It doesn’t provide evidence for any stronger statement than that; just that good grades and quality of sleep seem to tend to go together.
It certainly doesn’t provide any evidence to support the title’s claim “Better sleep habits lead to better college grades”; that changing sleeping habits improves grades.
That would be an interesting study if anyone finds a way to get it past the ethics panels.
Or it could be that some students don’t need to sacrifice sleep to succeed.
I spent most of my degree goofing off with the regular interruptions of sitting in lectures, writing notes, and maybe review them once before taking a test.
I always made sure to get enough sleep to be mentally sharp. If I did that, the act of writing notes in the lecture was enough to lock the information in my head.
Later on in college when class got more difficult, my best friends and I would talk about what we learned each day. We taught each other our own subjects and teaching can be the best way to learn.
Not everyone is so fortunate to have the massive advantages I did. I had to be careful with money but never needed loans or a job. This let me focus solely on getting good enough grades to graduate.
The data presented by Prof. Patrick Winston in one lesson of 6.034 at the MIT, including the slide "[if you skip sleep to study] you might as well get drunk", with the examples of the studies made on Marines, must come to mind.
> You don't learn without problem solving ... The custodians of knowledge about how much sleep you need[, a]nd what happens if you don't get it[,] is the United States Army. Because they're extremely interested in what happens when you cross 10 or 12 times zones, and have no sleep, and have to perform. ... [A]fter the first Gulf War, which was the most studied war in history, ... there were after action reports ... full of examples like this. The US Forces ... drawn up for the night ... up for about 36 hours straight ... [w]hen, much to their amazement, across their field-of-view came a column of Iraqi vehicles ... both sides enormously surprised. A firefight broke out ... in acts of fratricidal fire. And the interesting thing is that all these folks here swore in the after action reports that they were firing straight ahead. And what happened was their ability to put ordnance on target was not impaired at all. But their idea of where the target was, what the target was, whether it was a target, was all screwed up. So this led to a lot of experiments in which people were sleep deprived. ... These are Army Rangers. It doesn't get any tougher than this.
[T]hey had ... fire control teams ... their job is to take information from an observer, over here, about a target, over here. And tell the artillery, over here, where to fire. So they kept some of these folks up for 36 hours straight. And ... they all said, we're doing great. And at that time they were bringing fire down on hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, and themselves. Because, they couldn't do the calculations anymore, after 36 hours without sleep.
And now you say to me, well I'm a MIT student, I want to see the data. So let's have a look at the data. [Slides at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.034f/sleep.pdf ] Very simple calculations you have to do in your head, like adding numbers, spelling words, and things like that ... after 72 hours without sleep, your performance relative to what you were at the beginning is about 30%. So loss of sleep destroys ability.
Sleep loss accumulates. So you say, well I need eight hours of sleep - and what you need, by the way, varies - but I'm going to get by with seven hours of sleep. So after 20 days of one hour's worth of sleep deprivation, you're down about 25%. ...
So you might say, well does caffeine help? Or ... naps in this case. And the answer is, yes, a little bit. Some people argue that you get the more effect out of the sleep that you do get if you divide it into two. Winston Churchill always took a three hour nap in the afternoon. He said that way he got a day and a half's worth of work out of every day. He got the full amount of sleep[, b]ut he divided it into two pieces. Here's the caffeine one. So caffeine does help.
And now you say, well, shoot, I think I'm going to take it kind of easy this semester. And I'll just work hard during the week before finals. Maybe I won't even bother sleeping for the 24 hours before the 6.034 final. That's OK. Well let's see what will happen. So let's work the numbers. Here is 24 hours. And that's where your effectiveness is after 24 hours. Now let's go over to the same amount of effectiveness on the blood alcohol curve. And it's about the level at which you would be legally drunk. So I guess what we ought to do is to check everybody as they come in for the 6.034 final, and arrest you if you've been 24 hours without sleep. And not let you take any finals again, for a year. So if you do all that, you might as well get drunk.
(Patrick Winston, lesson (#10) for the 6.034 - Artificial Intelligence course at the MIT, 2010)
I wonder how those forms of sleep deprivation compares to those with mania or hypomania (i.e., bipolar I/Ii) and the amount of sleep they get in those cycles (none to 1-3 hours).
The military has such an odd no-sleep culture. "Hey, let's load up a submarine full of nuclear weapons and a nuclear reactor and then generate a schedule that requires everyone on board to function at a cognitive deficit with no spatial references."
Another perplexing one is hospitals. Sleep is one of the most important factors in self-healing. However for someone in a long hospital stay, rooms often don't get completely dark, there are machines which make noise and light, and patients are often woken up throughout the night for various tests and procedures. It seems like the opposite of what you would want to do to make someone healthy.
This was shocking to me the first time I had to stay in a hospital for multiple nights. The door was always kept open for nurses, and the hallway lights and noise was constant. I had to share a room with a patient who kept the lights and television on 24/7 and, whenever she was awake, was loudly complaining to someone on her phone or threatening to kill the nurses for not giving her enough medication. I had no option for another room and had to “recover” between multiple operations in these conditions. My first week out of the hospital was focused on recovering from the hospital conditions, not my actual medical issue.
Oh you'd love to know that William Stewart Halsted, the father of residency basically was cocaine and morphine addict who thought that doctors needed to completely immerse themselves in the hospital environment and didn't need sleep at all.
Many countries follow that pattern of having patients subject to physiologically unreliable personnel; others impose some limiting rules ("No, doctor, you cannot be in the panel for the examinations of medicine students on Saturday: on Monday you operate in the surgery room and you are required to rest, just like personnel in civil aviation"); nonetheless, that some goodsensical boundaries are set is not a warranty for a properly set up system - also in those territories I have seen other personnel completely untrained on basic procedures (like nurses staring at you waiting silent for a minute, or in stillness expecting something inexplicit, then shouting "SOOOO?!" bovinely).
Anyway, yes, I consider territories in which the use sleep deprived medical personnel is tolerated a strong sign of lack of civilization, when the important factor appears that some of them state "Yes we are used to it" (?! !!!) instead of, say, "We were unduly forced by understaffing" - that some of them have no idea of the difference is a huge alarm bell.
My wife was recovering from surgery and stayed in hospital for several days.
Every 4 hours, a nurse would bust in through the door so hard the door would bounce back almost like a western saloon, in they push their cart with computer, and YELL, "We are just gonna take the blood pressure!"
Occasionally, we did get one nurse who would do this with tact.
Yeah this goes hand in hand with medical culture in general. My partner is becoming a physician, and they will make these people work 12 hour shifts, or multiple days straight, or both. We pretty much burn them out before they’ve even gotten out of residency. She hasn’t encountered any real reasoning, just “this is the way”.
It’s on purpose, they want soldiers to be able to function well in high stress and pressure situations. They do this so they train under the same conditions they would be in war. It is most definitely not healthy tho. I think the military does not really care about the health of its personnel during and after their duty.
As I understand it its bcs the military wants organizations that can function under long term stress and pressure. If personnel is always sleep deprived you will find the processes that doesn't work in that kind of environment, before you go in hot.
another good argument for people from low income families who may may have trouble staying in college due to subpar living conditions which affect their grades.
i’ve read people’s comments on some other forums (not here) blaming poor people for not studying or trying hard enough and that is the reason they are poor. which is obviously crazy to think that about everyone who comes from the lower class is lazy or not trying hard enough.
i am thinking about a lot commuters, who live at home because they can’t afford a dorm or an off campus apartment. i’ve met many people who would just stop going to college or lose multiple days only to find out the only car in the family broke and that persons grades were hurting so they later on ended up dropping out.
always good to understand where people may be coming from
> which is obviously crazy to think that about everyone who comes from the lower class is lazy or not trying hard enough.
This is an extremely common belief I’ve seen from my dad’s generation. His parents worked hard and succeeded, therefore anyone who didn’t succeed, didn’t work hard.
I wonder about confounding effects. Students who were struggling might be more prone to study late and more prone to do poorly on tests. (My first year at MIT [when you’d typically take 3.091] kicked my ass and I got little sleep; maybe the second caused some of the first, but the first definitely caused a lot of the second.)
Sleep is instrumental in forming long term memories IIRC. So it's not at all surprising that better sleep quality would result in improved grades, seeing how they largely depend on you being able to understand and remember stuff for the tests, and other academic activities.
Though I'm surprised that physical exercise did not correlate. Is positive effect on mental performance is well established in the literature. I suppose "more studies are needed" (which means "we don't know" in academia-speak).
Perhaps it is the case that there is a certain group of students who do well in class and sleep well? The article speaks of correlations at first, then immediately jumps into causation.
Probably because it makes extreme sense to treat, provisionally, in practice and within one's set of tentative hypotesis, that correlation as a causation. Well functioning individuals increasingly behave erratically under sleep deprivation. Inductively "billions" of humans presumably got it as an experience, that rest dysfunction "correlated" with imperfect performance, with clear direction about which side may have conditioned the other. The warning is all on the size of the effect, not on the correlative factors.
Secondary factors such as vicious circles of struggle, anxiety etc. aside.
> Another surprising finding is that there appears to be a certain cutoff for bedtimes, such that going to bed later results in poorer performance, even if the total amount of sleep is the same.
I would perhaps rephrase this as "people who stimulate themselves enough that they stay up late have poor quality sleep".
I for sure experience this myself when I don't properly wind down my mind several hours before going to sleep.
Not really. First of all, of course, the point is that bad sleep impairs cognition; the suggested point seems to be that there are "appointments" with scheduled internal operations (whatever: glial cleanup etc.), and that if they are missed it is missed maintenance.
> we found ... zero correlation with fitness, which I must say was disappointing ...” Grossman [3.091 - Solid-State Chemistry, who initially promoted the study to find this other correlation] says
> it’s the sleep you get during the days when learning is happening that matter most
> there appears to be a certain cutoff for bedtimes, such that going to bed later results in poorer performance, even if the total amount of sleep is the same ... if you go to bed after 2, your performance starts to go down even if you get the same seven hours
> those who got relatively consistent amounts of sleep each night did better
> The overall course grades for students averaging 6.5 hours of sleep were down 50% from other students who averaged just one hour more sleep. Similarly, those who had just a half-hour more night-to-night variation in their total sleep time had grades that dropped 45 percent below others with less variation.
Good quality sleep is very important for our health (https://ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-sleep-psychology/), because it helps to improve concentration and productivity, even increases the ability to solve problems. Therefore, it is so important for students to adhere to sleep norms, otherwise there will be problems with good grades.
Prof James Maas has been talking about this for 30+ years. He even has the anecdotal claim that dropping morning practice for a sleep deprived athlete (on his advice) contributed to her winning an Olympic Gold Medal in 2004.
This was not surprising, as many people already knew sleep helps your brain remember things. However, it is good data to back this up for people skeptical of the benefits and the "cutoff" time was interesting.
Grades beyond whatever threshold keeps you from having problems with the university don't mean squat unless there is more academia in your future.
At any given level of college education (undergrad, masters, etc.) the overwhelming majority of students will not be continuing in academia after that.
Edit: and spare me the low effort comments about GPA and internships, the overwhelming majority don't have those requirements and the overwhelming majority of those that do don't check.
GPA matters less for Tech than other fields. But some places (Finance, Accounting) they do check for first jobs I believe. Also I was asked for GPA from a few places, but luckily they were Government, and Defense Contractors, which I didn't really want to work at anyways.
The study provided evidence that people who have good grades on average tend to get “better” sleep on average (according to whatever criteria FitBit’s sleep tracking feature uses) than those who have worse grades. It doesn’t provide evidence for any stronger statement than that; just that good grades and quality of sleep seem to tend to go together.
It certainly doesn’t provide any evidence to support the title’s claim “Better sleep habits lead to better college grades”; that changing sleeping habits improves grades.
That would be an interesting study if anyone finds a way to get it past the ethics panels.