The Sleep Habits That Can Improve Your Grades, According to a New Study

Jeffrey Grossman set out to study how exercise affects college students’ grades. What he found, instead, offers uniquely specific insight into the impact sleep has on academic performance. Grossman, a professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), asked 100 of his Introduction to Solid State Chemistry students to wear a Fitbit activity tracker for an entire semester. (Eighty-eight did.) He also worked with colleagues in MIT’s athletic department to create an exercise class—incorporating videos from his “hero,” “Insanity” creator Shaun T—that 22 of the students took throughout the semester. Grossman expected these students to perform better academically than their classmates—but after months of poring over the data, he says, an association just wasn’t there. “It was disappointing, to be honest,” Grossman says. But “after going through this, we took a little break and said, ‘Wait a second. We don’t just have the active data; we have the inactive data.'” Grossman and his colleagues realized they had something rare: a relatively large amount of objective data on sleep duration, quality and consistency from a diverse group of people actively engaged in a learning environment. They ran new analyses, and started to see patterns unfolding. Some of their findings—like the idea that getting more and higher quality sleep is associated...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized sleep Source Type: news