Men and women perform differently in studies after several sleepless nights (spoiler: they are less affected)

After several sleepless nights, students believe that all it takes is a good night’s sleep to do well on that super challenging test. Unfortunately, things are not quite like that. People are also mistaken when they think that men and women suffer the same effects from a bad night’s sleep. In reality, if people got enough sleep and especially if they had a stable sleep routine, their results would be much better.

We, from awesome.club, we know how important it is to sleep well to get good grades on tests or to perform well in the workplace. Therefore, we bring some important details on this topic.

Two professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the famous MIT, in the USA, decided to analyze, in a group of 100 students, the quality of sleep the night before an exam. They also sought to understand why women perform better than men. For this, they used the device fitbit, which analyzes the inconsistency of sleep, that is, the differences in sleep between one day and another. This difference is often much greater among teens and young adults who frequently go to bed late and have a busy morning the next day.

Other studies have shown that sleep quality is related to student performance in the classroom, but few studies have objectively analyzed the relationship between sleep duration and quality and test results. Therefore, for an entire semester, the researchers recorded the heartbeats of some of these students, in order to analyze in detail how the university students were sleeping.

Most students slept an average of 7 hours and 8 minutes. In the research, people who had a greater sleep inconsistency ended up getting lower marks, even those who slept badly during a week and “made the difference” by sleeping well one night before the test. On the other hand, those who had a fixed schedule, that is, they always went to sleep at the same time throughout the week, ended up achieving good results compared to those who slept the same amount of hours, but always at different times.

The researchers knew from other studies that women get better results than men. But why does this happen? Not maintaining a sleep routine does not affect them as negatively. Men who always go to sleep at different times are much more affected and have much worse results.

Robert Stickgold, professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at the Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study, has already expressed his concern about the issue. And it wasn’t as a researcher, but as a family man. The overall scores of students who slept an average of 6 hours were 50% lower than those who slept an average of just one hour more. Those who had a variation of just half an hour of sleep had their grades affected by 45% compared to those who did not have the same variation.

Sleeping poorly at night has many negative implications. The cognitive performance of a person who stays awake for 17 hours is the same as that of a person with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05%. Those who sleep a few hours or do not have a fixed routine suffer greater difficulties during the day and feel more tired, drowsy and even have difficulty thinking.

How do you deal with sleepless nights? Do you usually maintain a good sleep routine? Tell us in the comments section!