Thanks to your natural circadian (24-hour) rhythms, your body and mind function at their best in a predictable daily routine. If you’re not feeling rested, aim for more. Aim for eight at the very least, but pay attention to your body. Eight hours is the bare minimum, and some students need as many as ten hours. The Sleep Foundation says that college-aged adults often need more sleep than the average adult. The most important habit is to get enough sleep. It wasn’t enough for students to simply get a good night’s sleep the night before the test though better performance was only associated with consistent good sleep habits over the preceding weeks. In one study, better quality and longer duration of sleep correlated with better grades. On the other hand, students who consistently get enough quality sleep are proven to perform better in exams than their sleep-deprived peers. That means you’re more likely to get ill – the last thing you need on exam day! That makes it even more difficult to sleep, getting you stuck in a vicious cycle. Exam season is stressful enough, but sleep deprivation makes it even worse. Impaired creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, logical reasoning, working memory, recall, attention, concentration, and other skills/functions that are essential for dental exam success. What does this mean for your exams? Well, sleep deprivation causes symptoms like: So if you’re in the majority of students that get six hours of sleep instead of eight during exam season, you’re more than likely sleep-deprived! Getting just one hour less sleep than you need every night for a week can have the same cognitive impact as one all-nighter. The effects might be more noticeable after an all-nighter, but you can also experience sleep deprivation from getting “not quite enough” sleep on a regular basis. Just one all-nighter can cause the equivalent cognitive impairment of a 0.05% blood alcohol concentration – almost the legal drink-driving limit. Sleep deprivation can be caused by not getting enough sleep, by not getting quality sleep, or both. Sleep deprivation – the enemy of exam success That’s not the only way lack of sleep can affect your studying. If you’re studying for your exams, that means it’s harder for you to process and retain what you’re trying to learn. When you cut your sleep short, you cut off those longer stages of REM sleep at the end. This is also the stage where your brain processes new information you’ve learned throughout the day and “commits” it to memory. With each cycle, you spend more time in the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, where most of your dreaming happens. When you sleep, your brain cycles through a number of stages. Getting enough quality sleep is essential to every aspect of your physical and mental health, not to mention your cognitive performance. However, when it comes to your dental exams, here’s how those all-night cramming sessions can actually sabotage your study efforts and what to do instead. With so much on the line, the pressure to sacrifice sleep for extra study time is understandable. During exam season, fewer than 10% of students manage to hit that target, with most students getting by on an average of six hours per night. According to the Sleep Foundation, college students should be getting at least eight hours of sleep every night.
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