The result of the said study suggests that poor sleeping hygiene was associated with a lower grade-point average in high school. Sleep hygiene usually worsened as college days begins, and poor sleep hygiene tended to pursue through the senior year. Students whose sleep hygiene gets worst during college days present a greater risk of decline in their grade point average.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine said that sleep hygiene involves habits and behaviors that aid in a healthy sleep. Common examples of such proper sleeping habits include setting a relaxing bedtime routine and avoiding caffeine few hours before bed time.
One of the principal investigator and lead authors of the study, Jennifer Paszka, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, said that sleep hygiene is a set of voluntary behaviors which one can change.
Paszka further explained that if they are related to college performance, then the students themselves could make small changes to help them do better. Paszka said that it makes sense if students will have a good sleep to help them achieve flying colors in college.
Also, the said research found differences according to “chronotype” that presents the time of day when a person chooses to be awake. Students who have evening class means that they have natural preferences to stay up later at night, revealed greater declines in grade point average transitioning from high school to college and had a lower freshmen grade point average of 2.84 compared with daytime students with grade point average of 3.18. Said night time students shifted greater toward a daytime chronotype by the senior year of college, when there were no longer significant grade point average differences between chronotypes.
Peszka said that the said study found out that night time students were shifting their clocks during their time in college to be more like morning larks and regular robins and probably that shifting helped their academic performance improve.
Meanwhile, Peszka together with other co-authors, Peszka David Mastin, PhD from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and John Harsh from the University of Southern Mississippi studied 89 students who provided access to their high school and college academic records. Before their freshmen year of college, during summer, they accomplished a series of questionnaires about their sleep preferences, sleeping habits and the way they sleep during their high school days.
A total of thirty-four students completed the same questionnaires at the end of their first year in college and 43 participants accomplished the questionnaires after their senior year. Chronotype was determined using the Horne-Ostberg criteria.
The researchers found out that students may be able to improve their academic performance by understanding their chronotype and following sleep proper sleep hygiene recommendations.
At SLEEP 2010, Peszka, Mastin, Harsh along with other colleagues reported that poor sleeping hygiene was linked to higher scores on a measure of perceived stress among college students. It also comes with higher scores on both the exhaustion and cynicism subscales of a tool that measured “burnout”, a level of global exhaustion characterized by over fatigue, reduced job efficiency and depressed mood.
Students with bad sleeping habits are suggested to seek relief from natural sleep aids, to somehow have a complete rest, according to experts.
Image credits and source:
http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2009/0906/teenager_sleep_0608.jpg
This makes sense when a child sleeps less, goes to bed later, and has more irregular sleep/wake habits.
ReplyDelete