Those who cut their hours of sleep to give some extra time to studies may be negatively affecting their academics, says a study.
These findings are made during a new longitudinal study by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), that took into account daily and yearly variations of students who sacrifice sleep to study.
"Sacrificing sleep for extra study time is counterproductive," says Andrew J. Fuligni, professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioural sciences at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at UCLA, and one of the researchers of the study, the journal Child Development says.
"Academic success may depend on finding strategies to avoid having to give up sleep to study, such as maintaining a consistent study schedule across days, using school time as efficiently as possible, and sacrificing time spent on other, less essential activities," Fuligni has been quoted saying in an UCLA statement.
As a part of the study 535 students from several Los Angeles area high schools in ninth, 10th, and 12th grades were asked to report diaries about their hours of study, sleep, and whether or not they experienced two academic problems -- not understanding something taught in class or doing poorly on a test, quiz, or homework.
"As other studies have found, our results indicated that extra time spent studying cuts into adolescents' sleep on a daily basis, and it is this reduced sleep that accounts for the increase in academic problems that occurs after days of increased studying," Fuligni has been quoted as saying.
"Although these nights of extra studying may seem necessary, they can come at a cost," said Fuligni.
The results of the study do not indicates that teens should spend less time studying overall, but it says that those teen who gave more sleep for academic faced more academic problems than usual.
--with inputs from IANS
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