Are Sleep Cycle, Biological Clock and  Grades correlated?

Irregular sleep cycle and performance, are they related? Can sleeping in daytime affect my scores? How do I cope with such an amount of homework and continuously varying class timings? What is a biological clock?

Does sleep sacrifice worth good marks?

Visit any student during exam season and you will find him or her glued to the book all night long. After all, studying whole night isn’t an anomaly these days. Many students know that depriving themselves from night time sleep is bad, but they are ready to sacrifice their physical and mental health to score points on tally. They know that once they are through the exam, they can sleep 12hrs a day. Is this mentality a healthy one?

Sleep, Sleep, Sleep!

70% of High School or senior students sleep less than 8 hours a night. 68% of students have trouble falling asleep because of stress. 12% of students with sleep problems miss or fall asleep in class three or more times a month. 20% of students pull all-nighters at least once a month. Teens who do not get enough sleep are more likely to be overweight, not get enough exercise, suffer from depression, and get bad grades.

What do scientists say?

Researchers at Harvard claim that a sufficient sleep is not only important in the exam days but also in the whole academic session. Night-time sleep deprivation can have direct and blunt effects on physical and mental health. It would detrimentally impact one’s score card. Research says that the daytime sleep cannot outplay the night-time sleep and hence, must not be compromised in any case.

Sleep your way to Success:

Ernest Hemingway is said to have once remarked, “I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I’m awake.” Whether you have it all together during the day or feel more like Hemingway, we all benefit from healthy sleep habits. Sleep promotes cognition and memory, facilitates learning, recharges our mental and physical batteries, and generally helps us make the most out of our days. With plentiful sleep, we improve our mental and physical health, reduce stress, and maintain the routine that is critical to healthy daily functioning. While for students, sleep is the first thing to be cut short whenever they try getting into other activities like games, cultural events, studies, and other extracurricular activities. Many prominent personalities promoted sufficient sleep at appropriate times. Even Einstein used to sleep for 10 hours. (during night)

What is a biological clock?

Most people notice that they naturally experience different levels of sleepiness and alertness throughout the day, but what causes these patterns is unknown to many. The two factors influencing this are sleep/wake homeostasis and circadian biological clock.

The sleep/wake homeostasis warns the body that it is “time to go to bed”. It also helps us to get adequate amounts of sleep at night so that we can work all day. If this is the only restoring process, we would be most alert during the daytime, while our craving for sleep would keep increasing with the increasing awake time. In short, the homeostasis maintains a profound balance in sleep and wakefulness.

The circadian biological clock is controlled by a part of the brain called the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus (SCN), a group of cells in the hypothalamus that respond to light and dark signals. From the optic nerve of the eye, light travels to the SCN, signaling the internal clock that it is time to be awake. The SCN signals to other parts of the brain that control hormones, body temperature and other functions that play a role in making us feel sleepy or awake.

When properly aligned, a circadian rhythm can promote consistent and restorative sleep. But when this circadian rhythm is thrown off, it can create significant sleeping problems. Research is also revealing that circadian rhythms play an integral role in diverse aspects of physical and mental health.

The circadian rhythms throughout the body are connected to a master clock, sometimes referred to as the circadian pacemaker, located in the brain. Circadian rhythms are closely connected to day and night. While other cues, like exercise, social activity, and temperature, can affect the master clock, light is the most powerful influence on circadian rhythms.

Is Circadian Rhythm the same as a Biological Clock?

Circadian rhythm is generally discussed in the reference to sleep-wake cycle. Biological clocks help regulate the timing of bodily processes, including circadian rhythms. A circadian rhythm is an effect of a biological clock, but not all biological clocks are circadian.

Circadian Rhythms except sleep

Research continues to uncover details about circadian rhythms, but evidence has connected them to metabolism and weight through the regulation of blood sugar and cholesterol. Circadian rhythms influence mental health as well, including the risk of psychiatric illnesses like depression and bipolar disorder diseases like dementia, as well as the potential for neurodegenerative

Too much for disturbing this rhythm, isn’t it?

When circadian rhythm is thrown off, it means that the body’s systems don’t function optimally.

Disruption In Circadian Rhythm, How?

• Jet Lag Disorder: This occurs when a person crosses multiple time zones in a short period of time
• Shift Work Disorder: This is seen in people working night shifts.
• Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder: People with this type of disruption find that they get tired early in the evening and wake up very early in the morning. Even if they want to be up later at night or sleep later in the morning, people with an advanced sleep phase disorder usually cannot do so.
• Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder: This type of circadian rhythm disruption is associated with “night owls” who stay up late at night and sleep in late in the morning.
• Irregular Sleep-Wake Rhythm Disorder: People with this rare disorder have no consistent pattern to their sleep and may have many naps or short sleeping periods throughout a 24-hour day. It is frequently connected to conditions that affect the brain.

The research suggests that physical and mental activity during local minima of the circadian cycle leads to impaired performance and dramatically increased physiological and psychological stress.

What is in for Grades?

For students, the logic is simple: Less time sleeping means more time to cram for that exam. According to some studies, as many as 60% of students claim to pull-all nighters, and their reasons were twice as often academic as social (Thacher 2008). As corroborated by many animal studies, the disruption in circadian rhythm has numerous detrimental effects on the learning, recalling, and sensory powers of the brain. Research concludes that most of the animals learn the most in their natural awake time period.

Cockroaches, rats, and mice, all nocturnal are more successful in various memory tasks when they learn during the nighttime. (Decker 2007, Hauber 2001, Hoffmann 1992, respectively). Those rats who were phase shifted had a harder time with recall, more like sitting blank in the examination hall, huh?

A study in humans confirmed this, showing that students who shifted their sleep-wake cycle by 2 hours had difficulty concentrating, even if they were sleeping a full 8 hours nightly (Taub 1974). This thereby proves the point that if a student is sacrificing the sleep days before exam and prefers studying, it is sorry to say that but your brain will be in denial- lack of concentration, anxiety, loss of understanding of the topic etc. are some prime features of it.

Is sleep a friend of students?

The hippocampus is associated with spatial memory and the crucial process of forming long-term memories. Neurogenesis—the growth of new neurons—in the hippocampus is associated with learning (Epp 2007) and it has been shown that circadian disruption can inhibit neurogenesis through many pathways. Restating the fact that sleep can affect neurogenesis.

Melatonin, a key ingredient of a good learning brain, is drastically affected by the ‘extra’ light hours at night and especially by the loving ‘night-time coffee’ of students’.

What’s more, circadian disruption has been shown to disturb the normal fluctuations of cortisol (Wotus et al 2013). Disruption of cortisol rhythms has been associated with structural changes in the hippocampus (Gartside et al 2003) and deficits in certain types of training of rats and mice. All three of these pathways lie at the center of sleep, body clocks, and learning and memory.

All of these findings suggest there is strong biological evidence in favor of students calling it a night, even when an exam is coming up. What could possibly be derived from the experiments above is that we should positively swap our night time studies as they exacerbate our loose ends and decrease the overall efficiency of a healthy human brain.

Conclusion:

Just choose the blankets over books, sleepiness over sleeplessness, stop deluging your brain with the knowledge when it just needs to relax and fuse all the information that you have gained for the day. What’s a more simple way of thinking this is that let your brain prepare for the next day rather than wasting the next day being half asleep.

A report by Sashit Vijay