College All Nighters Hurt Performance, New Research Shows

Calgary, Canada: As a part of their awareness campaign on insomnia and other sleep disorders, Nutriden Inc., a company involved in manufacturing premium nutritional supplements, has outlined new research which highlights the negative impact of pulling off all nighters on a person's performance.

All nighters are an entrenched part of college life with students viewing it as a last ditch effort towards getting the best grade possible. But sleep research suggests that students would be better off getting a healthy night's rest instead. According to Nutriden Inc.'s founder Tom Schumlich, “All nighters cause serious disruption to a body's natural rhythms and are very harmful to a person's long term health goals especially when it's when practiced regularly. Students should instead work on their time management skills to ensure that they balance both their sleep as well as their schedules effectively.”

A study conducted by UC Berkeley shows that sleep deprivation shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles decision-making processes. For exams that involve multiple choice questions and true or false answers, pulling all nighters will do more harm than good as they can make one's decision-making processes much weaker than normal.

David Earnest, Ph.D., a professor with the Texas A&M College of Medicine who studies circadian rhythms, says, "The brain loses efficiency with each hour of sleep deprivation. When we try to learn information quickly, we're only enabling short-term memory. This memory type extinguishes rapidly. If one doesn't 're-use' information, it disappears within a period of a few minutes to a few hours." So while last minute cramming can temporarily help one pass exams, they are terrible for actually learning and maintaining information on a long term basis.

Chronic lack of sleep can also cause other problems such as a lack of focus and an inability to recall information. For students looking to maximize their performance, following a regular schedule for both sleep and studies is the ideal choice. Others who are plagued with insomnia and have difficulty sleeping without disturbances should look into natural sleep aids that can help in sleep recovery. To learn more about sleep disorders and its various treatments, visit Nutriden Inc.'s official website.