No Lose When You Snooze: How Sleep Makes You Smarter

Sleep science reveals how sleep improves your memory, helps you learn faster, makes you more disciplined, and increases your productivity.

Sleep is great.

Lack of sleep makes athletes perform worse, especially in endurance sports. English football teams have hired sleep coaches to make sure that their players are well-rested for the long and grueling Premier League season.

But sleep isn’t just important for top athletes and physical performance. Regular people like you and me who wake up in the morning, drink our morning coffee, and get on with the daily hustle also need a good night’s sleep.

While scientists haven’t figured out the ins and outs of sleep yet, we know it’s incredibly important. We know a lack of sleep eventually makes you fat, dumb, and dead.

A few hours of extra sleep can make you a whole lot smarter. Studies have shown that good sleep improves both work performance and school performance.

There are tons of other benefits to sleep as well. This article is all about how a few extra hours of sleep can make you smarter.

Let’s get to it.

Sleep Helps You Learn And Remember Things

Sleep is essential for cognitive function. It’s an organization function that we don’t entirely understand.

Every day, we’re bombarded with information. Sleep helps us learn and remember that information. On the flipside, sleep deprivation has been shown to negatively affect learning and memory.

For those of us who are still in school, this means it’s a really bad idea to cram for exams the night before.

If you’ve ever learned motor-functioning skills such as sports or playing an instrument, you may have experienced a sudden improvement in ability overnight. This is because a good night’s sleep results in a 20% increase in motor speed.

Sleep Helps You Think And Act Straight

Sleep affects the brain, especially an area called the prefrontal cortex.

You can think of the prefrontal cortex as the engine underneath our highest-level functioning. Highest-level functioning includes things like our ability to set goals and stick to them, our ability to focus, our logical thinking, and our decision-making ability.

This literally means you can become more disciplined by sleeping. If willpower won’t cut it, try some sleep. Jocko Willink probably disagrees.

The prefrontal cortex also influences our hot executive functions, such as our ability to self-regulate our impulses and emotions.

When our prefrontal cortex doesn’t function, we end up having problems with some of these processes. Unfortunately, the prefrontal cortex is sensitive to sleep deprivation.

If we don’t get enough sleep, we compromise our prefrontal cortex and our cognitive performance suffers. While some sleep deprivation can be compensated for, consistent sleep deficiency can make a mess of your prefrontal cortex.

Unfortunately, the symptoms of sleep deficiency can mimic the symptoms of other conditions. For example, sleep deprivation in children can produce symptoms that mimic ADHD.

Lack of Sleep Makes You Dangerous

Without enough sleep, we lose our ability to pay sustained attention for long stretches of time. This can be particularly dangerous if you do something involving other people’s safety.

Imagine you’re sleep deprived behind the wheel on a twelve hour drive. If you’re sleep deprived, you might doze off (what scientists call ‘microsleep’) and swerve into oncoming traffic.

It happens more than you’d expect.

It’s also more relevant now than before. A study of sleep recommendations to children from 1897 to 2009 showed that we’re sleeping less now than before.

Sleep Makes You More Productive

If you think for a living — if your job requires specific knowledge, creativity, and a hint of genius, then you really have to pay attention to this point.

In a conversation with Reut Gruber, PhD and sleep scientist at McGill University, she told me “sleep is the best cognitive enhancer.”

“If I get a good night’s sleep, my productivity level will be significantly higher. My performance in my job as a professor is dependent on my ability to concentrate. If I haven’t gotten enough sleep, and I need to write my grants, it will be a major challenge. With good sleep, I’ll do well.”

Lack of sleep makes us less efficient and less focused — and it’s sure to burden our productivity.

In a world that only increases the demands on our mental performance through that aforementioned bombardment of information, maybe we should treat ourselves as athletes when it comes to sleep?

Personally, I’ve started scheduling an extra hour for sleep each night.