How does sleep support learning?

Studying abroad? ✈️ Don’t underestimate the power of a good night’s sleep! 💤 It’s one of your best tools for learning, focus, and emotional balance. In this guest article, Rochelle Clews shares how quality rest can boost your academic success – and how to make it happen.

If you’ve ever pulled an all-nighter to prepare for a test, only to forget everything the next day, you’re not alone. Being a student can mean a lot of juggling, and too often, sleep gets put on the back burner to make time for revision, sports, socialising, and everything in between. But the truth is that sleep isn’t wasted time – it’s one of your most powerful tools for learning and academic success.

Here, we take a look at exactly how sleep supports learning, so you can feel more confident about ensuring you get enough shut eye to perform at your best.

Storing information

Though it may feel like not much happens within your brain when you sleep, it’s actually incredibly active while you rest. During this time, your brain processes all the information you’ve taken in throughout the day, strengthens important memories, makes connections between new and existing knowledge, and clears out unnecessary mental clutter.

You sleep in five stages, but research shows that stages three and four are especially important for learning. During this time, your brain consolidates factual knowledge, moving it from temporary storage in the hippocampus to long-term memory in the prefrontal cortex. It’s also working away suppressing knowledge and ‘forgetting’ information it considers unhelpful or unimportant. The researchers also found that restless deep sleep resulted in a visibly reduced learning efficiency of up to 40%.

In other words, while you sleep, your brain is turning today’s lessons into tomorrow’s understanding.

Focus and cognitive function

Paying attention is not easy after a late night or restless sleep. You feel foggy, distracted, and struggle to comprehend complicated ideas or theories. This is because poor sleep directly impacts your ability to concentrate and focus, and a good night’s sleep boosts your cognitive function and enables you to function at optimal capacity – something that should be high on your priority list as a student.

Though plenty of people say they feel fine after only five to six hours of sleep, studies have continuously shown that this is insufficient, and long-term sleep deprivation can lead to serious health conditions such as depression, obesity, and neurodegenerative disorders later in life. For a student, it’s ideal to aim for eight to ten hours each night.

If you make sure to get enough sleep, you’ll find that you can process new information faster, have better memory recall, are more emotionally balanced, and make fewer mistakes.

Top tips for a deeper night’s sleep

Improving your sleep as a student doesn’t mean you have to decline every social invitation or overhaul your lifestyle. Simply being mindful of how much you need to sleep and implementing a few small changes can make a big difference to your mood, learning ability, and academic success. Here are a few ideas to try:

• Stick to a consistent sleep schedule: Going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, even on weekends, can help to ensure your circadian rhythm is set correctly and you’re able to properly enjoy all of the sleep stages during your slumber.
• Slow down before bed: The blue light that’s emitted from screens can wreak havoc on your body’s natural sleep hormones, so try to switch off a while before your bedtime. Wind down with a book, calming music, or some light stretching instead.
• Make your bedroom a haven: Even though your eyes are shut, the environment in which you sleep is known to impact the quality of your rest. Create a space that feels relaxing, tranquil, cool, and dark to enjoy a peaceful night’s sleep.

Learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom, it also happens while you sleep. Though it may require a bit of time management and rescheduling, prioritising your rest is an essential part of achieving the results you want throughout your academic education.

Author: Rochelle Clews

As a mature student, mother, and self-declared tech addict, Rochelle understands well the struggles of getting enough sleep. She shares her advice with other students to inspire them to take charge of their sleep schedules, so they can achieve their goals and enjoy all the benefits of a good night’s rest.

At UK Student Solutions, we know that academic success is about more than just grades – it’s about taking care of your overall well-being. That’s why we’re committed to supporting our students not only in their studies, but also in building healthy habits that help them thrive during their time abroad.