The biggest mistake you can make the night before the Selectivity exam is not leaving a topic unlooked at: it is not sleeping
When we think of a student during exam time or of a candidate who is preparing very intensely for an exam that will offer him job stability, we automatically think of the classic image of being up early in the morning studying hundreds of underlined pages. Here it seems that sleeping becomes a minor issue due to the fact of studying and cramming hundreds of pages. But the reality is that study without sleeping It’s like wasting time, even though it may seem otherwise. The science. Here the science has a lot to sayand a robust body of evidence suggests that putting aside studying and getting into bed for 7 or 8 hours of sleep is by far the smartest decision you can make before an exam or during preparation. And something they don’t teach us is that studying is only half of the learning and memorization process that occurs in our brain, since the other half occurs while we are asleep in order to ingrain knowledge. In the brain. To understand why sleep is non-negotiable for students, we have to look at what happens inside our heads when we sleep. At these moments we may think that the brain is in a state of lethargy or shutdown, but the truth is that it is a period of frenetic activity at the neuronal level. We found one of the proofs in a published article in Neuron which suggests that the sleeping brain is biologically optimized for memory consolidation. Something very important, because during the day the brain acts like a true sponge, capturing a large amount of information quickly but volatile, which far exceeds the limit of its capacity to retain it. Transferring it to the hard drive. All this knowledge that we try to acquire in one afternoon has to be consolidated so that we can later remember it in the exam. This is where sleep comes in, which is where a hippocampal-cortical transferwhich allows the information acquired during wakefulness to be reactivated and transferred to the cerebral cortex, which is where the information is stored long-term. In Nature We found a fascinating article that detailed how neurons repeat at full speed the information learned during the first phase of sleep. This phase prepares the ground so that, during REM sleep, in the second half of sleep, synaptic connections are stabilized and strengthened to integrate all the information. But if we skip hours of sleep, or reduce it to 3-4 hours to be more efficient, this process is interrupted. The disaster of sleep deprivation. The penalty for not sleeping is severe, since if you decide to spend the night sleepless to review “a couple more topics”, you should know that the price you have to pay is a 40% reduction in learning capacity, in addition to an increase in memory losses and a plummet in concentration. And what these losses ultimately generate are temporary memory gaps, which is the typical situation in which we remain “blank” looking at the exam sheet without knowing what to write, although you remember having read it hours before. This is why a student with few hours of sleep shows much slower response times, is confused when making decisions, and suffers a radical worsening of attention. In surveys. In 2023, a study carried out with 640 students of the Autonomous University of Madrid during their exam period pointed out that 61.3% of those surveyed already sensed that their performance would improve if they slept more. From here, the researchers confirmed a direct and positive association between sleep quality and academic performance. Furthermore, they discovered that the “sleep debt” accumulated during the week took a very high toll, being associated with worse performance perceived by the students themselves. The perfect dose. Here the recommendation that we must keep in mind is that of the WHO or the National Sleep Foundation, which suggests that young adults should sleep between 7 and 8 hours a day, and even increase to 9 hours for students with great cognitive stress, such as opponents. Images | Ministry of Health In Xataka | If you wake up tired on a regular basis, your rest is fragmented. The good news is that science knows how to fix it
