The Better You Sleep, the Better You Work

Practice alone isn't quite enough to make you perfect. You need to get enough sleep, too.

A study by Harvard Medical School researchers that appears in the July 3 issue of the journal Neuron says your ability to learn motor skills is maximized when you get a full night's sleep.

The study involved teaching groups of people to type a sequence of keys on a computer keyboard as quickly and accurately as they could. One group was trained in the morning and then re-tested 12 hours later. They were able to improve their typing ability by about 2 percent in the re-test.

Another group was trained in the evening and then re-tested 12 hours later, after they'd had a full night's sleep. They had an average 20 percent improvement in their performance when they were re-tested.
The study also found that the amount of performance improvement was linked to the amount of Stage 2 sleep, called non-rapid eye movement (NREM), experienced by the participants, particularly late in the night.

"This is the part of a good night's sleep that many people will cut short by getting up early in the morning," says the study's senior author, Matter Walker, a clinical fellow in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

"In order for an individual to learn new things, they may require a good night's sleep before the maximum benefit of the time they spend practicing is realized," Walker adds in the Harvard press release.