Member-only story
How Hitting Snooze Could Boost Your Productivity
Sleep longer to refine your cognitive abilities.
If you oversleep, you’re lazy. That’s what we’re told as teenagers.
As we grow up, we learn to treat sleep as dispensable. Under the stress of looming deadlines, we’ve all pulled an all-nighter in the hope it will make us more productive.
But we have it backward. Feeling tired might seem like a small price to pay when you’re in a rush, but sacrificing sleep could cause changes in your brain's structure that will impact your intelligence and cognitive abilities.
Granted, too much sleep can be just as damaging. But research indicates that our brains need between 7–9 hours of sleep a day. So if you’re a productivity fanatic who wakes up at 3.30 am, make sure you’re giving your brain the rest it needs.
If you don’t, you risk hindering your memory skills and mental health. For some of us, having an extra hour in the morning could make us more productive.
A Brain Boost
There are ample psychological studies that have evaluated the impact of sleep on our brains. The growing consensus is that snoozing can boost our memory.
Studies have focused on different kinds of memory and recall:
