It is exam season for millions of students now. Recently, a few young students who are appearing for board exams told me something critical which made me think. They said that sometimes they sacrifice sleep for about 2-3 nights consecutively. This is a bit alarming on multiple counts!

They said many students follow this style because they prefer a tight sprint of a couple of days just before the exam day rather than a month-long study marathon. 

Firstly, it is not good for both your physical health and mental health. Secondly, it has a negative impact on your performance irrespective of whether it is an exam or presentation or sports or stage event. 

Latest research in modern medicine has shown direct evidence between sleep quality and good memory retaining abilities. Although a student might get a certain amount of confidence and satisfaction by mugging up materials all night, the brain is not going to be extremely efficient in retaining that information and releasing that information efficiently into paper. 

If you sacrifice your sleep non-stop for 2-3 nights, what the brain usually does is minimise your guilt trip. If you have not prepared for your exams many weeks in advance, such a non-stop burning of midnight oil might help in reducing a guilty conscience before exams. There is a feel good factor there. However in terms of memory retention and logical functioning, you are reducing your grey matter efficiency without you knowing about it overtly. That is the subtle negative impact. 

Obviously one can imagine the stress and anxiety related to high pressure and high stakes games of board exams. However please do try your best to get at least 6 hours sleep before exam time. That will make your brain sharper to translate all your knowledge, ideas and thoughts smoothly into paper. After all, it is not about how much time you read, it is all about what you write eventually. 

This is no way a criticism of the younger generation or present day students. I was also not one of those students who used to be super organised in meticulously preparing for exams weeks or months in advance. Yours truly was also a last minute preparation kinda guy. I used to forego sleep non-stop just before exams. But I learnt the lesson the hard way. 

Ironically, the nights where I did not sleep even a wink and put maximum preparation time, my own performance in those exams were not as good as the ones where I gave my brain a bit of rest. 

I failed my chemistry pre-boards exam in my 12th standard and this was the exam I put on non-stop sleepless nights back-to-back thinking it will enable me to do better. By giving my brain no rest and no sleep only made matters worse. 

I slept for a solid 6 hours before my English board exam because I was a more science-oriented student. I did not stress much about the language exam. Moreover I frankly did not care at that time about what marks I got in language since it will not be used as a parameter for my admission process into BSc Physics course. Only PCM aggregate mattered for me then. Interestingly, with less stress and better sleep, I scored 93 marks in my 12th board exam and became a language topper. 

For the science subjects, I had much more stress and gave minimum sleep and eventually I scored less in all those subjects compared to my English exam. Hence I noticed a pattern between good quality sleep, less stress and exam performance. 

Later in life, when I used to bunk my sleep before important conference presentations, older and wiser scientists advised me that doing a brain burn-out is neither good for stage presentation nor for effectively answering challenging questions from the technical conference audience. 

To be brutally honest, scientists, doctors and journalists do not have much moral high ground in preaching about good sleep hygiene and regular sleep patterns to the younger generation. 

However, it is totally justified from our side to convey the facts of modern research findings as well as valuable life lessons from our own real life so that the younger generation of students do not make the same mistakes in life like us. 

So irrespective of whether you are under-prepared or over-prepared, please go get some much-needed sleep before you get ready to conquer those exams and bag those marks. Trust me, it will do good both academically and biologically!

(The author, Dr Aswin Sekhar, is an Indian astrophysicist and science writer and science outreach professional)