Why Sleep Is Vital for Academic Success | David Creswell PhD

We all know we need a good night’s sleep but sleep researcher, David Creswell PhD has studied how our performance is actually affected by sleep. He has even found a predictive correlation between student’s college GPA scores and their sleep duration.

David Creswell is a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and has published numerous studies on mindfulness-based interventions and their impact on well-being. He is a prominent researcher specializing in health psychology, mindfulness meditation, and stress management.

Earlier this year David co-authored a paper in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences called, “Nightly sleep duration predicts grade point average in the first year of college” which caught our attention. The research measures performance metrics among students who wore Fitbits while sleeping. The findings suggest getting less than 6 hours of sleep may be a threshold where sleep shifts from helpful to harmful.

To wrap up the conversation, hosts Kurt and Tim discuss the topic of sleep in their Grooving Session. They discuss their very different sleep patterns and what Kurt has done to help improve his insomnia.

Topics 

(4:22) Welcome and speed round questions.

(5:50) David’s research on sleep.

(12:14) What about daytime napping?

(15:42) The difference between sleeping more or less than 6 hours per night.

(17:16) Sleep duration and academic success in college students.

(22:16) How to avoid false positives in research.

(30:09) Does David listen to music while he sleeps?

(33:34) Grooving Session with Kurt and Tim on sleep.

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