With the increasing deadlines from a very tender age sleep, an essential requirement for human body is becoming a scarce commodity. Many a research has already quoted the importance of sleep for not only for safeguarding health but producing better results. Now a new research says that anyone who is trying to get equipped with new skill like dance, yoga, and swimming should take good breaks while training so that he or she would learn faster. The same individual when pushes himself or herself consistently thinking ‘practice makes man perfect’ may not yield better results and reaches a point where law of diminishing returns start working.

How does sleep help: Getting trained on a new skill engrosses rewiring of brain, which in technical terms is known as neural plasticity. For a new skill to endure and stay, the changes in the brain should be fused and evened out. Such endurance would occur only when the changes are transferred from short-term memory to long-term memory. If the consolidation process doesn’t happen in the required manner the new learning would remain short lived. Lack of adequate sleep may also interrupt the consolidation process. Sleep is so mandatory that if one doesn’t sleep a day after training, such learning may not be effective. Similarly overturning may reduce learning if consolidation process is not given enough time.

Sacrificing sleep for study may hit performance: Another study says those who study abandoning sleep may produce results which are counterproductive i.e. they would just harm their academics. The study conducted by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that focused on variations of students at regular intervals, who have a habit of sacrificing sleep for studies. The study elaborates that the academic success may depend on consistent planning and daily schedule, effective time management and controlling deviations. The results from the study point out that added time used up studying cuts into youngsters sleep on regular basis, and it is this condensed sleep that accounts for the enhancing in academic problems that occur after days of increased studying. Even though these nights of extra studying seem necessary, they can come at a cost says a member involved in the study. The study advises teens not to abandon sleep for studies.