Edited by: Elle Scord | Graphic by: Cadence Liang
Can sleeping in on the weekends undo a week of late nights?
At 3 a.m. before my IBDP mocks in high school, I was surrounded by flashcards and a tower of energy drinks, feeling pretty good about my life choices. I assumed everyone else in my class was in the same boat. That’s just what exam week is, right?
Then I ran into my friend after the exam, and he looked suspiciously well rested and confident. Turns out, he was asleep by 10 p.m. and up at 6 a.m., so that he could get a full eight hours of sleep. I asked him why he didn’t just stay up grinding like the rest of us, and he said, “After 2 a.m., I don’t think my brain even works. I need to sleep to be alert for the exam.”
I scoffed and thought to myself that there’s no way he could have covered the material as well as I did if I had more time to prepare.
Then the results came back and to my surprise, he did way better than me.
I was running on energy drinks and about four hours of sleep, and I couldn’t recall half of what I’d studied. He’d done the responsible thing and it paid off. I hate to admit it, but he was totally right.
Initially, my plan had been to catch up on sleep over the weekend, like a lot of us at USC during exam season. Spoiler: it didn’t work. So I decided to look into whether it ever does.
Most college students get around 6 to 7 hours of sleep a night. Many college students treat that gap like a credit card bill we can pay off later, and scientists even call it “sleep debt”.
But a study found that people who slept in on the weekend only improved slightly. They got more sleep and reduced some of their late night eating, but these temporary benefits disappeared once the weekday schedule started again. The researchers called this approach ineffective. People who “caught up” on sleep ended with results much like those who never got the extra sleep. So sleeping until noon on Saturday didn’t actually fix me, it just made me feel like I was doing something about my sleep debt.
Here’s the science that backed up my friend’s advice. Sleep is when your brain sorts what you studied and stores the important stuff. According to Harvard’s Division of Sleep Medicine, too little sleep hurts all three parts of learning: taking information in, storing it, and recalling it later. In fact, the study showed that students remembered vocabulary better when they slept soon after learning it. Losing that sleep hurts their recall, even after a night of recovery sleep.
So, my all nighter wasn’t extra studying - I was just skipping the step that makes studying stick.
It showed up in grades too. Students who get six or fewer hours tend to have lower GPAs than those who get 7 to 8. Shorter sleeping hours is also linked to feeling more stressed and anxious. It even messes with the hormones that control hunger - which explained my 2 a.m. snacking runs.
You’d think that sleeping in at least would help. But big swings in your sleep schedule can also throw off your body’s clock. Staying up until 3 a.m. and sleeping until noon on weekends, then dragging yourself up at 8 a.m. on Monday, is basically jet lag without the actual vacation - it’s called “social jet lag”.
This phenomenon is actually very common. A study that tracked about 15,000 students found that around 60% had at least 30 minutes of social jet lag everyday.
So what can we actually do? Keep your bedtime and wake up time consistent, even on the weekends. Aim for 7 to 8 hours and stop the caffeine by about 5 p.m. The weekend can’t undo a week of 3 a.m. nights, so the best strategy is the one we don’t really want to hear: go to bed.
Next time exam season hits, I know who I’m copying - he’ll be asleep by 10.