Why sleep is important ?
A 2017 paper out of Harvard University introduced a new metric called "Sleep Regularity." The paper reported a significant positive correlation between this novel metric and academic performance (as measured by GPA) in healthy college students. In fact, students in the study with regular sleep and wake times had an average GPA of 3.72 while those students deemed irregular sleepers averaged only 3.24 on the 4-point scale; that’s the difference between an A and a B+ average.
The most exciting part of this finding, to quote the study’s lead, Dr. Andrew Phillips, was: “Sleep regularity was uncorrelated with sleep duration, suggesting that regularity captures another informative dimension of sleep.”
Taking a moment to think logically, this isn’t that surprising. For example, we tend to feel better if we hydrate at somewhat regular intervals than we would if we were dehydrated all week but made up for it on the weekend with surplus hydration; why should sleep be any different? We therefore set out to quantify the relationship between sleep consistency and WHOOP data in order to understand why our members ought to be striving to improve the consistency of their sleep timing.
Before we dive into our exciting findings, let’s first back up one step and explain how we calculate sleep consistency.
Why Is This Important?
According to researchers at both Harvard and Stanford, the reason why getting 8 hours of sleep each night is not the same as averaging 8 hours per night is that the brain gets “thrown off” - an effect equivalent to always being jet-lagged.
Disrupting the circadian rhythm in this way prevents us from producing the sleep hormone melanin. Since melanin concentrations are highly correlated with sleep quality, WHOOP set out to measure the relationship between various measures of sleep quality and our new measure of sleep consistency. The results are reviewed below.
MORE SLEEP
As it turns out, WHOOP Members who think they are making up for insufficient sleep during the week with extra sleep on weekends are often fooling themselves. Those whose average sleep consistency was in the Poor zone averaged 4 percentage points lower Sleep Performance (the percentage of total sleep each night compared to sleep needed) than did users in the Sufficient and Maximal zones, corresponding to average Sleep Performance scores of 70.6 and 74.1, respectively. While that may not sound like a huge difference, it adds up to about 2.5 more hours of sleep over the course of a week.
BETTER SLEEP
Members ask us all the time how to increase their slow wave (deep) sleep and REM sleep. While not the biggest game changer, those with greater sleep consistency averaged slightly more slow wave and REM sleep, and had slightly less time awake, than did members with the same amount of sleep time but lower measures of consistency. This means that consistent sleepers aren’t just getting more sleep, they are getting more restorative and efficient sleep than are people getting similar amounts of sleep at inconsistent times.
REJUVENATING SLEEP
Lastly, our members feel the difference. Those whose average sleep consistencies were in the Sufficient and Maximal zones were 4% more likely than those in the Poor zones to report feeling rested or energized on our daily Recovery survey. Members whose average sleep consistency was Poor were also more than twice as likely to report feeling exhausted than those whose average sleep consistencies were in the Sufficient and Moderate zones.
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