3. You’ll be able to build muscle more easily.
There’s a reason that fitness magazines and forums always focus on the importance of sleep. If you don’t sleep, you can’t build muscle.
Your body uses most of the night (except when you are in REM sleep) to heal damage done to your cells and tissues when you are awake and more metabolically active. At the start of the night and during slow wave sleep, your body also releases growth hormone. Lack of sleep, on the other hand, is linked to muscle atrophy.
4. You’ll learn better.\
This isn’t just about kids. Adults who get enough sleep do better on tests of short-term memory.
And when researchers had adults do a task once, get a good night’s sleep, and then try the task again, they showed improvement. But participants who stayed awake 30 hours after learning the same task had a much harder time improving their skills — even if they practiced and had a chance to catch some recovery shut eye later. Something about the initial sleep deprivation impaired their ability to learn.
Of course, letting kids get enough sleep is important too. In one case, starting schools an hour later (at 8:30 instead of 7:30) increased “standardized test scores by at least 2 percentile points in math and 1 percentile point in reading.” The Minneapolis school district found that starting school an hour and a half later (7:15 to 8:40) improved attendance and led to fewer symptoms of depression among students.