Out of all the things that people are in control of, keeping a healthy brain is what research shows to be the most important part of succeeding academically.
Whether you view it through a Big-Five lens (see: personality predictors of academic performance) or simply that your brain is functioning well, it all points toward the same thing. It’s not just that a healthy diet improves your levels of neuroticism (second biggest personality predictor of academic performance), but various, necessary aspects of cognition in general.
To get the most crucial information about these, I recommend:
- Better habits, better brain health - Harvard Health Letter
- No more counting sheep: Proven behaviours to help you sleep - Harvard Health Blog https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/no-more-counting-sheep-proven-behaviors-to-help-you-sleep-2018110515313
- Sleep Recommendations By Age - National Sleep Foundation https://www.eossleep.com/2015/02/12/national-sleep-foundation-updates-recommended-sleep-times-for-different-ages/
Lastly, here is why it some believe that above all these, proper and quality sleep appears to be the most important: Mountains of data demonstrate that a healthy sleep does indeed boost learning significantly. Taken from the best-seller Brain Rules by John Medina:
“In fact, a highly successful student can be set up for a precipitous academic fall, just by adjusting the number of hours she sleeps. Take an A student used to scoring in the top 10 percent of virtually anything she does. One study showed that if she gets just under seven hours of sleep on weekdays, and about 40 minutes more on weekends, she will begin to score in the bottom 9 percent of nonsleep-deprived individuals. Cumulative losses during the week add up to cumulative deficits during the weekend—and, if not paid for, that sleep debt will be carried into the next week. Another study followed soldiers responsible for operating complex military hardware. One night’s loss of sleep resulted in about a 30 percent loss in overall cognitive skill, with a subsequent drop in performance. Bump that to two nights’ loss, and the figure becomes 60 percent. Other studies extended these findings. When sleep was restricted to six hours or less per night for just five nights, for example, cognitive performance matched that of a person suffering from 48 hours of continual sleep deprivation. More recent research has begun to shed light on other functions that do not at first blush seem associated with sleep. When people become sleep-deprived, for example, their ability to utilize the food they are consuming falls by about one-third. The ability to make insulin and to extract energy from the brain’s favorite dessert, glucose, begins to fail miserably.”
You can check out a summary of this amazing book’s chapters at: