Sleep Before an Exam: How Rest Affects Your Test Score

Expertise provided by Shannon Glenn, a Certified Adult and Pediatric Sleep Consultant, with more than 20 years of experience as a sleep coach. She also holds a degree in psychology, and focuses on helping clients develop a worry-free mindset around sleep.

Poor sleep can negatively impact your memory, creativity, and logical reasoning, exactly the skills you need for most standardized tests. Not getting enough sleep has been proven to affect performance in all areas of academics, and that includes the kind of high-level reasoning that standardized exams demand.

We spoke with certified sleep consultant Shannon Glenn to learn how much sleep test-takers actually need, what to do in the days before your exam, and how to tell whether your sleep is undermining your score.

How Much Sleep You Really Need

Shannon is clear on this: when you need to perform at a high cognitive level, you should get at least 8 hours of sleep a night.

There is a small percentage of the population, about 5%, that can function well on less than 7 hours. If you feel refreshed when you wake, don’t get tired during the day, and fall asleep easily at bedtime on less than 7 hours, you might be one of them. But most people aren’t, and the stakes of guessing wrong on this are too high when a test score is on the line.

Shannon has little patience for the objection that there isn’t time for a full night of sleep. As she puts it: that would be like saying “what if I don’t have time to eat?” Sleep, diet, and exercise are the three pillars of a healthy lifestyle, and the reality is your body will make you sleep eventually because you need sleep to stay alive. The real question is what sleep schedule works with your lifestyle, since a full night for you might look different from a full night for someone else.

Building a Sleep Plan Before Test Day

A good sleep plan is something you work on for days, or even weeks, before the test, not just the night before. Shannon recommends eating a well-balanced diet, maintaining a consistent sleep schedule from day to day, keeping a consistent evening and morning ritual, and trying to exercise daily. These habits compound. If your baseline is solid, one restless night before the exam won’t break the bank.

Signs Your Sleep Needs Work

According to Shannon, you should think about your sleep quality if you feel really tired after you wake up in the morning, feel tired or drowsy throughout the day, rely on caffeinated beverages to function, or take more than 30 minutes to fall asleep at night.

If you’re in bed for 8 hours but still feel terrible in the morning, there are a few possible reasons. You might be in bed for 8 hours but only actually sleeping for 6. Your sleep schedule might vary too much from day to day, which leaves you tired regardless of total hours. Or you might have the wrong sleep schedule for your body clock.

Shannon also notes that it’s worth being checked by a sleep physician to rule out sleep apnea or any kind of obstructed airway that could be preventing quality sleep.

The Evidence: Sleep and Mental Performance

Sleep research has been around for over 100 years, but the growing acceptance of its importance has really only taken hold in the last 30-plus years. Peer-reviewed research on memory consolidation and recall, problem-solving, judgment, and creativity is now conducted every year, and it is widely accepted that adequate, quality sleep impacts mental performance.

What a Sleep Coach Actually Does

A sleep coach doesn’t just tell you to go to bed earlier, Shannon says. Ensuring your bedtime lines up with your body clock and lifestyle is more important than simply adding hours. A sleep coach assesses your daytime activities and makes recommendations to ensure that what you do during the day is positively impacting your sleep.

In a typical session, Shannon discusses strategies for gradually making habit changes to promote the best natural sleep you can get. That often means pulling clients off sleep aids (if applicable), developing healthy sleep hygiene, and building a sleep schedule that achieves the right amount of sleep for each person.

For someone with minimal sleep issues, results usually appear within a week. For someone with more significant issues, it can take up to 6 weeks before they’re feeling more rested and sleeping better.