In a field experiment among US university students, incentives for sleep increase both sleep and academic performance. Our primary intervention pairs bedtime reminders with morning feedback and immediate rewards for sleeping at least 7 hours on weeknights. The intervention raises the share of weeknights with 7+ hours of sleep by 26% and average sleep by 19 minutes during a 4-week treatment period, with posttreatment effects of 8 minutes. Immediate incentives outperform both delayed incentives and reminders/feedback alone during treatment but have no distinguishable impacts posttreatment. The primary intervention improves average semester course performance by 0.075–0.089 grade points, a 0.10–0.11 standard deviation increase. Our results demonstrate that incentives targeting sleep can be a cost-effective approach to improve educational outcomes.
Teenagers to start school at 10am in Oxford University sleep experiment
Thousands of GCSE students will start lessons an hour later to see if it improves their exam results
Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor
Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get those extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back, and if you ca…
Sleep as a Competitive Advantage
Too many of us live by the myth that one less hour of sleep gives us one more hour of productivity, Tony Schwartz writes in the Life@Work column. In reality, lost sleep not only leaves us more fatigued, but also takes a toll on our cognitive capacity.
Why We Sleep, and Why We Often Can’t
Does our contemporary obsession with sleep obscure what makes it special in the first place?
The sleep switch that builds muscle, burns fat, and boosts brainpower
UC Berkeley researchers mapped the brain circuits that control growth hormone during sleep, uncovering a feedback system where sleep fuels hormone release, and the hormone regulates wakefulness. The discovery helps explain links between poor sleep, obesity, diabetes, and cognitive decline, while opening new paths for treating sleep and metabolic disorders.
The Effects of Financial Incentives in Experiments: A Review and Capital-Labor-Production Framework
We review 74 experiments with no, low, or high performance-based financial incentives. The modal result has no effect on mean performance (though variance is usually reduced by higher payment). Higher incentive does improve performance often, typically judgment tasks that are responsive to better effort. Incentives also reduce “presentation” effects (e.g., generosity and risk-seeking). Incentive effects are comparable to effects of other variables, particularly “cognitive capital” and task “production” demands, and interact with those variables, so a narrow-minded focus on incentives alone is misguided. We also note that no replicated study has made rationality violations disappear purely by raising incentives.
Getting to the Top of Mind: How Reminders Increase Saving
We provide evidence from field experiments with three different banks that reminder messages increase commitment attainment for clients who recently opened commitment savings accounts. Messages that mention both savings goals and financial incentives are particularly effective, whereas other content variations such as gain versus loss framing do not have significantly different effects. Nor do we find evidence that receiving additional late reminders has an additive effect. These empirical results do not map neatly into existing models, so we provide a simple model where limited attention to exceptional expenses can generate undersaving that is in turn mitigated by reminders. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2296 . This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics.
Overcoming Salience Bias: How Real-Time Feedback Fosters Resource Conservation
Inattention and imperfect information bias behavior toward the salient and immediately visible. This distortion creates costs for individuals, the organizations in which they work, and society at large. We show that an effective way to overcome this bias is by making the implications of one’s behavior salient in real time, while individuals can directly adapt. In a large-scale field experiment, we gave participants real-time feedback on the resource consumption of a daily, energy-intensive activity (showering). We find that real-time feedback reduced resource consumption for the target behavior by 22%. At the household level, this led to much larger conservation gains in absolute terms than conventional policy interventions that provide aggregate feedback on resource use. High baseline users displayed a larger conservation effect, in line with the notion that real-time feedback helps eliminate “slack” in resource use. The approach is cost effective, is technically applicable to the vast majority of households, and generated savings of 1.2 kWh per day and household, which exceeds the average energy use for lighting. The intervention also shows how digitalization in our everyday lives makes information available that can help individuals overcome salience bias and act more in line with their preferences. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
I Train CEOs—This 16-Minute Morning Habit Builds Muscle and Boosts Productivity
The neuroscience-backed session builds muscle while increasing your focus and executive function.
Grading is a Scam (and Motivation is a Myth) | A Professor Explains
How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes or Less | The Art of Manliness
With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Friday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in March 2018. Have you ever unexpectedly found yourself with a snatch of time in which to steal a […]
The Mythical Agent-Month – Wes McKinney
Like a lot of people, I’ve found that AI is terrible for my sleep schedule. In the past I’d wake up briefly at 4 or 4:30 in the morning to have a sip of water or use the bathroom; now I have trouble going back to sleep. I could be doing things. Before I would get a solid 7-8 hours a night; now I’m lucky when I get 6. I’ve largely stopped fighting it: now when I’m rolling around restlessly in bed at 5:07am with ideas to feed my AI coding agents, I just get up and start my day.
How Cycling Solved Sleep | Defector
AURILLAC, France — Is the Tour de France the most competitive sleep environment in sports? “Probably, yeah,” answered Dr. Jon Greenwell, EF-Education EasyPost’s Head Doctor when I asked him. Every athlete needs to recover, though the demands on professional cyclists at the biggest race in the sport are unique. Riders have to be fresh every…
What’s something that helps you fall asleep fast?
45 votes, 239 comments. 60M subscribers in the AskReddit community. r/AskReddit is the place to ask and answer thought-provoking questions.