16-18 year olds perform better academically when they shave about two hours off from 9 hours of sleep recommended for them by federal guidelines, a new study has claimed.

The new study by Eric Eide and Mark Showalter from Brigham Young University is the first in a series of studies where they examine sleep and its impact on our health and education.

`We`re not talking about sleep deprivation,` Eide, the study author said.

`The data simply says that seven hours is optimal at that age,` he said.

Surprisingly, the current federal guidelines are based on studies where teens were simply told to keep sleeping until they felt satisfied.

`If you used that same approach for a guideline on how much people should eat, you would put them in a well-stocked pantry and just watch how much they ate until they felt satisfied,` Mark Showalter said.

`Somehow that doesn`t seem right,` he said.

In the new study, the BYU researchers tried to connect sleep to a measure of performance or productivity. Analysing data from a representative sample of 1,724 primary and secondary school students across the country, they found a strong relationship between the amount of sleep youths got and how they fared on standardized tests.

`We don`t look at it just from a `your kid might be sleeping too much` perspective,` Eide said.

`From the other end, if a kid is only getting 5.5 hours of sleep a night because he`s overscheduled, he would perform better if he got 90 minutes more each night,` he said.

The size of the effect on test scores depends on a number of factors, but an 80-minute shift toward the optimum is comparable to the child`s parents completing about one more year of schooling.

`Most of our students at BYU, especially those that took early-morning seminary classes in high school, are going to realize that 9 hours of sleep isn`t what the top students do,` Showalter added.

The study has been published in the Eastern Economics Journal.

Source: ANI
Image: Flickr/creativecommons hoyasmeg