BMJ  2006;332:163-164 (21 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7534.163

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Alison Tonks, associate editor

atonks@bmj.com

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Sleep deprivation is bad for performance, but being woken up is worse. In a laboratory experiment, adult volunteers performing a series of random adding tests scored lower in the three minutes after waking than they did at any time over the next 24 hours. One minute after waking, their scores were only 65% of their best, significantly worse than all other test scores during the experiment, including the test done after a whole night without sleep (P ≤ 0.01). After 20-60 minutes awake, the volunteers had bounced back to over 80% of their peak performance.


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  		Credit: JAMA

 

The experiment was small but carefully done. The nine healthy volunteers had no caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, or drugs (recreational or medicinal) for three weeks before the study. For the same period they logged a regular eight hours' sleep every night.

The results suggest that cognitive performance is worst just after waking, which has obvious . . . [Full text of this article]


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