Did you know that sleeping for only 6 hours is equivalent to spending sleepless nights?

It's going to say your productivity doesn't drop when you don't get enough sleep! According to Jill Duffy of Fast Company, a new study has revealed that lack of sleep may be worse than we think - and that just resting six hours a night for two weeks can have the same consequences as being forced to stay awake. 48 hours in a row.

According to Jill, the study was conducted with 48 adults who, for two weeks, had a limited sleep period of four, six and eight hours per night. During these 14 days, participants were monitored and performed activities to test their reaction time and cognitive performance every two hours - unless they were asleep - and some (unlucky) were kept awake for three consecutive days.

In addition, during the period in which they were kept in the laboratory, participants also answered a series of questions - related to their mood state and the symptoms caused by lack of sleep.

Results

As expected, participants who slept eight hours a night were the best performers on the tests, while the performance of those in the group who could only rest for four hours went from bad to worse over time. However, the researchers were really surprised by the performance of the group that could only sleep six hours.

As explained, these participants were leading to apparently good lack of sleep until the tenth day of the study, more or less. However, his test performance was so low in recent days that the results were equivalent to those of the forbidden sleepers. The four-hour group, in turn, also performed poorly, with the difference that the drop in test efficiency occurred more pronounced and faster.

In evaluating the data collected in all tests, the researchers concluded that sleeping just six hours a night for two weeks is as harmful as staying two days in a row without nailing the eyes. But that was not all.

Sleep? That sleep?

What caught the scientists' attention was the fact that these participants did not complain about lack of sleep even after they performed poorly during the tests. Those who were sleepless, in contrast, complained a lot, classifying their sleep levels as being gradually higher throughout the study.

According to the researchers, the experiments highlight how people deal with lack of sleep, and the results suggest that many people do not even realize the consequences of not getting enough sleep. To make matters worse, most of us can't properly "kick" how many hours we rest at night - often overestimating the amount of time.

So rare are those who can tell how little they sleep at night, and when the amount of sleep is not enough, they believe their performance remains unchanged. And look, you don't even have to be long without rest for the effects to be noticed!

Can you see your performance drop when you don't get enough sleep? Comment on the Mega Curious Forum