After a day full of activities, of course, you need time to rest. Sleep is one of the most common ways to rest your body and brain. Sleep is one of the activities that have many benefits for the body, including maintaining the balance of hormones and the immune system. You can feel these benefits if you have good quality sleep.

Maintaining the quality of sleep can also be one of the factors that can help you improve the performance of your working memory. According to a study conducted by the University of California, good sleep quality, mood, and age are three important factors in maintaining working memory. Working memory is a part of short-term memory that stores and manages information needed for cognitive tasks, such as learning, reasoning, and understanding.

In this research, experts found that poor sleep quality and mood can reduce the ability to remember events previously experienced. The experts also found that the older a person is, the more his/her memory weakens. The experts further explained that the three factors are related to each other. For example, an older adult usually tends to experience bad mood compared to those with younger age. A bad mood is also often associated with lower sleep quality.

To reach this conclusion, the experts conducted two studies. In the first study, the experts gathered 110 students, and each student reported their sleep quality level and their mood through a questionnaire, the results of which were related to the performance of their working memory. In their second study, experts took samples from 31 community members aged 21-77 years to find out the relationship between age and working memory performance.

Text by Anggie Triana
Stock photos from Pixabay

Source(s):

• Xie, W., Berry, A., Lustig, C., et all (2019). Poor Sleep Quality and Compromised Visual Working Memory Capacity. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617719000183.
• Science Daily - Good sleep quality and good mood lead to good memory with age (2019). https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190511083929.htm, May 14, 2019.