Granted, for most people all nighters are a nostalgic memory of their years spent in undergrad, where they spent an entire night at the campus library, wolfing down energy drinks and coffee trying to cram a semester’s worth of materials into the wee hours of the morning, in an attempt to write an impending exam or midterm.

Post graduation, when we enter the workforce most of us hope to never have to pull another all-nighter again. The older you get the harder it seems on your body, and it does not have the same appeal it did in your early 20s. However, with the aggressive extension of the office into the home, and a competitive work environment that forces ambitious people to take their work home with them often find themselves working away until the dead of the night, if not until dawn. Still others, such as new parents, cannot afford the luxury of sleep because they are up around the clock, attending to their newborn’s needs.

Albeit that all nighters may seem like a necessary evil in today’s demanding world, science now provides evidence that staying up all night (or for a significant portion) may affect your brain’s abilities to keep track of reality (yikes)! The study was done by psychologists from the University of California and Michigan State University. The study explains that for most people, sleep deprivation in certain conditions would lead to false memories (memories that are either incorrect factually or fabricated all together). The most unnerving tidbit gleaned from this study is that most of us are most susceptible to false memories when we are sleep deprived and trying to encode information; that is when we are sleep deprived and trying to do work.

This affects all of us, whether you are a student cramming for an exam or an associate trying to get a leg up on the office work. We all intuitively knew that all-nighters were counterproductive all along, and now science has come along to provide evidence for it. Some better time management, and allowing ourselves to focus (with the help of Green Tea Focus) during the workday instead of procrastinating can alleviate us from the perils of having to pull all nighters.

Source of the scientific study: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/07/15/0956797614534694.abstract