Sleep is the panacea of our time. A vast and growing body of research shows that when we get good sleep, good things happen inside our bodies.When we don't get good sleep, though, the opposite can occur, with poor sleep linked to all kinds of health problems.And it's not just our health that's hurt by a lack of sleep.In recent times, multiple studies have investigated the effects poor sleep has on adolescents, with many finding better sleep can improve students' overall well-being, while suggesting a lack of it might impact young people's academic grades.In a first-of-its-kind study published in the Journal of Political Economy, researchers set out to test that question, and discovered a way to influence college students that not only boosted their sleep but also their college grades."Sleep deprivation is extremely common among young adults, yet universities have struggled to find affordable ways to improve student performance," health economist Osea Giuntella from the University of Pittsburgh told ScienceAlert."To our knowledge, this is the first field experiment to show that improving sleep causally improves academic performance."Getting some extra sleep can boost your academic results, research shows. (Drazen Zigic/iStock/Getty Images Plus)In their research, Giuntella and fellow researchers studied a group of 1,149 student participants over several waves of the experiment.At baseline, the students were getting on average just 6.6 hours of sleep each night, and sleeping less than 6 hours on 29 percent of weeknights.