Study explores link between text anxiety and poor sleep College students across the country struggle with a vicious cycle: Test anxiety triggers poor sleep, which in turn reduces performance on the tests that caused the anxiety in the first place. New research from the University of Kansas just published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine is shedding light on this biopsychosocial process that can lead to poor grades, withdrawal from classes and even students who drop out. Indeed, about 40% of freshman don't return to their universities for a second year in the United States. We were interested in finding out what predicted students' performance in statistics classes -- stats classes are usually the most dreaded undergrad class. It can be a particular problem that can be a sticking point for a lot of students. I'm interested in sleep, and sleep and anxiety are related. So, we wanted to find out what the relationship was between sleep, anxiety and test performance to find the correlation and how it unfolds over time."