There’s nothing quite like a bad night’s sleep to make you feel utterly rubbish. But according to a new study, there may be a way to reverse some of the negative effects of a bad night’s sleep – and it only takes 20 minutes.

The study, which was led by the University of Portsmouth, set out to explore how our sleep, oxygen levels and exercise can affect our ability to perform mental tasks. We know that a bad night’s sleep can make it harder for us to concentrate and can affect our emotions, but the team wanted to explore whether there was a way to reverse this.

To find out, they devised two separate experiments, recruiting a group of 12 people to take part in each one. Both experiments looked at the cognitive performance of the participants both before and after exercise, but the sleep disruption they experienced beforehand varied; the first group only experienced partial sleep disruption, while the second group experienced total sleep deprivation and hypoxia (low blood oxygen levels).

How to recover from a bad night’s sleep: a new study says just 20 minutes of exercise can help