Sleep Nation: Teens

Open Letter to My Kid about Sleep

I recall chatting with my friends at the end of class one afternoon late in my sophomore year of high school. We were discussing (or, for some of us, bragging about) how little sleep we were surviving on. Sophomore year was the year some of my friends discovered coffee. Others went the Mountain Dew route, but none of us even considered just hanging it up for the night and starting homework earlier the next day. We were getting crushed with an average of three or four hours of homework nightly for our honors-level courses, extracurricular activities, family obligations and the attempt to scrape together a social life. None of us would have said so, but we all considered running on a bare-minimum of sleep a badge of maturity, and we had no compunction about sacrificing it for other priorities.

Sleep v. School

We were in good company, and not much has changed among teens since that time. According to the National Sleep Foundation, kids in middle school through the first years of college need between 8.5 and 9.25 hours of sleep per night. One study by Dr. Frank Danner of the University of Kentucky found that only 5% of adolescents get 8 hours of sleep, with the average amount limited to just 6.5 hours. But why? There are a couple of factors in play, the first of which is biological. Even though teenagers need a lot of sleep, their brains undergo a shift in sleep-wake cycles that makes them more prone to feel alert at night and sleepy in the morning. It just goes with puberty, and I went through it, too. Unfortunately, this tendency to feel awake at night and tired in the morning is completely at odds with the schedule on which most American high schools run. In fact, some enlightened communities have experimented with later start times for high schools. Considering your school district’s Stone Age attitude about other aspects of your education, I wouldn’t hold my breath for a later start time, Kiddo (and if I home-schooled you so you could sleep in, I guarantee you would consider it hell on earth). Instead, you can use some strategies to tweak your circadian rhythms a bit, and we’ll look these later on. Before we do that, though, I have to convince you to care. Common sense should tell you that lack of sleep will hurt your GPA or your athletic performance, but the effects of sleep loss have also been demonstrated scientifically. One study even went so far as to correlate 15 minutes of true sleep (not just time in bed) with an entire letter grade. I find that correlation a bit artificial, but you can’t argue with the basic premise. You have a competitive streak, and it would irritate you to feel off your game or not perform on an exam because you were tired. In other words, the night before the final exam, go to bed instead of staying up to cram. You’ll do better.

Looks Good on You

The other problem with sleep deprivation is that being tired just isn’t attractive. You don’t have to be an adolescent to be crabby from sleep deprivation, which impacts the impression you make on people – not just teachers and authority types, but peers, too. People can also tell by looking at you when you’re tired. No amount of makeup will make you look well-rested if you aren’t, no matter what your foundation’s label says. Did you know that sleep deprivation is also linked to obesity? It’s true, and there’s more to it than just the classic image of the groggy, pajama-clad visitor to the fridge in the dark of night. In fact, researchers at Johns Hopkins found that for each additional hour of sleep kids got, their obesity risk dropped by 9%. Another researcher correlated obesity with REM sleep (the sleep phase in which dreaming occurs), which of course you can only have if you are completing more sleep cycles per night. Your sleep cycles last about 90 minutes total. Here’s another reason to care: your body releases growth hormone while you are sleeping. Not napping in the back of the classroom because your substitute teacher put on a video, but deeply asleep during the night. Given that your mom is 4’11”, you might want to keep in mind that you have a chance to influence your exposure to growth hormone.

Why the “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” Attitude Can Kill You

The scariest risk of sleep deprivation of all probably won’t motivate you, as kids always think it won’t happen to them, but I’m going to tell about it you anyway. It’s driving. According to a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration done in 1994, some 1500 people were killed and another 71,000 injured out of the 100,000 or so police-reported traffic accidents attributed to sleep deprived drivers. In other words, almost 3 out of 4 of people involved had some sort of serious bad outcome from a traffic accident of this kind. The same organization found that teenagers accounted for 25% of crashes related to sleep deprivation. Now, I admit that 1994 was a long time ago, but social attitudes about sleep and driving haven’t changed particularly, so there is still value in this statistic.

Look out for our sleep podcast, soon!

Lisa Jancarik, Assistant Editor, UMM