Sleep Deprivation: The Facts, the Effects, What We Can Do
Poudre SD counselors, it’s always a pleasure to meet with you. You had asked Brian, Jennifer and me to talk about current mental health issues in the community. I did a bit of an end run on the assignment. When you are sleep deprived, what are the effects on your behavior? Your emotions? Your ability to learn? Can we call the effects of sleep deprivation a mental health problem? If so, consider: It affects more secondary students than any other single condition. It is the most treatable condition.
The Facts
(See the links below for the details and the research.)
* Teens need more sleep than they did when they were younger or than they will as adults.
* Circadian rhythms change in adolescence: Teens feel sleepy later at night; they feel wakeful later in the morning. The pattern is physiologically driven; it isn’t a cultural effect.
* Most adolescents start their school day earlier than elementary students in the same district. This is backwards.
* As a result, U. S. adolescents are frequently sleep deprived. In one study, almost half of the students who began school at 7:20 were “pathologically sleepy” at 8:30, falling directly into REM sleep in an average of only 3.4 minutes–a pattern similar to what is seen in patients with narcolepsy.
The Effects
Sleep deprivation causes or is a causal factor in:
* Reduced alertness, concentration, cognition, memory, and understanding
* Poorer grades (and it appears that even 25 minutes less sleep correlates with grade swings)
* Traffic accidents
* Disciplinary problems
* Associations with depression and ADHD characteristics
* Difficulty controlling emotions and impulsivity.
What can we do about it?
* We can urge districts to respond to the science and start the secondary school day later. It sounds difficult: bus schedules, athletics, disruption of activities… In fact, many districts have made the change, with good academic results. (How logical is it to have a flat out focus on academic results, and systematically reduce the learning effectiveness of your students?)
* We can encourage late starts for students who are clearly not functional first and second periods.
* We can encourage good sleep hygiene, to help kids make the best of a bad situation. Bed is for sleeping, not for eating, TMing, gaming, watching TV, etc.
* We can explain that there is some evidence that the blue screens of monitors and TVs inhibit the production of melatonin. Light at that “blue” frequency tells the brain it’s daytime. Getting off screen an hour or more before bedtime may be helpful.
* We can help academically oriented teens who prepare for exams by studying far into the night realize that it may be better to be sharp in the morning than to study on. But there’s more: the hippocampus transfers new learning into long-term memory, and integrates it with other knowledge. When? During sleep. Learning without “sleeping on it” is pouring hard-earned knowledge into a sieve.
* A bandaid solution: Zombie Naps
Here are my earlier, more detailed posts about sleep deprivation in teens:
The meat of it: Walking Zombies – Adolescent Sleep Deprivation
An ‘07 update: Teen Sleep
Here’s an article, The Early Bird Gets the Bad Grade which suggests some positive benefits of late start beyond a good night’s sleep for students.
Update: The NY Times followed that Op-Ed with an editorial: Are You Up Yet?.
So which is it we should focus: bus and athletic schedules, or kids as learners?