Sleep Experts to Teens: Please, Get Your ZZZ’s
Lack of proper rest poses health, education risks
High school student Naomi Freeman is busy, like many of her peers. She juggles academic, extracurricular and work responsibilities – and when there’s time, she sleeps.
Freeman’s six hours of sleep a night is not unusual among teenagers. It’s also not healthy, according to experts, who say millions of young people may be putting their health and education at risk by not making sleep a higher priority.
Earlier this fall, experts recommend that schools adopt later starting times to fit the unique sleep patterns of teenagers.
“Kids are too sleepy to learn well. They’re too sleepy to be happy. And they’re at great risk for such things as traffic accidents,” said Dr. Mary Carskadon, who researches adolescent sleep patterns and is co-chairwoman of the National Sleep Foundation task force on teenagers and sleep.
The foundation, in what it calls a “wake-up call” to teens, parents and educators, released a report – “Adolescent Sleep Needs and Patterns” – That warns of the consequences of sleep deprivation. It also suggests lifestyle changes to ensure adolescents get adequate rest.
“Teenagers don’t need less sleep the older they get. They still need as much sleep as they did when they were pre-teens,” Carskadon told CNN. “We, as a society, are asking them to sleep at the wrong time.”
Her research shows that adolescents tend to fall asleep and awaken later than adults and often experience an increase in daytime sleepiness – even when they get enough rest.
“This can put their circadian rhythm, or biological clock, in conflict with the school bell,” Carskadon said. “the result illustrates a critical trend: too many teens come to school too sleepy to learn. And their fatigue often leads to behavior problems that contribute to a negative overall school performance and experience.”
Among the NSF’s recommendations is the creation of “sleep-smart schools” that adopt sleep education curricula and review school start times that more adequately respond to a teens biological shift to a later sleep/wake cycle. Lifestyle changes at home, to make sufficient sleep on a regularly scheduled basis a top priority for adolescents and adults, are also suggested.
Adapting to such changes would be tough for Freeman, 17, who is a student council president at her high school in Beacon, New York, as well as captain of the cheerleading squad.
“On a typical day, I get up at 6 in the morning to be at school by 7. I go to pep club until 7:40, then it’s off to classes.” Freeman’s after-school activities include a part-time job, an internship and volunteer work. After that she does homework, getting to bed at about midnight. “I normally get about six hours of sleep a night…I have to time to get anymore,” she said.
Such a hectic schedule is typical of many young people, according to Amy Fishbein, health and fitness editor of Seventeen magazine. “Yes, it’s really common. There’s a lot more pressure on teens to get into college, to excel academically. Social pressures are really high. There’s the computer, its more distracting. There are a lot more things to do.”
Any suggestion that over-indulgent parents are to blame for sleep-deprived teens ignores the scientific evidence, Fishbein argues. “Teenagers have a biological tendency to stay up later and sleep later,” she explains. “So the way their school day is structured for them actually doesn’t help them out any. So it’s definitely not the case of over-indulgent parents, it’s definitely all the pressures in society.”
Rep. Zoë Lofgren, D-California, who advocates schools setting later start times, has introduced a bill in Congress to provide financial incentives to districts that push back that opening bell. “Teens are paying a heavy price for following old adage, ‘early to bed, early to rise.’ It’s time for high schools to synchronize their clocks with their students’ body clocks so that teens are in school during their most alert hours and can achieve their full academic potential.”
Could sleep deprivation be as bad as alcohol impairment? Study suggests so….
Night Owls take note: new research offers yet another reason to get more sleep. In a study published in 2000 in the British Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, researchers in Australia and New Zealand report that sleep deprivation can have some of the same hazardous effects as being drunk.
Getting less than 6 hours a night can affect coordination, reaction time and judgment, they said, posing “a very serious risk.”
Drivers are especially vulnerable, the researchers warned. They found that people who drive after being awake for 17 to 19 hours performed worse than those with a blood alcohol level of .05 percent. That’s the legal limit for drunk driving in most western European Countries, though most U.S. states set their blood alcohol limits at .1 percent and a few at .08 percent.
The study said 16 to 60 percent of road accidents involve sleep deprivation. The researchers said countries with drunk driving laws should consider similar restrictions against sleep-deprived driving.
The British Medical Association warned that there are other problems associated with sleep deprivation beyond impaired motor skills. People who get too little sleep may have higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression, and may take unnecessary risks.
The dangers are not limited to drivers. People who work long shifts, such as medical personnel or other emergency workers, may also have troubles.
Case Study of Later Start Times
High school students are less likely to miss classes or stop coming to school regularly if they can sleep later on school mornings, according to the largest study done into the impact of high school start times.
The study of thousands of Minneapolis high school students also found that they got more sleep, got slightly better grades and experienced less depression after the district switched from a 7:15a.m. start to an 8:40a.m. start in 1997.
Many districts have made high school classes start earlier in recent years for financial reasons and to accommodate after-school activities. But those near-dawn starts have become controversial around the country as research suggested that teenagers behave better and appear more ready to learn when classes start later. The new research is the most comprehensive look at the issue.
Kyla Wahlstrom of the University of Minnesota, who researched the changes in Minneapolis and earlier in the suburb of Edina, said that officials from many school districts nationwide have contacted her about whether they should have classes begin later. The Minneapolis data could help them make their decisions she said.
“Attendance and continuous enrollment have improved significantly in Minneapolis schools since the start times were changed,” she said. “It certainly makes sense that less sleepy students are more likely to stay in school and will be more ready to learn.”
In the 1995-96 school year, for instance, an average of 83 percent of night-grade Minneapolis students attended class daily, Wahlstrom found by analyzing attendance records for the entire school district. By 1999-2000, ninth-grade attendance had increased to an average of 87 percent.
Wahlstrom also pointed to a strong effect noted with students “continuously enrolled” in the Minneapolis school district – defined as being in the same high school two years in a row.
Before the change, she said, only 50 percent of ninth-graders were continuously enrolled, but that increased to 58 percent after that later starts were implemented. For 10th graders, she said, the percentage of continuously enrolled students grew from 55 percent to 67 percent.
“Something is keeping students from coming and going so much,” said Wahlstrom, who conducted the research for the Minneapolis school district and works at the University of Minnesota Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement.
A smaller analysis involving 3,000 students also found students tended to behave better in school and experience fewer signs of depression after they were able to sleep later, Wahlstrom said.
Some skeptics of the possible benefits of later start times have said that high school students are likely to just go to sleep later if they know they can sleep later on school mornings.
But Wahlstrom also found that Minneapolis students went to sleep at almost the same time before and after the school start switch – around 10:45p.m. That means, she said, they were sleeping about an hour more a night because they were getting up later.
The switch made by Minneapolis in 1997 is being implemented this year in Arlington County, where high school students will report to class at 8:15 a.m., rather than last year’s 7:30a.m. Officials there proposed the change after being persuaded by sleep research that students’ natural body clocks make them go to sleep later and wake up later than younger children.
Some parents in Montgomery and other surrounding counties have also lobbied for the change, but school officials have questioned its value and have said it would be expensive and complicated to change bus schedules. Coaches and others who oversee after-school activities – as well as retailers who hire students – have objected to any changes, too.
Officials in many districts have also said they will change high school start times only if research shows it will improve student performance and test scores. Minneapolis research found a slight improvement in grades, but not a significant change.
“There are so many confounding issues surrounding grades that I doubt research will be able to tell us if the later starts produce higher grades,” Wahlstrom said.
Advocates of later high school starts were encouraged by the results from Minneapolis. Richard Gelula, director of the National Sleep Foundation, said that he hopes other school districts will follow the city’s lead.
“We have known that inadequate sleep affects mood, concentration, memory, error rates, speed and other measures of cognitive performance,” he said. “But until the Minneapolis study, we did not know how changing the high school start time from 7:15a.m. to 8:40a.m. would directly affect students.”
“These findings are a terrific indicator of how much benefit there may be by aligning school start times with the biological sleep patterns of teens, who get too little sleep with current, early start times.”
Minneapolis has about 12,000 high school students, and is one of the most economically and ethnically diverse districts in the nation. The suburb of Edina, which implemented later high school starts before Minneapolis and has reported similarly positive results, is a far more wealthy and homogeneous district.
Sources
CNN.com – article “Sleep Experts to Teens: Please Get Your ZZZ’s” (2000)
CNN.com – article “Sleep Deprivation as Bad as Alcohol Impairment, Study Suggests” (2000)
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