NATURE’S CURE-ALL
In today’s world of “I want it and I want it right now!” we’ve become a society where people walk around in a zombie-like mode talking or playing on their “smart phones” all day and night. We eat, drive, watch television, go out for an evening to movies, concerts, dinner, and go to bed with some type of 4×8-inch apparatus attached to our heads . It’s a major wonder anyone ever gets an actual “good night’s sleep” anymore. And while the wizards who know all tell us too much contact with a cell phone isn’t necessarily “good for us,” it won’t kill us either.
However, depriving our minds and bodies of relaxation, and especially the sleep the majority of us really do need to function fully in our constantly on the go -overdrive schedules, way too many of us ignore our bodies when we have warning signs or we begin to s-l-o-w down. Instead we try to re-amp ourselves by knocking back eight ounces of whatever our favorite caffeinated drink might be, waiting for that KA-BONG signal so that we can charge right back into super-drive with our batteries fully charged.
Well, this might work for a while, but sooner or later not getting enough “down” time and sleep “z’s” can cause real havoc physically and emotionally, and for some can cause permanent damage.
So, why can’t we just go and go and go like the energizer bunny? Biology. And everyone’s bodies all have pretty much the same “requirements” in order to continue working without a breakdown of some type.
When our bodies see darkness we automatically slow down for a certain number of hours. For most of us that means that we tend to perk up from around 9am until 2pm, then again from around 6pm until 10pm. This is governed in part by the brain’s pineal gland, which knows to release melatonin throughout the body after it has been dark for a certain number of hours. However, during puberty, this shifts by several hours, making it biologically much harder for teenagers to go to sleep or get up at the normal times.
RHYTHM AND DARKNESS
We all have circadian rhythms, which essentially is like a clock our bodies follow. When teenagers go through puberty, their circadian rhythms essentially shift three hours backward. So when parents want or expect teenagers to hit the sack at nine or ten o’clock at night and they fight about how unreasonable the request is, it isn’t just a drag for them, it’s close to a biological impossibility. Studies of teenagers around the globe have found that adolescent brains do not start releasing melatonin until around eleven o’clock at night, and keep pumping out the hormone well past sunrise.
On the other end of the spectrum, most adults have little-to-no melatonin in their bodies when they wake up. Due to all that melatonin surging through their bloodstream, teenagers who are forced to be awake before eight in the morning are often barely alert and want nothing more than to give in to their body’s demands and fall back asleep. Because of the shift in their circadian rhythm, asking a teenager to perform well in a classroom during the early morning is like asking him or her to fly across the country and instantly adjust to the new time zone — and then do the same thing every night, for four years. Good luck with that.
A lack of sleep affects the teenage brain in similar ways to the adult brain, only more so. Chronic sleep deprivation in adolescents diminishes the brain’s ability to learn new information, and can lead to emotional issues such as depression and aggression. Today, many researchers now see sleep problems as a cause, and not a side effect, of teenage depression.
RESEARCH WITH LIVE GUINEA PIGS
During the beginning of the school year of 1996-1997 the Edina, Minnesota school board proposed a solution that was different and a little radical. Surmising that students who were awake were more likely to learn something than those who were semi-asleep at the very least, the board made the decision to push the high school’s starting time an hour and five minutes later, to 8:30. It was the first time in the nation that a school district changed its schedule to accommodate teenagers’ sleeping habits. What researcher Kyla Wahlstrom presented with her findings a year later was definable and unambiguous. In spite of some parental quibbling, they found that many teenagers did in fact spend their extra hour sleeping, and reported that they came to school feeling rested and alert. Add that to the fact that the number of on-campus fights fell, fewer students reported feeling depressed to their counselors, and the dropout rate dropped.
The year before the Edina district shifted its starting time, the top 10 percent of students in Edina’s high school averaged a combined 1,288 out of 1,600 on their SAT scores. The next year, the top 10 percent averaged 1,500. The researchers couldn’t find a reason other than the extra sleep. The head of the College Board, the company that administers that test, called the results “truly flabbergasting.”
It was not long after Edina’s findings became known that several other districts followed suit. Some found the effects sometimes went beyond scholastics. A study in Lexington, Kentucky, for instance, showed that starting the school day later in the morning led to a 16 percent reduction in the number of teenage car accidents during a year in which teenage accident rates rose 9 percent for the state as a whole. In Rhode Island, “pushing starting times back a half hour resulted in a forty-five-minute increase in the average amount of time that the average student spent sleeping. ‘Our mornings are a whole lot nicer now,’ the lead researcher of the study, whose daughter was a high school student, said at the time.”
PUT THE BULLY TO BED
In 2011 the University of Michigan conducted a study tracking nearly 350 elementary school children. About a third of the students regularly bullied their classmates. Researchers found that “the children with behavioral issues were twice as likely to have excessive daytime sleepiness or to snore, two symptoms of a persistent sleep disorder.”
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