ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-12-01
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Zj_InJ4BQ
it's six o'clock in the morning pitch black outside my fourteen year old son is fast asleep in his bed flipping the reckless deep sleep of a teenager I flipped on the light and physically shake the poor boy awake because I know that like ripping off a bandaid it's better to get it over with quickly I have a friend who yells fire just to rouse her sleeping
teen and another we got so fed up that she had to dump cold water on her son's head just to get him out of bed some brutal perhaps familiar every morning I ask myself can I knowing what I know and doing what I do for a living be doing this to my own son I see I sleep researcher so I know far too much about sleep
and the consequences of sleep loss I know that I'm depriving my son of the sleepy desperately needs as a rapidly growing teenager I also know that by waking him up hours before his natural biological clock tells him he's ready I'm literally robbing him of his dreams a type of sleep most associated with learning memory consolidation and emotional processing but it's not just my kid that's being
deprived of sleep sleep deprivation among American teenagers is an epidemic only about one in ten if the eight to ten hours of sleep per night recommended by sleep scientists and pediatricians now if you're thinking to yourself few were doing good my kids getting eight hours remember eight hours is the minimum recommendation you're barely passing it's hours kindly getting see on your report card there are many
factors contributing to this epidemic but a major factor preventing teams from getting the sleep they need is actually a matter of public policy not hormones socialize or Snapchat across the country many schools are starting around seven thirty eight am or earlier despite the fact that major medical organizations recommend that middle and high schools start no earlier than eight thirty AM these early start policies have a
direct effect on how much or really how little sleep American teenagers are getting they're also pitting teenagers and their parents in a fundamentally unwinnable fight against their own bodies around the time of puberty teenagers experience a delay in the biological clock which determines when we feel most awake and when we feel most sleepy this is driven in part by a shift in the release of the
hormone melatonin teenagers bodies wait to start releasing melatonin until around eleven PM which is two hours later than what we see in adults or younger children this means that waking a teenager up at six AM is the biological equivalent of waking in adult up at four AM now in the unfortunate days when I have to wake up at four A. M. I'm a zombie functionally useless
I can't think straight I'm irritable and I probably shouldn't be driving a car but this is how many American teenagers feel every single school day in fact many of the shall we say unpleasant characteristics that we took up to being a teenager moodiness irritability laziness depression could be a product of chronic sleep deprivation for many teams battling chronic sleep loss there go to strategy to compensate
is consuming large quantities of caffeine in the form of Beatty FRAPH chinos or energy drinks and shots so essentially we've got an entire population of tired but wired you advocates of sleep family start times know that adolescence is a period of dramatic brain development particularly in the parts of the brain that are responsible for those higher order thinking prophecies including reasoning problem solving and good judgment
in other words the very type of brain activity that's responsible for reining in those impulsive and often risky behaviors that are so characteristic of adolescence and that are so terrifying to S. parents of teenagers they know that like the rest of us when teenagers don't get the sleep they need their brains their bodies and behavior suffer with both immediate and lasting a fax they can't concentrate
their attention plummets and many will even show behavioral signs that mimic ADHD the consequences of team three plus go well beyond the classroom sadly contributing to many of the mental health problems that skyrocket during adolescence including substance use oppression and suicide in our work with teams from LA unified school district we found that teens with sleep problems were fifty five percent more likely to abuse alcohol
in the past month in another study with over thirty thousand high school students they found that for each hour of lost sleep there was a thirty eight percent increase in feeling sad or hopeless and a fifty eight percent increase in teen suicide attempts and if that's not enough teens who skipped out on sleep are increased risk for a host of physical health problems that plague our
country including obesity heart disease and diabetes then there's the risk of putting a sleep deprived team with a newly minted driver's license behind the wheel studies have shown that getting five hours or less of sleep per night is the equivalent of driving with a blood alcohol content above the legal limit advocates the friendly start times and researchers in this area I produced tremendous science showing the
tremendous benefits of later start times the findings are unequivocal and as a freak scientist I rarely get to speak with that kind of certainty teams from districts would later start times get more sleep to the naysayers who make bank that a school start later teams will just stay up later truth is the bedtime stay the same but their wake up times get extended resulting in more
sleep they're more likely to show up for school school absences dropped by twenty five percent in one district and they're less likely to drop out not surprisingly they do better academically so this has a real implications for reducing the achievement gap standardized test scores in math and reading go up by two to three percentage points that's as powerful as reducing class sizes by one third fewer
students replacing a so so teacher in the classroom with a truly outstanding one their mental and physical health improves and even their families are happier I mean who wouldn't enjoy a little more pleasantness from our teens and a little less cranky ness even their communities are safer because car crash rates go down a seventy percent reduction in one district given these tremendous benefits you might think
well this is a no brainer break so why have we as a society failed to heed this call often the argument against later start times go something like this why should we delay start times for teenagers we need to toughen them up so they're ready for the real world but that's like saying to the parent of a two year old don't like Johnny nap or he
won't be ready for kindergarten delaying start times also presents many logistical challenges but just for students and their families but for communities as a whole updating bus routes increase transportation costs impact on sports care before after school these are are the same concerns that come up in district after district time again around the country a school start times are debated and illegitimate concerns but these are
problems we have to work through they are not valid excuses failing to do the right thing for our children start middle and high schools no earlier than eight thirty AM and in districts across around the country big and small live made this change they found that these fears are often unfounded and far outweighed by the tremendous benefits for student health and performance and our collective public
safety so tomorrow morning when coincidentally we get to set our clocks back by an hour and you get that delicious straw hour of sleep and the day seems a little longer and a little more full of hope think about tremendous power of sleep and think about what a gift it would be for our children to be able to wake up naturally in harmony with our own
