Expert tells group: Adolescent sleep matters

When an adolescent starts his or her day may matter more than most people think.

That’s according to Dr. Mary Carskadon. She spoke about adolescent sleep recently to The Miriam Hospital Women’s Association, in a program sponsored with Lifespan and Bradley Hospital. It is a topic of high interest to an increasing number of communities, including in Rhode Island, where Barrington parents are pushing to have bus schedules and school start times pushed back for teens.

Carskadon is a professor in Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and director of the Chronobiology and Sleep Research Laboratory at Bradley Hospital, a Lifespan partner. She is an authority on adolescent sleep and circadian rhythms.

A major focus of Carskadon’s scientific activities is research examining interrelations between the circadian timing system and the sleep wake patterns of children, adolescents and young adults. Her findings have raised public health issues regarding the consequences of insufficient sleep for adolescents, as well as concerns about the early starting times of schools. Her work has affected education policy and prompted school districts to delay school start times.

She discussed sleep biology, a 2-process model of sleep regulation.  In Process S, sleep pressure rises with wake and falls with sleep. In Process C, sleep pressure oscillates (circadian rhythm). These processes work together. Both processes favor delay in the timing of sleep across adolescence.

What changes in adolescents (at puberty), is the mid-sleep phase, which changes/delays from age 10 to 19. Teens’ biology changes and pushes the clock later. Late nights are favored. So too are late mornings. Older kids need the same amount of sleep, but it’s easier to stay up later, pushing the sleep time back.

With an early school start time, teens are: getting too little sleep, waking at the “wrong” time, and are sleepy in the classroom (especially in the morning). In the U.S., school start time reform is now seen as a major public health problem, as noted by the Center for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

One main reason we care about adolescent sleep is that risk taking behavior goes up with sleep deprivation.  Put another way, she explained, mood and self-harm – sadness, hopelessness, suicide and driving drowsy, all go up in adolescents with less than six hours of sleep.

Also, sleep affects learning. Too little sleep impairs learning acquisition. Too little sleep impairs information retrieval. Too little sleep may impair consolidation of information that happens during sleep.

Following is a list of strategies. Carskadon proposed for helping teens get an optimal amount of sleep:

•            Make a plan for sleep. Set a bedtime for yourself that will allow enough time to sleep – and keep as close to it as you can.

•            Get bright light every morning to help move your internal clock to an earlier time that can help you fall asleep earlier.

•            Avoid light at night before bedtime to keep your internal clock from moving later.

•            Avoid “arousing” activities in the evening and give yourself a wind-down time to relax for about 30 minutes before bedtime.

•            Don’t sleep with your cell phone on, nor the computer, TV, or any other technology (including lights) in your bedroom.

•            Stick as closely as you can to your sleep schedule on weekends.

•            Avoid caffeine after school.

•            Do not nap after 4 p.m.

•            Have some fun every day and enjoy your life.

For additional information The Miriam Hospital Women’s Association, contact Vickie Scott, Department Assistant, 401-793-2520 or Vickie.Scott@lifespan.org

Submitted by Barbara Brown for The Miriam Hospital Women’s Association.