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 Even though the study found more than one in five adolescents get
less than seven hours of sleep on school nights, the amount of sleep
kids got didn’t influence what’s known as self-regulation, or the
ability to manage things like memory, behavior, emotions and
impulses, the study found.
Adolescents who were night owls, though, were significantly worse at
self-regulation than their peers that tended to turn in and wake up
early. And teens who were the most tired during the day struggled
much more with self-regulation than youth who suffered the least
from daytime drowsiness.
“In other words, it’s not how long you sleep that has the biggest
impact on self-regulation, but when you sleep in relation to the
body’s natural circadian rhythms and how impaired you are by
sleepiness,” said lead study author Dr. Judith Owens, director of
sleep medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital.
For many teens who need to be at school early, these results suggest
they’re being set up to struggle with academics and their health.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that teens get 8
to 10 hours of sleep. Due to changes in circadian rhythms - the
body’s internal “clock” - coinciding with puberty, most teens cannot
fall asleep much before 11 p.m.
“Their morning wake time should be around 8 a.m. to allow them to
get both an optimal amount and timing of sleep,” Owens said by
email. “Both insufficient and misaligned sleep has consequences for
physical and mental health (increased obesity risk, depression)
safety (car accidents, sports injuries) and academics (absenteeism,
lower grades).”
That’s why the AAP also advises schools not to start before 8:30
a.m.
“The results of this study suggest that the kind of circadian
misalignment and daytime sleepiness associated with early school
start times are associated with impaired self-regulation, which in
turn may contribute to risk taking behaviors, poor control of
emotions and impaired thinking skills,” Owens added.
To assess how sleep relates to self-regulation, researchers analyzed
data from an online survey of 2,017 students in 7th through 12th
grades at 19 public schools in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Participants were 15 years old on average, and 54 percent were in
high school.
On average, the students reported getting about 7.7 hours of sleep
on school nights, researchers report in Pediatrics.
Daytime sleepiness was associated with lower self-regulation
regardless of whether teens were night owls or early risers, the
study found.
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Having a night owl or “eveningness” circadian rhythm was also,
independently, tied to poor self regulation.
The study doesn’t prove that daytime sleepiness or a natural
tendency to hit the sack at a certain time can directly cause poor
self-regulation, the authors note. It’s also impossible to rule out
the possibility that poor self-regulation actually makes it harder
for teens to sleep, the researchers also point out.
Even so, the findings suggest it’s important for schools to offer
delayed start times that try to accommodate teens’ natural
inclination to stay up late and sleep in, said Dr. Sujay Kansagra,
author of My Child Won’t Sleep and a pediatric neurology researcher
at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
“Unfortunately, their brains have a natural tendency to shift
bedtime to later at night,” Kansagra, who wrote a commentary
accompanying the study, said by email. “Couple this with early
school start time and you run the risk of chronic sleep deprivation
that leads to poor school performance and an increase in unsafe
behaviors.”
Absent later school start times, parents can still take steps to
help teens develop better sleep habits, Kansagra said.
“Limit bright lights from TV, smartphones, and tablets for one hour
prior to the desired bedtime,” Kansagra said. “Artificial lights
suppress melatonin and make it harder to fall asleep.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2f4PrZn and http://bit.ly/2ehW6gX Pediatrics,
online November 3, 2016.
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