Sleep Deprivation Hampers Students at East

The Late Late Night Show bands play their final song, but the usual East student is still far from getting to bed. Some are up trying to finish their Odyssey reading, while others are mindlessly browsing Facebook, but they all share one thing in common: they’re chronically sleep-deprived.

In a survey of 210 East students, the average amount of sleep was 6.5 hours. The National Sleep Foundation lists that teenagers need between 8.5-9.25 hours of sleep; only 21 percent of those polled listed that they slept 9 hours or more. English Teacher Marla Lindsey, who was an East student in 1995, has seen how sleep deprivation has always been prevalent at East.

“I think there has always been sleep deprivation among teenagers, but I’m not sure it’s for the same reasons necessarily,” Lindsey said. “If I think back to myself, I was deprived of sleep, but that’s because I was a three-sport athlete and a top ten honors student, and was traveling with the team, and was trying to balance that and music. I really was up at night studying and doing homework.”

Dr. Mary Carskadon, Ph.D., director of Chronobiology and Sleep Research at Bradley Hospital and a professor at Brown University, has conducted several studies on teenage sleep. In a 1998 study, she confirmed that teenagers need around one to one-and-a-half more hours of sleep per night than adults, and found that a lack of sleep negatively affected a wide range of things such as mood, athletic performance, weight control and learning. Dr. Carskadon found that, among the 3,000 teenagers studied, those with A’s and B’s averaged 25 more minutes of sleep per night than those with C’s, D’s and F’s.

“[A lack of sleep] affects learning in at least two ways,” Dr. Carskadon said. “One, because when you don’t get enough sleep, your attention and alertness are impaired, so learning aquisition, or gathering information, is impaired by that. Two, when you don’t get enough sleep, the consolidation of learning is impaired.”

However, East students may not be to blame for staying up late. Dr. Carskadon was one of the first doctors to establish that teenagers’ circadian rhythms, or their internal clock, may change and make it difficult for teenagers to go to bed earlier. These rhythms, affected by the production of melatonin in the body, push students to stay up later than they did in elementary or middle school. The NSF also lists that it is “natural” for students to not be able to fall asleep before 11.

Senior Joe Newman averages about 5 to 6 hours of sleep a night during the school week, shooting to fall asleep in between 11 and 12:30, but rarely earlier. He usually feels tired during the school day, but says he can’t get in sleep until the weekend, and even then, work sometimes prevents him from catching up.

“I’m tired in the morning, I’ll be awake around noon, and then crash around 2,” Newman said. “Then I’ll be extremely tired from like 2 to 6 and get energy back and be energized for the night and kind of force myself to sleep.”

Lindsey also sees a major difference between her students in the morning and between those in the afternoon. After lunch, there are drooping heads and kids aren’t as “alert” or fast-moving as the kids in the morning, and she notices that it “slowly trickles into a little bit lower grades.”

“I have found that the afternoon classes, at least mine, have been harder,”Lindsey said. “I feel like we got through chapter five with hour three and now were only on chapter four discussion [with the afternoon hours].”

Another factor that is becoming increasingly dangerous is what Dr. Carskadon refers to as “screen time,” or time spent in front of electronics such as the computer, cell phones and TV. Lindsey remembers that, during her time at East, such distractions were not nearly as prevalent.

“It’s really different now because [the computer] is at your fingertips in your room, especially if it’s in your room, and you can get on at any point in the night and it certainly becomes a distracter,” Lindsey said. “My bedroom was a desk with books on it, and I shut that door, and maybe I could turn on music, but that was it.”

Junior Riley Watson aims to get to bed at around 11 each night, but spends much of his time right before bed watching TV or browsing through one of the 11 websites he visits daily. Although he would be getting around 8 hours of sleep, he says he wakes up 3 to 4 times in the middle of each night. To compensate for the lost sleep, he often takes “micro-naps” during the day and also sleeps in on the weekends.

“[We would be] doing presentations, and everyone is talking in a very droll monotone voice, and no one is really sure what they’re talking about,” Watson said. “I just kind of doze off.”

Like Newman and Watson, many teens attempt to load up on sleep during the weekend, hoping to recover from the past school week’s lack of sleep. Dr. Carskadon warns that this might not be an optimal solution.

“It is kind of a short-term fix,” Dr. Carskadon said. “It doesn’t help you accomplish what the brain and body are meant to be accomplishing on a daily basis. It keeps you from being totally ‘in the weeds,’ so to speak, but it is not the way you and your brain work most efficiently.”

To help teens at East get more sleep, Dr. Carskadon advises setting a bedtime, something that few of the students she studied did; only 57 percent of East students had a bedtime that they shoot to get to bed by. Dr. Carskadon also suggests avoiding lots of light right before bedtime and getting more in the morning, which can help a teenagers get to sleep when their internal clock may be pushing them later.

Several studies show the benefits of moving start times forward to combat the teenager’s natural tendency to go to sleep later. In a study by the University of Minnesota of schools in Minneapolis and Edina, they found pushing start times by more than an hour in surburban schools created an increase in alertness and a decrease in stress and behavior-related incidents. Students often kept the same bed times, gaining an hour of sleep.

In another study by Dr. Carskadon, in which they moved school start times back from 8:25 to 7:20, students reported being “pathologically sleepy” and were so tired that they fell into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in an average of 3.4 minutes–a dangerous symptom that means the student is so tired they skip the important non-REM period of sleep.

“One of the hardest things for the teen brain to do,” Dr. Carskadon said,”is to get up early because the developmental pressure is to get up later.”

In the end, Dr. Carskadon has seen that growing “screen time,” combined with a steady amount of extracurriculars, could create a sleep deprivation trend that continues to grow more dangerous.

“School work, sports practices, clubs, volunteer work, and paid employment take precedence,” Carskadon said in a story for the NSF. “When biological changes are factored in, the ability even to have merely ‘adequate’ sleep is lost.”