Creative Engineering Design
Nowadays, our society is faced with numerous problems that impact us on varying levels. Many problems that we face as human beings shape who we are, and can tend to make us stronger and bring us together. However, the presence of more serious problems can tend to hurt us at times as human beings, causing us to live less happy lives and generally decreasing our wellbeing. For this STEM project, groups found different, interesting, and at times pervasive problems that pose a threat to humans, all while using the engineering design cycle to successfully solve each problem.
Throughout this project, my group and I decided to research Sleep Deprivation, specifically among teenagers, a problem with huge impacts that have been long overlooked by society. We spent large amounts of time researching our topic, learning about the effects it has on teens, and possible solutions. After conducting our research, our group put together a brochure explaining Sleep Deprivation directed at parents and teens in order to educate them on the topic. After making final prints of brochures, our group put together a professional presentation on sleep deprivation for our class. We also handed out our pamphlets to our class, and walked everyone through the different features and sections of it. |
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Use of the Engineering Design Cycle
We used the steps of the engineering design to solve our problem.
Identify Need: The project title of “World Problem” resonated highly with our group. From the get go, we knew that we wanted to try and solve a world problem that had huge impacts on those around us, especially teenagers around our age. When it comes to major problems faced by kids our age, we at first had many differing ideas on what problems we wanted to approach. These ideas included bullying, depression, and other harrowing topics. The topic of sleep deprivation was originally my group member Chris’ idea, and he pointed out that in many situations, he had heard that sleep deprivation was either directly or indirectly connected to each of the topics mentioned previously. There was a general consensus amongst the the group that this was a good point, so we in turn decided to finally settle on tackling the problem of sleep deprivation.
Research Problem: In order for our group to successfully attempt to solve our chosen problem, it was important that we got an adequate amount of research on the topic in order to gain a better understanding of how sleep deprivation works and how it ultimately impacts kids our age. In order to do this, our group chose three articles on sleep deprivation each, and annotated each article in order to gain a deeper understanding of the reading we were doing. Our annotation can be read below:
Article 1
More than two thirds of American men and about half of women say they wish they got more sleep. Poor sleep is linked to higher risk for a host of serious health problems like diabetes, heart disease and depression, and yet the demands of modern society make it harder and harder to get a good night’s rest. We work long hours, we stare at the bright screens of smartphones and tablets late into the night, and these bad habits are rubbing off on our kids too.[a]
In 2014, the National Sleep Foundation conducted a poll called “Sleep in the Modern Family,” to get a view of sleep habits in American families with at least one school-aged child. Roughly 1,100 parents of children 6-17 years old answered questions about their sleep, their children’s sleep, and household rules around bedtimes. Ninety percent of parents surveyed said sleep was important for their family’s health, and yet 90 percent also reported that their children slept less than the recommended guidelines. One of the biggest culprits keeping kids awake seems to be the use of electronic devices at night, a bone of contention familiar to any parent of teenagers and preteens.[b]
Kristen Knutson, PhD, assistant professor in the University of Chicago Department of Medicine, served as the polling expert for the NSF. Her research focuses on the links between sleep and health, particularly the role social factors like family routines and electronic use play in sleep quality. She and her colleagues published a study recently in the journal Sleep Health that takes a deeper look at the data in the NSF poll. We spoke to her about what they found, and what parents can do to help their kids get more sleep.[c]
UChicagoMed: Are kids getting enough sleep?
Kristen Knutson: Oh no. No, no, no. The estimate was that 90 percent of parents in the poll reported sleep durations below what we would recommend for children. And that’s even after we lowered the bar. The NSF recently published recommended sleep amounts by age group. The recommended amount for 11- to 14-year-olds was nine to 10 hours, and then they dropped that to eight to nine hours for teenagers. That’s not to suggest that teenagers need less sleep, I think we’re just lowering the bar because we realize getting a teenager to get nine hours of sleep is not going to happen. Even then, 90 percent of the teenagers alone were getting less than 9 hours of sleep.[d]
What are the biggest culprits? Is it really technology?
Technology is a big part of it today, but there is a conflict between biology and society that happens during adolescence and puberty. From a biological perspective, as kids go through puberty their circadian clocks delay. For example there’s a circadian rhythm of being able to fall asleep at a certain time. For a child before puberty, 11- to 12-year-olds, that ability falls around 8 or 9 pm. As you go through puberty, the ability to fall asleep occurs later and later. So you may be screaming at your 16 year old to get to bed at 10, even if they tried they may not be able to fall asleep right away.[e]
But at the same time, school start times are getting earlier while their biological clock is telling them to go to bed later. So that’s a problem, and their friends are up later too, so they can text or Snapchat with them, which keeps them awake because the light and activity is stimulating. So it’s just a perfect storm for making sleep really challenging.[f]
What role do parents play, not necessarily as enforcers of sleep times but role models for their kids?
There were a couple things in the survey that were really surprising. Even if you think about the parent as the enforcer of the rules—the one who says get the cell phone out of the room, turn the television off—at least having these rules was associated with better sleep, even in the teenagers.[g]
Obviously that’s not good for sleep—waking up and shining bright light in your eyes as you’re looking at your smartphone or tablet is going to impair your sleep. And there seemed to be a relationship between parents who are short sleepers and kids who are short sleepers. Just like diets are shared, sleep behavior is shared, so they’ll model themselves after you.[h]
Is it okay if the phone is in the room but it’s just plugged in and charging? Or is there something about the presence of it, knowing it’s there and you might get a message?
That should be fine, but if your kid knows it’s there and might be tempted to check it in case a friend texts, you might as well charge it in the living room. Even if it’s on vibrate, their brains are cued to hear that and it could wake them up. They’re going to want to get up and check it, so it’s removing the temptation by taking it out of the room.[i]
Is there a rule of thumb for how long before bedtime you should turn off the electronics?
If you could do at least 30 minutes that’s great. An hour or more is wonderful, but that’s not terribly realistic for a lot of people, including myself. I know the rules and I break them myself sometimes. But give your brain a chance to unwind, to reduce the effects of the bright light and recover from that. Give yourself at least 30 minutes to not be staring at a bright light or doing anything particularly stimulating like playing violent video games. Watching TV from a distance isn’t necessarily as bad because it’s not as bright, unless what you’re doing is very stimulating, so watching a horror movie in bed isn’t always a great idea.[j]
Which is more of a problem: the light from screens or the stimulation from using electronics?
Both. Light is particularly bad because it suppresses melatonin. It’s also an alerting signal to the brain of it being daytime. It can confuse the brain about what time of day it is. The brain is thinking it should be alert and awake because it’s bright and something is going on. So it’s doing both at the same time.[k]
What are some top things parents can do to help their kids get more sleep?
Get the electronics out of the room. They’re kids, even teenagers are kids, so their impulse control isn’t as developed and they are going to be tempted by the phone. Even if you tell them to turn it off, and you watch them turn it off or even turn it off yourself, an hour later if you’re asleep they might be tempted to check it and send one more text about something that happened at school that day. If you take it out and charge it in your bedroom—if you can be trusted—then that will help remove the temptation. It might be a battle, but if it becomes the rule every night, that can help.[l]
Teenagers also drink a lot of caffeine these days, so try to minimize how much they have at night. It’s a vicious cycle. We know they’re not getting enough sleep, and they’re trying to get through the school day with caffeine. But you have to try to limit it, especially in the evening.[m]
And just try to talk to them about how sleep is important for health and how well they do in school. There have even been studies that show sleepy people have been judged to be less attractive than not sleepy people—I’m trying to find something that teenagers will care about.[n]
Parents also have to be role models as best we can. Respect your bedtimes and your own sleep, and show the child that it matters, just like eating right and exercising. Try to prioritize sleep when we can, and come up with strategies about what you can do as a family to help.[o]
https://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2016/02/17/electronic-devices-kids-and-sleep-how-screen-time-keeps-them-awake/
[a]device usage hurts amount of sleep we get
[b]surveys show that devices may be hurting the amount of sleep youth get
[c]introduces on of the researchers
[d]most teens don't get the recommended amount of sleep
[e]biology plays a role in the lack of sleep
[f]school times get earlier, while body clock tells teens to go to bed later
[g]having rules is associated with better sleep
[h]good sleeping from parents rubs off on teens
[i]having a phone in the room can wake up the teen
[j]turning off phone 30 minutes before bedtime is effective in helping teens get sleep
[k]light surpasses melatonin, making you wake up
[l]try to keep electronics out of the room
[m]minimize caffeine consumption
[n]talk to teens about importance of sleep
[o]have parents serve as role models
Article 2:
Ever sleep poorly and then walk out of the house without your keys? Or space out while driving to work and nearly hit a stalled car?[a]
A new study led by UCLA’s Dr. Itzhak Fried is the first to reveal how sleep deprivation disrupts brain cells’ ability to communicate with each other. Fried and his colleagues believe that disruption leads to temporary mental lapses that affect memory and visual perception. Their findings are published online today by Nature Medicine.[b]
“We discovered that starving the body of sleep also robs neurons of the ability to function properly,” said Fried, the study’s senior author, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Tel Aviv University. “This leads to cognitive lapses in how we perceive and react to the world around us.”[c]
The international team of scientists studied 12 people who were preparing to undergo surgery at UCLA for epilepsy. The patients had electrodes implanted in their brains in order to pinpoint the origin of their seizures prior to surgery. Because lack of sleep can provoke seizures, patients stay awake all night to speed the onset of an epileptic episode and shorten their hospital stay.[d]
Researchers asked each study participant to categorize a variety of images as quickly as possible. The electrodes recorded the firing of a total of nearly 1,500 brain cells (from all of the participants combined) as the patients responded, and the scientists paid particular attention to neurons in the temporal lobe, which regulates visual perception and memory.[e]
Performing the task grew more challenging as the patients grew sleepier. As the patients slowed down, their brain cells did, too.[f]
“We were fascinated to observe how sleep deprivation dampened brain cell activity,” said lead author Yuval Nir of Tel Aviv University. “Unlike the usual rapid reaction, the neurons responded slowly and fired more weakly, and their transmissions dragged on longer than usual.”[g]
Lack of sleep interfered with the neurons’ ability to encode information and translate visual input into conscious thought.[h]
The same phenomenon can occur when a sleep-deprived driver notices a pedestrian stepping in front of his car.[i]
“The very act of seeing the pedestrian slows down in the driver’s overtired brain,” Fried said. “It takes longer for his brain to register what he’s perceiving.”[j]
The researchers also discovered that slower brain waves accompanied sluggish cellular activity in the temporal lobe and other parts of the brain.[k]
“Slow, sleep-like waves disrupted the patients’ brain activity and performance of tasks,” Fried said. “This phenomenon suggests that select regions of the patients’ brains were dozing, causing mental lapses, while the rest of the brain was awake and running as usual.”[l]
The study’s findings raise questions about how society views sleep deprivation.[m]
“Severe fatigue exerts a similar influence on the brain to drinking too much,” Fried said. “Yet no legal or medical standards exist for identifying overtired drivers on the road the same way we target drunk drivers.”[n]
In future research, Fried and his colleagues plan to more deeply explore the benefits of sleep, and to unravel the mechanism responsible for the cellular glitches that precede mental lapses.[o]
Previous studies have tied sleep deprivation to a heightened risk of depression, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and stroke. Research has also shown that medical school residents who work long shifts without sleep are more prone to make errors in patient care.[p]
The research was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Human Frontier Science Program Organization, the Israel Science Foundation, the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, the Adelis Foundation and the French Operations Research and Decision Support Society.[q]
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/spacing-out-after-staying-up-late
[a]examples of impacts of sleep deprivation
[b]sleep deprivation disrupts brain cells’ ability to communicate with each other
[c]no sleep=neurons can't function properly
[d]Explains experiment
[e]Explains experiment
[f]Tasks became more difficult as patients got sleepier
[g]sleep deprivation=dampened brain cell activity
[h]Lack of sleep interferes with neutrons ability to function
[i]Shows example of sleep deprivation and driving
[j]Sleep deprived=slow reaction time
[k]slow brain=slow activity in temporal lobe
[l]Slow, sleep-like waves disrupted the patients’ brain activity and performance of tasks
[m]questions how society sees the problem
[n]fatigue is almost like being drunk
[o]talks about future studies
[p]sleep deprivation linked to other health problems
[q]people involved in research
Article 3:
Carolyn Walworth, 17, often reaches a breaking point around 11 p.m., when she collapses in tears. For 10 minutes or so, she just sits at her desk and cries, overwhelmed by unrelenting school demands. She is desperately tired and longs for sleep. But she knows she must move through it, because more assignments in physics, calculus or French await her. She finally crawls into bed around midnight or 12:30 a.m.[a]
The next morning, she fights to stay awake in her first-period U.S. history class, which begins at 8:15. She is unable to focus on what’s being taught, and her mind drifts. “You feel tired and exhausted, but you think you just need to get through the day so you can go home and sleep,” said the Palo Alto, California, teen. But that night, she will have to try to catch up on what she missed in class. And the cycle begins again.[b]
“It’s an insane system. … The whole essence of learning is lost,” she said.[c]
Walworth is among a generation of teens growing up chronically sleep-deprived. According to a 2006 National Sleep Foundation poll, the organization’s most recent survey of teen sleep, more than 87 percent of high school students in the United States get far less than the recommended eight to 10 hours, and the amount of time they sleep is decreasing — a serious threat to their health, safety and academic success. Sleep deprivation increases the likelihood teens will suffer myriad negative consequences, including an inability to concentrate, poor grades, drowsy-driving incidents, anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide and even suicide attempts. It’s a problem that knows no economic boundaries.[d]
While studies show that both adults and teens in industrialized nations are becoming more sleep deprived, the problem is most acute among teens, said Nanci Yuan, MD, director of the Stanford Children’s Health Sleep Center. In a detailed 2014 report, the American Academy of Pediatrics called the problem of tired teens a public health epidemic.[e]
“I think high school is the real danger spot in terms of sleep deprivation,” said William Dement, MD, PhD, founder of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, the first of its kind in the world. “It’s a huge problem. What it means is that nobody performs at the level they could perform,” whether it’s in school, on the roadways, on the sports field or in terms of physical and emotional health.[f]
Social and cultural factors, as well as the advent of technology, all have collided with the biology of the adolescent to prevent teens from getting enough rest. Since the early 1990s, it’s been established that teens have a biologic tendency to go to sleep later — as much as two hours later — than their younger counterparts.[g]
Yet when they enter their high school years, they find themselves at schools that typically start the day at a relatively early hour. So their time for sleep is compressed, and many are jolted out of bed before they are physically or mentally ready. In the process, they not only lose precious hours of rest, but their natural rhythm is disrupted, as they are being robbed of the dream-rich, rapid-eye-movement stage of sleep, some of the deepest, most productive sleep time, said pediatric sleep specialist Rafael Pelayo, MD, with the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic.[h]
“When teens wake up earlier, it cuts off their dreams,” said Pelayo, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “We’re not giving them a chance to dream.”[i]
Teens have a biologic tendency to go to sleep later, yet many high schools start the day at a relatively early hour, disrupting their natural rhytym.
Monkey Business/Fotolia
Understanding teen sleepOn a sunny June afternoon, Dement maneuvered his golf cart, nicknamed the Sleep and Dreams Shuttle, through the Stanford University campus to Jerry House, a sprawling, Mediterranean-style dormitory where he and his colleagues conducted some of the early, seminal work on sleep, including teen sleep.[j]
Beginning in 1975, the researchers recruited a few dozen local youngsters between the ages of 10 and 12 who were willing to participate in a unique sleep camp. During the day, the young volunteers would play volleyball in the backyard, which faces a now-barren Lake Lagunita, all the while sporting a nest of electrodes on their heads.[k]
At night, they dozed in a dorm while researchers in a nearby room monitored their brain waves on 6-foot electroencephalogram machines, old-fashioned polygraphs that spit out wave patterns of their sleep.[l]
One of Dement’s colleagues at the time was Mary Carskadon, PhD, then a graduate student at Stanford. They studied the youngsters over the course of several summers, observing their sleep habits as they entered puberty and beyond.[m]
Dement and Carskadon had expected to find that as the participants grew older, they would need less sleep. But to their surprise, their sleep needs remained the same — roughly nine hours a night — through their teen years. “We thought, ‘Oh, wow, this is interesting,’” said Carskadon, now a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University and a nationally recognized expert on teen sleep.[n]
Moreover, the researchers made a number of other key observations that would plant the seed for what is now accepted dogma in the sleep field. For one, they noticed that when older adolescents were restricted to just five hours of sleep a night, they would become progressively sleepier during the course of the week. The loss was cumulative, accounting for what is now commonly known as sleep debt.[o]
“The concept of sleep debt had yet to be developed,” said Dement, the Lowell W. and Josephine Q. Berry Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. It’s since become the basis for his ongoing campaign against drowsy driving among adults and teens. “That’s why you have these terrible accidents on the road,” he said. “People carry a large sleep debt, which they don’t understand and cannot evaluate.”[p]
The researchers also noticed that as the kids got older, they were naturally inclined to go to bed later. By the early 1990s, Carskadon established what has become a widely recognized phenomenon — that teens experience a so-called sleep-phase delay. Their circadian rhythm — their internal biological clock — shifts to a later time, making it more difficult for them to fall asleep before 11 p.m.[q]
Teens are also biologically disposed to a later sleep time because of a shift in the system that governs the natural sleep-wake cycle. Among older teens, the push to fall asleep builds more slowly during the day, signaling them to be more alert in the evening.[r]
“It’s as if the brain is giving them permission, or making it easier, to stay awake longer,” Carskadon said. “So you add that to the phase delay, and it’s hard to fight against it.”[s]
Pressures not to sleepAfter an evening with four or five hours of homework, Walworth turns to her cellphone for relief. She texts or talks to friends and surfs the Web. “It’s nice to stay up and talk to your friends or watch a funny YouTube video,” she said. “There are plenty of online distractions.”[t]
While teens are biologically programmed to stay up late, many social and cultural forces further limit their time for sleep. For one, the pressure on teens to succeed is intense, and they must compete with a growing number of peers for college slots that have largely remained constant. In high-achieving communities like Palo Alto, that translates into students who are overwhelmed by additional homework for Advanced Placement classes, outside activities such as sports or social service projects, and in some cases, part-time jobs, as well as peer, parental and community pressures to excel.[u]
William Dement
At the same time, today’s teens are maturing in an era of ubiquitous electronic media, and they are fervent participants. Some 92 percent of U.S. teens have smartphones, and 24 percent report being online “constantly,” according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center. Teens have access to multiple electronic devices they use simultaneously, often at night. Some 72 percent bring cellphones into their bedrooms and use them when they are trying to go to sleep, and 28 percent leave their phones on while sleeping, only to be awakened at night by texts, calls or emails, according to a 2011 National Sleep Foundation poll on electronic use. In addition, some 64 percent use electronic music devices, 60 percent use laptops and 23 percent play video games in the hour before they went to sleep, the poll found. More than half reported texting in the hour before they went to sleep, and these media fans were less likely to report getting a good night’s sleep and feeling refreshed in the morning. They were also more likely to drive when drowsy, the poll found.[v]
The problem of sleep-phase delay is exacerbated when teens are exposed late at night to lit screens, which send a message via the retina to the portion of the brain that controls the body’s circadian clock. The message: It’s not nighttime yet.[w]
Yuan, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics, said she routinely sees young patients in her clinic who fall asleep at night with cellphones in hand.[x]
“With academic demands and extracurricular activities, the kids are going nonstop until they fall asleep exhausted at night. There is not an emphasis on the importance of sleep, as there is with nutrition and exercise,” she said. “They say they are tired, but they don’t realize they are actually sleep-deprived. And if you ask kids to remove an activity, they would rather not. They would rather give up sleep than an activity.”[y]
The role of parentsAdolescents are also entering a period in which they are striving for autonomy and want to make their own decisions, including when to go to sleep. But studies suggest adolescents do better in terms of mood and fatigue levels if parents set the bedtime — and choose a time that is realistic for the child’s needs. According to a 2010 study published in the journal Sleep, children are more likely to be depressed and to entertain thoughts of suicide if a parent sets a late bedtime of midnight or beyond.[z]
In families where parents set the time for sleep, the teens’ happier, better-rested state “may be a sign of an organized family life, not simply a matter of bedtime,” Carskadon said. “On the other hand, the growing child and growing teens still benefit from someone who will help set the structure for their lives. And they aren’t good at making good decisions.”[aa]
They say they are tired, but they don’t realize they are actually sleep-deprived. And if you ask kids to remove an activity, they would rather not. They would rather give up sleep than an activity.
According to the 2011 sleep poll, by the time U.S. students reach their senior year in high school, they are sleeping an average of 6.9 hours a night, down from an average of 8.4 hours in the sixth grade. The poll included teens from across the couny from diverse ethnic backgrounds.[ab]
American teens aren’t the worst off when it comes to sleep, however; South Korean adolescents have that distinction, sleeping on average 4.9 hours a night, according to a 2012 study in Sleep by South Korean researchers. These Asian teens routinely begin school between 7 and 8:30 a.m., and most sign up for additional evening classes that may keep them up as late as midnight. South Korean adolescents also have relatively high suicide rates (10.7 per 100,000 a year), and the researchers speculate that chronic sleep deprivation is a contributor to this disturbing phenomenon.[ac]
By contrast, Australian teens are among those who do particularly well when it comes to sleep time, averaging about nine hours a night, possibly because schools there usually start later.[ad]
Regardless of where they live, most teens follow a pattern of sleeping less during the week and sleeping in on the weekends to compensate. But many accumulate such a backlog of sleep debt that they don’t sufficiently recover on the weekend and still wake up fatigued when Monday comes around.[ae]
Moreover, the shifting sleep patterns on the weekend — late nights with friends, followed by late mornings in bed — are out of sync with their weekday rhythm. Carskadon refers to this as “social jet lag.”[af]
“Every day we teach our internal circadian timing system what time it is — is it day or night? — and if that message is substantially different every day, then the clock isn’t able to set things appropriately in motion,” she said. “In the last few years, we have learned there is a master clock in the brain, but there are other clocks in other organs, like liver or kidneys or lungs, so the master clock is the coxswain, trying to get everybody to work together to improve efficiency and health. So if the coxswain is changing the pace, all the crew become disorganized and don’t function well.”[ag]
This disrupted rhythm, as well as the shortage of sleep, can have far-reaching effects on adolescent health and well-being, she said.[ah]
“It certainly plays into learning and memory. It plays into appetite and metabolism and weight gain. It plays into mood and emotion, which are already heightened at that age. It also plays into risk behaviors — taking risks while driving, taking risks with substances, taking risks maybe with sexual activity. So the more we look outside, the more we’re learning about the core role that sleep plays,” Carskadon said.[ai]
Many studies show students who sleep less suffer academically, as chronic sleep loss impairs the ability to remember, concentrate, think abstractly and solve problems. In one of many studies on sleep and academic performance, Carskadon and her colleagues surveyed 3,000 high school students and found that those with higher grades reported sleeping more, going to bed earlier on school nights and sleeping in less on weekends than students who had lower grades.[aj]
Sleep is believed to reinforce learning and memory, with studies showing that people perform better on mental tasks when they are well-rested. “We hypothesize that when teens sleep, the brain is going through processes of consolidation — learning of experiences or making memories,” Yuan said. “It’s like your brain is filtering itself — consolidating the important things and filtering out those unimportant things.” When the brain is deprived of that opportunity, cognitive function suffers, along with the capacity to learn.[ak]
“It impacts academic performance. It’s harder to take tests and answer questions if you are sleep-deprived,” she said.[al]
That’s why cramming, at the expense of sleep, is counterproductive, said Pelayo, who advises students: Don’t lose sleep to study, or you’ll lose out in the end.[am]
The panic attackChloe Mauvais, 16, hit her breaking point at the end of a very challenging sophomore year when she reached “the depths of frustration and anxiety.” After months of late nights spent studying to keep up with academic demands, she suffered a panic attack one evening at home.[an]
“I sat in the living room in our house on the ground, crying and having horrible breathing problems,” said the senior at Menlo-Atherton High School. “It was so scary. I think it was from the accumulated stress, the fear over my grades, the lack of sleep and the crushing sense of responsibility. High school is a very hard place to be.”[ao]
We hypothesize that when teens sleep, the brain is going through processes of consolidation — learning of experiences or making memories. It’s like your brain is filtering itself.
Where she once had good sleep habits, she had drifted into an unhealthy pattern of staying up late, sometimes until 3 a.m., researching and writing papers for her AP European history class and prepping for tests.[ap]
“I have difficulty remembering events of that year, and I think it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep,” she said. “The lack of sleep rendered me emotionally useless. I couldn’t address the stress because I had no coherent thoughts. I couldn’t step back and have perspective. … You could probably talk to any teen and find they reach their breaking point. You’ve pushed yourself so much and not slept enough and you just lose it.”[aq]
The experience was a kind of wake-up call, as she recognized the need to return to a more balanced life and a better sleep pattern, she said. But for some teens, this toxic mix of sleep deprivation, stress and anxiety, together with other external pressures, can tip their thinking toward dire solutions.[ar]
Research has shown that sleep problems among adolescents are a major risk factor for suicidal thoughts and death by suicide, which ranks as the third-leading cause of fatalities among 15- to 24-year-olds. And this link between sleep and suicidal thoughts remains strong, independent of whether the teen is depressed or has drug and alcohol issues, according to some studies.[as]
“Sleep, especially deep sleep, is like a balm for the brain,” said Shashank Joshi, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. “The better your sleep, the more clearly you can think while awake, and it may enable you to seek help when a problem arises. You have your faculties with you. You may think, ‘I have 16 things to do, but I know where to start.’ Sleep deprivation can make it hard to remember what you need to do for your busy teen life. It takes away the support, the infrastructure.”[at]
Sleep is believed to help regulate emotions, and its deprivation is an underlying component of many mood disorders, such as anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder. For students who are prone to these disorders, better sleep can help serve as a buffer and help prevent a downhill slide, Joshi said.[au]
Rebecca Bernert, PhD, who directs the Suicide Prevention Research Lab at Stanford, said sleep may affect the way in which teens process emotions. Her work with civilians and military veterans indicates that lack of sleep can make people more receptive to negative emotional information, which they might shrug off if they were fully rested, she said.[av]
“Based on prior research, we have theorized that sleep disturbances may result in difficulty regulating emotional information, and this may lower the threshold for suicidal behaviors among at-risk individuals,” said Bernert, an instructor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Now she’s studying whether a brief nondrug treatment for insomnia reduces depression and risk for suicide.[aw]
Sleep deprivation also has been shown to lower inhibitions among both adults and teens. In the teen brain, the frontal lobe, which helps restrain impulsivity, isn’t fully developed, so teens are naturally prone to impulsive behavior. “When you throw into the mix sleep deprivation, which can also be disinhibiting, mood problems and the normal impulsivity of adolescence, then you have a potentially dangerous situation,” Joshi said.[ax]
Some schools shiftGiven the health risks associated with sleep problems, school districts around the country have been looking at one issue over which they have some control: when school starts in the morning. The trend was set by the town of Edina, Minnesota, a well-to-do suburb of Minneapolis, which conducted a landmark experiment in student sleep in the late 1990s. It shifted the high school’s start time from 7:20 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. and then asked University of Minnesota researchers to look at the impact of the change. The researchers found some surprising results: Students reported feeling less depressed and less sleepy during the day and more empowered to succeed. There was no comparable improvement in student well-being in surrounding school districts where start times remained the same.[ay]
With these findings in hand, the entire Minneapolis Public School District shifted start times for 57,000 students at all of its schools in 1997 and found similarly positive results. Attendance rates rose, and students reported getting an hour’s more sleep each school night — or a total of five more hours of sleep a week — countering skeptics who argued that the students would respond by just going to bed later.[az]
Other studies have reinforced the link between later start times and positive health benefits. One 2010 study at an independent high school in Rhode Island found that after delaying the start time by just 30 minutes, students slept more and showed significant improvements in alertness and mood. And a 2014 study in two counties in Virginia found that teens were much less likely to be involved in car crashes in a county where start times were later, compared with a county with an earlier start time.[ba]
Bolstered by the evidence, the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2014 issued a strong policy statement encouraging middle and high school districts across the country to start school no earlier than 8:30 a.m. to help preserve the health of the nation’s youth. Some districts have heeded the call, though the decisions have been hugely contentious, as many consider school schedules sacrosanct and cite practical issues, such as bus schedules, as obstacles.[bb]
In Fairfax County, Virginia, it took a decade of debate before the school board voted in 2014 to push back the opening school bell for its 57,000 students. And in Palo Alto, where a recent cluster of suicides has caused much communitywide soul-searching, the district superintendent issued a decision in the spring, over the strenuous objections of some teachers, students and administrators, to eliminate “zero period” for academic classes — an optional period that begins at 7:20 a.m. and is generally offered for advanced studies.[bc]
Certainly, changing school start times is only part of the solution, experts say. More widespread education about sleep and more resources for students are needed. Parents and teachers need to trim back their expectations and minimize pressures that interfere with teen sleep. And there needs to be a cultural shift, including a move to discourage late-night use of electronic devices, to help youngsters gain much-needed rest.[bd]
“At some point, we are going to have to confront this as a society,” Carskadon said. “For the health and well-being of the nation, we should all be taking better care of our sleep, and we certainly should be taking better care of the sleep of our youth.”[be]
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/10/among-teens-sleep-deprivation-an-epidemic.html
[a]Shows real life example of sleep deprivation
[b]Shows impacts of real life sleep deprivation
[c]Sleep deprivation makes learning ineffective
[d]statistics show majority of teens sleep deprived
[e]industrialized nations getting more sleep deprived
[f]sleep deprivation hurts how students perform
[g]Teens have biological tendency to go to sleep later
[h]Sleep time compressed because schools start early
[i]When teens wake up earlier, they do not have time to dream
[j]Research on sleep once done at jerry house in Stanford
[k]Experiment in 70s carried out on children who aged between 10 to 12
[l]Researchers monitored their brainwaves while they slept
[m]Experiment run with same children over multiple summers as they grew older
[n]Teens need the same amount of sleep as young children, contrary to prior belief
[o]Sleep debt= when restricted to only a certain hour of sleep per night, you become progressively tired during the day
[p]Awareness being raised on sleep debt
[q]As teens get older, they are naturally inclined to go to sleep later
[r]shift in the biological system that governs the natural sleep-wake cycle causes teens to sleep later
[s]brain tells people to sleep later
[t]cellphones and other devices serve as a break from the work load
[u]Teens have to stay up late late because they have a lot on their plate
[v]students that use devices a lot have decreased chance of getting a good night's rest
[w]Sleep deprivation made worse with exposure to screens
[x]Real life example
[y]There is a lack of emphasis on the importance of sleep
[z]Teens function better when parents set good bedtimes
[aa]Parents setting good bedtime shows structure within a family
[ab]By the time students finish high school, they are sleeping less
[ac]South Korean students sleep the least, and have high suicide rates
[ad]Australian students get good sleep, as school starts later there
[ae]some try to make up sleep by sleeping on weekends, but not sufficient enough
[af]this type of sleeping interrupts their normal sleeping rhythm
[ag]Disrupted rhythm can hurt rest of the body
[ah]Hurts teens overall
[ai]Sleep deprivation can lead to many other harmful side effects
[aj]Less sleep= bad grades
[ak]More sleep= better mental performance
[al]impacts academic performance
[am]losing sleep to studying is ineffective
[an]real life example of a panic attack
[ao]lack of sleep lead to this
[ap]more studying forced her to sleep less
[aq]had bad memory due to lack of sleep
[ar]wake up call to get more sleep
[as]strong link between lack of sleep and suicide
[at]more sleep helps to work better when awake
[au]sleep regulates emotions
[av]sleep impacts ways teens process emotions
[aw]sleep disturbances= less emotional regulation
[ax]sleep deprevations=lower inhibitions
[ay]schools shifting start times to deal with the problem
[az]shifted start times had positive results
[ba]shifted start times had positive results
[bb]AAP issued policy telling schools to push start times back
[bc]real life examples
[bd]Parents and teachers need to help solve problem
[be]We should take better care of sleep as a society
Develop Possible Solutions: After doing our research, our group shared all of our results with each other, and tried to use the information we were given in order to brainstorm multiple solutions to the problem. Our solutions included:
Select the Most Promising Solution: Our group kept going back and forth our data and our ideas, slowly narrowing down our list by how practical each idea was, and how well we thought each solution would address the problem. After a while, we settled on creating an informational pamphlet that was to be used in order to educate teens and parents on this issue.
Construct a Prototype: Our group used the research we did previously in order to compile our information into our brochure. This was at times slightly difficult, because we wanted to put in as much information as possible into the the brochure, but we had a size constraint on each page of the brochure. A copy of our brochure can be seen below:
Research Problem: In order for our group to successfully attempt to solve our chosen problem, it was important that we got an adequate amount of research on the topic in order to gain a better understanding of how sleep deprivation works and how it ultimately impacts kids our age. In order to do this, our group chose three articles on sleep deprivation each, and annotated each article in order to gain a deeper understanding of the reading we were doing. Our annotation can be read below:
Article 1
More than two thirds of American men and about half of women say they wish they got more sleep. Poor sleep is linked to higher risk for a host of serious health problems like diabetes, heart disease and depression, and yet the demands of modern society make it harder and harder to get a good night’s rest. We work long hours, we stare at the bright screens of smartphones and tablets late into the night, and these bad habits are rubbing off on our kids too.[a]
In 2014, the National Sleep Foundation conducted a poll called “Sleep in the Modern Family,” to get a view of sleep habits in American families with at least one school-aged child. Roughly 1,100 parents of children 6-17 years old answered questions about their sleep, their children’s sleep, and household rules around bedtimes. Ninety percent of parents surveyed said sleep was important for their family’s health, and yet 90 percent also reported that their children slept less than the recommended guidelines. One of the biggest culprits keeping kids awake seems to be the use of electronic devices at night, a bone of contention familiar to any parent of teenagers and preteens.[b]
Kristen Knutson, PhD, assistant professor in the University of Chicago Department of Medicine, served as the polling expert for the NSF. Her research focuses on the links between sleep and health, particularly the role social factors like family routines and electronic use play in sleep quality. She and her colleagues published a study recently in the journal Sleep Health that takes a deeper look at the data in the NSF poll. We spoke to her about what they found, and what parents can do to help their kids get more sleep.[c]
UChicagoMed: Are kids getting enough sleep?
Kristen Knutson: Oh no. No, no, no. The estimate was that 90 percent of parents in the poll reported sleep durations below what we would recommend for children. And that’s even after we lowered the bar. The NSF recently published recommended sleep amounts by age group. The recommended amount for 11- to 14-year-olds was nine to 10 hours, and then they dropped that to eight to nine hours for teenagers. That’s not to suggest that teenagers need less sleep, I think we’re just lowering the bar because we realize getting a teenager to get nine hours of sleep is not going to happen. Even then, 90 percent of the teenagers alone were getting less than 9 hours of sleep.[d]
What are the biggest culprits? Is it really technology?
Technology is a big part of it today, but there is a conflict between biology and society that happens during adolescence and puberty. From a biological perspective, as kids go through puberty their circadian clocks delay. For example there’s a circadian rhythm of being able to fall asleep at a certain time. For a child before puberty, 11- to 12-year-olds, that ability falls around 8 or 9 pm. As you go through puberty, the ability to fall asleep occurs later and later. So you may be screaming at your 16 year old to get to bed at 10, even if they tried they may not be able to fall asleep right away.[e]
But at the same time, school start times are getting earlier while their biological clock is telling them to go to bed later. So that’s a problem, and their friends are up later too, so they can text or Snapchat with them, which keeps them awake because the light and activity is stimulating. So it’s just a perfect storm for making sleep really challenging.[f]
What role do parents play, not necessarily as enforcers of sleep times but role models for their kids?
There were a couple things in the survey that were really surprising. Even if you think about the parent as the enforcer of the rules—the one who says get the cell phone out of the room, turn the television off—at least having these rules was associated with better sleep, even in the teenagers.[g]
Obviously that’s not good for sleep—waking up and shining bright light in your eyes as you’re looking at your smartphone or tablet is going to impair your sleep. And there seemed to be a relationship between parents who are short sleepers and kids who are short sleepers. Just like diets are shared, sleep behavior is shared, so they’ll model themselves after you.[h]
Is it okay if the phone is in the room but it’s just plugged in and charging? Or is there something about the presence of it, knowing it’s there and you might get a message?
That should be fine, but if your kid knows it’s there and might be tempted to check it in case a friend texts, you might as well charge it in the living room. Even if it’s on vibrate, their brains are cued to hear that and it could wake them up. They’re going to want to get up and check it, so it’s removing the temptation by taking it out of the room.[i]
Is there a rule of thumb for how long before bedtime you should turn off the electronics?
If you could do at least 30 minutes that’s great. An hour or more is wonderful, but that’s not terribly realistic for a lot of people, including myself. I know the rules and I break them myself sometimes. But give your brain a chance to unwind, to reduce the effects of the bright light and recover from that. Give yourself at least 30 minutes to not be staring at a bright light or doing anything particularly stimulating like playing violent video games. Watching TV from a distance isn’t necessarily as bad because it’s not as bright, unless what you’re doing is very stimulating, so watching a horror movie in bed isn’t always a great idea.[j]
Which is more of a problem: the light from screens or the stimulation from using electronics?
Both. Light is particularly bad because it suppresses melatonin. It’s also an alerting signal to the brain of it being daytime. It can confuse the brain about what time of day it is. The brain is thinking it should be alert and awake because it’s bright and something is going on. So it’s doing both at the same time.[k]
What are some top things parents can do to help their kids get more sleep?
Get the electronics out of the room. They’re kids, even teenagers are kids, so their impulse control isn’t as developed and they are going to be tempted by the phone. Even if you tell them to turn it off, and you watch them turn it off or even turn it off yourself, an hour later if you’re asleep they might be tempted to check it and send one more text about something that happened at school that day. If you take it out and charge it in your bedroom—if you can be trusted—then that will help remove the temptation. It might be a battle, but if it becomes the rule every night, that can help.[l]
Teenagers also drink a lot of caffeine these days, so try to minimize how much they have at night. It’s a vicious cycle. We know they’re not getting enough sleep, and they’re trying to get through the school day with caffeine. But you have to try to limit it, especially in the evening.[m]
And just try to talk to them about how sleep is important for health and how well they do in school. There have even been studies that show sleepy people have been judged to be less attractive than not sleepy people—I’m trying to find something that teenagers will care about.[n]
Parents also have to be role models as best we can. Respect your bedtimes and your own sleep, and show the child that it matters, just like eating right and exercising. Try to prioritize sleep when we can, and come up with strategies about what you can do as a family to help.[o]
https://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2016/02/17/electronic-devices-kids-and-sleep-how-screen-time-keeps-them-awake/
[a]device usage hurts amount of sleep we get
[b]surveys show that devices may be hurting the amount of sleep youth get
[c]introduces on of the researchers
[d]most teens don't get the recommended amount of sleep
[e]biology plays a role in the lack of sleep
[f]school times get earlier, while body clock tells teens to go to bed later
[g]having rules is associated with better sleep
[h]good sleeping from parents rubs off on teens
[i]having a phone in the room can wake up the teen
[j]turning off phone 30 minutes before bedtime is effective in helping teens get sleep
[k]light surpasses melatonin, making you wake up
[l]try to keep electronics out of the room
[m]minimize caffeine consumption
[n]talk to teens about importance of sleep
[o]have parents serve as role models
Article 2:
Ever sleep poorly and then walk out of the house without your keys? Or space out while driving to work and nearly hit a stalled car?[a]
A new study led by UCLA’s Dr. Itzhak Fried is the first to reveal how sleep deprivation disrupts brain cells’ ability to communicate with each other. Fried and his colleagues believe that disruption leads to temporary mental lapses that affect memory and visual perception. Their findings are published online today by Nature Medicine.[b]
“We discovered that starving the body of sleep also robs neurons of the ability to function properly,” said Fried, the study’s senior author, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Tel Aviv University. “This leads to cognitive lapses in how we perceive and react to the world around us.”[c]
The international team of scientists studied 12 people who were preparing to undergo surgery at UCLA for epilepsy. The patients had electrodes implanted in their brains in order to pinpoint the origin of their seizures prior to surgery. Because lack of sleep can provoke seizures, patients stay awake all night to speed the onset of an epileptic episode and shorten their hospital stay.[d]
Researchers asked each study participant to categorize a variety of images as quickly as possible. The electrodes recorded the firing of a total of nearly 1,500 brain cells (from all of the participants combined) as the patients responded, and the scientists paid particular attention to neurons in the temporal lobe, which regulates visual perception and memory.[e]
Performing the task grew more challenging as the patients grew sleepier. As the patients slowed down, their brain cells did, too.[f]
“We were fascinated to observe how sleep deprivation dampened brain cell activity,” said lead author Yuval Nir of Tel Aviv University. “Unlike the usual rapid reaction, the neurons responded slowly and fired more weakly, and their transmissions dragged on longer than usual.”[g]
Lack of sleep interfered with the neurons’ ability to encode information and translate visual input into conscious thought.[h]
The same phenomenon can occur when a sleep-deprived driver notices a pedestrian stepping in front of his car.[i]
“The very act of seeing the pedestrian slows down in the driver’s overtired brain,” Fried said. “It takes longer for his brain to register what he’s perceiving.”[j]
The researchers also discovered that slower brain waves accompanied sluggish cellular activity in the temporal lobe and other parts of the brain.[k]
“Slow, sleep-like waves disrupted the patients’ brain activity and performance of tasks,” Fried said. “This phenomenon suggests that select regions of the patients’ brains were dozing, causing mental lapses, while the rest of the brain was awake and running as usual.”[l]
The study’s findings raise questions about how society views sleep deprivation.[m]
“Severe fatigue exerts a similar influence on the brain to drinking too much,” Fried said. “Yet no legal or medical standards exist for identifying overtired drivers on the road the same way we target drunk drivers.”[n]
In future research, Fried and his colleagues plan to more deeply explore the benefits of sleep, and to unravel the mechanism responsible for the cellular glitches that precede mental lapses.[o]
Previous studies have tied sleep deprivation to a heightened risk of depression, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and stroke. Research has also shown that medical school residents who work long shifts without sleep are more prone to make errors in patient care.[p]
The research was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Human Frontier Science Program Organization, the Israel Science Foundation, the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, the Adelis Foundation and the French Operations Research and Decision Support Society.[q]
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/spacing-out-after-staying-up-late
[a]examples of impacts of sleep deprivation
[b]sleep deprivation disrupts brain cells’ ability to communicate with each other
[c]no sleep=neurons can't function properly
[d]Explains experiment
[e]Explains experiment
[f]Tasks became more difficult as patients got sleepier
[g]sleep deprivation=dampened brain cell activity
[h]Lack of sleep interferes with neutrons ability to function
[i]Shows example of sleep deprivation and driving
[j]Sleep deprived=slow reaction time
[k]slow brain=slow activity in temporal lobe
[l]Slow, sleep-like waves disrupted the patients’ brain activity and performance of tasks
[m]questions how society sees the problem
[n]fatigue is almost like being drunk
[o]talks about future studies
[p]sleep deprivation linked to other health problems
[q]people involved in research
Article 3:
Carolyn Walworth, 17, often reaches a breaking point around 11 p.m., when she collapses in tears. For 10 minutes or so, she just sits at her desk and cries, overwhelmed by unrelenting school demands. She is desperately tired and longs for sleep. But she knows she must move through it, because more assignments in physics, calculus or French await her. She finally crawls into bed around midnight or 12:30 a.m.[a]
The next morning, she fights to stay awake in her first-period U.S. history class, which begins at 8:15. She is unable to focus on what’s being taught, and her mind drifts. “You feel tired and exhausted, but you think you just need to get through the day so you can go home and sleep,” said the Palo Alto, California, teen. But that night, she will have to try to catch up on what she missed in class. And the cycle begins again.[b]
“It’s an insane system. … The whole essence of learning is lost,” she said.[c]
Walworth is among a generation of teens growing up chronically sleep-deprived. According to a 2006 National Sleep Foundation poll, the organization’s most recent survey of teen sleep, more than 87 percent of high school students in the United States get far less than the recommended eight to 10 hours, and the amount of time they sleep is decreasing — a serious threat to their health, safety and academic success. Sleep deprivation increases the likelihood teens will suffer myriad negative consequences, including an inability to concentrate, poor grades, drowsy-driving incidents, anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide and even suicide attempts. It’s a problem that knows no economic boundaries.[d]
While studies show that both adults and teens in industrialized nations are becoming more sleep deprived, the problem is most acute among teens, said Nanci Yuan, MD, director of the Stanford Children’s Health Sleep Center. In a detailed 2014 report, the American Academy of Pediatrics called the problem of tired teens a public health epidemic.[e]
“I think high school is the real danger spot in terms of sleep deprivation,” said William Dement, MD, PhD, founder of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, the first of its kind in the world. “It’s a huge problem. What it means is that nobody performs at the level they could perform,” whether it’s in school, on the roadways, on the sports field or in terms of physical and emotional health.[f]
Social and cultural factors, as well as the advent of technology, all have collided with the biology of the adolescent to prevent teens from getting enough rest. Since the early 1990s, it’s been established that teens have a biologic tendency to go to sleep later — as much as two hours later — than their younger counterparts.[g]
Yet when they enter their high school years, they find themselves at schools that typically start the day at a relatively early hour. So their time for sleep is compressed, and many are jolted out of bed before they are physically or mentally ready. In the process, they not only lose precious hours of rest, but their natural rhythm is disrupted, as they are being robbed of the dream-rich, rapid-eye-movement stage of sleep, some of the deepest, most productive sleep time, said pediatric sleep specialist Rafael Pelayo, MD, with the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic.[h]
“When teens wake up earlier, it cuts off their dreams,” said Pelayo, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “We’re not giving them a chance to dream.”[i]
Teens have a biologic tendency to go to sleep later, yet many high schools start the day at a relatively early hour, disrupting their natural rhytym.
Monkey Business/Fotolia
Understanding teen sleepOn a sunny June afternoon, Dement maneuvered his golf cart, nicknamed the Sleep and Dreams Shuttle, through the Stanford University campus to Jerry House, a sprawling, Mediterranean-style dormitory where he and his colleagues conducted some of the early, seminal work on sleep, including teen sleep.[j]
Beginning in 1975, the researchers recruited a few dozen local youngsters between the ages of 10 and 12 who were willing to participate in a unique sleep camp. During the day, the young volunteers would play volleyball in the backyard, which faces a now-barren Lake Lagunita, all the while sporting a nest of electrodes on their heads.[k]
At night, they dozed in a dorm while researchers in a nearby room monitored their brain waves on 6-foot electroencephalogram machines, old-fashioned polygraphs that spit out wave patterns of their sleep.[l]
One of Dement’s colleagues at the time was Mary Carskadon, PhD, then a graduate student at Stanford. They studied the youngsters over the course of several summers, observing their sleep habits as they entered puberty and beyond.[m]
Dement and Carskadon had expected to find that as the participants grew older, they would need less sleep. But to their surprise, their sleep needs remained the same — roughly nine hours a night — through their teen years. “We thought, ‘Oh, wow, this is interesting,’” said Carskadon, now a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University and a nationally recognized expert on teen sleep.[n]
Moreover, the researchers made a number of other key observations that would plant the seed for what is now accepted dogma in the sleep field. For one, they noticed that when older adolescents were restricted to just five hours of sleep a night, they would become progressively sleepier during the course of the week. The loss was cumulative, accounting for what is now commonly known as sleep debt.[o]
“The concept of sleep debt had yet to be developed,” said Dement, the Lowell W. and Josephine Q. Berry Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. It’s since become the basis for his ongoing campaign against drowsy driving among adults and teens. “That’s why you have these terrible accidents on the road,” he said. “People carry a large sleep debt, which they don’t understand and cannot evaluate.”[p]
The researchers also noticed that as the kids got older, they were naturally inclined to go to bed later. By the early 1990s, Carskadon established what has become a widely recognized phenomenon — that teens experience a so-called sleep-phase delay. Their circadian rhythm — their internal biological clock — shifts to a later time, making it more difficult for them to fall asleep before 11 p.m.[q]
Teens are also biologically disposed to a later sleep time because of a shift in the system that governs the natural sleep-wake cycle. Among older teens, the push to fall asleep builds more slowly during the day, signaling them to be more alert in the evening.[r]
“It’s as if the brain is giving them permission, or making it easier, to stay awake longer,” Carskadon said. “So you add that to the phase delay, and it’s hard to fight against it.”[s]
Pressures not to sleepAfter an evening with four or five hours of homework, Walworth turns to her cellphone for relief. She texts or talks to friends and surfs the Web. “It’s nice to stay up and talk to your friends or watch a funny YouTube video,” she said. “There are plenty of online distractions.”[t]
While teens are biologically programmed to stay up late, many social and cultural forces further limit their time for sleep. For one, the pressure on teens to succeed is intense, and they must compete with a growing number of peers for college slots that have largely remained constant. In high-achieving communities like Palo Alto, that translates into students who are overwhelmed by additional homework for Advanced Placement classes, outside activities such as sports or social service projects, and in some cases, part-time jobs, as well as peer, parental and community pressures to excel.[u]
William Dement
At the same time, today’s teens are maturing in an era of ubiquitous electronic media, and they are fervent participants. Some 92 percent of U.S. teens have smartphones, and 24 percent report being online “constantly,” according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center. Teens have access to multiple electronic devices they use simultaneously, often at night. Some 72 percent bring cellphones into their bedrooms and use them when they are trying to go to sleep, and 28 percent leave their phones on while sleeping, only to be awakened at night by texts, calls or emails, according to a 2011 National Sleep Foundation poll on electronic use. In addition, some 64 percent use electronic music devices, 60 percent use laptops and 23 percent play video games in the hour before they went to sleep, the poll found. More than half reported texting in the hour before they went to sleep, and these media fans were less likely to report getting a good night’s sleep and feeling refreshed in the morning. They were also more likely to drive when drowsy, the poll found.[v]
The problem of sleep-phase delay is exacerbated when teens are exposed late at night to lit screens, which send a message via the retina to the portion of the brain that controls the body’s circadian clock. The message: It’s not nighttime yet.[w]
Yuan, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics, said she routinely sees young patients in her clinic who fall asleep at night with cellphones in hand.[x]
“With academic demands and extracurricular activities, the kids are going nonstop until they fall asleep exhausted at night. There is not an emphasis on the importance of sleep, as there is with nutrition and exercise,” she said. “They say they are tired, but they don’t realize they are actually sleep-deprived. And if you ask kids to remove an activity, they would rather not. They would rather give up sleep than an activity.”[y]
The role of parentsAdolescents are also entering a period in which they are striving for autonomy and want to make their own decisions, including when to go to sleep. But studies suggest adolescents do better in terms of mood and fatigue levels if parents set the bedtime — and choose a time that is realistic for the child’s needs. According to a 2010 study published in the journal Sleep, children are more likely to be depressed and to entertain thoughts of suicide if a parent sets a late bedtime of midnight or beyond.[z]
In families where parents set the time for sleep, the teens’ happier, better-rested state “may be a sign of an organized family life, not simply a matter of bedtime,” Carskadon said. “On the other hand, the growing child and growing teens still benefit from someone who will help set the structure for their lives. And they aren’t good at making good decisions.”[aa]
They say they are tired, but they don’t realize they are actually sleep-deprived. And if you ask kids to remove an activity, they would rather not. They would rather give up sleep than an activity.
According to the 2011 sleep poll, by the time U.S. students reach their senior year in high school, they are sleeping an average of 6.9 hours a night, down from an average of 8.4 hours in the sixth grade. The poll included teens from across the couny from diverse ethnic backgrounds.[ab]
American teens aren’t the worst off when it comes to sleep, however; South Korean adolescents have that distinction, sleeping on average 4.9 hours a night, according to a 2012 study in Sleep by South Korean researchers. These Asian teens routinely begin school between 7 and 8:30 a.m., and most sign up for additional evening classes that may keep them up as late as midnight. South Korean adolescents also have relatively high suicide rates (10.7 per 100,000 a year), and the researchers speculate that chronic sleep deprivation is a contributor to this disturbing phenomenon.[ac]
By contrast, Australian teens are among those who do particularly well when it comes to sleep time, averaging about nine hours a night, possibly because schools there usually start later.[ad]
Regardless of where they live, most teens follow a pattern of sleeping less during the week and sleeping in on the weekends to compensate. But many accumulate such a backlog of sleep debt that they don’t sufficiently recover on the weekend and still wake up fatigued when Monday comes around.[ae]
Moreover, the shifting sleep patterns on the weekend — late nights with friends, followed by late mornings in bed — are out of sync with their weekday rhythm. Carskadon refers to this as “social jet lag.”[af]
“Every day we teach our internal circadian timing system what time it is — is it day or night? — and if that message is substantially different every day, then the clock isn’t able to set things appropriately in motion,” she said. “In the last few years, we have learned there is a master clock in the brain, but there are other clocks in other organs, like liver or kidneys or lungs, so the master clock is the coxswain, trying to get everybody to work together to improve efficiency and health. So if the coxswain is changing the pace, all the crew become disorganized and don’t function well.”[ag]
This disrupted rhythm, as well as the shortage of sleep, can have far-reaching effects on adolescent health and well-being, she said.[ah]
“It certainly plays into learning and memory. It plays into appetite and metabolism and weight gain. It plays into mood and emotion, which are already heightened at that age. It also plays into risk behaviors — taking risks while driving, taking risks with substances, taking risks maybe with sexual activity. So the more we look outside, the more we’re learning about the core role that sleep plays,” Carskadon said.[ai]
Many studies show students who sleep less suffer academically, as chronic sleep loss impairs the ability to remember, concentrate, think abstractly and solve problems. In one of many studies on sleep and academic performance, Carskadon and her colleagues surveyed 3,000 high school students and found that those with higher grades reported sleeping more, going to bed earlier on school nights and sleeping in less on weekends than students who had lower grades.[aj]
Sleep is believed to reinforce learning and memory, with studies showing that people perform better on mental tasks when they are well-rested. “We hypothesize that when teens sleep, the brain is going through processes of consolidation — learning of experiences or making memories,” Yuan said. “It’s like your brain is filtering itself — consolidating the important things and filtering out those unimportant things.” When the brain is deprived of that opportunity, cognitive function suffers, along with the capacity to learn.[ak]
“It impacts academic performance. It’s harder to take tests and answer questions if you are sleep-deprived,” she said.[al]
That’s why cramming, at the expense of sleep, is counterproductive, said Pelayo, who advises students: Don’t lose sleep to study, or you’ll lose out in the end.[am]
The panic attackChloe Mauvais, 16, hit her breaking point at the end of a very challenging sophomore year when she reached “the depths of frustration and anxiety.” After months of late nights spent studying to keep up with academic demands, she suffered a panic attack one evening at home.[an]
“I sat in the living room in our house on the ground, crying and having horrible breathing problems,” said the senior at Menlo-Atherton High School. “It was so scary. I think it was from the accumulated stress, the fear over my grades, the lack of sleep and the crushing sense of responsibility. High school is a very hard place to be.”[ao]
We hypothesize that when teens sleep, the brain is going through processes of consolidation — learning of experiences or making memories. It’s like your brain is filtering itself.
Where she once had good sleep habits, she had drifted into an unhealthy pattern of staying up late, sometimes until 3 a.m., researching and writing papers for her AP European history class and prepping for tests.[ap]
“I have difficulty remembering events of that year, and I think it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep,” she said. “The lack of sleep rendered me emotionally useless. I couldn’t address the stress because I had no coherent thoughts. I couldn’t step back and have perspective. … You could probably talk to any teen and find they reach their breaking point. You’ve pushed yourself so much and not slept enough and you just lose it.”[aq]
The experience was a kind of wake-up call, as she recognized the need to return to a more balanced life and a better sleep pattern, she said. But for some teens, this toxic mix of sleep deprivation, stress and anxiety, together with other external pressures, can tip their thinking toward dire solutions.[ar]
Research has shown that sleep problems among adolescents are a major risk factor for suicidal thoughts and death by suicide, which ranks as the third-leading cause of fatalities among 15- to 24-year-olds. And this link between sleep and suicidal thoughts remains strong, independent of whether the teen is depressed or has drug and alcohol issues, according to some studies.[as]
“Sleep, especially deep sleep, is like a balm for the brain,” said Shashank Joshi, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. “The better your sleep, the more clearly you can think while awake, and it may enable you to seek help when a problem arises. You have your faculties with you. You may think, ‘I have 16 things to do, but I know where to start.’ Sleep deprivation can make it hard to remember what you need to do for your busy teen life. It takes away the support, the infrastructure.”[at]
Sleep is believed to help regulate emotions, and its deprivation is an underlying component of many mood disorders, such as anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder. For students who are prone to these disorders, better sleep can help serve as a buffer and help prevent a downhill slide, Joshi said.[au]
Rebecca Bernert, PhD, who directs the Suicide Prevention Research Lab at Stanford, said sleep may affect the way in which teens process emotions. Her work with civilians and military veterans indicates that lack of sleep can make people more receptive to negative emotional information, which they might shrug off if they were fully rested, she said.[av]
“Based on prior research, we have theorized that sleep disturbances may result in difficulty regulating emotional information, and this may lower the threshold for suicidal behaviors among at-risk individuals,” said Bernert, an instructor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Now she’s studying whether a brief nondrug treatment for insomnia reduces depression and risk for suicide.[aw]
Sleep deprivation also has been shown to lower inhibitions among both adults and teens. In the teen brain, the frontal lobe, which helps restrain impulsivity, isn’t fully developed, so teens are naturally prone to impulsive behavior. “When you throw into the mix sleep deprivation, which can also be disinhibiting, mood problems and the normal impulsivity of adolescence, then you have a potentially dangerous situation,” Joshi said.[ax]
Some schools shiftGiven the health risks associated with sleep problems, school districts around the country have been looking at one issue over which they have some control: when school starts in the morning. The trend was set by the town of Edina, Minnesota, a well-to-do suburb of Minneapolis, which conducted a landmark experiment in student sleep in the late 1990s. It shifted the high school’s start time from 7:20 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. and then asked University of Minnesota researchers to look at the impact of the change. The researchers found some surprising results: Students reported feeling less depressed and less sleepy during the day and more empowered to succeed. There was no comparable improvement in student well-being in surrounding school districts where start times remained the same.[ay]
With these findings in hand, the entire Minneapolis Public School District shifted start times for 57,000 students at all of its schools in 1997 and found similarly positive results. Attendance rates rose, and students reported getting an hour’s more sleep each school night — or a total of five more hours of sleep a week — countering skeptics who argued that the students would respond by just going to bed later.[az]
Other studies have reinforced the link between later start times and positive health benefits. One 2010 study at an independent high school in Rhode Island found that after delaying the start time by just 30 minutes, students slept more and showed significant improvements in alertness and mood. And a 2014 study in two counties in Virginia found that teens were much less likely to be involved in car crashes in a county where start times were later, compared with a county with an earlier start time.[ba]
Bolstered by the evidence, the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2014 issued a strong policy statement encouraging middle and high school districts across the country to start school no earlier than 8:30 a.m. to help preserve the health of the nation’s youth. Some districts have heeded the call, though the decisions have been hugely contentious, as many consider school schedules sacrosanct and cite practical issues, such as bus schedules, as obstacles.[bb]
In Fairfax County, Virginia, it took a decade of debate before the school board voted in 2014 to push back the opening school bell for its 57,000 students. And in Palo Alto, where a recent cluster of suicides has caused much communitywide soul-searching, the district superintendent issued a decision in the spring, over the strenuous objections of some teachers, students and administrators, to eliminate “zero period” for academic classes — an optional period that begins at 7:20 a.m. and is generally offered for advanced studies.[bc]
Certainly, changing school start times is only part of the solution, experts say. More widespread education about sleep and more resources for students are needed. Parents and teachers need to trim back their expectations and minimize pressures that interfere with teen sleep. And there needs to be a cultural shift, including a move to discourage late-night use of electronic devices, to help youngsters gain much-needed rest.[bd]
“At some point, we are going to have to confront this as a society,” Carskadon said. “For the health and well-being of the nation, we should all be taking better care of our sleep, and we certainly should be taking better care of the sleep of our youth.”[be]
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/10/among-teens-sleep-deprivation-an-epidemic.html
[a]Shows real life example of sleep deprivation
[b]Shows impacts of real life sleep deprivation
[c]Sleep deprivation makes learning ineffective
[d]statistics show majority of teens sleep deprived
[e]industrialized nations getting more sleep deprived
[f]sleep deprivation hurts how students perform
[g]Teens have biological tendency to go to sleep later
[h]Sleep time compressed because schools start early
[i]When teens wake up earlier, they do not have time to dream
[j]Research on sleep once done at jerry house in Stanford
[k]Experiment in 70s carried out on children who aged between 10 to 12
[l]Researchers monitored their brainwaves while they slept
[m]Experiment run with same children over multiple summers as they grew older
[n]Teens need the same amount of sleep as young children, contrary to prior belief
[o]Sleep debt= when restricted to only a certain hour of sleep per night, you become progressively tired during the day
[p]Awareness being raised on sleep debt
[q]As teens get older, they are naturally inclined to go to sleep later
[r]shift in the biological system that governs the natural sleep-wake cycle causes teens to sleep later
[s]brain tells people to sleep later
[t]cellphones and other devices serve as a break from the work load
[u]Teens have to stay up late late because they have a lot on their plate
[v]students that use devices a lot have decreased chance of getting a good night's rest
[w]Sleep deprivation made worse with exposure to screens
[x]Real life example
[y]There is a lack of emphasis on the importance of sleep
[z]Teens function better when parents set good bedtimes
[aa]Parents setting good bedtime shows structure within a family
[ab]By the time students finish high school, they are sleeping less
[ac]South Korean students sleep the least, and have high suicide rates
[ad]Australian students get good sleep, as school starts later there
[ae]some try to make up sleep by sleeping on weekends, but not sufficient enough
[af]this type of sleeping interrupts their normal sleeping rhythm
[ag]Disrupted rhythm can hurt rest of the body
[ah]Hurts teens overall
[ai]Sleep deprivation can lead to many other harmful side effects
[aj]Less sleep= bad grades
[ak]More sleep= better mental performance
[al]impacts academic performance
[am]losing sleep to studying is ineffective
[an]real life example of a panic attack
[ao]lack of sleep lead to this
[ap]more studying forced her to sleep less
[aq]had bad memory due to lack of sleep
[ar]wake up call to get more sleep
[as]strong link between lack of sleep and suicide
[at]more sleep helps to work better when awake
[au]sleep regulates emotions
[av]sleep impacts ways teens process emotions
[aw]sleep disturbances= less emotional regulation
[ax]sleep deprevations=lower inhibitions
[ay]schools shifting start times to deal with the problem
[az]shifted start times had positive results
[ba]shifted start times had positive results
[bb]AAP issued policy telling schools to push start times back
[bc]real life examples
[bd]Parents and teachers need to help solve problem
[be]We should take better care of sleep as a society
Develop Possible Solutions: After doing our research, our group shared all of our results with each other, and tried to use the information we were given in order to brainstorm multiple solutions to the problem. Our solutions included:
- Locked phone box
- Earmuffs to not hear phone sounds
- Protocol to teach parents
- Protocol to inform educators on late start times
- A “stupid phone”
- Make a “got sleep” movement
- Phone auto shut off
- Go to sleep
- Create the best bed ever
- Roofies/some amped up nyquil
- Sleep hypnotizing
- Smart keurig
- Sleep pod that deprives senses
- Get in car crash while sleep deprived and learn from your mistakes
- Sleep aromas: Diffuser with certain essential oils that help hormone production and getting to sleep quicker.
- Sleep elixir
- App that pays you to sleep
- Accessible sleep therapy
Select the Most Promising Solution: Our group kept going back and forth our data and our ideas, slowly narrowing down our list by how practical each idea was, and how well we thought each solution would address the problem. After a while, we settled on creating an informational pamphlet that was to be used in order to educate teens and parents on this issue.
Construct a Prototype: Our group used the research we did previously in order to compile our information into our brochure. This was at times slightly difficult, because we wanted to put in as much information as possible into the the brochure, but we had a size constraint on each page of the brochure. A copy of our brochure can be seen below:
Test and Evaluate Prototype: We tested our design by first and foremost editing our pamphlet ourselves and looking for errors both grammatically and statistically. From there, we showed and passed out our brochure to the whole class. The majority of the class found it informative and aesthetically pleasing, so we thought that our prototype was rather good.
Communicate Design: Done in tandem with the passing out of brochures, our group did a presentation on the topic of sleep deprivation and the way our brochure was put together
Redesign: Had our group gotten to this part, we would have made sure to make the brochure even more aesthetically pleasing by adding more colors and pictures. We also probably would have whittled down our presentation, as we made it rather lengthy and at times, boring.
Communicate Design: Done in tandem with the passing out of brochures, our group did a presentation on the topic of sleep deprivation and the way our brochure was put together
Redesign: Had our group gotten to this part, we would have made sure to make the brochure even more aesthetically pleasing by adding more colors and pictures. We also probably would have whittled down our presentation, as we made it rather lengthy and at times, boring.
Reflection
Throughout this project, I thought that I did an excellent job of managing my time. I believe that as an individual, I was rather successful at following the Gantt chart my groups made in order to make sure I was staying on track the whole time. I also tried focusing more on the work I was doing this project (probably connected to the fact that the topic of sleep was very interesting), and wandered less throughout the room while I worked as opposed to other projects. This helped me finish my work in an orderly fashion.
In addition to this, I also thought that I did a great job of getting all of my group members heavily invested in the project. Because each group member had to annotate separate articles, I found it important to encourage quality annotations that would lead to a great final product. I felt that this positive reinforcement helped my group members perform at very high and excellent standards. These standards would later translate to the great success of our brochure prototype.
In terms of improvement, as Mr. Williams puts it, I believe that it is important that I learn how to condense my work. I have found that as I research topics and dive into them deeply, I can have a tendency to stretch projects much further than they should be stretched. For example, our presentation that should have taken us only five minutes got stretched to nearly twenty. This is not the first time that this has happened either, as I have caught myself doing this on several other projects as well. In the future, I believe that I can successfully solve this problem by summarizing important points in order to keep presentations shorter.
In the future, I would also like to improve on my annotations, something that is related to my previously mentioned improvement. I believe that if I am able to do better critical reading, I will be less likely to include pointless information in my presentations. I will do this by limiting the amount of words I use in my annotations, and spending more time finding the greater idea of the article being annotated.
In addition to this, I also thought that I did a great job of getting all of my group members heavily invested in the project. Because each group member had to annotate separate articles, I found it important to encourage quality annotations that would lead to a great final product. I felt that this positive reinforcement helped my group members perform at very high and excellent standards. These standards would later translate to the great success of our brochure prototype.
In terms of improvement, as Mr. Williams puts it, I believe that it is important that I learn how to condense my work. I have found that as I research topics and dive into them deeply, I can have a tendency to stretch projects much further than they should be stretched. For example, our presentation that should have taken us only five minutes got stretched to nearly twenty. This is not the first time that this has happened either, as I have caught myself doing this on several other projects as well. In the future, I believe that I can successfully solve this problem by summarizing important points in order to keep presentations shorter.
In the future, I would also like to improve on my annotations, something that is related to my previously mentioned improvement. I believe that if I am able to do better critical reading, I will be less likely to include pointless information in my presentations. I will do this by limiting the amount of words I use in my annotations, and spending more time finding the greater idea of the article being annotated.