Is Your Teen Getting Enough Sleep? - 11:17:23, 9.58 PM === When I was growing up, I was not allowed to have sleepovers, and I remember being really upset about it, especially as a teenager when all of my friends were having sleepovers, and I wasn't allowed to stay overnight. I distinctly remember so many conversations where I was trying to convince my parents that it was going to be fine. But no matter how persuasive my argument was, they always came back with the same answer. They would tell me, it isn't so much the sleepover that we're concerned about, it's who you are when you get home from that sleepover. Now, years later, as a mom myself, with years of parenting experience under my belt, I understand exactly what they meant. Because a sleep deprived teenager is a force to be reckoned with. The truth is, teenagers need around 9 1/ 4 hours of sleep every single night. But most teenagers actually only get 6 1 /2 to 7 1 /2 hours of sleep on average. That is quite the deficit. If a teenager is getting two to three hours less sleep every single night than they actually need, that means over the course of a week, they are coming up short 14 to 21 hours of sleep. That is almost an entire day of sleep every single week. I want you to take a second right now and think about what time your teenager normally goes to bed and what time they normally wake up and how much sleep they are getting every single night. How close is it to 9. 25? This is definitely an area at our house that we have a lot of room for improvement. The thing is, sleep is important for everyone, no matter what age they are, but it is especially important for our teenagers. The teen years are a time of huge physical growth for our kids. If you have ever bought pants for a growing teenage boy, you know exactly what I mean. They can grow four inches in a matter of months. It is almost impossible to keep them in pants that fit. But not only are they growing physically, they are also going through a period of rapid brain development and growth. Not only is their brain going through this physical reconstruction process throughout the teen years, but it is also a time when they are learning so much. Sleep is the time when all of this growth and development happens and when everything they are learning gets processed and becomes part of their memory. Teenagers getting enough sleep is not just about being more enjoyable to be around. It is essential to their growth and development. I don't want to get too deep into all of the science about sleep and its importance, but I do want you to know about the negative impact that not getting enough sleep can have on your teenager. The first thing it affects is their physical health and their physical body. Lack of sleep in teenagers is connected with cardiovascular problems, high blood pressure, a reduced immune system, diabetes, and obesity. . It can aggravate skin conditions like acne. It is correlated with a higher risk of sports injuries, an increase in impulsive behavior, and impaired reflexes. In fact, they have shown that driving while sleep deprived is the equivalent of driving under the influence of a significant amount of alcohol. This may explain the astronomical rates for your teen's car insurance. Lack of sleep also impacts your teen's intellectual development and their academic performance. It leads to decreased creativity and problem solving, impaired memory, reduced ability to concentrate, and it slows down the development of their frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain that is responsible for logic, reasoning, emotional regulation, and higher thinking. Along with this, sleep also impacts your teen's mental health. Teens who don't get enough sleep show more aggression, have more mood swings, have a higher likelihood of developing depression and anxiety, And are at a higher risk of self harm and suicide. So if we know all of this information about how lack of sleep impacts our teenagers, why is this such a problem? Why are we not making sure that they get enough sleep and what can we do to help them get more sleep? There are a lot of factors that come into play here, but I want to talk to you about three of the main things that are impacting our teens ability to get enough sleep and what we can do about it. The first one has to do with biology. It's actually completely out of our control. Part of your teen's development is that their sleep wake cycle starts to change. When our kids are younger, they have what we call a Lark sleep cycle, which means they wake up early, they go to bed early, but as our teens get. older and get into those teen years, they start to move more toward an owl sleep cycle, which means they go to bed late and they wake up late. Now, this doesn't just happen because culturally we expect them to stay up later or because they're more interested in staying up later. It's actually biologically wired. Teenagers bodies release melatonin, which is the chemical that helps us go to sleep, about two hours later than in a child or an adult. This means that they don't get tired until about two hours later than a child or adult would. And that melatonin stays in their system for two hours longer in the morning, which makes it very difficult for them to wake up. And they are usually very groggy. So if you have a hard time waking your teenager up, it's not because they're grumpy. It's because they still have so much melatonin in their system that it's hard for them to wake up. It's like if someone were to wake you up at two or three in the morning, you would be pretty groggy. You would have a hard time waking up. And that's exactly what's happening for our teenagers. So what do we do about this? It really is a huge challenge because our teens have to wake up in the morning to get to school on time. And most schools start before that melatonin is out of their system. Based on the sleep research that has been done, there is a movement toward having schools start later as our kids get older to really reconcile this conflict. And you can definitely advocate for a later school start time in your area if you think that would be helpful. But since that is not entirely in our control, I want to make sure and give you a couple of things that you can do right now in your home with your teen that will make a difference with this. The first thing is that we need to make sure we are creating a sleep schedule together with our teen intentionally and not just letting them kind of fly by the seat of their pants on when they feel like going to bed and when they feel like waking up. The more consistent that sleep schedule is, the better their body will adjust to it. So as you think through that schedule, you want to make sure that there's never more than a two hour difference in their sleep and wake times. That means the time they wake up throughout the week needs to be within two hours of the time they wake up. on the weekends. And so that's going to take some careful consideration and thinking through it so that you can create a schedule that will get their body in a routine that will work for them. The other thing you can do is first thing in the morning, make sure your teen either goes outside or sits near a sunny window. That means you could eat breakfast outside or near a window. But you just want to get them into the sunlight. as soon as you possibly can, because that starts to activate their wake cycle. The next big challenge that is facing our teens and their ability to sleep is screens. And I know that you know this problem well. The light from screens interferes with our sleep rhythms, but there's a lot more to it than just that. The addictive nature of onscreen activities also makes it easy for our teens to lose track of time, especially at night when they're tired. More than that, 89 percent of teenagers keep their phone in their bedroom at night. You know, if you've been around for a while, that that is a hard and fast rule at our house. We do not allow phones in bedrooms. And this is one of the primary reasons why. When teenagers have screens in their bedrooms, they are more likely to stay up later on those screens, whether it be a phone, whether it be a laptop, whether it be a TV, and that means they are being exposed to that blue light that interferes with their sleep rhythms. Even later into the night, in general, they've found that boys tend to stay up later playing games and girls tend to stay up later texting. A study done by the JFK Medical Center in New Jersey found that one in five teens interrupt their sleep to text in the middle of the night. That means after they have gone to sleep, they are waking up to send text messages and reply to text messages. As part of this study, they watched a group of teens who all had sleep issues and every one of the teens in the study was awakened by a text message at least once a night after they had gone to sleep. And those messages came anywhere from 10 minutes after they had gone to sleep to 4 hours after they had gone to sleep. Talk about interrupting sleep. This is a huge problem. I'm sure you're not going to be surprised when I tell you that the solution to this problem is to make sure you get all the screens out of your kids bedrooms. Buy them an alarm clock. Don't let them charge their phone in their bedroom. Don't have TVs in their bedrooms. Don't have computers in their bedrooms. The other thing you can do is make sure that your teen turns off all screens at least an hour before they go to bed. This will help to minimize the impact of that blue light on their sleep rhythms. The last thing that I want to talk about that's having a huge impact on our teen's ability to get enough sleep at night is their busy schedules and stress. When your teen wakes up early to get to school on time and then comes home to a full schedule of extracurricular activities and sports, then they also have to find a way to fit in time with friends, time to do their homework, time to relax, and of course they are not getting to bed early. This is a huge part of the problem with our teens being able to get enough sleep. There just are not enough hours in the day to do all the things that are expected of them. And that is really stressful, which also negatively impacts our ability to sleep. The solution to this problem is not easy. But it is something that we need to think about and really be intentional about as parents. We need to make sure we are not overscheduling our teens and not allowing them to overschedule themselves. Make sure your teen understands the importance of sleep. Help them manage their workload and make sure that they have time to get to all the important things. Make sure you leave room for downtime and time with their friends because those things are important to your teen and they're going to make time for those things whether you schedule them in or not. You also need to teach your teen healthy ways to manage their stress so that it doesn't interfere with their sleep and one of the most important things you can do is stay calm yourself. Whatever you do, do not argue or fight with your teen at night right before they need to go to bed. This is not the time to get on their case for not having planned their time better or not having their homework done already. That will just add more stress and make it even harder for them to get a good night's sleep. Along with this, there is actually a scientifically proven best way to prioritize different types of homework at different times of the day to optimize learning based on sleep patterns. And that is something I have a mini class on inside of my Enjoy coaching community. So if that's something you're interested in helping your teen to learn so that they can maximize learning in less time during the day and make the most of the time they do have, you definitely want to check that class out. I hope this episode has been really helpful for you and helped you understand really why sleep is so important for your teen and what you can do to help them get the amount of sleep that they need. There are a lot of factors working against us, making this a really challenging thing to do. But I want to encourage you not to get discouraged if you can't figure out a way for your team to get 9. 25 hours of sleep a night. Just take one small step toward helping them get more sleep than they're getting right now. Every little bit counts. Every little bit makes a difference. So take one thing that you can implement and do it today. If you want to learn more about teens and sleep, or how to help your teen learn healthy ways to manage stress, or if you are interested in helping your teen create a study schedule that will optimize their learning so they can learn more in less time, or if you need help figuring out how to stay calm so that you don't fight with your teen and end up interfering with their sleep: I want to invite you to join me inside of the Enjoy community, where we cover all these things and so much more.
