A ninth grader in the class said his method was to roll the tiktok until he nodded. Another teenager said she often fell asleep while chatting with her friends late at night. Not everyone is attending the class discussions that have been held on Fridays recently. Some students fell during a nap at the desk.
Sleep training is no longer only for newborns. Some schools are deceiving themselves and teaching teenagers how to have a good night’s sleep.
“It sounds strange to say that high school kids have to learn sleep skills,” said Tony Davis, a health teacher in Mansfield. “But you’re shocked how many are just not sure how to sleep.” ”
Teenagers burning midnight oil are nothing new. Teens are biologically programmed to stay up late in later circadian rhythms as puberty changes. But research shows that teenagers are losing sleep more than ever, and experts believe it may play a role in youth mental health crisis and other issues that plague schools, including behavior and attendance issues. Stanford Graduate School of Education. The Pope has conducted more than a decade of investigations into high school students and led parental curriculum for the importance of juvenile sleep in schools across California. “Sleep is directly related to mental health. There will be no one who argues with it.”
How much sleep do teenagers need? Teens need eight to 10 hours of sleep every night to make their dysplasia brain and body. However, nearly 80% of teenagers have a smaller rate of return, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has tracked a steady decline in teenage sleep since 2007. Today, most teens sleep on average 6 hours.
Research increasingly demonstrates the close connection between sleep and emotional, mental health and self-harm. As sleep decreases, depression, anxiety and suicide increases thoughts and behaviors. Several studies have also shown that lack of sleep and sports injuries and athletic performance, driving accidents in adolescents, and dangerous sexual behavior and substance use, are partly due to impaired judgment when the brain is drowsy.
Over the years, sleep experts have been shocked by the adolescent sleep crisis, and American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others have also joined. As a result, some school districts have moved to later start times. Two states (California and Florida) passed laws requiring high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., and simply telling teenagers to get up early and go to bed is not always effective, because any parent can prove it: they need to convince them.
That’s why the City of Mansfield School with 3,000 students in north-central Ohio is performing what’s called a “sleep intervention.”
High schools in the area are driving a new course, “Get a good night’s sleep to get better”, hoping to improve academic success and reduce chronic absences, when students missed over 10% of the school year. Attendance coordinator for the district, Kari Cawrse, said students who lacked a large number of classes fell from 44% in 2021, but remained at 32%, said Kari Cawrse, attendance coordinator for the district. The survey of parents and students highlights the common problems of sleep, and the cycle of a stubborn child going to bed, unable to sleep, missed the school bus and stayed at home.
Students in Davis’ classroom shared insights on why it’s hard to get a good night’s sleep. A survey of 90 students in five Davis classes found that more than 60% use their phones as an alarm clock. More than 50% of people fall asleep while looking at their phones. Experts have urged parents to take their phones out of their bedrooms at night for years, but national surveys show that most teenagers can keep their phones in barriers – many are asleep.
In the six-part course, students are asked to keep their daily sleep log for six weeks and evaluate their mood and energy levels.
Freshman Nathan Baker thought he knew how to fall asleep but realized he was wrong. Before bed means settling down with your phone, watching videos on YouTube or Snapchat Pospight, and often staying up late at midnight. Good night, he slept for five hours. He would feel so exhausted at noon that he would come home and sleep for a few hours without realizing it would ruin his nighttime sleep.
“The bad habits must have started in middle school, and all the stress and drama began,” Baker said, accepting the skills he learned in his sleep class and was surprised by the results. Now his sleep habits start around 7 or 8 pm: he lets his phone go to the evening and avoids snacks at night, which can damage the body’s circadian rhythm. He tried to sleep regularly, at 10 p.m., making sure to close the curtains and turn off the TV. He likes to listen to music to fall asleep, but moves from his previous playlists to stereo instead of the playlists on his phone, calming R&B or jazz.
“I feel much better. I have a smile on my face,” Baker said, who now sleeps seven hours a night on average. “Life has become easier.”
There are scientific reasons. Research on MRI scans shows that when sleep deficit and function are not at the same time, the brain is under stress. The extra cortex has less activity, which regulates emotions, decision-making, focus and impulse control, and performs more activity in the brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, thus dealing with fear, anger, and anxiety.
Parents and teenagers themselves often don’t know the signs of sleep deprivation and attribute it to typical adolescent behaviors: irritability, grumpy temper, emotionally vulnerable, unmotivated, impulsive, or generally negative.
Think about young children, they lose their temper when they miss a nap.
“Teenagers also have collapses because they are tired. But they do it in a more age-appropriate way,” said Kyla Wahlstrom, an adolescence sleep expert at the University of Minnesota, who has looked at the benefits of delayed enrollment for decades of delayed school sleep. Wahlstrom has developed free sleep classes used by Mansfield and several Minnesota schools.
Not only does social media blame social media for being accused of exacerbating the teenage mental health crisis, but many experts say the national dialogue ignores the key role of sleep.
“The evidence of linkage is much higher and more causal than evidence of social media and mental health compared to evidence of social media and mental health, and is more causal than evidence of social media and mental health,” said Andrew Fuligni, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles and co-director of the UCLA Development Youth Center.
Nearly 70% of Davis’ Mansfield students say they often feel sleepy or exhausted during school. But technology is not the only reason. Today’s students are over-scheduled, overworked and stressed, especially when they are close to seniors and college applications.
Mansfield senior Chase Cole is taking three senior arrangements and honors classes, and he is working to play football at college. He competes in three different football leagues and usually practices until 7pm when he needs a nap when he gets home. Cole wakes up for supper and dives into homework for at least three hours. He allowed five minutes of phone calls to play on homework and TV before going to bed on homework and TV until around 1 a.m.
“I absolutely need to go to bed again at night,” said Cole, 17.
Amelia Raphael, 15, said there wasn’t enough time to fall asleep in the day. Raphael, who calls himself a “super grade”, is taking on physics, honors chemistry, algebra and trigonometry and has taken online college courses. Her goal is to complete her associate degree in high school she graduated.
“I don’t want to pay for college. It’s a lot of money,” Raphael said.
She knew she had over-arranged. Raphael said: “But if you don’t do that, it’s preparing yourself for failure.
