High School Students Need More Sleep

Recent studies suggest that teen-agers need nine or more hours of sleep nightly and that students earning A’s and B’s generally are getting to bed earlier than those who get lower grades.

How much sleep a teen-ager gets at night is a key and physiological ingredient to academic success, says Max Hirshkowitz, director of the Houston VA Medical Center’s sleep center.

Medical experts and educators long have urged teens and their parents to ensure that youth get a good night’s rest. But recent studies show that sleep is more than just a good idea.

There are really two issues:

• One is intellectual performance—cognition and the ability for the brain to maintain focus on fixed attention. They are impaired by sleep deprivation. You put those together, and kids can’t stay focused long enough to learn something. If you’re sleep-deprived, it’s hard to concentrate.
• The other thing is emotional, behavioral. There’s a decline in mood, and even depression. There can be irritability and outbursts. This is essentially the inability to cope.

When adults become sleep-deprived, they want to go to sleep. But with kids, it’s a matter of impulse control. The article speculates that some kids are diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and they may really sleep-deprived.

Studies conducted by the nation’s top sleep researchers suggest that, on average, high schoolers sleep a little more than seven hours per night—typically, they hit the sack about 11 p.m. and wake around 6:15 a.m.

That’s a big part of the problem, experts say.

They say the biological wiring of teens demands nine hours and 15 minutes of sleep every night—perhaps because most growth hormones are released during sleep.

Complicating the matter further are two things:

• teens are physiologically programmed to stay up later at night and wake later in the morning than younger children.
• high schools throughout the nation begin classes as early as 7:30 a.m.

So today’s busy teen-agers may be going to bed too late and waking too early—two to three hours before their brains, which think it’s still nighttime, are ready for real intellectual exercise.

“Kids have a lot to do,” Hirshkowitz said. “I think it’s just symptomatic of the times. They have their studies, and they have their extracurricular activities, and then they have their social lives. A lot of kids are up late sitting in front of their computer display terminals. The way they make room for all of these competing things is to curtail their sleep.”

Nonetheless, for many teens, that alarm clock blares bright and early every school day.

Some schools, persuaded by researchers, have embraced an obvious solution—starting high school classes later in the morning.

A few years ago, two Minnesota school districts, supported by the medical community there, pushed back high school start times by nearly an hour, to 8:30 a.m. Although comprehensive results of the change aren’t expected to be released until sometime next month, early data indicate Minnesota students are performing better academically. National studies suggest the same correlation—that the better students generally get to bed earlier than other students.

Schools are often unaware that the need for teen-agers to sleep in is real. School schedules are set up in the absence of this understanding. The perception has always been that teen-agers are just lazy and that there’s no reason they can’t get up in the morning. But now we know there are physiological reasons teen-agers don’t want to get up at 6 a.m.