Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright, authors of Generation Sleepless: Why Tweens and Teens Aren’t Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them, penned a recent opinion article in The Washington Post. They argue that while experts are sounding the alarm about teen mental health – with more than 1 in 3 high schoolers saying they’ve felt persistent sadness or hopelessness – we’re ignoring the elephant in the room. “A major culprit is hiding in plain sight,” Turgeon and Wright argue, adding, “this generation of teens is the most sleep-deprived population in human history. No group has ever slept as little as the modern adolescent.”

While 70% of young children and 65% of adults get enough sleep, only 15% of high school seniors do. Teens need nine hours of sleep per night but get only six and a half on average. And one in five teens gets less than five hours a night.

And since research shows sleep deprivation has been widely linked to poor mental health – particularly depression and self-harm – the authors pointedly ask, “How could we expect this level of sleep deprivation not to deepen the cracks in adolescents’ mental health?”

Brain studies have shown that “sleep deprivation amps up the reactive, negative emotional centers of the brain, while the prefrontal cortex — which soothes and gives us perspective, judgment and emotional regulation — is less active.”

Why are teens sleeping so little? A combination of too-early school start times, mountains of activities, and up to four hours of homework a night doom teens to chronic sleep debt. The authors explain it this way: “Imagine an experiment in which researchers forced subjects to wake up three hours before their natural rise time, then asked them to perform complex cognitive tasks, for five days straight. That’s a description of the average teen’s school week.” More is being asked of young people than is physically healthy.

Add the addictiveness of smartphones and social media, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

What can be done? Quite a bit, they argue. Schools should start later and give less homework since studies show it’s counterproductive after an hour anyway. College admissions offices could rein in the impossible expectations. Social media companies can be held accountable for the addictiveness of their products. But in the meantime, parents can step in, setting “devices-off hours and reasonable bedtimes.” Research shows that doing so leads to positive mental health outcomes: “In a study of more than 15,000 middle- and high-schoolers, those with bedtimes of 10 p.m. or earlier were 24 percent less likely to suffer from depression and 20 percent less likely to have suicidal ideation than those with bedtimes of midnight or later.”

Sleep is a fixable problem, the authors argue. Addressing chronic sleep deprivation in teens is an important first step to health, which will draw what is truly troubling them into clear focus.

Read the full article here.

Turgeon, Heather and Wright, Julie. “We’re ignoring a major culprit behind the teen mental health crisis.” The Washington Post, 20 May 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/20/teen-mental-health-crisis-culprit-lack-of-sleep/