How sleep helps teens deal with social stress

Adequate sleep can help teens navigate challenging social situations

February 25, 2020

Science Daily/Michigan State University

Study found that adequate sleep allowed students to cope with discrimination and challenges associated with ethnic or racial bias. It also helps them problem-solve more effectively and seek peer support when faced with hardships

A new Michigan State University study found that a good night's sleep does adolescents good -- beyond helping them stay awake in class. Adequate sleep can help teens navigate challenging social situations.

The study, which focused on ninth grade students, found that adequate sleep allowed students to cope with discrimination and challenges associated with ethnic or racial bias. It also helps them problem-solve more effectively and seek peer support when faced with hardships.

"Findings of this study have important implications," said Yijie Wang, assistant professor of human development and family studies at MSU. "Understanding how sleep helps adolescents negotiate social challenges may consequently elucidate how promoting sleep may improve adolescent adjustment during high school and beyond."

Published in Child Development, this is the first study to identify the timing in which sleep helps with adolescents cope with stress.

Compared to adults and children, high school students are particularly at risk for insufficient sleep due to early school times, busy schedules and increased social stressors. The transition to high school also introduces more diversity to their social environment and relationships.

Via this study, Wang and co-author Tiffany Yip of Fordham University wanted to pinpoint the effect sleep has on coping with discrimination. They found that if a teen has a good night of sleep, they are able to cope with harsh experiences -- like discrimination -- better.

"This study did not treat sleep as a consequence of discrimination," Wang said. "However, our team did identify the influence of discrimination on same-day sleep in other studies. These studies showed that, on days when adolescents experienced ethnic or racial discrimination, they slept less and also took longer to actually fall asleep."

Participants in the study wore an actigraphy watch, which tracked physical activities in one-minute intervals and determined their sleep-wake state, every day for two weeks. The students were also asked to complete a survey each day before bed, reporting their daytime experiences such as ethnic or racial discrimination, how they responded to stress and their psychological well-being.

A surprising finding in the study was that peers, not parents, were the immediate support that help adolescents cope with discrimination.

"Compared to parents, peers are likely to be witnessing and involved in adolescents' experiences of ethnic or racial discrimination on a daily basis," Wang said. "As such, they're more of an immediate support that backs up adolescents and comforts them when discrimination occurs."

Still, parents have an important role in helping their children cope with both sleep and social situations. Beyond getting the recommended eight hours, the quality of sleep is just as important. That includes having a regular bedtime, limiting media use and providing a quiet, less crowded sleep environment.

While encouraging good sleep habits in adolescents can be a struggle, said Wang that the benefits of a routine help them cope with the challenges of life in high school and beyond.

"The promotive effect of sleep is so consistent," Wang said. "It reduces how much adolescents ruminate, it promotes their problem solving and it also helps them to better seek support from their peers."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200225143511.htm

Teens sleep longer, are more alert for homework when school starts later

Middle and high schoolers felt less sleepy and more engaged in academics

June 7, 2019

Science Daily/American Academy of Sleep Medicine

Preliminary findings from a new study of middle school and high school students suggest that they got more sleep and were less likely to feel too sleepy to do homework after their district changed to later school start times.

In fall 2017, the Cherry Creek School District in Greenwood Village, Colorado, delayed school start times for middle school by 50 minutes (changing from 8 a.m. to 8:50 a.m.) and for high school by 70 minutes (changing from 7:10 a.m. to 8:20 a.m.). Results show that one year after the change, self-reported sleep on school nights was 31 minutes longer among middle school students and 48 minutes longer among high school students.

"Biological changes in the circadian rhythm, or internal clock, during puberty prevents teens from falling asleep early enough to get sufficient sleep when faced with early school start times," said principal investigator Lisa J. Meltzer, Ph.D., an associate professor of pediatrics at National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado. "This study provides additional support that delaying middle and high school start times results in increased sleep duration for adolescents due to later wake times."

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that middle schools and high schools should start at 8:30 a.m. or later to support teen health, alertness and safety. However, a previous data analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only 14% of high schools and 19% of middle schools started at 8:30 a.m. or later.

The study involved more than 15,000 students in grades 6-11 who completed online surveys during school hours before the start time change in spring 2017 (n=15,700) and after the start time change in spring 2018 (n=18,607). The survey included questions asking about weekday and weekend bedtime, wake time and total sleep time; sleepiness during homework; and academic engagement.

The study also found that the percentage of students who reported feeling too sleepy to do their homework declined after the school start time delay from 46% to 35% among middle school students and from 71% to 56% among high school students. Scores on a measure of academic engagement were significantly higher after the start time change for both middle school and high school students.

"The study findings are important because getting enough sleep is critical for adolescent development, physical health, mood, and academic success," said Meltzer.

CCSD Superintendent Dr. Scott Siegfried said that the study supports firsthand feedback he's received from students across the 108-square-mile district.

"I don't know how many of our high school students have come up to me and said, 'This has changed my life for the better.' They've told me they're getting up to an hour of additional sleep before school starts," Siegfried said. "That extra sleep makes a real difference in terms of health and wellness. The input from our students and the numbers from this landmark study point to the same conclusion: The change in our start times has been a positive step and benefited our students' everyday routines."

The research abstract was published recently in an online supplement of the journal Sleep and will be presented Wednesday, June 12, in San Antonio at SLEEP 2019, the 33rd annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC (APSS), which is a joint venture of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

Meltzer is also the senior author of another abstract from this study, "Impact of Changing School Start Times on Teachers/Staff," which found significant benefits of later school start times for middle and high school teachers and school-based staff. They reported increased sleep duration due to later wake times, as well as improvements in daytime functioning.

"This is the first large study to examine the impact of healthy school start times on teachers and staff," said Meltzer. "It is important to consider that this policy change, critical for the health and well-being of students, also impacts other members of the school community."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190607113825.htm

Pace of Brain Development Still Strong in Late Teens

May 10, 2011

Science Daily/Brown University

The brain changes during the teen years, for instance by pruning away connections that no longer seem needed. By measuring the brainwave signals of sleeping teens ages 15-16 and again a few years later, researchers found that the process does not appear to slow as teens approach adulthood.

Boys and girls have put many of the trappings of teenagerhood behind them by the age of 18 or 19, but at least some of the brain resculpting that characterizes the decade of adolescence may still be going as strong as ever, according to findings in a new study that measured brainwaves of subjects in their midteens and again in their late teens.

"The unique feature of this study is that it puts together these EEG measures of power and looks at these sleep stages longitudinally (in the same people over time) and across several regions around the brain," she said.

Carskadon said that sleep is a convenient time to take long-term, well controlled measurements of neural activity, but that the study does not show the role sleep may play in neural renovation among older teenagers.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110510101621.htm

Teen Sleep Study Adds to Evidence of a 'Neural Fingerprint'

May 2, 2011

Science Daily/Brown University

New research finds that consistent, "signature" brainwave patterns first noticed in short-term studies of adults are so robust that they're also detectable over a matter of years in the notoriously turbulent brains of teens. From there, the question is what such a "neural fingerprint" might mean.

Teens are rarely described as stable, so when something about their rapidly changing brains remains placidly unaltered, neuroscientists take notice. Such is the case in a new study of electroencephalography (EEG) readings gathered from dozens of teens while they slept. Despite the major neural overhaul underway during adolescence, most individuals maintained a unique and consistent pattern of underlying brain oscillations. The work lends a new level of support to the idea, already observed in adults, that people produce a kind of brainwave "fingerprint."

"At the moment it's too soon to tell anything about individual sleep or behavior from this, but it could provide a tool to geneticists," she said. "It is a link between behavior and genes."

With further research, the functional or physiological significance of the patterns could become clearer, Carskadon said. One question would be whether particular influences such as sleep deprivation or alcohol use affect the pattern.

"Knowing this gives us another tool to examine brain function and stability," Carskadon said. "Showing that there are these fingerprints may open up future possibilities in using this kind of analysis in larger samples to look for endophenotypes that might be predictive of someone, say, who might go on to develop schizophrenia or depression."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110426185251.htm