How the time change can help teens reset their sleep schedules : NPR

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The change from daylight saving time to winter time provides a respite for those who need more sleep.

Clocks went back an hour Sunday morning and many people may have benefited from an extra hour of sleep. Going forward, this change means darker evenings and brighter mornings — and you’ll be able to take advantage of that morning light to reset your sleep schedule.

This can be especially helpful for teens who are chronically short sleepers. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three out of four high school students don’t get enough sleep.

Dragging groggy teens out of bed in the morning or forcing them off their screens and into bed at night can be frustrating for parents. Sleep doctors say a better understanding of adolescent bedtime biology can help your teen get more sleep.

Sleep behavior and circadian clocks

More than other age groups, adolescents must struggle to stick to a schedule that doesn’t fit their biology.

One reason is our internal 24-hour clock, the circadian clock, which you can think of “as the conductor of many clocks throughout the body,” says Stephanie Crowley, a chronobiologist at Rush University in Chicago.

At the onset of puberty, this orchestra of clocks decides: Hey, I want to stay up really late. This changes again in your late 20s, but for teens it often means they don’t feel sleepy as early on.

Then there is the homeostatic sleep drive, which is the other major biological mechanism that regulates sleep. This doesn’t do teenagers any favors either. The sleep meter records how long you’ve been awake and tells your body when to stop. But this physiological process slows down in adolescents, so they tire more slowly, Crowley explains.

“You can think of it as a pressure cooker,” she says. “So this pressure to start sleeping increases much more slowly in the more mature adolescent.”

School schedules and pressures

Even sleep medicine experts struggle with this aspect of parenting, says Dr. Sanjay Patel, a sleep physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and father of 15-year-old twins.

Patel says he and his wife do their best to help their daughters get quality rest. For example, high school sophomores don’t have their phones in their rooms at night, nor are they allowed to sleep after 8 a.m. on weekends because it can disrupt their weekday schedule.

“I think parents and teenagers just need to get involved and try to highlight how this affects them on a daily basis, because otherwise nothing changes,” he says.

But there’s nothing Patel can do to make her daughters’ school day start at 7:28 a.m., a time that doesn’t align with their biology.

School start times are a big problem, but after school, the demands placed on teens also rob them of their sleep, says Mary Carskadon, a sleep researcher at Brown University. Teenagers’ schedules are filled with extracurricular activities, part-time jobs, and homework.

Carskadon says all of this contributes to widespread lack of sleep. That’s why she gets upset when people disparage teenagers for their mood swings or poor impulse control, because those behaviors are the hallmark of poor sleep.

“I mean, they really blame the victim,” she said.

So that teenagers can rest better, Carskadon recommends that schools start later and give less homework. And she says extracurricular activities should not be allowed to extend late into the evening.

“We need to close the loop,” Carskadon says, noting that public health problems such as teen suicide rates and car accidents could be alleviated if teens got better rest.

Another systemic change desired by Carskadon, Crowley and Patel is the end of daylight saving time and the continuation of standard time throughout the year. This would increase exposure to morning light, which is a key environmental signal that it’s time to wake up, and could help adolescents adjust their circadian clock to an earlier schedule.

Sleep Strategies to Try at Home

Sleep doctors recommend several strategies that parents can use to help teens.

On one hand, remind teens that quality rest allows them to excel in sports or academics, says Dr. Rafael Pelayo, who works with teens at Stanford Medicine’s Sleep Medicine Center.

He also recommends letting them do something they love when they first wake up. For example, if a child is a gamer, turn on the Xbox at 7 a.m. and, he says, tell him: “The earlier you wake up, the more video games you can play. And then you have light in your eyes.”

Don’t send kids to their rooms as punishment, Pelayo says, because it creates a negative association with where they sleep. And parents should model healthy sleep behaviors for their teens, which includes no late-night snacking or doom scrolling.

On weekends, many teenagers make up for their missed rest by sleeping a few hours after waking up during the week. Crowley says this causes a kind of jet lag, because it shifts a teenager’s internal clock by 45 or 50 minutes in just two days.

An hour or so of extra rest is OK, but Crowley agrees with Patel that it’s best to get up around the same time every day, even on Saturdays.

And Crowley’s research found that, unfortunately, long naps can exacerbate the problem, because they weaken the homeostatic sleep drive by causing even later fatigue in adolescents. Crowley recommends limiting naps to 30 minutes.

A big challenge many teens face is that they simply don’t feel tired at night, although Crowley says the recent change to standard time is a chance to move to a better schedule.

Let’s say you usually go to bed at midnight. Maybe tonight, turn out the lights at 11 p.m. Your body will probably still feel like midnight, but you’ll wake up with an extra hour of rest.