Earlier bedtime can improve adolescents’ sleep duration
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- Adolescents increased their time asleep by 41 minutes for each additional hour in bed from an earlier bedtime.
- Findings show adolescents can fall asleep earlier despite circadian phase delay.
Adolescents can overcome circadian phase delay and boost their sleep duration with an earlier bedtime, according to a study published in Pediatrics.
“As kids mature through adolescence, their rise time is held pretty much constant or maybe even just a little earlier due to when school starts, but their sleep duration decreases, and that decrease is associated with their bedtime becoming later,” Ian G. Campbell, PhD, a researcher in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Davis, and co-author of the study, told Healio.
The idea for the latest study of adolescent sleep came from experiences in previous longitudinal studies, Campbell said.
“We were giving talks to local high school and junior high parent groups about what we were interested in and what this was telling us about brain maturation,” Campbell said. “And they wanted to know, ‘Well, OK, fine, but how much sleep does my kid need?’ We couldn’t answer that from that previous study, and so we designed a study to look at how sleep need changes across adolescence.”
Campbell and colleagues analyzed the experiences of two cohorts: They studied a younger cohort of 77 participants aged 9.9 to 16.2 years annually for 3 years, and an older cohort of 67 participants aged 15 to 20.6 years once.
“We had patients keep their habitual rise time, and we required their rise time to be between 6 and 8 a.m., and we altered their time in bed by changing their bedtime,” Campbell said.
Ultimately, the authors found that adolescents can increase their time asleep by 41.5 minutes (standard error [SE], 0.7) for each additional hour in bed with an earlier bedtime, and that average sleep duration increased by more than an hour as the time in bed increased, from 402.8 (SE, 1.6) minutes with 7 hours to 470.6 (SE, 2.1) minutes with 8.5 hours to 527.5 (SE, 3) minutes with 10 hours.
Additionally, although sleep duration decreased with age by approximately 1.5 minutes per year, the ability to increase sleep duration by adopting an earlier bedtime remained constant, according to the study.
“These results were unsurprising to us, but I think other people will find them surprising because of this idea that a circadian phase delay that occurs during adolescence prevents kids from going to sleep earlier,” Campbell said. “We found out it’s not really preventing them from going to sleep. If you put them in bed, they can go to sleep earlier.”
Campbell said that further investigations are underway on related topics.
“The current investigation is continuing to publish papers on how the different sleep schedules affect daytime performance,” Campbell said. “We have multiple daytime performance measures, and we’ll be publishing those over the next year.”
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts