Let Sleeping Teens Lie

Subject: Let Sleeping Teens Lie Tue Aug 12, 2008 7:58 pm

TEENAGERS who get less than eight hours' sleep do not perform as well at memory tasks such as dictation and multistep maths, a new study has found.

A student who got eight to nine hours of sleep could carry out nearly 80 per cent of tasks, compared to less than two-thirds of tasks managed by a student who slept for less than eight hours, the study by Flinders University in South Australia found.

"It is almost as if kids without enough sleep don't have enough memory capacity to store that much information," Flinders' Child and Adolescent Sleep Clinic director Michael Gradisar said.

Sleep experts say many students are not getting enough sleep, which has serious implications for learning. Psychologists Michael Carr-Gregg and Andrew Fuller argue school start times are at odds with teenagers' body clocks and school should start later.

Clinical psychologist David Morawetz said many teenagers' sleep problems stem from changes to their circadian rhythms, or body clock, in their late teens when the sleep hormone melatonin kicks in much later, affecting their ability to fall asleep and also to wake again.

Katie Wood, who is studying for the International Baccalaureate, used to lie awake at night trying to will herself to sleep. She was "getting by" on about four hours a night. As well as worrying about her lack of sleep, she was anxious about her self-imposed 40 hours of study a week, her school musical and her singing exams. "I lost a lot of weight and I got sick with a cold and my eye started to twitch-," she said.

Since attending a sleep program by Dr Morawetz she has cut 10 hours of study from her schedule and stopped doing yoga and studying before bed. She now regularly gets seven hours of solid sleep a night and her grades have not suffered. "It is almost like the more I studied, the less I could take in because my brain was angry with me."

LNK

Let Sleeping Teens Lie

Let Sleeping Teens Lie

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

AnCaps & Psychology, Edumbcation, Even IndoctriNation