Happy Monday and welcome to your mental Health mini. This week's guests are Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright, and we are talking sleep. Looking at the research on sleep and sleep deprivation, the more it became clear that teenagers are the ones that are suffering the most. They suffer far worse sleep deprivation than any other population on the planet and anyone ever in human history.
Teenagers. Have a natural shift in their body clock, meaning their melatonin and other sleepiness hormones released later in the evening. But of course, because the body is not ready to go to sleep until a little bit later, but it needs to sleep a little bit later. And then we have increased homework, ballooning homework for some students, increased activities. Some kids pile on activities just to show up well on their college, you know, applications.
So this is pushing bedtime later and later. All these activities, all this homework, this natural shift in the biological cock. Then you add technology to that 6 Bedtime is getting later, and later and later and later and then on the other side of the night. Most high schools in our country start too early, making it just mathematically impossible to get even close to the sort of baseline amount of sleep that teenagers can get by with.
We would love to see teenagers sleep between 9:00 and 10:00 hours. We say 8 is adequate, and that's because under 8 hours a night, you start to see correlation with a lot of negative effects. So the risk of depression goes up, anxiety, the body goes into a stress response when you're low on sleep. But the average high schooler
gets about 6 hours a night. So we're talking about two to three hours chronically of sleep deprivation throughout the course of the week, piling up to 12 hours by the end of the week. And that level of sleep loss, I mean, there's so many things that it does. 1 is that while you're awake, your brain releases a lot of byproducts of activity. So that's like waste or toxic buildup in your brain.
And then when you fall asleep, this kind of cleaning mechanism gets turned on and it starts to wash that waste away throughout the time that you're asleep. So when you don't sleep enough, essentially you've got waste build up in your brain that is not properly, you know, cleansed out. And that kind of makes sense, right? When you think about how you feel when you are sleep deprived, you feel almost still sick, right? So imagine that in a chronic way.
Over the course of the week, kids who sleep 6 hours a night are twice as likely to have symptoms of depression. It really changes the lens that you see the world through. So you're more likely to have a negative assumption about, you know, somebody does something. You're more likely to interpret it in a negative way, and you're more likely to feel hopeless about the future and just not feeling like the creative juice of I can solve this problem. I can do this.
The ties to mental health are just there are so many. Sleep also helps with processing emotions through dreams. When we dream, our brains consolidate date positive memories and sort of dampen down more negative memories. And when teenagers have to wake up, you know, hours before their bodies want to wake up, the sleep a most miss out on is
dream sleep. So they're missing out on this really important emotional processing, filtering things out, organizing how memories are formed and how memories are stored, so we forget things more easily. And the most common sleep issue for teenagers definitely is difficulty falling asleep. And that's partly because what Julie said about the shifted biological clock. So the main thing that we get teens to do is wake up at the same time on the weekends. Don't sleep in more than one
hour. That's ideal if you are so sleep deprived that you have to sleep in two hours. Do that for one day during the weekend, but not 2. And then go outside, even through the clouds on a cloudy day, the sun is 1000 times more powerful than your indoor lights. Sunlight presses go on the internal clock, so it's a timing queue that tells your brain, OK, the day has started now get ready for the night to come. So get 5 to 10 minutes of sun, even if it's cloudy.
It's really intense sun and I think those two pieces of advice for teenagers are sometimes and the and the cut off of caffeine. The half life of caffeine is way longer than most people think. So if you're really having trouble falling asleep, the waking up within an hour of your morning wake up time, 5 to 10 minutes of sun and 2:00 PM cut off for for caffeine is going to
do a lot. I think if you just really trust your body and believe in your body and brain and know how capable they are of helping you sleep well and knowing how much sleep you need, that's a really great way to sort of think about it. Not like, oh, I have to do this, but my body wants to do it and it can. And I just need to clear the way a little bit so that my body can get the sleep it needs. And like, I think even just after a few nights of good sleep, the difference is so
profound. You're more efficient and you can study, you can remember better. You know, all that procrastinating and taking really long time to do things really improves when you sleep well, you feel like your skin looks better, you relationships improve because you're not as short tempered and you see people in a more positive way and you want to be around
people. So all the things that teenagers are staying up late trying to achieve, they can actually achieve better and more efficiently if they sleep well. And just give yourself that gift of feeling that way. If you enjoyed this week's Mental Health Mini, you can listen to the full episode. It is episode 104 featuring authors Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright. A link to the full episode is in the show notes.
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