The Results Are In: You Should Really Get Some Rest
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December 3, 2024
Lily Sharkey
12th Grade
Dominican Academy
Why do we sleep? Some evolutionary scientists theorize that sleep is for human safety. It also has restorative effects such as repairing brain tissue and supporting muscle growth. Sleep also plays a key role in memory consolidation, a purpose most relevant to the demographic who gets the least sleep.
While sleep disorders typically lead to dysfunctional sleep, pubertal development and school progression play a prominent role in total sleep time. Sleep deprivation impacts memory and learning, academic performance, mood states, and real versus perceived efforts. Researchers attempt to quantify the impact of sleep on these variables; across adolescents and young adults, the results posit sleep as positively correlated with increased performance.
Teens reportedly enjoy staying up later while simultaneously desiring more sleep. As humans develop, several external factors impact the quantity and quality of sleep—compared to preadolescents, adolescents have earlier school start times leading to earlier rise times while also having later bedtimes because of increased schoolwork, jobs, and extracurriculars.
Studies have shown that parents are less likely to set bedtimes for adolescents than preadolescents. In a sample of 3,120 high school students from four public high schools in three Rhode Island school districts, only 5.1% of participants indicated they had a parent-prescribed bedtime (Wolfson & Carksadon). As adolescents age, they reportedly obtain less sleep. Across ages 13-19, self-reported total sleep times (on both school and weekend nights) decrease by around 40-50 minutes as a result of later bedtimes and constant rise times (Wolfson & Carksadon). Sleep deprivation does not end with adolescence, as young adult college students often purposely deprive themselves of sleep, especially around examination times (Pilcher & Walters).
Decreased total sleep time can not be entirely blamed on parents and school, however. Research suggests that there are biological factors that impact total sleep time. While sleep need has been proven to stay constant throughout adolescence, the timing of that sleep does change. During puberty, adolescents experience circadian phase delay, and consequently, adolescents’ weekend sleep patterns have later onset and offset times compared to weeknights. One study shows that circadian phase delay correlates with maturation stage, and another study demonstrates a phase delay during puberty as a result of biological factors, proving that adolescents are inclined to sleep later for reasons not influenced by psychosocial factors. Adolescents naturally desire to go to sleep and rise later, but in conjunction with external factors that require them to rise earlier, they are unable to get the appropriate amount of sleep (Wolfson & Carksadon).
Sample distributions of sleep patterns
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Sleep deprivation has an impact on many facets of life for adolescents and young adults. Wolfson and Carskadon conducted a study measuring daytime function in high school students with adequate sleep habits and less than adequate sleep habits. Tracking academic performance, daytime sleepiness, behavior problems, and depressive mood, the researchers found that students with higher grades reported longer and more regular sleep. Students who obtained less than 6.75 hours of sleep on a school night or experienced greater than two hours of weekend bedtime delay reported increased daytime sleepiness, depressive mood, and sleep/wake behavior problems compared to students with more than 8.25 hours of sleep or less than one hour of weekend bedtime delay (Wolfson & Carksadon).
Pilcher and Walters observed similar results in 44 college students across five psychology classes. In the experimental study, participants completed either 24 hours of sleep deprivation or eight hours of sleep. Following, they filled out the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, a survey that emulated normal testing conditions for college students. While sleep deprived students performed considerably worse than non-deprived students on the cognitive task, they rated their concentration, effort, and estimated performance higher than non-deprived students. The implication of this is that students do not understand the full ramifications of sleep deprivation on the ability to finish cognitive tasks (Pilcher & Walters).
Particinapts in a motor sequence finger-tapping task show sleep-dependent improvement, correlated with late-night stage two non-REM sleep.
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Sleep is not only essential for optimal concentration and effort, but is also linked to memory consolidation. Here, memory consolidation refers to the cellular, molecular, and systems-level changes that occur subconsciously to stabilize and enhance memories. It is hypothesized that memory consolidation processes occur primarily during sleep, particularly during REM, NREM2, and slow-wave sleep (SWS). Three laboratories conducted studies using visual texture discrimination, motor sequence tasks, and motor adaptation tasks to demonstrate how after practicing a task, improvement occurs following a night’s sleep but not during an equivalent time of wakefulness.
The level of improvement corresponds to the number of specific sleep events that occur throughout the night, and sleep deprivation has been shown to interfere with typical overnight improvement.
While these results support the improvement of procedural memory with sleep, the impact of sleep on declarative memory is more mysterious. Some studies hypothesize that large amounts of SWS early in the night support stabilization of declarative memory. When investigating hippocampus dependent spatial memory, researchers observe increased hippocampal activity during SWS in participants who train navigation tasks. While it is still unclear what role SWS plays in declarative memory consolidation, it is likely that sleep also does strengthen declarative memory (Stickgold).
It is easy to say students would be healthier and more driven if they received more sleep, but life places constraints that limit the feasibility of this. External factors such as school, work, and activities interfere with the acquisition of adequate sleep, and coupled with changing biological and psychosocial factors, adolescents and young adults are compelled to sleep later despite having to rise earlier.
It's a difficult problem to solve—perhaps we should sleep on it.
Reference Sources
Pilcher, June J., and Walters, Amy S.” How sleep deprivation affects psychological variables related to college students’ cognitive
performance.” Journal of American College Health, vol. 46, no. 3, 1997, pp. 121-126.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07448489709595597. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.
Stickgold, Robert. “Sleep-dependent memory consolidation.” Nature, vol. 437, no. 7063, 2005, pp. 1272-1278.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04286. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.
Wolfson, Amy R., and Mary A. Carskadon. “Sleep Schedules and Daytime Functioning in Adolescents.” Child Development, vol. 69, no. 4,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1132351?origin=crossref. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.