YOUR DEVELOPMENTDo teenagers really need more sleep?
Staying up late and lying in the next morning are behavioural
hallmarks of teenage life, but is it laziness or is the adolescent
body-clock set to a different time? Recent research findings appear
to support the latter view. A massive survey of 25,000 people
aged between eight and ninety by Till Roenneberg at the Ludwig
Maximilian University in Munich found that a person’s time of
optimum functioning becomes progressively later in the day through
childhood and adolescence, reaching the latest time at about the age
of twenty, after which it starts getting progressively earlier again.
Meanwhile, Mary Carskadon at the E.P. Bradley Hospital Sleep and
Chronobiology Research Laboratory looked at the brain waves of
teenagers who’d been kept awake for 36 hours, and found that signs
of “sleep pressure” appeared to build up more slowly compared to
children. She told New Scientist magazine that this could account for
why adolescents find it easier to stay up late. Some experts have even
suggested that school lessons should be timetabled to start later so
as to fit in better with the teenage body-clock. In 2009, Monkseaton
High School in Tyneside, England decided to act on these recommen-
dations, with lessons starting at ten in the morning for a five-month
trial period. Preliminary results released in 2010 showed absenteeism
at the school had plummeted during the trial period and grades in
maths and English had improved significantly.
Dog tired. Teenagers may not need to have more sleep – just to get up later
than the rest of us.