Insufficient Sleep Associated with Risky Teen Behavior

Based on nothing but my own personal experience when I get tired I get cranky and more truthful, so the sole factor could be nothing but more people filling out the survey honestly.

I'm only half joking.

The "I'll sleep when I'm dead" generation.

Yeah seems obvious that kids from rough homes don’t get enough sleep.

It could also be an indication of the lack of parental involvement in their lives.

"Compared to students who reported sleeping eight hours at night, high school students who slept less than six hours were twice as likely to self-report using alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or other drugs, and driving after drinking alcohol. They were also nearly twice as likely to report carrying a weapon or being in a fight. Researchers found the strongest associations were related to mood and self- harm. Those who slept less than six hours were more than three times as likely to consider or attempt suicide, and four times as likely to attempt suicide, resulting in treatment. Only 30 percent of the students in the study reported averaging more than eight hours of sleep on school nights."

Seems like a lot of data mining to create correlations (hence the use of the word "association" a lot). This kind of work can be good for problem finding and hypothesis generation. It's unfortunate that we live in a world where:

- news outlets publish research that is meant to stimulate discussion + hypothesis exploration

- readers are unable, undereducated, and / or disempowered to discern the level of rigorous science examination done

EDIT: The funny thing is that I predict that this HN thread will lead hundreds of folks to tell stories of confirmation bias.

"self reported" Maybe the interpretation could be that less sleep makes people more honest :p

Another way of wording the finding is "students who engage in activities that adults don't approve of found to also go to sleep at a time adults don't approve of."

Well, there's pretty good controlled experimental evidence that lack of sleep causes impulsivity. But obviously causality works the other way too and this study doesn't help us know how much of these effects would go away if, say, high school start times were pushed back and how much would persist which is what we're really interested in.

It could be cortisol. I've been researching the effects of this hormone and it's kind of crazy. It's the hormone that regulates stress, fat deposits, memory and a lot of other things.

Questions like this always pop up, and correlate highly with people who didn't read the article.

I would think that fighting, alochol and other drugs are being consumed by 6 hour sleepers during the two hours that the 8 hour sleepers are... asleep.

There is also the possibility that a third variable contributes to both. Like maybe a stressful family life or living in a city (louder at night, more access to drugs) causes teens to be more likely to use drugs and to sleep less.

The confusion of causation and correlation is often presented as a bug in the human operating system. It’s definitely a mistake here and you are right to point it out. But I sometimes wonder if the bug in the human cognitive process is (not mistaking causation vs correlation) but actually that we attribute greater weight to conclusions presented as science, even when they are bad science. We - rightly - trust the scientific process, more than for example testimony or hearsay. Disreputable scientists hack this heuristic to pass bad science as fact.

Hmmm. As a former grades 8-12 educator, if I were to observe 'risky teen behavior' I'd first want to talk to their parents and to ascertain their (compulsory) school environment.

Adolescents have enough to worry about (which they're good at), and their need for a caring support structure is a paramount concern. Experimentation is natural and healthy for them, within limits.

Have you talked to the teachers? Or helped your kid to create a study schedule?

Take this study with a grain of salt. It only shows that teens who engage in risky behavior are more likely to get less sleep, not that less sleep leads to risky behavior in teens.

There are lots of options to mitigate this.

You can take them out of the accelerated/gifted program and put them back on the "normal" university track in high school.

The big risk is that it will cause your kid to get alienated socially among both the "normal" and the "gifted" kids, so make sure that your kid is involved in the decision-making process.

If your kid has an IEP, you can also talk to the teacher to get accommodations. For example, maybe your kid could quietly work on their homework during their school day, instead of being forced to pay attention to the teacher's lecture.

You can also just tell the kid that they can decide how much homework they want to complete. In high school and university, any un-completed work just gets recorded as a zero; if the kid is already getting 80s and 90s then a few missed or half-complete assignment questions shouldn't materially affect their final grade (provided they understand enough of the main concepts to complete major tests/projects/exams). Having a strategy for deciding what work is safest to drop/defer when you're overwhelmed is a useful skill both in upper education and in the workplace.

Source: Went to a high school in York Region.

I'm sure the teens that use weed or carry guns are not the same ones that get swamped with homework and tests.

The military has a pretty good idea just how long they can keep people awake, and what the best combinations of stimulants are to keep them in warfighting condition. The Wehrmacht in WW2 used an awful lot of amphetamines, and dexedrine has been in common usage for a long time as well.

Funny story, insufficient sleep looks a lot like adhd: https://www.additudemag.com/symptoms-of-insomnia/

> And the consequences of insufficient sleep on ...

Ahh.. the Copenhagen Interpretation of studies.

This particular study is about teenagers - perhaps because 'risky teen behaviour' is something you're more likely to find in teenagers, or, less churlishly, because risky behaviour in general is something you find much more often in teenagers.

Also compare age-segmented stats for depression, suicides, violence, etc - and they're an obviously higher at-risk demographic.

> Not that any of this is news. That adolescents need more sleep than any other age group, and that they suffer tremendously from being deprived it by adults, has been known for an extremely long time.

This is not true.

Outside of newborns / toddlers, pretty much everyone needs about 8 hours of sleep. Changes as you get (much) older make it more difficult to get the full 8 hours, and adolescents' circadian rhythms means that to the uninformed it seems like they want more / less / longer / lazier etc.

They don't - all the current research indicates they need ~8 hours too, but they don't naturally want to fall asleep until 2-3 hours after the average 25+yo.

> But adults don't care.

This is a breathtaking thing to say.

> The most common resistance to the notion of starting high school later is that it would interfere with football practice, making it a total non-starter.

I'd suggest this courageous hypothesis could at best apply to something less than 5% of the world.