Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
It's crazy to me just how terrible school systems are at optimizing for learning. I would get terrible headaches from classrooms that had too many people and too little fresh air. I thought it was just me dreading my lessons, but in reality it was from co2 ppm reaching levels that humans can't properly function in.
We wake up students too early, put them in rooms that kill cognitive performance and then have the audacity to complain when they can't follow along!
Based on what you just said, if we moved school to 10am, you would just stay up until 4am playing StarCraft.
I don't think school is too early. I think you just stayed up too late.
I believe that.
>Is that particularly realistic?
The only issue is that at 5am, there won't be daylight during the winter. Lack of daylight presents safety issues and makes it more difficult to wake up.
My freshman year of high school my school was under construction so I was bussed across town. Which meant I had to wake up close to 5am. I don't remember staying up especially late, but I was perpetually tired. Id sleep on the bus both ways.
In college I had a semester when I had a 5am class. I found it much easier to stay up all night and crash after than to wake up for class.
Perhaps 5am is just a difficult time to wake up.
To be clear, this wasn't just my seminary class- this is the way teens in the seminary program have handled it for years and years, so it may not be the biggest but it's definitely not the smallest sample size available.
Again, YMMV. I openly admit that I'm biased in my thinking because of the anecdata.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181212140741.h...
I just wasn't tired until 2am no matter what.
Did you test this hypothesis at the time with a CO2 monitor? Lack of sleep causes headaches, too.
It appears to me that your judgement is based on prejudice against teenage behaviour rather than evidence.
> Both conclusions are perfectly reasonable, have precedent, and could both be true simultaneously.
This is exactly why I object to the statement "in reality it was from co2 ppm" without evidence from a CO2 monitor.
A co2 monitor confirmed my suspicion. The problem with co2 monitors, is that it's really impractical to pull one out to check. I'm actually in the process of building one myself that instead sends descrete notifications to my phone if the co2 ppm gets too high.
I later confirmed it, by carrying a co2 monitor with me and noticing every time I get that type of headache, it's because the co2 was too high.
The device I'm building will be attacked to my backpack and connected to my phone via bluetooth so it can push notifications descretely, allowing me to get out of a place where the co2 levels will give me a headache, without the social cost of taking out a co2 monitor everywhere you go.
I agree, but... you were staying up until 1-2am playing video games. C'mon.
It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.
Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
This is, at least in my experience, completely untrue. When I play Starcraft, I'll easily play till 2-3 am before I start feeling tired. And I'd continue playing, but I'm literally succumbing to exhaustion at that point.
If I force myself to before that, say midnight, I start feeling tired almost immediately. And if I don't play at all, and don't substitute gaming with some equally stimulating activity, I can easily be tired and ready to sleep by 10 or 11 pm.
Not to mention, in addition to the mental stimulation, the impact of staring at bright blue light on natural melatonin production.
I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.
Babies don't have a clock.
If you do a sport in highschool you basically have to be able to get 4 hours of sleep and deal with it
This leaves you 4-5 hours depending on how long it takes you to get ready. This is more than enough to do homework, though some days definitely sucked more than others. In my opinion it helped develop valuable time management skills.
I don't mind sports, but the way it's placed on a pedestal in the US above all other activities is ridiculous to me. Not keen on homework that takes over after school hours either.
After football season I got out of school at 3.
Also, why the fuck is it "impossible" to socialize with family and neighbors at 6pm? They are probably at work until 5pm anyways. By the time someone is old enough to play football they should already know how to cook.
I started playing football (a different one to what OP meant, I'm guessing), at the age of... 2. Definitely not old enough to cook then.
Good luck convincing most male teenagers that they need to learn to cook for themselves, too. I've only picked up those skills in the last few years, and I'm almost done with university!
News reports claim high school students are assigned 3.5 hours of homework per weeknight.
(e.g. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2014-mar-01-la-ol-too... )
For my part, I still play video games, slept through most of school, got kicked out, taught myself to program at 22, and have been working in the field for 14 years now. I won't take a job with a strict in-time because I know I have a hard time getting to bed early.
I'm not bashing video games, but you have to take some responsibility. School at 10 wouldn't work well for a variety of reasons, even if I wish it were possible.
- My parents wouldn't leave me alone for very long in the evenings, so I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to really concentrate until they were off to bed - My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus.
The first trait was obviously correctable and probably circumstantial, but the second feels far more innate. I just focus better right after the sun goes down, and I'm not really sure why. It's like all the stress from the day melts away, and I get a chance to finally be myself for a few hours. So, I work an evening shift (my work day starts at noon and gets out quite late) and I couldn't be happier for it.
It's a shame that this combination is both common, and regarded as lazy by society at large, because it seems to be quite the opposite. I get my best work done in the evenings, and so do lots of other people. I wish that we were generally more accepting of these traits, because if I hadn't had the good fortune to stumble into a job with such a well-aligned shift, I would still be struggling to sleep properly most nights.
Not saying this isn't your natural predisposition, but FWIW this is pretty much exactly what happens to everyone with a disrupted sleep schedule. Or any disrupted normal cycle, really[1]. Probably the large majority of people have experienced this.
[1]: Fasting is one example- you will be starving by lunch or dinner, but if you wait a few hours longer the hunger will go away pretty much entirely. You may feel sluggish and slow when you're hungry, but once your brain realizes you aren't going to eat you will feel lighter and more energetic. If your body needs to go past its normal cycles, your brain will give you the resources to do so. The hunger and tiredness you feel normally are more like periodic maintenance reminders.
My current adult strategy is to simply plan for 7.5 hours of sleep each night; this gets me well rested consistently and doesn't appear to have any negative side effects. So long as I get the sleep in at some point, it doesn't seem to matter all that much when in the day it is. I could shift to mornings (and worked retail this way for years), but it's harder to maintain; 2am just feels "normal" to me. So, given the choice, I'll start the day later and wake up rested.
Have you ever tried shifting to mornings? I used to think as you and started getting up early (and going to bed earlier), and was much more productive. My focus in particular was much higher because there so much fewer distractions.
Not saying this is you, but I had an old boss who thought he did his best work at night. Except, I had to come in every morning and fix all the bugs he introduced during his late night coding sessions. Being tired made him think he was making better decisions than he was which is inline with the adage that driving tired is like driving under the influence.
On the plus side, if something has to get done, I don't mind staying until 10 pm too much.
Whether my choices were wise is not too important. What's important is that I almost failed mathematics because of my poor choices.
If every other teenager makes equally stupid choices, causing them to not learn vital skills, we should still change up the system. Teenagers will teenage, build the system around it!
in reality it was from co2 ppm
The reason I don't believe it was just boredom is the worst offender was always choir- a class I loved, and a class with obviously elevated production of co2.
I keep the air intake on always now.
Source: studied math till 2 AM, played some TF till 4 AM, had math classes at 9 AM in highschool. Did not have bad grades in math classes.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
It absolutely amazes me when I see young children out and about late at night because I had a very strict early bedtime as a child - 8pm early in life, 9pm starting my tween years. It was very much to my disdain at the time, but now I strongly believe being well rested served me well in all aspects of my life.
What makes it unnatural? If you want to appeal to nature, how about turn off all the electricity in your house and see how late kids stay up with just a fire going.
I wager the lack of a regular routine is the source of the problem. The school I went to had split shifts. I was on the early shift, and had to be up at 5AM. It wasn't a big deal because I had to be in bed by 9PM or it was my ass.
Perhaps kids would get more sleep if their parents had rules and enforced them.
It's probably in our genetics
https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/the-genetics-of-be...
DSPD is also seen far more frequently in adolescents.
Some people aren't much affected by screen time at night, and some people can readily get up before dawn. I for one have to be very careful to limit my exposure at night, and waking up before sunrise (artificial or natural) is excruciating. I have been diagnosed with DPSD. I vastly prefer to go to bed and wake up later than average
My elementary, high school, and middle school all started at different times (and my senior year of high school started much later because I completed enough credits).
Regardless of how late school started, I would just stay up later, the later school started. I usually got around 6 hours of sleep/night and would be very tired during the day. I now know that I need at least 7 hours to be functional.
Now I do think everyone has a different level of sleep they can function on, but the time a person goes to bed has little to do with it.
This is just another excuse that today's parents are giving because they don't want to take screens away or discipline their children.
"All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined -- but the time at which they wake up is socially determined,"
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181212140741.h...
Should we abolish timezones and daylight savings as to not interfere with the immutable teenage sleeping patterns?
On timezones, doesn't matter. On daylight savings time, absolutely, though not necessarily just for teenagers but because daylight savings is idiotic and is of no benefit to 99% of the population.
Or maybe it's my brain developing some Alzheimer like disease.
I'm 36
But what about holding it at, say, 11 am, or 12 pm, or some other time that's later in the day and doesn't conflict with the lunch period? Then perhaps it would be OK for everybody, early risers and late risers alike. It's not like the day absolutely has to start with a meeting.
(If I wanted to punish people that like to get up early, I'd suggest holding it at 6 pm or something. That ought to cause maximum annoyance to people that are good at getting up early: not so late that it's an unreasonable demand, any more than 9:30 am is, but still late enough that it's probably going to mess about with how you'd naturally structure your work day.)
I find it's a glorified catch-up session and can be held equally successfully at 2pm. People can generally use their morning productively without it.
I also find written form of standup more valuable than the verbal one.
That defined interruption imposes a big cost in productivity beforehand. It squeezes everything.
Why standups couldn't just be a handful of bullet points from each person when they spin up for the day in a Slack channel is something I have never quite understood.
Many of these affect simply the time of day when you can fall asleep.