Sleep is a vital part of adolescents’ daily lives. Teenagers should spend around one-third of the day sleeping, allowing their minds and bodies to rest, recover, and grow. Sleep plays a role in learning, memory, emotional processing, thinking, and attention; and, unsurprisingly, it’s closely connected to mental health.
Unfortunately, many teenagers struggle to get enough sleep. School start times that are out of sync with adolescents’ natural sleep and wake rhythms can make it harder for young people to get the hours they need. Screen time can also interfere with these rhythms, keeping the body alert and awake. Stress, anxiety, and other mental health symptoms often make sleeping more difficult.
Some teenagers also experience sleeping disorders, such as insomnia or nightmare disorders. Sleep disorders develop when difficulties sleeping start to seriously affect a young person’s everyday life and well-being.
Given the importance of sleep for young people’s mental health, getting restorative, high-quality sleep should be a priority. This blog offers some information about what causes sleeping problems among teenagers and the impact on teen mental health. We also outline ten tips that can help teenagers sleep more soundly and for longer periods.
How Do Difficulties Sleeping Impact Teenagers’ Mental Health?
Sleep plays a fundamental role in young people’s mental well-being. It supports emotional processing and regulation, learning, memory, and cognitive functions.
On the other hand, sleeping difficulties and a lack of restorative sleep disrupt these processes, causing more negative moods, thought patterns, and behaviours.
Sleep and Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation is the ability to manage our emotional responses while identifying, accepting, and understanding our emotions. Difficulty with emotional regulation, known as emotional dysregulation, is a transdiagnostic symptom of many mental health disorders, including eating disorders, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sleep and emotional regulation are closely connected. When we get less sleep, we’re more likely to experience intense emotional reactions and negative moods. Lack of sleep also disrupts the way we process emotions.
Research has found that after only a few days of inadequate sleep, adolescents experience more negative moods and find it more difficult to manage negative emotions. Studies have also linked lack of sleep to different forms of emotional distress, including depression, anxiety, anger, confusion, and hopelessness.
Lack of Sleep and High-Risk Behaviours
When teenagers don’t get enough restorative sleep, it impacts the way they behave. In particular, lack of sleep is associated with more impulsive, high-risk, and dangerous behaviours.
One study found that high school teenagers who slept for seven hours or less on a school night were more likely to engage in:
- drink driving
- weapon carrying
- fighting
- suicidal behaviours
- tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use
- sexual risk-taking
Scientists still aren’t sure exactly why lack of sleep affects impulsivity and high-risk behaviours. Some evidence suggests that inadequate sleep may disrupt certain processes of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), an area of the brain involved in emotional regulation, inhibition of impulses, social decision-making, and other important social and emotional functions. One study found that a lack of restorative sleep during early adolescence was associated with disrupted reward processing in the dmPFC and depressive symptoms years later.
Sleep Deprivation and Cognitive Functions
Sleep plays an essential role in restoring and supporting our cognitive functions, including learning, working memory, and attention. One study found that a lack of sleep is directly linked to a shorter attention span and other cognitive functions over one week.
Interestingly, the results of the study showed that the impact of several nights of restricted sleep is cumulative. This means that missing only a couple of hours of sleep each night over several days can have the same effect as losing an entire night of sleep. However, we might not notice how tired we really are: while participants’ cognitive functions continued to decline, their subjective perceptions of sleepiness quickly levelled off.
What Is Restorative Sleep?
Restorative sleep is sleep that leaves you feeling refreshed and energised upon awakening. In psychology, restorative sleep (and non-restorative sleep) is defined as a subjective experience that’s closely associated with mental and physical health.
The physiological processes that lead to the experience of restorative sleep are not well defined. But it’s likely connected to the completion of natural sleep cycles, which enable your body to perform its restorative functions. These functions mainly take place during deep sleep and REM sleep. Sometimes, people may sleep for many hours but not spend enough time in the restorative stages of their sleep cycles to feel rested when they wake up.
What Kinds of Sleeping Problems Do Teenagers Experience?
Sleep problems occur when teenagers are unable to get enough restorative sleep, even when they want to. They may find it hard to get to sleep, wake up early, or wake up during the night. Some adolescents may sleep for enough hours but still wake up feeling tired and unenergised.
Sleep Hygiene
Sleep problems can develop for many different reasons and often involve a combination of causes. Sometimes, difficulties sleeping are related to poor sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene is a term that describes features of the sleeping environment and behaviours that can impact the quality and length of sleep. This might include:
- Keeping to the same sleep schedule
- Leaving screen devices outside of the bedroom
- Sleeping in a cool and quiet room
Research has established that poor sleep hygiene is closely connected to disruptions in sleep among adolescents and adults without sleep disorders. However, it’s still not clear whether sleep hygiene contributes to sleep disorders such as insomnia.
Delayed Circadian Rhythms
Circadian rhythms are our bodies’ natural clocks, governing important bodily functions such as sleep and appetite by synchronising the underlying mechanisms with day and night. Hormones such as melatonin play a central role in our circadian rhythms. Our bodies release hormones in response to environmental triggers, such as light and social cues. These hormones act as chemical messengers, communicating information to different parts of our body.
Teenagers’ circadian rhythms are later than adults’, meaning they naturally sleep later and wake up later. They also need more sleep: on average, just over nine hours. However, school start times remain early during adolescence, so teenagers have to wake up much earlier than they naturally would. This means it can be difficult to get the hours of sleep they need.
Sleep Disorders
Sometimes, teenagers can develop sleeping difficulties that impact their daily life and emotional and physical well-being. When these difficulties are not a result of another mental health condition, they may receive a diagnosis of a sleep disorder. Sleep disorders can have a serious effect on a young person’s life, affecting their mood, energy, concentration, motivation, relationships, and ability to pursue the things they love.
Some types of sleep disorders include:
- Insomnia, when someone has difficulties getting to sleep or staying asleep
- Sleep-disordered breathing, when someone stops breathing or has breathing difficulties while they are asleep
- Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders (CRSD), when someone’s internal body clock is out of sync with social routines
While young people’s sleeping difficulties can sometimes improve with changes to sleep hygiene, sleep disorders require additional support. If you think a young person may have a sleep disorder, it’s important that they seek professional help. Therapies like cognitive-behavioural therapy can support young people in restructuring the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that contribute to insomnia.
Sleeping Difficulties and Other Mental Health Disorders
Sleep problems are a common symptom of many mental health disorders, including eating disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety. Often, difficulties sleeping and other mental health symptoms can form a vicious cycle, where lack of restorative sleep exacerbates symptoms like anxiety or low mood, which, in turn, make sleeping more difficult.
As with sleeping disorders, it’s important that young people access professional support for any mental health disorder that is causing sleeping difficulties.
Top Ten Sleep Tips for Teens
There are many different reasons that teenagers may not get enough restorative sleep, and this will impact the type of support they need. When young people’s sleeping difficulties are, in part, connected to their sleeping environment or routines, making some simple changes can make an important difference.
Because teen sleep problems are often influenced by delayed circadian rhythms, young people may want to adjust their sleeping routines to enable them to go to bed earlier.
Here we’ve included ten sleeping tips for teenagers.
Setting a Consistent Bedtime
Studies have found that US teenagers lose an average of ninety minutes of sleep each night. It can help teens to set a bedtime that will give them enough sleep (at least nine hours) on school nights, and try to stick to it. This can shift their circadian rhythms and sleep-wake cycles earlier, moving in sync with the routine required by school start times.
Avoiding Bright Light in the Evening
Bright light in the evening can shift circadian rhythms later, making it more difficult to fall asleep and wake up early. Research suggests that avoiding bright light for around two hours before the usual bedtime, such as by using dimmer room lighting, can help bring sleep times forward.
Exposure to Bright Light in the Morning
Exposure to bright light in the morning, especially within the first hour after waking up, can shift circadian rhythms earlier. In the summer, this might mean opening the curtains and letting in the daylight, or spending some time outside. In the winter, light therapy lamps can imitate natural daylight, helping teenagers fall asleep earlier and feel alert in the morning hours.
Avoiding Caffeine in the Afternoon
Caffeine has a half-life of about five hours. This means that six hours after a cup of coffee, a teenager’s body still retains around half of the caffeine they initially consumed. Drinking caffeinated drinks in the afternoon can increase alertness in the evening, making it harder to fall asleep.
Keeping a Similar Schedule at Weekends
Teenagers often go to sleep and wake up later on weekends. However, this can delay their circadian rhythms and make it more difficult to get to sleep and wake during the school week, particularly on Sunday night and Monday morning. Maintaining a similar schedule on weekends can help their circadian rhythms remain more aligned with their natural rhythms.
Having Wind-Down Time Before Bed
Having at least half an hour of ‘wind-down’ time before bed can help teenagers to calm down and fall asleep more easily. This might involve reading a book, taking a bath, listening to a podcast, or doing gentle stretching. Following a bedtime routine can help regulate teenagers’ internal clocks while preparing the body for sleep.
Avoiding Screen Time in the Evening
As with other types of bright light, looking at a screen in the evening can delay teenagers’ internal clock. It’s best to try to avoid screen time for at least two hours before bed.
Keeping Screens Out of the Bedroom
Looking at screens before bed or during the night can disrupt teenagers’ sleep. But when screen devices are in the bedroom, it can feel hard to avoid: young people may end up opening their devices just to check the time. Teenagers’ sleep may also be disturbed by notifications, calls, or messages they receive.
Creating a Good Sleeping Environment
Our bodies sleep best under certain environmental conditions. Keeping bedrooms cool, dark, and quiet can make it easier to fall and stay asleep.
Exercising During the Day
Exercising in the daytime can help adolescents get more restorative sleep. Both aerobic exercise, like running or cycling, and resistance exercise, like weight training, can improve sleep quality. Exercising promotes sleep regardless of the time of day, but exercising in the morning can also help to move circadian rhythms earlier, while evening exercise may shift them later.
The Wave Clinic: Specialist Mental Health Support for Young People
The Wave Clinic offers specialist mental health care for young people and families. We take a whole-person approach to mental health support, working with teenagers and young adults to grow in self-confidence, develop life skills, and build futures they believe in.
We centre the family in all of our programs, emphasising the strength families can give to a young person’s recovery. We’re trauma specialists, carefully and sensitively addressing the role of past experiences in the way teenagers think, feel, and act today.
If you’re interested in our programs, please get in touch with us today.
