Here's how to cure teen sleep problems in just one week

A new study shows that teenagers quickly improved their sleep time and quality in just one week.

Oh, teenagers and their sleep. On one side, they need it – but on the other hand, satisfying this need is elusive for many. According to the National Sleep Foundation, teens need eight to ten hours of sleep per night. Yet, according to research, only 15% of them devote at least eight and a half hours to their classes.

Later, the time of the beginning of the school would be useful. Due to the biology of adolescence, sleeping and waking tend to occur later in adolescence, "which means that it's natural not to be able to fall asleep before 23h, "notes the Foundation. With Middle American high school and high school starting at 8:00, you can see how this could be a problem.

But we can do something at home to solve the problem: reduce evening exposure to bright screens on phones, tablets and computers.

And in fact, according to research presented at the European Congress of Endocrinology, it has been shown that only one week of this type of approach would reverse teenage sleep problems.

Previous studies have shown that blue light from electronic devices could affect the brain's clock and the production of melatonin, a sleep hormone, leading to poor quality sleep and disrupted.

"Teens spend more and more time on screened devices and sleep complaints are common in this age group," said Dr. Dirk Jan Stenvers of the Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism. UMC Amsterdam. "We show here very simply that these be easily reversed by minimizing the use of the evening screen or blue light exposure. According to our data, it is likely that adolescents' complaints about sleep and their sleep retardation are at least partly induced by the blue light of the screens. "

The study, a collaboration between the Dutch Institute of Neuroscience, the UMC of Amsterdam and the Netherlands National Institute of Public Health and the Environment, examined the effects of exposure to blue light on teens at home. Participants included 55 Dutch youth aged 12 to 17 who represented two types of screen users: frequent (four hours a day) and infrequent (one hour a day).

The study consisted of three phases of one week, each week being separated by one week of "load shedding period", for a total of five weeks. Children kept sleep diaries, wore monitoring devices, and provided saliva samples to measure melatonin levels.

Uncommon users acted as a control group; before the start of the study, they woke up 30 minutes earlier and were less likely to wake up at night than frequent users.

The first week, frequent users were asked to use their screen normally; the third week, they were asked to wear blue-light glasses during the evening screening hours. The fifth week, they were asked to completely avoid the time spent in front of the screen at night.

At the end of the study, the researchers concluded that "a blockage of blue light with glasses and screening abstinence resulted in the onset of sleep and waking up 20 minutes earlier and a reduction in symptoms of sleep reported in participants after only one week. . "

A lack of sleep goes beyond fatigue; this can also increase the risk of more serious long-term health problems such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. There has been a lot of research on the lack of sleep and the time spent in front of a screen, but this is the first investigation into the impact of actual sleep exposure in adolescents at home and on the possibility of inverting it.

And that can be it. Now that scientists have figured this out, they might be able to work on some of these other teenage phenomena, such as anxiety and the turn of the superhuman eye?