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Healthy sleep leads to a healthy brain. Neuroscientists have conveyed this message. But parents, doctors, and educators have struggled to identify what needs to be done to improve adolescent sleep. Some called for delaying back-to-school hours or limiting screen time before going to bed for academic, health and even economic gains.
Nevertheless, recent estimates suggest that about half of American teenagers are sleep deprived. These numbers are alarming because sleep is especially important during adolescence, a period of significant brain changes that affect learning, self-control, and emotional systems. And sleep deficits are even greater among economically disadvantaged young people than among their more affluent counterparts.
Research from my developmental neuroscience lab shows a simple solution to the problem of sleep deprivation: providing teenagers with a good pillow. Because comfortable bedding does not require technology, costly interventions, or a lot of time, this can be especially beneficial for improving the sleep of disadvantaged teens.
Studies in my lab have shown that seemingly minimal differences in the quality and duration of sleep affect how the brain processes information.
Sleep acts as a glue that helps the brain to code newly acquired information into long-term knowledge. It also improves concentration in school because sleep alleviates hyperactive behaviors, strong emotional reactions and disorders. This means that students who are normally removed from the classroom for disruptive behavior are more likely to stay in class if they are not deprived of sleep. More time in the classroom leads to more learning.
My colleagues and I initially hypothesized that the number of hours of sleep was the most important factor for healthy brain development over time. But when we tested this idea with a study, the results surprised us. Instead, adolescents whose sleep was irregular throughout the school week, varying up to 2.5 hours from one night to the next, exhibited less development of white matter connections in their brains. a year later than those who slept a more constant night.
The white matter – made up of the long axons of the neurons – connects different regions of the brain, as a highway connects two cities and helps to process information efficiently and quickly. Adolescence is an important time to pave all the highways of the brain, and this research suggests sleep can be vital for this construction.
What are the main ingredients of sleep that contribute to healthy brain development? My laboratory has designed a study to study.
We equipped 55 high school students from 14 to 18 years old from different socio-economic backgrounds through actigraphs, wristwatch type monitors that monitor the quality of sleep. A higher quality of sleep is defined by a reduced number of alarms per night. These are moments of the night when the sleep rhythms are disturbed and the person is briefly awake or enters a lighter sleep phase, whether or not they are aware of it. In our study, teens had an average of five wake – ups per night lasting from less than a minute to over an hour.
After two weeks, they came to the lab to have their brain analyzed. We were interested in measuring the connections between the brain pathways involved in self control, emotion processing and reward processing – the same ones that are important for reducing impulsivity and staying focused in the classroom. Unsurprisingly, adolescents with better sleep quality had better "brain connectivity". In other words, the connections between the key regions of the brain were stronger.
But the most important and surprising discovery is the one we found when we went deeper into researching why some teens slept better than others. Was it less technology in the room? Darker rooms? Less noise? Higher socio-economic status? Not in our study.
Adolescents who are more satisfied with their bedding and pillows are those who benefit from a better quality of sleep, which is associated with increased connectivity of the brain, an effect that transcends socio-economic limits. Conversely, adolescents in our study with low brain connectivity and poor sleep quality showed greater impulsivity than those with high connectivity and sleep quality, illustrating the actual effects of behavior on behavior.
So, is there a perfect pillow? We have found that one size does not fit all. For some people, a flat pancake pillow soothes them in a deep sleep. For others, only a super inflated cloud will do the trick. And while our conclusions were the strongest for pillow comfort, bedding in general was also important.
In all measurable areas, young people raised in poverty have poor results. Compared to their more affluent peers, they exhibit poorer academic and cognitive performance, psychosocial well-being, and physical health. These shortcomings have been the subject of intense debate and research, but they remain vast and persistent.
The availability and quality of basic needs, including food, health, parental warmth and housing, help to explain some of the diverging results between high and low income adolescents. But researchers have put very little emphasis on sleep – an equally important basic need that could be an untapped solution for bridging the performance gap.
Reducing the gap in success is the goal of many government-funded programs. One way to do this is to create realistic and accessible intervention targets that improve day-to-day operations. Sleep can be one of those targets. It is relatively easy to quantify and track, influenced by daily patterns that can be changed, such as parental supervision and bedtime routines, and is directly related to learning, social and health outcomes.
In this period of marginal hysteria related to the effects of technology on sleep and brain development, little attention is paid to the basics of good sleep in adolescents. Ensuring that they have comfortable bedding can help improve sleep in all teenagers, especially in the poorest families. And it's much easier to persuade parents and teens to invest in pillows than to argue over phone privileges.
Galván is professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles. This article was originally published on theconversation.com.
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