Let’s talk about sleep, teenagers and anxiety…the statistics are unsettling!!

Let’s talk about sleep, teenagers and anxiety…the statistics are unsettling!!

Sleep (or lack of it) is one of the biggest contributors to poor mental health. Sleep aids teenagers learning in the waking hours, memory consolidation and aids emotional processing. At the current time teenagers in this country are experiencing a sleep deprivation epidemic. Does that sound dramatic, well I assure you it is true.

1 in 10 teenagers get the 8-10 hours of sleep recommended by researchers and paediatricians. One of the reasons for this is that during puberty there is a shift in melatonin production (the hormone in your body that makes you yawn and stretch and generally feel sleepy) In teenagers this hormone is active later in the evening, around 11pm ish, but with after school activities, school work and the social media activity teenagers need to fit in, 11pm seems early. So, they fight this melatonin production, and the system becomes disrupted.

The end result is a teenager that can’t think straight, who is irritable and feels terrible and they need to make it through the school day. Increasingly for some teenagers their ‘go to’ thing is caffeine drinks, consuming huge amounts in a day. So, then they are a teenager who is hyper and wiped out at the same time.

As I talked about in my previous post, there is huge dramatic brain development happening around this time, that sleep contributes to. It’s the part of the brain that exercises good judgement and eventually will counteract the stupid risky behaviours in teenagers that are terrifying to parents.  

The effects of lack of sleep go way beyond the classroom, research shows it contributes to substance use, anxiety and depression.

The statistics:

A teenager who lacks a good amount of sleep is 55% more likely to have used alcohol in the last month.

For each hour of lost sleep there is a 38% increase in feelings of sadness and hopelessness.

For teenagers with a driving license, 5 hours or less of sleep a night is the equivalent of driving with a blood alcohol level 1.5 times above the legal limit.

I am in no way the expert on sleep, but I wanted to raise the awareness around this as a contributing factor to poor mental health, in particular anxiety, as the fight or flight system is so much more activated when we have had poor sleep.

What a change and a joy it would be for teenagers and the family to experience a little less moodiness, but also for the teenager to feel revitalised and fully resourced for the day ahead.

Statistics and info from sleep researcher Wendy Troxel.