mini: gen z is sleep deprived: here's why

Welcome to the new Mental Health Minis series! Every other Monday, we will feature a 5-minute mini-episode with content from a past She Persisted episode. This week’s guests are Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright— psychotherapists, sleep experts, and the authors of The Happy Sleeper and Generation Sleepless. In this mini-episode, you'll learn why teenagers today are so sleep deprived and what every teen can do to get better sleep.

To listen to the full episode, click ⁠HERE⁠!

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Happy Monday and welcome to yourmental Health mini.
This week's guests are Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright, and we
are talking sleep. Looking at the research on sleep
and sleep deprivation, the more it became clear that teenagers
are the ones that are suffering the most.
They suffer far worse sleep deprivation than any other

(00:20):
population on the planet and anyone ever in human history.
Teenagers. Have a natural shift in their
body clock, meaning their melatonin and other sleepiness
hormones released later in the evening.
But of course, because the body is not ready to go to sleep
until a little bit later, but itneeds to sleep a little bit
later. And then we have increased

(00:40):
homework, ballooning homework for some students, increased
activities. Some kids pile on activities
just to show up well on their college, you know, applications.
So this is pushing bedtime laterand later.
All these activities, all this homework, this natural shift in
the biological cock. Then you add technology to that
6 Bedtime is getting later, and later and later and later and

(01:03):
then on the other side of the night.
Most high schools in our countrystart too early, making it just
mathematically impossible to geteven close to the sort of
baseline amount of sleep that teenagers can get by with.
We would love to see teenagers sleep between 9:00 and 10:00
hours. We say 8 is adequate, and that's
because under 8 hours a night, you start to see correlation

(01:25):
with a lot of negative effects. So the risk of depression goes
up, anxiety, the body goes into a stress response when you're
low on sleep. But the average high schooler
gets about 6 hours a night. So we're talking about two to
three hours chronically of sleepdeprivation throughout the
course of the week, piling up to12 hours by the end of the week.
And that level of sleep loss, I mean, there's so many things

(01:48):
that it does. 1 is that while you're awake, your brain
releases a lot of byproducts of activity.
So that's like waste or toxic buildup in your brain.
And then when you fall asleep, this kind of cleaning mechanism
gets turned on and it starts to wash that waste away throughout
the time that you're asleep. So when you don't sleep enough,

(02:09):
essentially you've got waste build up in your brain that is
not properly, you know, cleansedout.
And that kind of makes sense, right?
When you think about how you feel when you are sleep
deprived, you feel almost still sick, right?
So imagine that in a chronic way.
Over the course of the week, kids who sleep 6 hours a night
are twice as likely to have symptoms of depression.

(02:32):
It really changes the lens that you see the world through.
So you're more likely to have a negative assumption about, you
know, somebody does something. You're more likely to interpret
it in a negative way, and you'remore likely to feel hopeless
about the future and just not feeling like the creative juice
of I can solve this problem. I can do this.
The ties to mental health are just there are so many.

(02:54):
Sleep also helps with processingemotions through dreams.
When we dream, our brains consolidate date positive
memories and sort of dampen downmore negative memories.
And when teenagers have to wake up, you know, hours before their
bodies want to wake up, the sleep a most miss out on is
dream sleep. So they're missing out on this

(03:17):
really important emotional processing, filtering things
out, organizing how memories areformed and how memories are
stored, so we forget things moreeasily.
And the most common sleep issue for teenagers definitely is
difficulty falling asleep. And that's partly because what
Julie said about the shifted biological clock.

(03:37):
So the main thing that we get teens to do is wake up at the
same time on the weekends. Don't sleep in more than one
hour. That's ideal if you are so sleep
deprived that you have to sleep in two hours.
Do that for one day during the weekend, but not 2.
And then go outside, even through the clouds on a cloudy
day, the sun is 1000 times more powerful than your indoor

(04:00):
lights. Sunlight presses go on the
internal clock, so it's a timingqueue that tells your brain, OK,
the day has started now get ready for the night to come.
So get 5 to 10 minutes of sun, even if it's cloudy.
It's really intense sun and I think those two pieces of advice
for teenagers are sometimes and the and the cut off of caffeine.

(04:23):
The half life of caffeine is waylonger than most people think.
So if you're really having trouble falling asleep, the
waking up within an hour of yourmorning wake up time, 5 to 10
minutes of sun and 2:00 PM cut off for for caffeine is going to
do a lot. I think if you just really trust
your body and believe in your body and brain and know how

(04:45):
capable they are of helping you sleep well and knowing how much
sleep you need, that's a really great way to sort of think about
it. Not like, oh, I have to do this,
but my body wants to do it and it can.
And I just need to clear the waya little bit so that my body can
get the sleep it needs. And like, I think even just
after a few nights of good sleep, the difference is so

(05:07):
profound. You're more efficient and you
can study, you can remember better.
You know, all that procrastinating and taking
really long time to do things really improves when you sleep
well, you feel like your skin looks better, you relationships
improve because you're not as short tempered and you see
people in a more positive way and you want to be around
people. So all the things that teenagers

(05:29):
are staying up late trying to achieve, they can actually
achieve better and more efficiently if they sleep well.
And just give yourself that giftof feeling that way.
If you enjoyed this week's Mental Health Mini, you can
listen to the full episode. It is episode 104 featuring
authors Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright.
A link to the full episode is inthe show notes.
And as always, make sure to leave a review, subscribe, share

(05:52):
with a friend or family member, and follow at ACHI Persistent
Podcast. Thanks for listening.