In societies around the world, teenagers are recriminated to stay up late and then complain when they have to get up early. While it is true that many teenagers (like many adults) have bad habits when they go to bed, science has long shown that this global problem It has a biological cause.
In 2004, researchers from the University of Munich showed that teenagers actually have a different sense of time. This study stated that the 24-hour cycle that determines when we wake up and when we go to bed is delayed during adolescence, reaching its latest point at 20 years.
After 20, the hours of wakefulness and sleep of the body are gradually advanced again until at 55 we wake up naturally at the same time as at 10 years. The relationship between the movements of this biological clock and the process of puberty is so strong that researchers suggested that this "maximum delay" in the biological clock at the end of adolescence could be what marks the end of puberty.
Lack of sleep
Almost at the same time as the Munich study was published, Russell Foster of the University of Oxford made a breakthrough in current neuroscience. By raising blind mice, Foster was able to demonstrate that the sleep times of all mammals depended solely on sunlight. This means that the biological clock (which determines when we are sleepy) is different from social time, which is established by official time and customs about when it is normal to do things.
In Babies and more Adolescents: these are the biggest risks to your health, according to the WHOWhen there is a conflict between biological time and social time, lack of sleep can occur. The social hours at which the institute or university begins (typically between 7.30am and 8.30am) are too early for teenagers around the world. The biological changes that teenagers go through need to go to bed later, wake up later and sleep up to eight or nine hours.
Many teenagers are losing two to three hours of sleep each night during the week. This is a systematic and unrecoverable loss of sleep and a danger to your health.Something easy to solve?
In theory the solution is simple: the first hour of classes should be adjusted to reflect the fact that teenagers need to start later as they grow up. But in practice, there are three major challenges: demonstrating that starting them too early is detrimental to teenagers' health, identifying the best time to start classes and making teachers willing to change traditional schedules.
In Babies and moreDream in teenagers: why are they always sleepy?The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention He has gathered many scientific studies to show that the US institutes They should set start times at a later time and there is enough medical evidence about the damage of starting the institute or university early in the morning: when they start too early, teenage students run an increased risk of obesity, depression, drug use and poor grades.
The United States Medical Association recommends that no class for teenagers should start before 8:30 am. However, having class in the early hours is still common in many countries around the world, including Australia, the United Kingdom, France and Sweden. There is more evidence that starting later is better: several studies show that there are clear health benefits for adolescents aged 13 to 16 who start high school at 10 in the morning.
In Babies and more, 30 percent of teenagers suffer from headaches, and bad lifestyle habits are one of the main causesMariah Evans, from the University of Nevada, relied on new methods to identify the best moments for teenagers aged 18 to 19 and came to a dramatic conclusion: starting much later around 11 or 12 in the morning was the best thing to do. The cognitive faculties.
Institutes and parents around the world need to change the way they treat teenagers: instead of blaming them for being sleepy in the morning, they should leave get up and go to bed later to adapt to your biological clock. Starting classes later, we would have safer, healthier and smarter teenagers. It's just a matter of time.
Author: Paul Kelley. Honorary Associate in Dream, Circadian and Neuroscience of Memory, The Open University.
This article has originally been published in The Conversation. You can read the original article here..
Translated by Silvestre Urbón
