Will I Ever Balance My Sleep Debt?

 

Every student can attest to the lack of sleep that seems to permeate the field of academia. We're always told to get more sleep, but we never seem to find the time for it. Sleep is meant to consume up to a third or more of each day, but more commonly in young people, it only eats up about one-fourth of our 24 hours (Stanford 2018). A 2015 article from Stanford University discusses the cycle that teens go through that leads to their lack of sleep. Often, high school students are tasked with homework, studying, and extracurricular activities that take up much of their time after school. Staying up late into the night causes students to be drowsy and unfocused during their early school start time which then requires more hours at home spent catching up on what was missed during class, continuing the cycle of staying up late into the night.

Crowley et al. discuss this at length in their 2018 paper that provides an update to the 'Perfect Storm' model of adolescent sleep. This model refers to the biopsychosocial factors that negatively impact the sleep patterns of adolescents. The 'Perfect Storm' model explains why teenagers often experience inadequate sleep. During adolescence, two biological systems undergo changes: the sleep/wake homeostatic process and the circadian timing system (Crowley 2018). External factors that impact these processes include early start times for school, overuse of technology, and extracurricular activities that occur early in the morning or late after school. Altogether, these create the "perfect storm" where teens go to bed later and wake up early, leading to a deprivation of quality sleep. Studies have shown that trying to catch up on sleep during the weekend does not fully reverse long-accumulated deficits.

I, like many others, have often thought that using weekends to catch up on sleep is reversing the negative effects of a sleep deficit. Sleep debt is a term that has been around for years but is gaining more attention in recent media. For example, if your body requires 9 hours of sleep per night, and you only get three, you have accumulated three hours of debt. If you do this for four nights in a week, that's nearly 15 hours of sleep debt in a week, and this number only increases if this pattern continues for months, or even years. Studies show that approximately 65% of American teens are living with borderline to severe sleep debt (Garey 2024). The question of whether the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation are reversible circulates frequently, especially among university students.

Loss of sleep is an overlooked factor when looking into risks of chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease (Dudley 2019). A study was done in 2019 by Depner et. al to examine the effects of sustained insufficient sleep before and after a period of weekend recovery. The scientists here found that even after the period of recovery, circadian rhythms were shifted later, insulin sensitivity increased, and body weight increased (Depner 2019). The findings of this study suggest that weekend recovery sleep in is not an efficient strategy to prevent the chronic negative effects to metabolic regulation that occur with insufficient sleep.

However, just because taking weekend mornings to sleep in won't completely reverse the damage done, that doesn't that you shouldn't implement proper sleep hygiene every night to minimize the health risks. Multiple studies and articles suggest keeping a set sleep schedule and developing a nightly routine are beneficial to improving daily function (Newsom 2022). Adolescents are also advised to consider their daytime habits that might contribute to the lack of sleep they are getting. Many, many, many young people use energy drinks and coffee to stay awake after already being awake for most of the night, and this only further disrupts natural circadian rhythms. 

Management of dietary habits, screen times, and extracurricular commitments are small steps we can take to make huge differences in our sleep and overall health. But as Crowley et al. stated in their paper, for younger adolescents who are still in high school, much of the change will have to come from those in control of the early start times. Administrators must consider exactly what they are asking of their students and what is healthy for young minds. Once that is done, students will feel better, perform better, and decrease the risk of long-term damage to their brains and bodies.

WORKS CITED

Crowley, Stephanie J., et al. “An Update on Adolescent Sleep: New Evidence Informing the Perfect Storm Model.” Journal of Adolescence, vol. 67, no. 67, Aug. 2018, pp. 55–65, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2018.06.001.

Depner, Christopher M., et al. “Ad Libitum Weekend Recovery Sleep Fails to Prevent Metabolic Dysregulation during a Repeating Pattern of Insufficient Sleep and Weekend Recovery Sleep.” Current Biology, vol. 29, no. 6, Mar. 2019, pp. 957-967.e4, www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30098-3, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.01.069.

Dudley, Katherine. “Weekend Catch-up Sleep Won’t Fix the Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Your Waistline.” Harvard Health Blog, 24 Sept. 2019, www.health.harvard.edu/blog/weekend-catch-up-sleep-wont-fix-the-effects-of-sleep-deprivation-on-your-waistline-2019092417861.

Garey, Juliann. “Teens and Sleep: The Cost of Sleep Deprivation.” Child Mind Institute, Child Mind Institute, 8 Mar. 2024, childmind.org/article/happens-teenagers-dont-get-enough-sleep/.

Newsom, Rob. “Sleep Debt: Can You Catch up on Sleep?” Sleep Foundation, 1 Apr. 2022, www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/sleep-debt-and-catch-up-sleep.

Richter, Ruthann. “Among Teens, Sleep Deprivation an Epidemic.” Stanford Medicine News Center, Stanford Medicine, 8 Oct. 2015, med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/10/among-teens-sleep-deprivation-an-epidemic.html.