Positive thinking

Jean Twenge, San Diego State University Something is stealing teens’ sleep. In a newly released analysis of two large national surveys , my co-authors and I found that the number of U.S. teens who reported sleeping less than seven hours a night jumped 22 percent between 2012 and 2015. Sleep experts agree that teens need at least nine hours of sleep a night . But by 2015, 43 percent of teens reported sleeping less than seven hours a night on most nights – meaning almost half of U.S. teens are significantly sleep-deprived. What could have raised sleep deprivation among teens to such unprecedented levels? Some factors are easy to rule out. For example, we found that the amount of time teens spent working, doing homework and participating in extracurricular activities held steady during those years. But there was one large change in teens’ lives between 2012 and 2015: More owned smartphones. It starts as an alarm clock… Today’s teens – whom I call “iGen” – a...

Carrie L. Partch, University of California, Santa Cruz For people who don’t get sleepy until 2 a.m., the buzz of an alarm clock can feel mighty oppressive. Relief may be on the horizon, thanks to the discovery this spring of a genetic mutation that causes night-owl behavior . Whether you’re a night owl or a morning lark rising effortlessly each day with the sun, your sleep habits are regulated by circadian rhythms. These internal clocks control just about every aspect of our health, from appetite and sleep to cell division, hormone production and cardiovascular function. Like many who study the intricacies of circadian biology, I’m optimistic that one day we’ll be able to design drugs that synchronize our cellular clocks. Bosses frowning on tardy arrivals could soon become a thing of the past. Our internal clocks Nearly every cell in your body contains a molecular clock. Every 24 hours or so, dedicated clock proteins interact with one another in a slow dance. Ov...

Wendy Hall, University of British Columbia How much sleep, and what type of sleep, do our children need to thrive? In parenting, there aren’t often straightforward answers, and sleep tends to be contentious. There are questions about whether we are overstating children’s sleep problems . Yet we all know from experience how much better we feel, and how much more ready we are to take on the day, when we have had an adequate amount of good quality sleep. I was one of a panel of experts at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to review over 800 academic papers examining relationships between children’s sleep duration and outcomes. Our findings suggested optimal sleep durations to promote children’s health . These are the optimal hours (including naps) that children should sleep in every 24-hour cy And yet these types of sleep recommendations are still controversial. Many of us have friends or acquaintances who say that they can function perfectly on four hours of sl...