The Self-Driven Child

Home > Other > The Self-Driven Child > Page 16
The Self-Driven Child Page 16

by William Stixrud


  Many parents are aware of the importance of sleep and want ideas about how to help their kids get more of it. They’re frustrated, because they can’t control how much homework their child is assigned, how early school starts, or the fact that their kids’ soccer games don’t start until 8:00 P.M. But what makes them really want to tear their hair out is that they can’t make their child sleep. We’ll delve into these quandaries and more, but first, let us explain how sleep contributes to a strong sense of control.

  Sleep and the Brain

  We are passionate about sleep, and though we lead pretty busy lives ourselves, we are vigilant about getting enough sleep to wake up without an alarm clock (for Bill it’s seven hours, for Ned it’s eight to eight and a half). Our zealousness stems from an understanding of how foundational sleep is to everything else. It’s like the foundation of a house—easy to neglect because it’s not very sexy or interesting, but without it, everything falls apart. Add a rainy winter and soggy ground to the weak foundation, and you’re looking at a catastrophe. Sleep is brain food. And so on those nights when you consider staying up to answer one more e-mail, or if your daughter wants to take on just one more commitment, consider these powerful sleep statements, share them with your kids, and let them guide your decisions.

  Sleep deprivation is a form of chronic stress. According to Bruce McEwen, a leading researcher on stress, sleep deprivation produces similar effects on the mind and body as chronic stress. These include higher cortisol levels, increased reactivity to stress, higher blood pressure, and decreased efficiency of the parasympathetic nervous system (which serves a calming function). Sleep deprivation produces inflammation, impacts insulin production, decreases appetite, and depresses mood. McEwen discovered that chronic sleep insufficiency (getting six hours of sleep or less per night) is like acute sleep deprivation in young adults. There is no difference in performance on cognitive tasks between older adolescents who sleep four to six hours per night for six weeks and those who get no sleep at all for three days.5

  When our stress response system functions normally, our cortisol levels are highest when we wake up in the morning and lowest before we go to bed at night. Cortisol helps give you the kick you need to get out of bed. But in people who are highly stressed, this pattern can often be reversed. Their cortisol levels will be high at night, when they’re trying to settle down, and low in the morning, when they’re trying to get up. The same is true of many sleep-deprived kids.

  Emotional control is dramatically impaired by sleep deprivation. If you don’t sleep enough, your amygdala becomes more reactive in response to emotionally charged events, mimicking the brain activity of people suffering from anxiety disorders.6 Many of the negative characteristics we associate with teens, like moodiness and poor judgment, may actually be the result of sleep deprivation. Ned gently asks his students, “Do you ever notice how when you’re really tired, your mom is so on your case and your best friend is being such a jerk—on the same day?” This is because sleep deprivation decreases your flexibility, weakens your ability to see things in context, and impairs your judgment. Sleep-deprived teens are much more likely to use caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and drugs to cope with the mood swings they could deal with more effectively by getting enough sleep.7

  Sleep loss is like a “negativity bomb.” This is according to distinguished sleep researcher Robert Stickgold, who performed a study in which the subjects, half of whom didn’t sleep for thirty-six hours, and half of whom were well rested, were shown positive, negative, and neutral words (e.g., “calm,” “grief,” “willow”) and asked to rate their emotionality. After two nights of recovery sleep, they were given a surprise memory test. Those from the “rested” group remembered 40 percent more of the words they’d been shown and retained the positive and the negative words fairly evenly. Those who were sleep deprived remembered fewer words in general and many more of the negative ones. Their recall of positive words decreased by half and of negative words by just 20 percent. “This result suggests the rather horrifying possibility that when you are sleep deprived, you effectively form twice as many memories of negative events in your life as of positive events,” Stickgold concluded, “producing a biased—and potentially depressing—memory of your day.”8

  Sleep deprivation, like chronic stress, can trigger anxiety and mood disorders in children who are already vulnerable to getting them. When you don’t get enough sleep, the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are weakened.9 Your Pilot is asleep but your Lion Fighter is awake. This disconnect between prefrontal cortex and amygdala is seen in PTSD, depression, bipolar disorder, and other psychiatric syndromes.10 There is a strong correlation between insufficient sleep and depression. Men and women with sleep apnea are two and a half times and five times more likely respectively to have major depressive disorder than peers who sleep well. The use of a CPAP (a device that keeps your airways open at night) significantly reduces symptoms of depression. The fact that girls’ risk for depression triples after puberty may be related to the fact that it gets harder for them to get enough sleep.

  Sleep deprivation has physical implications. It impairs blood sugar regulation and contributes to obesity. Studies of children in Japan, Canada, and Australia found that kids who get less than eight hours of sleep per night have a 300 percent higher obesity rate than kids who sleep ten hours.11 In Houston, a study of teens showed that the chance of obesity increased 80 percent for each hour of lost sleep.12 If teens are sleep deprived, they’re also likely to get sick a lot more, as sleep deprivation suppresses immune function.13 Sleep loss also leads to a significant decrease in cancer-killing cells, enough for the American Cancer Society to classify night-shift work as a probable carcinogen.14

  Sleep is critical to learning. There’s almost nothing more important to learning than being well rested. Simply put, it is far more effective to teach someone for four hours after they’ve slept for eight than to teach them for eight hours after they’ve slept for four. It doesn’t take much sleep deprivation to impact thinking and cognitive performance. As part of a study of minor sleep restriction, sixth graders were asked to sleep either one hour more than usual or one hour less than usual, for three nights. The students who slept as little as thirty-five minutes less than others functioned like fourth graders on cognitive tests, effectively losing two years of cognitive power.15

  Consider what happens when we sleep. The brain “replays” experiences, sending signals back and forth repeatedly from the cortex to the hippocampus, integrating and consolidating memories. Recently learned material plays on a screen in your mind, making it seep in more deeply and connecting it to other things you have learned in the past. Sleep refreshes the whole brain and improves its ability to pay attention, making it optimally receptive to new learning. During non-REM sleep (sleep without rapid eye movements), scientists see short bursts of electrical activity called “sleep spindles” that help the brain move information from a short-term storage site in the hippocampus to the long-term locus of memory in the cortex. This so-called slow-wave sleep helps to solidify new memories and saves information we’ve learned. Sleep expert Matthew Walker likens it to hitting the “save” button. Electrical waves travel from one part of the brain to another in what Walker calls a “slow synchronized chant,” helping to connect pieces of information in different parts of the brain, relate them to one another, and build a tapestry framework of understanding.16

  In an early sleep study by Robert Stickgold, participants played Tetris for seven hours over the course of three days. When awakened just after falling asleep, 75 percent reported experiencing visual images of the game, suggesting that the brain was continuing to work on mastering Tetris skills during sleep (an important skill to master if ever there was one). Stickgold concluded that people who slept after learning and practicing a new task remembered more the next day than those who stayed up all night after learning the task.17

  You don’t have t
o be a high school student for the impact of sleep on learning to be relevant. Last spring, Bill decided to learn Hebrew at the encouragement of his wife, Starr, as she had been studying it for a couple of years. He made decent progress in the first week or so, studying for a few minutes in the morning before he left for work. One evening Starr suggested that they study Hebrew together at 8:45 P.M. While Bill felt perfectly alert and could easily have held a conversation, played the guitar, or discussed a case with a colleague, it turned out that he was too tired to learn. He slowly sounded out a few three-letter words on the first line of his workbook and then proceeded to the second line. After laboring for a couple of minutes to decode what seemed to be a new and harder set of words, he looked back to the first line and realized that the words on the second line were exactly the same as those on the first—but he was too tired to remember them. By 8:45 at night, he was trying to learn with a brain that was functioning at 10 percent capacity at best. If he had to learn the words, he suspected it would take him several hours, whereas if he went to bed and returned to them in the morning, he knew he could do it in twenty minutes. And yet this level of mental inefficiency is where many students do most of their learning!

  Not surprisingly, sleep and grades are intertwined. Numerous studies have shown a correlation between students’ self-reported shortened sleep time and weaker academic performance. Later school start times have led to decreased absences and tardiness, reduced sleepiness in school, and improvement in mood and feelings of efficacy.18 According to a recent study of nine thousand high school kids by Kyla Wahlstrom, when start times were pushed back to 8:35 A.M. and later, grades rose a quarter step. The later, the better, Wahlstrom says. You’ll see stronger results when you change a school’s start time from 7:30 to 8:30, for instance, than from 7:30 to 8:00.19

  When You’re Rested . . .

  When you’re well rested and not stressed, the prefrontal cortex helps regulate your emotional systems in a top-down way. If you sleep well, the connection between the prefrontal cortex and other systems is refreshed and strengthened, enabling our trusty Pilot to regulate our thinking and behavior.

  Every once in a while, Ned will see a kid who is not only getting top grades and putting in a sterling performance in outside activities, but who is also happy and unstressed. When he asks about sleep patterns (because he always does), the student will say something like, “Oh, yeah, I’m in bed by ten. I just cannot function well when I’m tired.” Now it’s possible that these kids are just more efficient and learn more easily, so that they can complete their work and get to bed at sensible hours. But it’s more likely that they’re more efficient and learn with greater ease precisely because they’re well rested. (It’s also true that poorly regulated kids very frequently have trouble sleeping, a problem we’ll discuss in Chapter Eleven.)

  Put simply, sleep heals. Rapid eye movement sleep—where most dreaming happens—takes the sting out of emotional experiences. When we’re in REM sleep, all stress-related neurochemicals are absent from the brain—the only time this happens in a twenty-four-hour period. According to Matthew Walker, during REM sleep the brain reactivates emotions and problematic memories and brings them back to the mind through reflective dreaming in a neurochemically safe, stress-free environment. This is the science behind the old saying that sleep makes things “look better in the morning.”20

  Just about everyone experiences a greater sense of control after a good night’s sleep. But here’s the clincher: to fall asleep, you have to let go. You have to give up control to gain it. And clearly, you can’t do this for someone else. So how can you help your children get enough sleep? There are as many obstacles to sleep as there are reasons to prioritize it, and the challenges vary considerably based on the age of the child. For that reason, we have decided to devote the remainder of this chapter to the questions we most commonly hear from parents, and how we answer them.

  “How much sleep does my child need?”

  Generally, preschoolers need ten to thirteen hours of sleep every day (one hour often comes in the form of a nap). Six- to thirteen-year-olds need from nine to eleven hours. Teenagers aged fourteen to seventeen need eight to ten hours. And young adults from eighteen to twenty-five years old need seven to nine hours.21 This is a general guideline, and Judith Owens, one of the top pediatric sleep researchers in the world, suggests that, like most other human needs, the need for sleep probably varies according to a bell curve.22 Some people need more sleep to function effectively than others. To determine whether your child is getting enough, consider: Does he wake up on his own? Is he tired during the day? Is he restless or irritable during the day? Use these considerations to guide you as you help your child get the sleep he needs.

  “How can I tell if my child has a sleep problem that requires a doctor’s help?”

  There are a few common sleep problems that parents should be aware of. At the top of the list are insomnia and sleep-related breathing problems, such as sleep apnea. If your child snores or has trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, you should consult your pediatrician and, if necessary, a sleep specialist, as you will want to rule out physical conditions such as asthma, allergies, and enlarged tonsils or adenoids that could be interfering with your child’s sleep. Insomnia can be a problem for children as young as four or five. For teens, insomnia is very prevalent, as is a phase-delay sleep syndrome, where they don’t feel tired until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and need to reset their biological clocks. Insomnia is frequently linked to ADHD and autism.23 You will also want to rule out stress, anxiety, or depression in the sleep-challenged child. If your child does not have ADHD or autism, but has trouble settling down or needs an adult in the room to help her sleep, this is considered a form of insomnia that has behavioral roots. It’s worth getting a recommendation for a cognitive behavioral therapist or a behavioral sleep specialist, as early interventions can be effective.

  “I get that sleep is important, but school starts so early, and my daughter’s extracurricular events plus homework have her up way too late. I hate to make her quit her extracurriculars—she loves them! What can I do?”

  We hear concerns like this a lot, and see it for ourselves. One of Ned’s students, Kelly, was a varsity athlete in three sports and took AP U.S. History, AP English, and AP Calculus. Her mom was understandably concerned about Kelly’s lack of sleep.

  “You’re involved in a lot,” Ned said to Kelly one day. “How are you doing?”

  “It’s okay,” Kelly shrugged. “I’m just really tired and pretty stressed.”

  “I can imagine,” Ned said. “Your mom sounded concerned about how you fit it all in. Just out of curiosity, what time do you get to bed?”

  “Usually two or three A.M.”

  “Wow. Can you walk me through your day? As serious as you are as a student and an athlete, you’re making it awfully hard to do your best, whatever that is, with so little sleep.”

  “Well, I usually have five hours of homework,” she said.

  “In my experience, when we’re a little more rested, we can do homework a bit faster. Maybe you could get the work done in only four hours and get more sleep. But, still, why two or three A.M.?”

  “I have lots of activities,” she said.

  “Beyond three varsity sports? What else do you do?”

  “Well, let’s see. There’s the Best Buddies program. And I do Model UN. And I’m a leader of my school’s Social Action Program. And I’m on the Honor Committee. Oh, and I’m a student ambassador, a student tutor, and peer mentor. I go to therapy. And I play club lacrosse and am part of an exercise program for kids with special needs.”

  We wish we were making this up. Of all the things Kelly needed to learn, foremost among them was how to make good choices. Ned said he couldn’t tell her that any one of those things was something she shouldn’t be doing. But she had less to give to each activity because she was involved in so many. An important part of hig
h school is learning that you can’t do it all and knowing that your own well-being has to come first.

  With high-achieving kids like Kelly, or with perfectionists, Ned often gives the following pep talk, which you can feel free to use as your own:

  I know how conscientious you are. You’ve made all these commitments and will never let anyone down. You’ll stay up later and work harder to get everything done. And so you will sacrifice yourself. You cannot be doing your best at anything if you’re chronically tired. One of the things you don’t know yet is that you don’t have to be superior at everything. You need to figure out what you want to specialize in and put your time and attention there. Consider dropping one of your extracurriculars or settling for a lower grade if there’s one class you both don’t like and know consumes a disproportionate amount of time. Reinvest that time in yourself, your sleep, and the classes or activities that really matter to you. Don’t look at it as letting someone down if you say no to an opportunity—instead, you’re giving someone else a chance to step up.

  “When I tell my teenage son he needs more sleep, he argues that he doesn’t need the nine and a half hours I think he does. He says that he feels just fine with less and that most of his friends are sleeping seven hours a night or less. How can I tell how much sleep he really needs?”

 

‹ Prev