Teens are sleeping less than ever and screens aren’t primarily to blame – NPR

Teens are sleeping less than ever and screens aren’t primarily to blame

March 8, 20267:04 AM ET, Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday

By Ari Daniel, 2-Minute Listen, Transcript

The spring time change can mean waking up a little groggy. But the situation may be worse for many teenagers who appear to be getting less sleep than ever, according to a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

That’s concerning because adolescents really need their beauty rest.

“Sleep plays a crucial role in adolescent brain development,” says Tanner Bommersbach, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “It’s important for emotional regulation in teenagers and important for their overall physical and mental health.”

Bommersbach says that it’s been clear for some time that teens are sleeping less now than they once did. But he and his colleagues wanted to know if that loss of sleep has been impacting certain groups of adolescents disproportionately.

They analyzed data from almost 121,000 high school students included in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey to understand trends in insufficient sleep, defined as less than eight hours per night.

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The bottom line is that things have gotten worse. Roughly three out of four American adolescents across all demographics reported insufficient sleep in 2023, which is up by 8% since 2007. This trend was driven by an increase in teens getting very short sleep of five hours or less, which swelled from 15.8% to 23.0% over that same time period.

In addition, they found Black students showed a greater increase in getting too little sleep compared to white students, says Bommersbach. “But in general, we were seeing large increases across the population regardless of a student’s age, sex, or race and ethnicity.”

Source: Teens are sleeping less than ever and screens aren’t primarily to blame : NPR