Generation Sleepless: Why Tweens and Teens Aren't Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them - Softcover

Turgeon MFT, Heather; Wright MFT, Julie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593542886 ISBN 13: 9780593542880

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

An intimate glimpse inside a silent epidemic that is harming teens and how parents can help them reclaim the restorative power of sleep.

If you could protect your teen from unnecessary anxiety, depression, and chronic stress, and foster a greater sense of happiness and well-being in their life, wouldn’t you? In Generation Sleepless, the authors of the classic guide to helping babies and young children develop healthy sleep habits The Happy Sleeper uncover one of the greatest threats to our teenagers’ physical and mental health: sleep deprivation. Caught in a perfect storm of omnipresent screens, academic overload, night owl biology and early school start times, Generation Sleepless illustrates how our teens are operating in a constant state of sleep debt and "social jet lag" while struggling to meet the demands of adolescence.

In this essential book, Heather Turgeon, MFT and Julie Wright, MFT draw on the latest scientific research to reveal that, at a critical phase of development, many teens need more sleep than their younger siblings, but they're getting drastically less. Generation Sleepless helps readers:
 


  •  foster a teen's self-motivation for sleeping well
  •  alter family practices around phones, social media, and screen time
  •  draw on an understanding of teens' night owl tendencies to create smart sleep habits
  •  lay out steps for sleep-friendly schools and promoting systemic changes that help teens get the rest they need
 
This first-of-its-kind book is packed with clear and instantly usable advice for parents as well as an eye-opening call to action for teachers, principals, colleges, coaches, and policy makers.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather Turgeon, MFT and Julie Wright, MFT are psychotherapists, sleep specialists, and authors of the popular parenting books, The Happy Sleeper and Now Say This. Through their online sleep classes and consultations as founders of The Happy Sleeper, they help families with babies, kids, and teens sleep well. Heather’s writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She lives in Los Angeles and has a (well-rested) tween and teen. Julie is the creator of one of LA’s best known parenting programs, The Wright Mommy and Me. She lives in New York City and has a young adult son.

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What if you knew that one simple daily habit would boost your teenager’s mental health three-fold, improve their grades and love of school, make them a better athlete, dramatically reduce their stress and anxiety, cut their chances of getting in a car accident in half, and ward off chronic health conditions like type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cancer? And what if this practice costs nothing and was completely natural. No downsides—only upsides to everything you care about in your teenager’s life.

Of course, you’d start today.

The irony is that we have this powerful panacea available to us at this very moment, and every day, we systematically neglect it. Yes, you’ve guessed it. It’s the life-fueling practice of sleep—and our teenagers are in the midst of the worst case of deprivation experienced by any population in history.

Modern-day teens are the most sleep-deprived group of any individuals the world has ever seen: while the majority of elementary school kids get the optimal amount of sleep on most nights, that number drops to about 30 percent by middle school, and by their senior year, only 5 percent of teens get optimal sleep on school nights. And the numbers keep slipping. In 2015, 58 percent more teenagers were severely sleep deprived than in 1991. A recent survey of sixty thousand American high school students measured how well teens are faring in terms of basic health recommendations for sleep, screen use, and exercise. Only 3 percent of girls and 7 percent of boys reached these targets.

As therapists and sleep specialists, we’ve watched this downward trend in teen sleep. A “perfect storm” (a concept we’ll explore throughout this book) of shifting biology, academic pressure, early high school start times, and a misconception that sleep is dispensable rather than essential, has been steadily chipping away at teen sleep. But while that storm has been brewing for decades, the explosion of technology has taken this storm to Category 5 hurricane levels. The smartphone is getting harder and harder to put down. Technology is ever more brilliant at keeping teens engaged and connected (teen sleep took a notable dip after 2011, as the smartphone gained popularity). Meanwhile, the academic load on students continues to increase and kids are being prepped for college applications when they’ve barely stopped playing tag on the playground. Like never before, teens’ sleep is being stolen from all sides.

To make matters worse, adolescence is a stage of life when proper sleep is vital and game changing—to a degree that few of us fully appreciate. Books on baby sleep are stacked high on our bedside tables, because no one doubts the importance of sleep to a growing baby. But the truth is, a teenager’s brain is doing through an equally important stage of growth (with potentially more life altering and consequential outcomes). Adolescence is an awe-inspiring and pivotal developmental phase, when the brain undergoes massive reorganization and growth, and much of that vital work happens during sleep. Missing sleep raises the risk of mental health issues, heightens teen stress at a neurochemical level, makes athletes more accident prone, and causes the brain’s memory storage to malfunction, which short-circuits learning and academic success. When sleep is missing, the ripple effects on mental and physical health are tremendous and exponential.

Even when we as parents try to protect sleep, we often feel like our hands are tied. Yes, most know our teen should get to bed on time, but they many of us feel frustrated and powerless, because the factors that truly limit sleep—insidious technology, academic overload and in some cases punishingly early high school start times—feel out of our control. What can they possibly do? (Who’s up for joining us in breaking into the headquarters of Big tech to change the algorithms that create increasingly addictive platforms and games? Or magically signing a bill to make middle and high schools across the world start no earlier than 8:30 a.m.) In all seriousness, what are parents, teens, and the people who care about them supposed to do with to protect growing teenage brains and bodies?

The answers are in this book. In the chapters ahead, we will help you regain what decades of science have shown as the mental and physical benefits of good sleep. Together, we will explore the wonders of the teenage brain, the surprising powers of healthy sleep, and the roadblocks to a teen’s full night of slumber. We’ll translate that knowledge into specific actionable steps that parents and teens—as well as school leaders and companies—can take, right now, to drastically transform sleep, and therefore health and well-being. We even have a “cheat sheet” for your teenager to read, so they feel personally motivated to engage in these simple practices. And along the way, you’ll find yourself engaging in better sleep—feeling healthier, happier and more patient as well. (What can we say? It’s never too late to start sleeping well.)

Teen Sleep Loss: Why It Matters
Sleep breathes life into the adolescent brain—it releases neurochemicals like serotonin and dopamine, that fuel teens with positivity, purpose, new ideas, passion, and sharp focus. It skyrockets hormones that strengthen and repair muscles. Sleep bolsters the immune system, decreases inflammation, and lowers the risk of chronic disease. If it seems like we could go on and on here, it’s true. There is no drug, supplement, or routine that can return the same multifaceted benefits as good sleep.

And not surprisingly, the consequences of teenage sleep deprivation are serious and wide-reaching. Sleep loss creates wear and tear on the brain and body that manifests in many of the mental health symptoms we see in today’s teenagers. According to the Pew Research Center, 7 in 10 teens say that anxiety and depression are major issues in their communities, and the number of teenagers who say they recently experienced depression increased 59 percent between 2007 and 2017. An increasing percentage of American youth say that they feel sad or hopeless, and tragically, the rate of suicide for fifteen-to-nineteen-year-olds has gone up 76 percent since 2007. Not coincidently, during this time, sleep has continued to shrink. As we’ll uncover in the next chapter, sleep loss raises stress levels, decreases the brain’s emotional regulation pathways, and amplifies the brain’s negative emotional centers. A sleep deprived brain sees the world through a negative lens, and skews towards sadness, frustration, anger, or hopelessness. A study of Chicago middle school kids found that those who got less sleep had lower self-esteem, lower grades, and higher levels of depression. A study of Chinese adolescents found that sleeping less than eight hours a night on a regular basis was associated with a threefold increase in the risk of suicide attempts. The connections between sleep and psychological wellbeing are direct and unmistakable. Mental health holds first place on every parent’s concern list—which means sleep should too.

Lack of sleep dampens activity in the prefrontal region of the brain—where our judgement, decision-making, and self-regulation live—which means sleep-deprived adolescents are at higher risk for accidents and poor decision-making. This turns out to be especially dangerous for teenagers, as we’ll explain in chapter 3, because of the unique way the brain changes in these years. Car accidents, injuries, and many more terrifying and life-altering events that keep parents awake at night are exacerbated by sleep deprivation. Substance use goes up as sleep time goes down. In fact, data from the CDC...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593542886
• ISBN 13: 9780593542880
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland