With all the discussion around the adolescent mental health crisis, a main suspect went relatively unnoticed: sleep.
I have treated thousands of young people with mental illness in the past 25 years. As a child and teenage psychiatrist, I observed a remarkable change in their daily habits thanks to the screen time. A 2021 report From Common Sense, the media found that people aged 13 to 18 spend almost nine hours a day watching screens.
These overtime hours of screen time came to the detriment of a variety of other activities: socializing in person, tasks, employment, reading books, physical activity and, above all, sleep. Studies confirm that adolescents are now sleeping less than Before smartphones Has resumed our lives, while their biological need for sleep has remained unchanged. Two -thirds of adolescents fail To obtain the minimum of eight hours that their mind needs most school nights, with black and male adolescents sleeping the less. According to the National Science Foundation, 70% of American high school students sleep less than eight hours a night, or less time than they spend screens.
Dozens of studies have proven how screen habits lead to bad sleep. The screen time alters sleep in five ways.
First of all, children are standing later because they prefer screen media to bed. Second, video games and social media increase autonomous excitement (this removes them), delaying the start of sleep even after deactivating the device. Third, many teenagers are in bed during the hours of clarity to engage with their phone or tablet, deconditioning the body to fall asleep in bed when they wish. Fourth, notifications – generally insomniac peers messages looking for the company – often wake up sleeping teens at night. Others provide alarm clock in the middle of the night to go online not disturbed by parents who assume they were sleeping. Fifth, the blue light emitted by night screens deceives the suprachiasmatic nucleus believing that it is the day, more disturbing the sensitive cycle of the sleep of a teenager.
Adolescents deprived of sleep sometimes fall asleep at school, but more often than not, nap after school and crashes the weekend, temporarily meeting their sleep debt but not having canceled most of the related damage. This damage is considerable. Sleep deprivation alters learning considerably, strongly predicting decreased grades. He also predisposes young people to depression, anxiety, suicidalityAnd obesity. Multiple studies confirm The fact that the relationship between screen time and poor mental health is linked to its negative effect on sleep. The lack of sleep that results from the night commitment of social media and adolescent video games can be the most important cause of the adolescent mental health crisis.
Why then, does the sleep of adolescents receive so little attention in the media? One of the reasons is that the effect of mental health insomnia is insidious. Adolescents and their parents often fail to connect a beginning of depression and anxiety with a drop in their sleep habits. Many depressed young people appreciate the time spent on entertainment on the screen late at night, because entertainment provides temporary relief from their growing daily distress. However, they do not know that their solution ultimately exacerbates the problem.
Ten years ago, it was not uncommon for insomnia adolescents to ask me to prescribe sleep drugs. More often than not, the withdrawal of the screens from their room at night resolved their insomnia without requiring pills.
But more and more, I find that adolescents don’t really want to give enough time to sleep. They prefer the use of nocturnal smartphones at a reasonable bedtime, refusing parental rules and even sleep drugs for fear that this will interfere with their favorite activity. When I worked with a boy who was standing overnight in his room playing video games, I suggested to her mother that she moves her game console in the living room. She did it, but to my surprise, he was not better sleeping. Then she clarified what was going on: “He’s not going to his bedroom, spends all night in the living room.”
Although screens may seem inseparable from modern adolescence, we must not ignore the growing evidence that the night screen uses a terrible assessment on mental health. Adolescents must be educated on the importance of adequate sleep and how screens can hinder. Many lack insight, perspective and will to manage the screen time by themselves, but parents can help by defining a bedtime that allows nine hours of sleep per night and restricting all access to screens until morning. Often, this means completely banning the bedroom screens, loading phones in the parents’ room overnight and automatically deactivate Wi-Fi each evening. Parents could also bristle because they also want to use their devices, but it offers parents a chance to give an example by moderating their own screen habits. Priority to sleep will help children and adolescents to lead a healthy life in this world saturated by the media. Sometimes the best therapy of all is a good night’s rest.
This test is adapted from a chapter written by Paul Weigle and edited by Naomi Schaefer Riley and Sally Satel in the edited volume “Watch out for children: how to think about the collapse of the mental health of young people. “”
Paul Weigle, MD, is a psychiatrist for children and adolescents certified by the board of directors, medical director associated with the Natchaug hospital and associate professor of psychiatry at the Uconn School of Medicine.