Most of us probably know that getting enough sleep makes us feel better, but there’s so much more to it than that – especially for our teens. In this episode, Vicki and Elizabeth talk with Lisa Lewis, author of the book The Sleep Deprived Teen: Why Our Teenagers Are So Tired, and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive about why our students aren’t getting enough sleep, the dramatic effect that can have on them, and how to help them get more sleep. If you sometimes feel as though your student is sleepwalking much of the time, you’ll discover you’re not alone – and you really help your teen make some changes.

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We were excited in this episode to have a conversation with Lisa Lewis, author of The Sleep Deprived Teen: Why our Teenagers Are So Tired and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive. Sleep is one of the most important factors in helping students succeed and stay healthy, but for college students it can be a major challenge.

Lisa began by sharing some of the issues that exist with early high school start times and what a difference it can make when middle and high schools move to later start times. Lisa also made clear that this problem of tired teenagers is not as simple as telling them to go to bed earlier. Their internal clocks are really different.

Wonder how much sleep your teen should be getting? Lisa shared that teens up to age 18 should be getting 8-10 hours of sleep. They may look like adults, but their sleep needs are different.

We covered the influence of light and dark, electronic devices and keeping them out of the bedroom, role modeling for students, and the links between sleep and mental health, risky behaviors, and grades.

Lisa also shared how much getting sleep can make a difference for athletes. The statistics in the book make it clear that sleep is a competitive advantage. If you have an athlete and you want to help them understand why sleep matters, check out the information in the book. It has made a difference for entire teams as well as individual athletes and also shortened healing time for injuries.

We also learned that “banking” sleep – getting enough ahead of time is much more beneficial than “catch-up” sleep trying to make up for a sleep debt. The math just doesn’t work.

And yes, we talked about naps! Good? Bad? It depends.

If you want to find out more about Lisa or her book, check out her website: www.lisallewis.com

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Transcript:

Announcer: 0:10

Welcome to the College Parent Central podcast. Whether your child is just beginning the college admission process or is already in college, this podcast is for you. You’ll find food for thought and information about college and about navigating that delicate balance of guidance, involvement and knowing when to get out of the way. Join your hosts as they share support and a celebration of the amazing experience of having a child in college.

Elizabeth Hamblet: 0:44

Welcome to the College Parents Central Podcast. I am your co-host, Elizabeth Hamblett, and we are streaming live on Facebook as well, so hopefully folks will get to enjoy both watching and listening to this later. We are here with the author of the Sleep Deprived Teen, my friend Lisa L Lewis. I’m going to attempt to hold this up. I have my electronic version

Vicki Nelson:

and I have the real one

Elizabeth Hamblet:

Hard copy. I connected with Lisa through some writing groups and was so grateful to have done so, because this book is amazing. We are getting back to school at this time of year and, as parents are thinking about how can they help their students be happy and healthy and successful in the new year, we cannot neglect the topic of sleep. Nothing is more important to any of this than sleep. A poorly rested teenager cannot be an accomplished student or an athlete or, you know, like most of us, a person. So with that, I’m going to ask Lisa to just introduce herself to us and tell us a little bit about how she got on this topic.

Lisa Lewis: 1:59

Absolutely. Thank you both for having me here. It’s such a joy and it’s a topic that I really am passionate about it, as Elizabeth knows. So I am the author of the Sleep Deprived Teen and thank you both for sharing your copies and the story of how that came about. I’ll just kind of give a quick recap, because it really stems from my dual roles as a parent and as a parenting journalist. So I have for quite a long time written about various topics related to parenting and education and public health, and obviously this topic of teen sleep, you know, really encompasses all of those areas. So for me, the impetus for focusing on this particular topic was actually when the oldest of my two kids, my son, was entering high school, which was almost 10 years ago now. So I’ve been absolutely immersed in this topic for close to a decade.

Lisa Lewis: 2:59

So it was 2015. He was just starting his freshman year of high school and at that point our local public high school started at 7.30 in the morning. So that was much earlier than any of the other start times he had ever had. As he moved through the system, you know, elementary, middle, high and it was really quickly obvious that it just was too early all the way around. It was too early for him. It was too early for our family. And I was the one, you know, driving him to school. We’d leave the house every day at 7.10. And he was sitting there in the car but he was really quiet. He wasn’t quite like alert and, you know, awake and ready for full day of learning. So that’s what initially propelled me into this topic was looking at start times and trying to figure out, well, why did our district have this sudden, you know, move back to 7:30 when it came to high school start times? And were we unique in this? And you know all that and what I quickly found were a few things. The first was that, sadly, we were not unique. This was actually happening across the country. And the second was that this was actually counter to what is recommended. So again, this was 2015. The previous year, 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics had just released a very influential policy statement on secondary school start times and they were recommending that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8.30 in the morning. So obviously, 7:30 was nowhere in range, but this topic was really starting to hit a critical mass because that statement had just come out, the CDC had just released a report looking at start times. So this was sort of the backdrop, you know, when I was, you know, suddenly having it, like you know, fall on my doorstep and, you know, realizing this was something that’s affecting me.

Lisa Lewis: 4:51

So I started writing about the issue because there’s a body of research that you know dates back to literally the mid 70s. I started writing about this issue, you know, in my role as a journalist and in fact one of the pieces I wrote was an op ed that ran in the Los Angeles Times. It was called Why Schools Should Start Later in the Day and that article, my op ed, literally ended up being read in the newspaper by one of our California state senators. And it just so happened and he his name is Anthony Portantinoino and his district is in Los Angeles. Just so happened he also had a high schooler and their high school was in the midst of talking about this issue of school start times. So I had sort of tapped into this issue at a time when it really was kind of hitting a critical mass. So, long story short, he read that he decided he wanted to look into the issue because he was interested in introducing a bill on this topic of starttimes. He ended up doing that.

Lisa Lewis: 5:53

I got caught up in this whole two and a half year legislative journey. I ended up testifying at the state capitol, Sacramento, about this and being involved in all the communications, and it culminated in California actually passing the first state law in the country setting minimum allowed start times for middle and high schools. So, yeah, sort of this bit of a you know crazy backstory, but that finally got signed into law in 2019. Three-year implementation window went into effect in 2022, which also just so happened to be when my book came out, because I was immersed in this topic, talking to all these researchers and gathering all this info, and so all of that happened in the summer of 2022.

Lisa Lewis: 6:39

And, as I mentioned, so what propelled me into this was the issue of school start times, which is still an issue in so many areas, you know, within the United States even today, but also it’s so much broader than that, and so really, my focus now is you know, that’s an essential piece of it when you look at it, but even so, overall, our teens are sleep deprived and there are so many ramifications and there are so many other pieces that play into. So really I, you know, focus more broadly now on that, this overall topic of sleep and wellness, because it affects literally every single thing we do.

Elizabeth Hamblet: 7:18

Well, that’s a really good lead into you know, our first question that we had for you when your kids are little, you are constantly on top of their nap situation, right, making sure they have a consistent bedtime. And then they get older and they’re in charge of it and you know. So sleep is really important for all of us, but why, very specifically, is it important for teenagers? Because I think sometimes we forget about that.

Lisa Lewis: 7:44

Yeah, so for teens, there are a couple of unique circumstances that you know. We do tend to think of sleep as being one of those things. When our kids are little, it’s like, please, God, just let them go to sleep and not, you know, get up in the middle of the night and come wake me, and not wake at 6am, you know, and then it totally, the situation totally flips on its head when our kids hit those teen years.

Lisa Lewis: 8:06

So, and there are several contributing factors to the situation we have today, which is that our teens are, by and large, the most sleep deprived of any age group. So that is due to several different factors. So the first is that when you think about how much sleep you need, we always hear eight hours, you know, as being kind of this magic, perfect number. So that is great for us as adults. The official sleep recommendations from the National Sleep Foundation for adults over age 18 is seven to nine hours. So you know that’s a pretty broad range, but the vast majority of adults are going to fall somewhere within that. So eight, great, that’s the midpoint, that’s perfect. But teens need more sleep than adults. Up until age 18, they should actually be getting eight to 10 hours of sleep. So I think the first thing is that that’s not always as widely known, and particularly when you’re looking at, you know, a teen, a junior, a senior in high school, they look like an adult, but they’re not. They do need more sleep than we do. So when you talk about eight hours, that’s the minimum that they’re supposed to be getting. So that’s the first piece of it.

Lisa Lewis: 9:17

The second is that they have a shift in their sleep timing. So, as I was just referencing, you know, when your kid is four, you know they’re, or you know, even younger, they’re bouncing out of bed at 6am. They don’t do that once they’re teens. You know there’s all those sort of jokes about like needing to go in and bang the pots and pans to get them out of bed at 11 in the morning. It’s not just because suddenly they became lazy, it’s because there is this fundamental shift that happens in the timing of their sleep schedule. So what happens? It’s called your circadian rhythm, which has to do with, essentially, the when you are awake and when you’re asleep, and it is tied to light and dark, so we are alert and awake during the day. We sleep at night when it’s dark, and we have sort of an internal schedule for that. It is heavily influenced by light. But what happens for teens is that whole schedule shifts later as they enter adolescence.

Lisa Lewis: 10:15

And this is again. This is a physiological thing. So the hormone melatonin is something that our brain actually produces and it is what primes us to feel sleepy. So melatonin is released and then that sort of leads us to start feeling sleepy, and then we get to that point we’re sleepy, we go to bed. Well, melatonin begins to be released later in the evening for our teenagers, and so all of a sudden they’re not feeling sleepy as early as they used to. So they’re not feeling sleepy until roughly 11 o’clock at night and then they need eight to 10 hours of sleep.

Lisa Lewis: 10:50

So you just kind of do the math and then you look at the start times and you can see if you’ve got to be up at, say, 630. Or even earlier. That makes it virtually impossible to get eight to 10 hours of sleep. So those are sort of the big pieces affecting teen sleep. And then there’s so much else and I know we’ll get into some of this because that’s sort of the backdrop. But then there’s all the other things going on in school. There’s their homework load, there’s their activities. You know this whole issue of overscheduling, like that’s real, and all that ends up taking up more and more and more of their wake time, cutting into that little piece that’s allotted for sleep.

Vicki Nelson: 11:32

Wow. You know, I think you’ve just answered. You know what’s often been in my mind, and I know other people who say well, why don’t the teenagers just go to bed earlier? Shouldn’t we just enforce an earlier bedtime? And if they’ve got to be at school at 7.30 and we know they need sleep, we say 9 o’clock, lights out, that’s it, you’re done. So now that makes more sense. And you just mentioned a lot of other factors. So I’m curious. I want to follow up on one that’s sort of my thorn in my side a lot of the time, and that’s technology. So how does now technology and all of the things that teens are involved in, how does that factor into all of this?

Lisa Lewis: 12:23

Yes, yeah, great question, and it does. The short answer is yes, it does factor in. This relates back to what I was just talking about the light and dark and the release of melatonin. So tech is here to stay. Obviously, it’s not like we can just we can delay when our kids get phones, but they’re online to do their school assignments too. I mean, being online is such an integral part of their social world. The same way, you know, when I was in high school, I was on the telephone for hours. Well, now that’s been replaced, you know. So tech is here to stay. It has a valid role, but it does absolutely have the ability to impact their sleep.

Lisa Lewis: 13:00

So there are a few different ways that that happens. The first is simply time displacement. So if you are online until late at night, at some point you are literally cutting into hours when you could have been sleeping instead. So that’s the first piece. The second piece is that so often, what our teens and we as adults are doing online is stimulating and engaging. So you know, for us, maybe we’re watching, you know, a movie or something, maybe we’re checking our work email, so our brain is still in work mode. You know, for our kids, they could be playing a video game that’s fast paced and energetic, they could be involved in some kind of an emotional you know chat with their friends about you know the latest relationship issue that’s come up, or whatever. So all that is keeping you awake and alert.

Lisa Lewis: 13:49

And then the last piece of it is the blue light aspect. So this gets back to the light piece I was talking about earlier. Blue light is part of the overall spectrum of light and, in fact, the biggest source of blue light for us is the sun, and when we’re out in the day and we get blue source of blue light that helps cue us to feel alert. Well, these devices that we’re using, these backlit devices, they actually emit blue light. It’s just part of the way that you know they’ve been constructed with the LEDs and that blue light actually primes us to feel alert. So you are like giving yourself these extra doses of blue light in the evening when you’re on your devices, and that can, in turn, delay the release of melatonin, meaning you’re not going to feel sleepy until later. So there’s all three of these ways that tech can potentially impact sleep.

Vicki Nelson: 14:42

So I know I’m jumping ahead a little bit. I know one of the things we’re hoping to talk about, perhaps a little later, is some suggestions for parents and what they can do. But is it realistic to expect teens to put their devices aside earlier? In other words, you’re not really sleepy until later, but let’s not add this factor and, by a little bit earlier, put the device away.

Lisa Lewis: 15:11

Yes, and in fact that is a best practice. The American Academy of Pediatrics does recommend getting off the tech devices an hour before bedtime.

Lisa Lewis: 15:20

So, again, that is the best practice. So that is something maybe to work toward, Because, again, just as with these recommendations, we know what the official recommendation is and then we know what reality is, and so I feel like you know, you may not ever get to perfect, but you can at least take steps to get closer so an hour before bedtime. That would be ideal. Even if you can’t do that, though, work towards better than what you have now. Maybe it’s a half hour before bedtime, but getting off of those devices rather than staying online, you know, go, go, go, go, go and just turn it off and expect that you can just turn your brain off the same way and just fall asleep. Flip a switch, yeah, exactly yeah, our brain does not have an off switch, the way that, you know, our devices do.

Lisa Lewis: 16:06

So that’s the best practice is to get off devices an hour before bedtime Along those lines, ideally not keeping them in the bedrooms overnight. So, you know, have a central charging station. The other thing that we can do as parents is help model these behaviors. because these are best practices that apply for all users of tech. So you know if we’ve set a house rule yeah, no devices in the bedrooms overnight. We’re just going to use an alarm clock rather than the alarm function on your phone I mean, those still exist out there then our devices need to be charging in the kitchen as well, and we need to not be sitting there on our laptops in bed. So it is also like having this be a family. You know, set of tech rules ideally not just for teens, and certainly if you haven’t had these kind of rules in place, showing that you are now going to be part of it and kind of working towards it and getting your teens buy-in is also a pretty essential piece.

Elizabeth Hamblet: 17:07

Yeah, because they can smell hypocrisy miles away, can’t they?

Lisa Lewis: 17:11

Yes. Yeah, absolutely Do as I say, not as I do.

Elizabeth Hamblet: 17:12

Their BS detectors are quite good. So obviously just having a crabby teenager in your house is just not fun in general and it’s not good for your mental health. But let’s talk more deeply about you know, just aside from being tired, you know what is the link between sleep and mental health, sleep and risky behaviors and something I think a lot of parents are worried about sleep and grades.

Lisa Lewis: 17:42

Yeah, absolutely Well, sleep affects literally everything we do. I always tell people there’s not one single thing that you do better as a result of being sleep deprived. So so there. So let me just kind of give a quick overview, because there’s so much to say about all of those topics.

Lisa Lewis: 18:00

But first looking at learning, because obviously that’s like the whole point of why our kids are in school all day, right? So when you are sleep deprived, it actually affects your ability to learn and retain information. So, and there are three different steps in the process where it particularly has an effect. The first is when you are acquiring that new information. So you’re sitting in class, and if you’re not really awake and alert, you know it’s not really penetrating to the same degree. That’s the same, by the way. You know, if you’re at home and you’re reading like we’ve all had that experience you’re trying to read something, you’re tired, and you realize you’ve just read the same page like four times and nothing has sunk in right. So that’s the first step.. The second, though, is retaining that information, because sleep is when our brains are processing and synthesizing all of that information we’ve taken in that day and moving it from short-term into long-term storage in terms of memory. So all that is such a critical piece of learning is what happens with that information and how you retain it. That’s what’s happening overnight when we’re sleeping. And then the third piece is when you’re trying to retrieve that information, because if you’re sleep deprived, just your cognitive functioning is slower and being able to retrieve that information is much slower and much more difficult. So that’s the first piece. So absolutely there’s an impact on learning.

Lisa Lewis: 19:26

The other big piece, though I mean there’s so many, but another very large piece is the mental health piece and again, so many different ways that being sleep deprived affects this. But to start, it’s basically your emotional resiliency is restored when you’ve had a good night’s sleep. You have an emotional buffer, you are ready to greet the day. It’s a key part of there’s a term flourishing, which really has to do with thriving, and that has to do with not just things like having a sense of purpose, but feeling engaged in your daily activities and in your interactions with others and just having a positive outlook. And so getting a good night’s sleep is a key piece of that, because you wake when you’ve had a good night’s sleep and you feel good when you open your eyes, you know, as opposed to when you wake and you haven’t had a good night’s sleep like you know it the second you open your eyes and it just makes everything that much more difficult.

Lisa Lewis: 20:27

You know, throughout the day, if you have mental health issues, like depression, like anxiety, et cetera, being sleep deprived exacerbates them. So you know again, if you are prone to that let’s say there’s a genetic component of family history you go in, maybe to a medical professional. That’s one of the very first questions they’re going to ask is how is your sleep? Are you getting enough sleep? Because if you’re not, that’s the first piece they’re going to want to address. That’s like the low hanging fruit. You know it can be very straightforward If you’re regularly getting five hours of sleep, well, they’re going to work with you on trying to increase that, to get to, you know, being within the range before they’re going to start looking, you know, generally speaking, at other possible causes, because sleep absolutely is part of that.

Lisa Lewis: 21:17

And then you’d asked about risky behaviors. So, again, sleep affects, and this is particularly acute with teenagers. When you haven’t gotten enough sleep, you are more prone to risky behaviors, impulsive decision-making, particularly as a teen because your prefrontal cortex is not going to be operating as efficiently and it already is not operating as efficiently in our teens, because their brain is in the midst of this multi-year process of brain remodeling and the part that revs up first is the limbic system, which is responsible for sensation seeking and it, you know, all that kind of stuff, whereas the prefrontal cortex, which is kind of the braking part of you know the system, does not go through that remodeling until later on, and so they don’t even have a strong of a prefrontal cortex functioning to begin with, and then, when you’re sleep deprived, it exacerbates that.

Vicki Nelson: 22:15

So it’s just so overwhelming the amount of well, I’m processing and as I read the book, I mean I’ve already sort of processed this a little bit the amount of things that are affected by sleep that so often we don’t realize. And one of the areas as I read the book that struck me the most and maybe because I have a grandson who’s an athlete and does I mean, he’s still young but he’s several sports and he’s quite good at it was some of the things that you talked about, some of the statistics even that you shared, about how dramatically getting enough sleep can improve athletic performance, and it seems as though for a lot of teenagers who are very active athletes, this is one of the strongest arguments for getting sleep. Can you talk a little bit about sleep and athletics?

Lisa Lewis: 23:21

Yes, yes. And absolutely it is to your point. You know, possibly, the way in when you’re trying to kind of have these conversations with your kid, because if they’re an athlete, maybe this is the piece that’s really going to resonate, the message being that sleep is a competitive advantage. So there is a study actually that really was sort of the seminal study, for this was done back in 2011 at Stanford. A researcher there worked with the Stanford men’s basketball team who they were not getting enough sleep. They were averaging less than seven hours of sleep. So she had them go through this process of being in bed for at least 10 hours a night as a way to hopefully extend their actual sleep time, because you can’t put someone to bed and say, okay, sleep. I mean, obviously it doesn’t work that way, but getting them to, you know, prioritize it by spending more time in bed. And, lo and behold, it worked. They were getting less than seven hours. After this, they were getting about eight and a half hours of sleep.

Lisa Lewis: 24:19

But what was so impressive was what that meant in terms of their performance. So all of a sudden, they were posting a 9% increase in free throws, a 9% increase in three-point shots and they had faster sprint times. So it’s like all of a sudden, this wasn’t because they were changing their training, it was just because they were getting more sleep. So and so this is now a message that is pretty, pretty widely understood.

Lisa Lewis: 24:48

And and when you look at pro teams, college teams, they often have sleep consultants. They work with you know, olympic athletes. Many of them have come out very publicly to talk about how important sleep is to their performance. So, absolutely so, when you get enough sleep, it improves your performance. On the flip side, when you don’t get enough sleep, it increases your risk for injuries, because it affects things like coordination and response time. And then if you are injured, if you’re not getting enough sleep, it is likely going to lengthen your recovery time.

Vicki Nelson: 25:26

There you have it.

Elizabeth Hamblet: 25:27

Yeah.

Vicki Nelson: 25:27

I mean there are a lot of teenagers who are not athletes, so there perhaps need to be some other arguments, but for so many that’s just it’s dramatic.

Lisa Lewis: 25:39

Oh, absolutely Absolutely. And sleep also is primarily when growth hormone is released. So that’s another argument that often, you know, really cause people, you know teens, to sit up and take notice.

Elizabeth Hamblet: 25:50

So you know along those lines. Obviously you talked about, you know, setting some household rules and modeling. But you know, are there any somewhat persuasive arguments that you think parents should be using while their kids are in high school? You know, to begin with, you know about this Because students feel the need, you know, in their teenage years to be in control of things. Right, and I think in some communities there is that you know grind culture, you know where it’s. It’s a point of pride to say well, you know these kids in AP classes who are getting loads and loads of work and I’m coming in on five hours and so how to persuade them? You know they can still lie about it at school if they want right.

Lisa Lewis: 26:44

Yeah, no, it’s tricky because it is multifactorial, as you mentioned, and particularly when you are in a high-achieving environment. There are these other factors that are contributing the homework load, the overscheduling of activities and the perceived need to do all of this in order to get into the right school, because it’s going to determine your future and all that. And it’s tricky because it needs to be addressed at so many different levels. There’s the kids themselves, as you mentioned. It’s sort of a point of pride. It’s sort of this kind of humble bragging well, I only got six hours of sleep. Oh, well, I only got five hours of sleep. So they’ve got that. Sometimes it’s coming from the family, you know, this need to sort of perceived need to succeed academically in order to get into the right school. Sometimes it’s, you know, baked into the school itself, which may have responded to, you know, the sort of push from parents because they, you know, want to be high achieving school. So it is coming from all these different places. But at the same time there’s a point of diminishing returns and I think that’s what’s so important to keep in mind.

Lisa Lewis: 27:49

One of the ways to sort of take a look at, you know, whether you are indeed overscheduled is to literally map out how many waking hours you have, you know during a typical day, and how those are currently being allocated. So you’ve got a set number of hours that you’re in school, but then you have your hours for homework for each class and it may vary because the advanced level classes are often going to have more homework. Then there’s all the extracurriculars and maybe it’s stuff they’re doing in school like band and speech and debate, or what have student government could also be club sports they’re doing outside of school. Maybe they also have a job. They also need time to be able to sit down and eat meals and catch their breath and shower and things like that. So you need to like factor in all that. And if you do all that and then you see that there’s not even an eight to 10 hour window left in the schedule, then it’s making it pretty hard for them to get, you know, enough sleep and it’s also maybe a sign that it’s time to reevaluate. And what that means is going to differ.

Lisa Lewis: 28:54

Obviously you know in each case, but when you think about it we’ve already set the limit somewhere. Like people will brag about getting five hours, they’re not going to brag about getting two hours of sleep right. Like at some point you know there’s a limit. And it’s the same with AP classes. Even somebody who’s overloaded their schedule with them, at some point there’s a limit. They’re not taking, excuse me, literally every single AP class that the school offers, like there is some limit they have set in their mind. Same with sports. Even if you’re a multi-sport athlete, you are not literally participating in every single sport that the school offers. You have set that limit somewhere, and it’s, I guess. Maybe my advice would be to look at where you’ve set that limit and perhaps recalibrate a bit.

Vicki Nelson: 29:39

Yeah, I know sometimes with my students who’s college level, who say they don’t have enough time. When we sit down and take 168 hours of the week and do exactly what you’re talking about, how many do you do? It’s eye-opening for them to realize often at that stage, to realize that they have more free time than they thought they did, that it fritters away somewhere. But just that mathematical approach of saying this many hours in a week or this many hours in a day and then actually looking at it, it does stare you right in the face. It’s good,

Lisa Lewis: 30:25

Oh, I was just going to say it sounds like the big piece that you’re mentioning is the time management piece, which is huge and is something that as kids leave home, they are suddenly much more responsible for that and so often that can use fine tuning. But that’s also something when our kids are still at home and they are in middle school and high school we are helping, particularly in the younger teens. Helping them learn those skills, helping them figure out you don’t wait until the night before something’s due to suddenly start on it. So developing those skills is something ideally they’re doing all the way through those secondary school years. I still need to be starting earlier too, but the point is like we are more involved when they’re at home. But hopefully we’re helping them develop those skills because that’s going to help eliminate those late nights in high school Like, oh God, I didn’t start and it’s due, but also ideally equip them so they’re able to take that with them when they do go off to college.

Vicki Nelson: 31:19

It strikes me that maybe college applications you know as students are writing their admissions essays and all they should include how many hours of sleep do you get? And maybe it boosts your admission a little bit if you say I get eight hours sleep, because then you know you’re going to have a student who’s going to be their sharpest. Probably the admissions officers would not listen to my argument, but it struck me, as you were talking.

Elizabeth Hamblet:

Well, and I like that idea. What would also be great it would be a way of saying to students, when you come here we expect you to take care of yourself. Because this is a podcast for parents of  current college students as well and when I help my college students with their schedules, they have meetings at 10:00 at night. I mean, I’m brushing my teeth at 10:00 and I think the nature of college life is not necessarily conducive to a good sleep schedule. And sometime on weekends, well, I’ll catch up on the weekend. And then there are activities on the weekend and it doesn’t really happen, and so . . .

Vicki Nelson:

Can I follow up on that question, too?  What about that idea of sort of banking your sleep time on the weekend. How helpful is that and how effective is that to say, well, yeah, I can only sleep on the weekend.

Lisa Lewis: 33:04

Yeah,. I’m. I’m positive because there’s a couple. There’s sort of two different pieces over here. One is banking, which is getting enough sleep ahead of time, okay, that it’s in the bank before you’re sleep deprived, and that actually has been shown to be a good strategy. So if you know you’re going to have some nights like that coming up, being really intentional about starting off, you know, in as good a position as you can, so that’s sort of that concept of sleep banking.

Lisa Lewis: 33:35

The type of long weekend sleep that you’re referring to, though, often is catch up sleep. It’s happening after the fact, and so that’s a little bit different, because you can never really truly catch up, so you’re always a little bit behind. So let’s say that you have built up this sleep deficit over the course of the week, so you have this accumulation of sleep debt, because every night, let’s say during the week, you’re not getting enough sleep, you end up with a sleep debt of 10 hours. Well, then you still need to be getting. Let’s just say, even if the kid is over 18 in college, let’s say they’re supposed to be getting eight hours. Well, they need to then add on an additional five hours on each of those nights in order to really make it up, and so that actually probably is not happening, even if they’re sleeping in until 11 or noon.

Lisa Lewis: 34:25

The other piece, though, is that then particularly if they not so much probably for college, but certainly for adults going to work, for high schoolers going to school you generally have, you know, an earlier start time, I would say, than college students. That’s probably like one of those best silver linings of colleges you don’t have to take classes at 7.30 in the morning, but it makes it that much harder to fall asleep at sort of a reasonable hour on Sunday night because you’ve got to get up. Whatever time, you have to get up on Monday, and so you may not be setting yourself up for good sleep habits for the following week either.

Vicki Nelson: 34:59

Yeah, and the other factor and I don’t know whether it does affect it or not my college students have very irregular schedules. So they may have an 8.30 class on Monday and Wednesday, but no classes until 11 on Tuesday and Thursday. So they get up early and then the next day they sleep late. How does that factor in?

Lisa Lewis: 35:27

Yeah, no, you’re right, and that is often the reality, especially during the college years. So ideally you want to be fairly consistent about your sleep schedule, which no one wants to hear, right? Because if you’ve got to wake at 630 on, you know as an adult, like for work, and then you know on the weekends you do not want your alarm going off that early. I mean, it’s human nature and so the same, obviously, for college students. Those days when they don’t have to be up, what they consider early for class, they’re probably not going to want to wake as early.

Lisa Lewis: 35:54

Um, however, if you can be more consistent, it’s going to help avoid these kind of issues we were just talking about. So, I mean, some variation is okay, but the the more wildly your sleep schedule is swinging, the more you are apt to have this concept of what they call social jet lag, because it is like jet lag, I mean trying to like get yourself on, you know the schedule. So so yeah, that that can actually be an issue. And, frankly, in addition to getting enough sleep, the official recommendations of all the sleep groups that are out there are that consistency of sleep is also so important, and this is not going to resonate so much probably with college students, but for us as adults it affects, it literally affects your longevity, I mean affects your lifespan. It affects things like cardiovascular risk. I mean there’s so many long term effects of getting inconsistent sleep on a chronic basis.

Vicki Nelson: 36:55

So I have another question based on my observation of my college students and even my memory of being in college although that was a few years ago, but some things don’t change and that is as much as when they were toddlers, we could never get them to take a nap. My college students love naps, and so they can’t wait until they can go back to their room and take a nap. Is that a good thing? Are they catching up a little bit on some sleep, or is that going to put them off cycle for getting to sleep on time?

Lisa Lewis: 37:36

Yeah, no, naps are. Naps can be great. There’s just sort of a couple of kind of caveats you want to keep in mind. If you’re going to take a nap, generally speaking, you don’t want to nap too late in the day, because that is going to potentially make it harder, you know, to fall asleep at kind of the right time at night. Similarly, you don’t want to nap too long, so generally, about 45 minutes or so would be the recommendation, and you know taking a nap when you’re feeling like you need one is fine, again, as long as you’re sort of, you know, trying to adhere to those guidelines.

Lisa Lewis: 38:15

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that a nap is basically a compensatory strategy. Often, it’s because you’re not getting enough sleep at night. So, ideally, you don’t want to fall into this habit of regularly needing a nap. You know getting less sleep at night and needing a nap to be able to make that up, because that, really, then, is a sign that that’s. You know, if you were to be getting more sleep at night, it might not be that same essential necessity to have a nap just to be able to get through the day.

Vicki Nelson: 38:46

Naps are great. They get us get a bunch of us through a lot of things.

Lisa Lewis: 38:52

Yeah, yeah. Well, there is one other caveat which you know I’m sure we’ve all experienced that if you nap too long, you also fall into a deeper sleep, and then you’re groggy, so you don’t wake up feeling refreshed.

Vicki Nelson:

So we have to learn how to nap appropriately and then, and then they’re probably okay.

Lisa Lewis:

Yeah, set a timer, you know, don’t go longer than 45 minutes and ideally if it’s already evening, like probably taking a nap is not a great idea.

Vicki Nelson:

Yeah, just go to bed earlier

Elizabeth Hamblet:

well, yeah, yeah, I mean my students described to me, you know, getting fatigued because something’s due the next day and then trying to take a nap at one o’clock in the morning and sleeping through whatever alarm they’ve set. So it’s yeah.

Lisa Lewis: 39:35

Yeah, yeah, because they needed more than a nap at that point. They needed an actual long sleep.

Vicki Nelson:

Yeah that’s a classic story. Yeah, slept through my alarm, um.

So you’ve talked a lot about things that we can do at home, you know, in terms of modeling, especially with technology and devices and all of that. Are there any other suggestions for parents of things or, I guess, maybe, how to start this conversation with their students, because it does sound as though you know, in order to put some of the strategies you’ve talked about into place. You’ve got to be explicit, but how do you get the conversation about sleep started?

Lisa Lewis: 40:28

Yeah, no, that’s a good question. I think it depends. It depends on the scenario. But oftentimes, you know, I’ve had people ask me well, how do you convince kids that they’re tired? It’s like, well, you know, if you’re tired, I mean they’re aware of it. You know they may be trying to power through it, but it’s not like you don’t notice. You know when you wake up tired and you’re draggy and all that,. So so I don’t think it’s so much that, as much as it is probably trying to ask questions, you know, as opposed to coming and saying hey, I’ve got this new policy for our family. But asking them, trying to sort of figure out let’s say, you know, as a scenario you’ve got and I’m assuming you’re talking about a kid who’s still at home for you know, purpose of this, this conversation.

Lisa Lewis: 41:18

So let’s say you’ve got a kid who you know, knows that they really need to be in bed by 10:30, because of what time they have to get up, but they’re regularly not doing that. Asking them, you know, if it’s not already overtly obvious, like, well, what’s getting in the way of you know you being able to get to sleep on time? And I say overtly obvious because, let’s say, they’re not getting home from sports practice till 10 o’clock, like well it’s pretty obvious that’s going to be a major contributing factor.

Lisa Lewis: 41:48

But there may be other things going on. So you know asking questions, you know being curious, you know which obviously that’s sort of just generally as parenting advice tends to work better than coming in and you know telling them some great solutions because they don’t really think of those as being helpful. So asking those kind of questions, like essentially trying to help with them, figure out what is it that’s kind of the pain point here that’s making it so hard. You know cause I know you know you want you’re trying to get to bed at 11 and it just seems like there’s or 1030, and there’s always these things that are coming up. You know what are some of the things you know we can do to help so that it’s probably coming in with more of that helpful attitude and trying to seek to be their partner in it as opposed to adversarial.

Lisa Lewis: 42:33

Like I told you, you were supposed to be in bed and it’s like why isn’t it happening and what can we do to kind of address those contributing causes? So that’s sort of the broad advice, because the reasons why it can vary. It can be the sports, it can be the homework load, maybe they are taking too heavy of a homework load. It can be time management skills, as you alluded to before. You know in terms of planning and when you’re getting started on assignments, it can be too many things that they’re scheduled to do. You know late night practices, you know all that stuff. So it’s trying to figure out what is actually most relevant in your kid’s particular situation and then from there you can figure out what are some ways to help address those.

Vicki Nelson: 43:14

Yeah, I think one of the really positive things that I take out of this conversation, and a lot of what you’ve shared, is that there really are ways to strategize and to be proactive. We know we’re tired, and I think that’s probably true of a lot of parents as well. It’s not just teenagers, it’s not just kids. We know we’re tired, we know our kids are tired they dragged school, whatever but we don’t think we can do anything about it. And so you know, I really like having some of those ideas and strategies, ways to talk about it and things to do.

Vicki Nelson: 43:59

I guess, oh, Well, I was going to say I guess you know we could keep going, but one of the other pieces in terms of doing something about it, I wonder, just before we finish up, if you could talk a little bit about this movement that it seems to be happening to try to make schools start later, as you were able to proactively help that to happen. But if parents are in a community and the school starts at 7.15 or 7.30, what are some ways that they can start to maybe begin to advocate and get that conversation started locally in their own communities?

Lisa Lewis: 44:49

Yeah, absolutely. I think it starts with having a common foundation of knowledge, so that you know all the kind of things we’re talking about here, how much sleep kids really need to be getting, the fact that they do have this circadian rhythm shift, so it’s not just that they’re being lazy, you know, etc. So sharing this kind of information is quite literally the best place to start. You know, I am absolutely a proponent of addressing start times at the state level, because you know you can have the broadest impact. That’s not to say that that’s the only way this can happen. However, it has happened and it continues to happen in districts around the country as small as a single high school or as large as an entire city. I mean, up until California’s law, it had never been done at the statewide level before in terms of setting the minimum allowed start times. Meanwhile, it has happened on a grassroots level in so many communities and I say so many because I can’t quantify it because there’s no central database of districts that have changed their start times, but I mean it’s hundreds at least and so that does continue to be a very effective way to do it. So, in terms of sharing information, that can start with a school-wide meeting. That can start with partnering with the PTA. In fact, the California state PTA was one of the co-sponsors of the bill in california, the other co-sponsor being Start School Later, which is a non-profit that advocates for this. You can also look at starting a local chapter of Start School Later, because that is a terrific treasure trove of resources from other people who have done this in their communities. But, you know, partnering with the PTA, hold a meeting. Bring in a local pediatrician or sleep specialist to talk about sleep. Bring in somebody who you know.

Lisa Lewis: 46:48

I go in and speak regularly to schools. I speak to parents about all of this. You know, oftentimes when I’m going in, they may be more broadly interested because, as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, school start times are such an essential piece of the equation but that is, you know, not at all the entire picture. And so many times there are schools where they may not have super, super early start times and yet there are still issues of sleep deprivation because of everything else we’ve been talking about the overscheduling, the academic expectations, et cetera, et cetera. So, as I was saying, so I think it starts with trying to hold those sort of conversations, getting together with other like-minded parents, having conversations with the school administrators. Often you will find that you know if they are aware of the research, they understand that it does have a direct impact on grades, on attendance rates, on mental health, on all these other aspects. So, starting to have that conversation, figuring out who your allies are locally and building from there.

Vicki Nelson:

There’s hope.

Elizabeth Hamblet: 47:58

Well, and obviously to get that information, everybody should read Lisa’s book.

Vicki Nelson: 48:02

Well, that’s the best place to start.

Elizabeth Hamblet: 48:04

And then you make it a community read.

Lisa Lewis: 48:09

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and to your point, I mean, I actually, when I was writing the book, I literally wrote the book that I wished that I had had when I was just in working on this journey. So, you know, starting off with that foundational information, giving you know that overview of all the various ramifications, from learning to mental health, to drowsy driving, to sports, and then, like a third of the book is all about specific strategies. So there are some specific to start times, but there’s also, you know, you know, I’m sure, having read the book as well as you both have, you know, a whole chapter on technology and on, you know, specific kinds of things you can do during the day to help prepare you for a good night’s sleep. You know nighttime strategies, wind down routines, so, yeah, so I do get into all of that and and as you can see, it’s a topic I’m passionate about and, just you know, could go on and on.

Vicki Nelson: 49:00

So again, just to remind people the book is the Sleep Deprived Teen, Why Our Teenagers Are so Tired and how Parents and Schools Can Help them Thrive. By Lisa L Lewis. Lisa, if people would like to follow up, if they would like to learn more about the book, learn more about you, reach out, what are? Are there ways that they can do that?

Lisa Lewis: 49:26

Yeah, absolutely. Best way would be through my website. My email address is on there and it’s wwwlisallewis.com.

Vicki Nelson: 49:37

Okay, so they go there and they can find out more about the book and more about everything and reach out to you if they need to.

Lisa Lewis: 49:46

Absolutely. Yeah, I’m always happy to chat with people about sleep.

Vicki Nelson: 49:51

Well, we are both. Elizabeth is nodding her head and I’m speaking for both of us to say we’re both really grateful that you took time to spend with us and have this conversation. It is such an important topic for teenagers and college students and probably their tired parents as well, so it’s good for all of us. So thank you so much and we will put some of this information in the show notes of the podcast. And if you get back and forth, if you are listening to the podcast, that’s wonderful. But if you know other people who do not listen to the podcast but maybe do YouTube, Elizabeth, where do they look on YouTube?

Elizabeth Hamblet: 50:40

Sorry, yeah, it’ll be on YouTube.

Vicki Nelson: 50:44

And how do they find it on YouTube?

Elizabeth Hamblet: 50:46

They just find my website, my page. There is the LD Advisory webpage and you’ll find it there.

Vicki Nelson: 50:53

And we put those in the show notes too. So thank you so much to our listeners for being here, our viewers for watching us and Lisa Lewis for sharing your information with us.

Lisa Lewis: 51:09

Absolutely. Thank you both so much. Really love talking to you about this.

Vicki Nelson: 51:13

Okay, thanks.