Austin Scholar #10: Let Teenagers Take Naps
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This week from Austin Scholar...
My experience with sleep and anxiety
Let teenagers take naps
Three sources on sleep that were fascinating to read while I researched this newsletter
The previous newsletter was all about balance (or lack thereof), and this week I found myself needing to take my own advice. I had a test every single day and found myself staying up late in order to study and prepare.
This, of course, led to me not getting very much sleep and I spent the week exhausted and lethargic. While I was writing this newsletter, I found myself daydreaming and being quite unfocused, which caused me to think that if I wrote about the importance of sleep, maybe I would be more inclined to rest instead of study :)
Austin’s Anecdote: My experience with sleep and anxiety
I have always had a lot of trouble sleeping. (My mom can confirm–I was quite the tiring baby.) Throughout elementary school, I would wake up my babysitter at 11 o’clock because I couldn’t fall asleep. (Sorry, y’all!) In middle school, I started doing school work until midnight and reading until 1 AM. During the COVID year, I couldn’t let myself go to bed until I had finished the next day’s work. Please don’t ask me the logic behind this. Anyways, I have basically been exhausted and sleep-deprived for my entire life.
The main reason I could never fall asleep, no matter how tired I felt, was because I couldn’t turn off my brain. My thoughts were running 10,000 miles per hour: thinking about school, going through my to-do lists, obsessing over math questions I got wrong, wishing I could go to sleep, and thinking some more about school. I couldn’t calm down enough to actually fall asleep.
So after an incredibly long day of school and homework and more school, I would spend a miserable hour laying in bed thinking about school some more. It was not fun.
I started to procrastinate getting into bed so I could avoid this hour of stewing in my anxiety – which made the problem even worse. Eventually, I felt like I would never be able to get enough sleep.
But then, I found myself in a situation where my parents basically forced me to consistently get 9 hours of sleep every night, and it was life-changing. Every night, I was in bed by 10:30 and awake by 8:00. I couldn’t say, “Oh, just one more assignment,” or “I’ll just read one more chapter.” Because I knew I couldn’t do any more school work, I found myself spending less and less time thinking about all of the school work I thought I should be doing.
Additionally, the consistent routine allowed me to feel tired and ready for bed before 11:00. I felt a boost in my mood, it took me less time to understand my school work, and I could focus a lot better. Overall, I was a much healthier person.
That’s not to say that all of my anxiety and sleep issues went away immediately. While the nights of staying awake for hours obsessively thinking about school still happened, they were a lot less frequent.
My learning was that I am not Edward Cullen and I require sleep to function, just like everyone else.
Let Teenagers Take Naps
The average teenager does not get enough sleep. Between school, homework, socializing, and relaxation, teenagers sleep an average of seven hours per night.
That is not enough. Teenagers should be getting around nine hours of sleep every night in order to account for our brain development and maturation along with physical growth spurts.
The scariest part: getting six hours of sleep for five nights in a row is equivalent to pulling an all-nighter, which we can all agree is incredibly detrimental to overall health. In fact, one all-nighter has the same effect on teenagers as a 0.1% blood alcohol level (too drunk to drive).