Teen Sleep Program

Essential Sleep Knowledge

Drowsiness is the moment when you need to make a conscious effort to remain awake and attentive. The words drowsiness and sleepiness have the same meaning.
When you are drowsy, you could fall asleep at any moment without warning.
The moment you fall asleep, you instantly become blind and deaf.

Why Red Alert? If you are driving a car or doing anything hazardous, you are completely unable to respond to danger. You could drive off of the road and into a tree without ever realizing what happened.

The average teenager requires 9-10 hours of sleep per night. All lost sleep accumulates into a sleep debt that must be paid back!
The larger the sleep debt, the more impaired a person will be during the day. This impairment can affect judgment, memory, learning, attention, reaction time and mood.
If you are fatigued for most of the day, have little energy, feel unmotivated, or even feel depressed and don’t know why, it is possible that you have a very large sleep debt.
You cannot get too much sleep.
People who reduce their sleep debt will feel energetic, motivated and at their peak performance all day.

Everyone has a biological (circadian) clock located in the brain (in the Suprachiasmatic Nuclei). It controls alertness over the course of the day.
On average, peak periods of alertness will be occur once in the morning and once in the evening. Generally, optimal alertness occurs around 9-11 AM and 9-11 PM.
There is a low point in alertness in the afternoon, usually around 3-5 PM. Some people think that eating a big lunch causes this drowsiness in the afternoon. This is a myth; food does not affect this drowsiness. It is the daily cycling of the biological clock that controls these periods of alertness and drowsiness.

There are about 90 different sleep disorders that afflict people, one of the most prevalent and serious is Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA).
OSA occurs when a person stops breathing for a period of time during sleep. The most common symptom of OSA is loud snoring, often interrupted by periods of silence in which the person struggles to breath but cannot.
A person waking up every few minutes (or more) gets reduced sleep quality and quantity each night and can build up an extremely large sleep debt.
Many high school students have the Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. This is when the internal body/circadian clock shifts to a later time, so that it is difficult to fall asleep until late at night and trouble waking up early in the morning.

Naps are an excellent strategy to improve alertness and performance. They are the only strategy that directly improves sleep debt.

There are two types of sleep: Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and non-REM sleep. These two types of sleep alternate throughout the night.
Dreaming occurs during REM sleep. In REM sleep, the body is paralyzed while the brain is extremely active; about as active as when you are awake.
During non-REM sleep, the body is not paralyzed and can move but the mind is much less active.
During REM sleep, the dream world is as real to the mind as the real world is to a waking brain. Dreams occur in real time and in color

The unabridged version of this information can be downloaded here.