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The findings of a recent study published in the journal Sleep, suggest that teens who go to bed earlier tend to be happier.
Parents who enforce early bedtimes for their teenagers may be on the right track in safeguarding their children from feelings of depression. Columbia University Medical Center in New York City’s Dr. James E. Gangwisch and his colleagues found that teenagers forced by their parents to go to bed not later than 10 p.m. showed remarkably lower tendencies of getting depressed and having suicidal ideations compared to those who were allowed by their parents to stay up till midnight or later.
According to Reuters, Gangwisch said that it is sort of a prevailing belief "that older adolescents don't need as much sleep as younger adolescents, but that's really not true--they still need about 9 hours of sleep at night."
In their report, Gangwisch and his team note that short sleep times have been associated with depression in both teenagers and adults, and that this association could be "bidirectional," in the sense that getting too little sleep increases one’s chances of depression, while being depressed causes difficulty of going to sleep.
For the study, Gangwisch and fellow researchers examined data from a nationally representative group of more than 15,000 seventh- through twelfth-graders, who participated in a 1994-1996 survey. According to fifty-four percent of parents, they enforced a bedtime of not later than 10 p.m. on school nights on their adolescent son or daughter. Another 21 percent said that their children had to go to bed at 11 p.m., while 25 percent said they allowed their children to stay up till midnight or even later.
Of the studied teenagers, more than two-thirds said that they went to sleep at night when they were supposed to.
Provided that parents who imposed more restrictions on their children’s bedtime might have other qualities that could prevent their child from getting depressed, the researchers asked the participating teenagers regarding the degree of affection their parents had for them, and made an explanation for this in their analysis of the association between thee amount of sleep and the risk of depression.
No link was found between whether an adolescent followed a rigid bedtime schedule and how much affection they felt their parents had for them. However, a clear association was noted between an adolescent’s bedtime and whether or not that adolescent believed the amount of sleep he or she was getting was enough. And teenagers who went to bed at midnight or later had 24 percent lower risk of getting depressed, and 20 percent had higher tendencies of having suicidal thoughts compared to those who had to go to bed at 10 p.m. or earlier.
Teenagers who got to sleep for five hours or less during the night had 71 percent higher tendencies of getting depressed, and 48 percent higher chances of having suicidal thoughts, than their peers who got to sleep for at least eight hours during the night.
The researchers also found that study participants who claimed they believed they got enough sleep most of the time, were 65 percent less likely to develop depression and 29 percent less like to have suicidal ideations than those who did not feel they were getting adequate amount of sleep.
Gangwisch noted that getting sufficient amount of sleep is truly essential for our mental well-being "as well as being able to focus and have the necessary energy and motivation to do the things we need to do during the day."
He said that requiring teenagers to follow an acceptable bedtime schedule is not an easy task, adding that it becomes more challenging amidst the lure of text messaging and Internet surfing into the early hours of the morning. "It's a tall order, especially with adolescents, they kind of have a mind of their own, and they should," Gangwisch said.
All the same, he added, the mere effort of asking an adolescent to try going to bed early for a few days may persuade them, once they experience much improvement in the way they feel after getting adequate amount of sleep.
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