Have you ever wondered why you can’t manage to get up in the morning? Many just assume teenagers are staying up too late or being lazy, but there’s actually a neurological reason behind your skewed sleep schedule! It turns out that teenage brains are vastly different from child brains, and you’re changing faster than you know.
As kids grow up, their sleep patterns change. Young babies need periodical naps, small children have early bedtimes, and now, you can’t get up at 6:00 A.M. no matter how hard you try. This is called delayed phase preference: A shift in your brain that sets your biological clock apart from everyone else. Delayed phase preference isn't well-studied by scientists, so we don’t know much about it. To address this, the National Institute of Medicine conducted a study on 183 sixth-grade boys and 275 sixth-grade girls, making them complete questionnaires every morning and evening. Their stage of puberty, school environment, and birth order were also taken into account. They found a significant difference in delayed phase preference development between boys and girls.
Delayed Phase Preference happens because of changes in our circadian rhythms. This could of course be because of changing social demands and academics, but many teenagers express that they can’t sleep early even if they have the time. The likely cause is instead because of puberty. Puberty causes a shift in the hormones that are released in your brain, including an increased production of estrogen, testosterone, and melatonin. As kids get older, melatonin has a delayed release in their brains, leading to daytime sleepiness. When examined by physicians, daytime sleepiness was shown to be prolonged because of melatonin lingering in the body instead of becoming inactive immediately after waking up.
For the past couple decades, teens complaining about sleepiness was attributed to increased workload and irresponsibility with sleep schedules. However, these new studies show that it’s not entirely the teen’s fault. School, work, and afterschool activities tire out teens more and more as they get to higher grades. It’s a well-known scientific fact that sleep deprivation doesn’t resolve itself - it builds up. Our current method of handling sleepy teens is to wake them up and scold them for staying up so late, but schedules aren’t tailored to their needs. Teens need accommodations in their schedules if they are expected to be fully awake in the morning. Instead of assigning blame, let’s listen to science - there’s a neurological reason behind delayed phase preference, and the only thing we can do is be understanding and accommodating.