Sleep May Be The Best Injury Protection
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We know from the statistics and from the traffic we see in our offices at Farah and Farah that teenagers are one population group that has a higher likelihood of being involved in traffic accidents than others, particularly first year drivers. So this proposal sounds like a win-win.
Letting teenagers sleep in an hour and start their school day at 8:30 rather than 7:30 a.m. may reduce the odds for car crashes.
While parents may blame their teens for staying up late e-mailing their friends, it turns out that adolescents are biologically programmed to stay up an hour later than they did before puberty.
This University of Kentucky study finds that a shift in their biological clocks conflicts with the earlier hours of high school. Their study showed that as biology is pushing them to stay up later, school starts earlier.
“By the end of the week, [kids] are a wreck and our study shows they might actually be in one,” says Fred Danner, a psychologist who co-authored this study to the Washington Post.
Researchers surveyed about 10,000 students from Kentucky on their sleep habits – first in 1998, and then again in 1999. By that time the start of school had been moved to 8:30 a.m.
What they found was that students who got a full eight hours of sleep a night had 16.5 percent fewer car crashes, down from 35.7 percent.
The research appears in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
The National Sleep Foundation finds fatigued drivers are responsible for about 100,000 accidents a year and more than half of them are young people ages 16 to 25.
And no doubt we’re all sleep deprived. Just like clean food and water, sleep is a necessity of life.
Experts say that sleep and learning are intimately related. Sleep deprivation impairs your ability to pay attention, to be creative and to communicate, to problem solve, be innovative, make decisions and have a great mood and motivation.
And insomnia is sometimes indicated as a trigger for depression, but depression is also considered one of the most prevalent causes of insomnia.
But how many of us are getting the recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep a night? Sounds like a luxury doesn’t it?
If it makes us more productive, keeps us safer and allows time at night to repair and restore – maybe adequate sleep isn’t a luxury at all. #