Schoolutions

S2 E10: Tackling the Global Tween & Teen Sleep Crisis with Marriage and Family Therapists, Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright

November 14, 2022 Olivia Wahl Season 2 Episode 10
Schoolutions
S2 E10: Tackling the Global Tween & Teen Sleep Crisis with Marriage and Family Therapists, Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright
Show Notes Transcript

Marriage and Family Therapists, Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright address the tween and teen sleep deprivation crisis in their book, Generation Sleepless.  Heather and Julie offer listeners steps to foster teens’ self-motivation for sleeping well and advice for parents, as well as your call to action for teachers, principals, colleges, coaches, and policymakers.

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SchoolutionsS2 E10: Tackling the Global Tween & Teen Sleep Crisis with Marriage and Family Therapists, Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright


[00:00:00] Olivia: Welcome to Schoolutions, where listening will leave you inspired by solutions to issues you or others you know may be struggling with in the public education system today. I am Olivia Wahl, and I am honored to welcome two renowned marriage and family therapists, Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright. Heather and Julie are psychotherapists, sleep specialists, and authors of the popular parenting books, The Happy Sleeper, Now Say This, and most recently, Generation Sleepless: Why Tweens and Teens Aren't Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them.

[00:00:38] Olivia: Through their online sleep classes and consultations as founders of The Happy Sleeper, they help families with babies, kids, and teens sleep well. Heather's writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She lives in Los Angeles and has a well-rested tween and teen. Julie is the creator of one of LA's best-known parenting programs, The Wright Mommy & Me.

[00:01:01] Olivia: She lives in New York City and has a young adult son. I have to say, Generation Sleepless is one of the most important books I've ever read as a mom and educator. Every caregiver, tween, teenager, teacher, principal, college board, coach, and policymaker needs to read this book. Without further ado, let's jump into our conversation.

[00:01:27] Olivia: Welcome Heather and Julie. 

[00:01:30] Heather: Thank you. Thanks for having us. 

[00:01:32] Julie: Thanks so much.

[00:01:32] Olivia: We were just chatting before the recording began and we realized we've grown up and lived in a very small area of upstate New York. It's kind of bananas. We're spread out all over right now, but I'm in Ithaca, New York, and Heather, you shared you grew up in Ithaca.

[00:01:51] Heather: I grew up in Ithaca and yeah, I go back every summer. So, it's so special to make contact with you and to talk to you. 

[00:02:00] Olivia: It's wonderful. And Julie, right now you're in Syracuse, New York, although you live in New York city, right?

[00:02:05] Julie: Yes. And I grew up here. I grew up in Syracuse. So, Heather and I always think it's funny that we grew up an hour away from each other, but we had to both go to LA to meet.

[00:02:16] Olivia: It's amazing. Before we jump into research and your helpful book, what I always do is I kick off the episode by asking guests who inspiring educators are from their lives. And I'd love to hear from each of you. 

[00:02:32] Heather: The first thing that comes to mind is my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Billings at Belle Sherman Elementary.

[00:02:39] Heather: I think he was the first teacher that really gave me the sense that he was a real person and a human being and we had a relationship with him. He was funny. He made fun of himself. He was very offbeat. My dad was a deer hunter growing up. My dad is Canadian, and he brought that tradition of deer hunting to New York.

[00:02:58] Heather: And I came into the class saying: Mr. Billings, my dad got a deer last night and he said, how much does it weigh? And I said: I don't know. And he goes: Go home and find out. 

[00:03:10] Heather: So, he sent me off. I lived across the street from the school. So, when I was a 10- year-old, my friend and I went back, and we weighed the deer. And I just, he was like, just not playing by the book. He stands out as being a real person with a big personality. So, I think that was my first experience of having that kind of teacher. 

[00:03:33] Olivia: Relationships are everything, aren't they? Yeah, absolutely. Julie, how about you? 

[00:03:38] Julie: Well, what came to my mind happened a lot later in my life.

[00:03:41] Julie: I was already a licensed therapist and Heather and I were already starting to work on The Happy Sleeper and I ended up several years in a study group with Dr. Dan Siegel, who is. The renowned author of many, many books and parents best know him as the author of Parenting from the Inside Out and the coauthor of books like Whole Brain Child and No Drama Discipline among others.

[00:04:05] Julie: He's written so many books, but he, he's been so inspiring to me because I mean, there's so much I could say about him, but I would say the overarching feeling that I've gotten that inspired me and inspired Heather too, is this idea of a deeper relationship that grows when we're attuned to each other.

[00:04:25] Julie: It's really what a lot of people think of as empathy, but he really talks a lot about being mindful and present so that you can really take the other person in and how sort of the circle of affect starts to grow. And it really informs and inspires all of our work. All three books that we've written include this idea that the relationship is at the heart of change and growth and health and well-being.

[00:04:51] Julie: So he's a huge inspiration and he wrote the foreword to The Happy Sleeper, which we still pinch ourselves that, you know, that he liked it well enough to write the foreword. So, he is really inspirational to me. 

[00:05:03] Olivia: The notion of relationships and being present for each other is that word attune. We'll actually circle back to that when we speak to families and the strategies that your book holds.

[00:05:16] Olivia: I've read it twice now, and I'm sure I'll go back and dip in and out because as a parent with all of the flooding of technology and the academic overload our kids are seeing, we're at a precipice right now. And one of the quotes I lifted: Modern-day teens are the most sleep-deprived group of any individuals the world has ever seen.

[00:05:40] Olivia: I read it. I read it again. I highlighted it. I noted it and it felt a gut punch because I'm living it. I'm seeing it. I'm living it in schools. Yet your book has such a variety of techniques and ideas to attack this issue. It's more than an issue. It's a crisis. We need to build the background research as to why this is a crisis.

[00:06:05] Olivia: We need this to be on everyone's radar. The other piece that really struck me as an issue was Mary Carskadon's perfect storm analogy around the shifting biology, academic pressure, early high school start times, the misconception that sleep is dispensable rather than essential, and we all know this, the explosion of technology.

[00:06:27] Olivia: These are huge issues that I'm going to have you unpack for listeners. Again, the reason I wanted you to be a guest is because this book is the perfect step-by-step guide to ensuring every teenager, every tween that we know gets the optimal amount of sleep, which after reading your book, I now know is between 9-10 hours a night.

[00:06:50] Olivia: I'd love to jump in to research and I'm going to read a quote before I have you both jump in. Here we go: We underestimate sleep needs because we think of teens as near adults. From a developing brain perspective, they are not. In fact, teens are beginning a new way of brain reorganization and psychological maturation that will last well into their twenties. And sleep is when much of this transformative construction happens. Heather, can you speak to the notion of that perfect storm as well as sleep clocks? Can you define that for our listeners? 

[00:07:29] Heather: Sure. Well, the perfect storm is what we describe as the factors that have led teens to this crisis. And I'm glad you led with that idea that teens are the most sleep-deprived population in human history.

[00:07:42] Heather: It just astounded us when we put it together. And it's very consistent in the research. About 70% of young children get healthy sleep. About 60% of adults get healthy sleep. And about 5% of juniors and seniors in high school get healthy sleep. So, it's an absolute nosedive. The reasons that, you know, it's not just one reason, it's a perfect storm.

[00:08:06] Heather: First of all, going back to the brain clock, you asked about the brain clock. Teenagers' brain clocks are set about two hours later than adult brain clocks and little kid brain clocks. So that's not a preference for going to bed later. It's not a feeling that they want to stay up later. Or like a rebellion, or I just want to spend time on my own.

[00:08:25] Heather: I like the nighttime. It's a biological shift in the brain clock that happens around the time of adolescence. So naturally, from a chemical standpoint, the brain clock of a teen is shifted about 2 hours later, meaning they get tired around two hours later, and they want to wake up around two hours later, too.

[00:08:44] Heather: So, their whole period of sleep has shifted. Then we've got a lot of homework, especially by sophomore, junior year in high school. Way too much homework. We could get into that. 

[00:8:54] Olivia: We will, yeah. 

[00:08:55] Heather: And then you've got activities and all the things that kids are doing, joining clubs, being on sports teams. And then you've got technology, which basically comes in. And just it's like a wrecking ball for sleep because it keeps us up and engaged and light and stimulation. So that pushes their bedtimes even later. And then on the morning end, you've got too early start times.

[00:09:19] Heather: So teen sleep is compressed and squeezed from both sides. And that is the perfect storm that leads you from, instead of sleeping your ideal amount of sleep that your body would like to take in, which is around nine and a quarter hours, the average teenager in the U.S. is sleeping around six and a half.

[00:09:37] Olivia: Yeah. And Julie, I felt after reading all of the beautiful research that you lay out in the book, I realized, you know what, I think the way I am going to try to open a dialogue, it's that notion of fostering awareness. Using the research to help understand self-motivation and understand all of this ripple effect.

[00:10:01] Olivia: I'd love for you to share Julie around the sleep camp or the camping studies. This was so fascinating for me to read.  

[00:10:10] Julie: Yeah, the camping studies were done by sleep scientists like Mary Carskadon and other really eminent sleep scientists. And what they do is in order to come up with that sort of average magical nine and a quarter hours that they determined that most teenagers need for optimal health, both mental and physical, is they take them camping and they get rid of all artificial light screens, devices.

[00:10:36] Julie: I think they do have like a little campfire or something, but what happens is their bodies are now being queued by sunset and sunrise. And they get early morning light, which we can talk about too, how important that is for resetting our internal clocks to be in sync with nature, to be in sync with the sun.

[00:10:56] Julie: So, when they first arrive at the camp, they sleep way more than nine and a quarter hours because they're so tired. So, I kind of have to get them to the point where they start to see what their natural sleep is once they're not sleep-deprived anymore. And the average is nine and a quarter hours. And it’s like Heather said, the research is very consistent.

[00:11:15] Julie: These studies have been done over time. So that's how we know whether we're working with babies or kids or teens, we want to put everything we can in place. We say, stack the deck in favor of getting everything that might impinge on sleep out of the way so we can then observe how much does this body want to sleep?

[00:11:35] Julie: The variance is not that great. So, we do see this sort of average emerging and it's shocking to parents. And that's one of the elements you mentioned up top about the perfect storm is that even if parents sort of have a nagging feeling or even teenagers themselves, that they're not sleeping well, sleep is still really low on their list.

[00:11:53] Julie: There's so much pressure for them to achieve, to do their homework, and the socialization comes in. They just don't prioritize sleep and they don't understand how much sleeping well will help them with their homework, with their activities, with their relationships. So, sleep is last on most people's list.

[00:12:13] Julie: And it's understandable because there's a huge amount of pressure to do well in school, to do activities, so that they can look good on their college admissions. That's another huge factor. 

[00:12:23] Olivia: It is.

[00:12:23] Julie: The whole field learning about the college admissions process and how it's evolved over the years. It's not good. It's not okay. And it's also not equitable, but kids just have way too much pressure and sleep comes last. 

[00:12:37] Olivia: And Heather and Julie, I think it would be neglectful to not mention that discrimination leads to a decrease in sleep. There's a quote from your book that is powerful. A recent study of Asian, Latinx, and Black adolescents illuminates one reason students of color are more likely to experience sleep issues.

[00:12:57] Olivia: Fordham researcher Tiffany Yip had adolescents track experiences of discrimination over a period of four years while also tracking sleep and other health symptoms. On days which kids experienced discrimination stress, they had disturbed sleep that evening and greater sleepiness and daytime dysfunction the next day.

[00:13:16] Olivia: The stronger the impact of the stress on sleep, the more likely kids were to have anxious or depressive symptoms in the longer term. And you also point out that when we don't sleep, the sensible higher brain is no longer is engaged in the raw emotional brain where fear, anger, and other reactive or negative emotions are generated, and it's left to fend for itself.

[00:13:39] Olivia: That being said, the data on mental health just keeps circling back to our students needing sleep, and we have the power to stop many of the outlying factors that are preventing it. I think of the terms you also explain it's social jet lag alongside teens missing their dreams and growth in general.

[00:14:01] Olivia: Heather, would you mind explaining that term social jet lag, what you mean by that? 

[00:14:06] Heather: Sure. So social jet lag means that your brain clock is out of sync with what you are expected to do in your day. So, if you woke me up at four o'clock in the morning and said: Okay, it's time for you to go write chapter one of your book.

[00:14:21] Heather: My brain is in sleep mode, but my day is asking me to do something that's completely out of sync with what I'm supposed to do at that time. So, there's a mismatch between the internal clock and the outside world, and teenagers start their days in that social jet lag because they're asked to do things that are out of sync with their brain clock.

[00:14:41] Heather: So, when I said that the brain clock is shifted two hours later, it means that a teen brain at 8 a.m. is not interested in learning about photosynthesis. That is not what a teen brain is meant to be doing at, you know, 8 a.m., 7:30 a.m. When researchers do studies of the optimal learning time for teens. It's around 10 a.m. It's late morning.

[00:15:03] Heather: That's social jet lag, but then accentuated social jet lag happens because teens sleep in on the weekends and then try to go back to their schedule on the weekdays, which makes it worse because then the brain is extra confused, and they try to make up for lost sleep. If you're missing two and a half hours of sleep every night of the school week, you will try to make up for it on the weekend by sleeping 10 hours, 11 hours.

[00:15:28] Heather: And then on Sunday night, it's extra hard to fall asleep and then extra hard to start Monday morning. So teenage brains are very confused by all of this. 

[00:15:38] Olivia: How many families or even friends of mine do I hear that teens are still sleeping well into the day on the weekends? And when I read that in the book, I thought, Oh my gosh. It's this notion that teens all sleep in late.

[00:15:53] Olivia: And after reading this book, I thought, no, no, no, these are notions that are just so wrong, but they've been perpetuated for years. It's just, it's crazy to me. And I think another factor, Julie, that really struck me is how important REM sleep is. And when you say teenagers are missing their dreams, you're literally saying teens are missing their dream opportunity.

[00:16:19] Olivia: Would you illuminate for listeners? What happens during that REM sleep that is so critical for our teenagers? Yeah, so 

[00:16:26] Julie: Yeah, so since teenagers are being asked to wake up like Heather was describing for her would be four in the morning for teenagers that four in the morning would be like us waking at one in the morning, but by the time they have to wake up for school, they have not completed their night.

[00:16:41] Julie: They're only about what three quarters or less of the way through their night and our sleep comes in stages and the majority of our REM sleep occurs at the very last few hours of the night. So, our teenagers are literally, they're just having that part of their sleep cut off, at least, at least five mornings a week.

[00:17:00] Julie: And what happens during our REM sleep, all kinds of really interesting things happen is when we dream. And what sleep scientists are learning about this period is that it helps us to process difficult emotional experiences or difficult emotional feelings that we've had during the day. It helps us to start to make sense of them.

 

[00:17:22] Julie: And this is another thing I learned from Dan Siegel. Once we can make sense of traumatic experiences and integrate them into our understanding, then we can heal from them and move on. So, teenagers don't have that opportunity. This process of emotional regulation and processing that happens during REM sleep also helps, understandably, now when we know what the function of it is.

[00:17:44] Julie: It helps teenagers to put more of a positive filter on those experiences. So, this, of course, is very important when we think about the commensurate crisis of teen mental health going on in the high levels of depression. So, missing out on their REM sleep is just a huge part of the tragedy that they're living through right now.

[00:18:05] Olivia: And I want to circle back to something you just said, how many high schools right now, how many middle schools right now are fighting tirelessly to put programs in place that support the mental health crisis yet, after reading your book, I'm sitting here thinking why in the world are we not just making sure as a very, very first step that our teens are getting proper sleep cycles?

[00:18:32] Olivia: That's everything. Why are we not starting at the most tangible first step out there? Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, right? I continued to think about the start time of 10 a.m., wrapping it 4 p.m., and we'll go back to this when we speak to schools, but my goodness, that would even be more conducive for many families as well.

[00:18:53] Olivia: There's so much possibility. I want to shift our conversation if it's okay with you. We need to not just alter our children's practices around screens. We need to alter our family practices around phones, social media, screen time. Our children will never follow an example that's being set that isn't leading the way with this vision.

[00:19:17] Olivia: I actually have another quote: There is a missing link in this story about technology and teenagers. A force at play that is vastly underappreciated. This missing link helps us explain the connection between heavy technology use, depression, anxiety, and other negative outcomes. And the best news is that whereas fighting technology as a whole can feel like swimming against the tide, this link is something you absolutely do have control over.

[00:19:46] Olivia: And if you protect it. You also protect kids from the worrisome consequences of excessive screen time. If you've guessed it already, you know us too well by now. Yes, it's sleep. I'd love to hear about the displacement theory and technology's impacts on sleep. 

[00:20:06] Heather: Sure. So, we know that heavy technology use is associated with a lot of negative outcomes, but in that list of negative outcomes, you always see, if you look at the fine print, you always see that sleep time goes down when technology use goes up.

[00:20:21] Heather: And then when you look at the negative consequences of a lot of excessive screen time, so we're talking about metabolic issues and obesity, things that have to do with nutrition and health, depression, anxiety, you will see that they're all consequences of sleep loss. So yes, heavy use of technology is not good for us for many reasons, but one of them, and I think one of the most important of those is that it reduces our time sleeping.

[00:20:50] Heather: Technology has a huge impact on our sleep and then sleep loss leads to all these negative effects that we keep connecting to technology. But really, I think that sleep loss is at the root of so much of the negative impact that technology has. So, sleep impacts your technology because we know this blue light theory, you know, this idea that if we are exposed to blue light, it suppresses our melatonin.

[00:21:15] Heather: It confuses the brain. It makes us think it's daytime. That's true, but even more important is that we get into a state of flow. So that's when you were talking about the displacement theory. It's basically just technology is too engaging and interesting, and we can't put it down. So, we spend too much time on it when we should be sleeping and our brains can't wind-down.

[00:21:35] Heather: So that's, you know, binging shows on Netflix, like just one more, just one more. and then soon, you don't know where our time went. And teenage brains can get into a state of flow over video games and a state of flow is where if your awareness of time goes out the window, you don't have a good hold on how much time is going by.

[00:21:57] Heather: So, it could be, it feels like it's five minutes, but it's really been 45 minutes. So, a state of flow is created by technology, and then sleep just gets pushed later and later. And the engagement of technology, just the feeling that teenagers have a very social brain, so they're thinking about what their friends are up to.

[00:22:16] Heather: And if they're on technology, it's feeding that social brain that is keeping them very engaged. All of those things suppress the body's natural sleep chemistry. So, teens will say, I'm not tired. I'm fine. I'm totally fine. And the teen body and brain is very happy to stay up late because of that delayed sleep clock.

[00:22:35] Heather: So, they're like, I'm just tired. They would get into bed and say: I can't fall asleep. But that's because of the shift in brain clock added with technology, which has activated the brain so much that it's suppressed all that really natural, healthy sleep chemistry. It's just all suppressed. 

[00:22:54] Olivia: And Heather, there was an example in the book that resonated so much with me, where you open your child's room, of course, after knocking, if they're a teenager and you say: You've been on the game for two hours and the VR headset and the child picks up the VR headset off of their forehead and says: I just started. What are you talking about?

[00:23:15] Olivia: And they've lost all sense, right? That's the flow. 

[00:23:19] Julie: That’s flow.

[00:23:20] Olivia: And the other piece I keep thinking about as well is that notion of the inability to stop and the idea of the reward center of the brain being so different in our teenagers. Julie, I'd love for you to speak to this, that dopamine, that flow that they get from the technology.

[00:23:41] Julie: Yeah, it's the same chemistry as, as any addiction. The brain gets a burst of pleasure, and it creates a cycle where it then wants more. And that's, that's what happens with technology cause there is a lot of pleasure. And big tech companies, whether they're developing video games or how YouTube works or whatever it is, that is at the top of a teen's list of what they're doing on tech, they know exactly what they're doing.

[00:24:06] Julie: And we love to teach teens the behind-the-scenes with those companies that are laughing all the way to the bank because it's working. And what's working is they know how to hook people, not just teenagers.

[00:24:17] Julie: They know how to hook all of us. And we want teenagers to be more savvy consumers and to be like, you know what, I'm not going to let you control my body and my brain, big tech. I'm going to take back some control here. And so, giving teenagers that way of thinking about it can be part of what's helpful. 

[00:24:37] Olivia: I worked tirelessly this summer with all different cohorts of middle and high school teachers. Social studies, science, ELA teachers, crafting curricula for their students that would be highly relevant, really compelling. And as I'm reading your book, I continuously thought about social media units that were created. So often we speak to our teens of the dangers of their digital footprint, the dangers of social media.

[00:25:03] Olivia: Why are we not helping them just like you said, Julie, understand the manipulation of social media? That idea of flow, how games are created to be so irresistible. You have to level up, level up just one more. I've got to finish this. I can't wait to be back in middle and high schools next week to speak to teachers.

[00:25:27] Olivia: Of course, your book will be in tow because the research is there. I want to give this to students to better understand. So, Julie, I think it's brilliant. Like let's give the power to our teenagers and tweens so they understand how they're being manipulated by these companies. It's fascinating, isn't it?

[00:25:47] Julie: It really is. It really is. I used to, when my son was a little kid, I taught him about commercials and I taught him what was really going on, you know, what they were trying to get him to want to buy this or buy that. And he loved it. He would say: Well, huh. I know what you're doing with this commercial. And he just loved that.

[00:26:04] Julie: It's the same feeling. It's the same feeling. I, I hope we can engender in our teens is, you know what? You're not going to get me, you know?

[00:26:11] Olivia: I agree. I agree. Heather, if we want to change our teen screen habits, I love the chart in the book. Would you share some do's and don'ts for screen time or changing screen habits?

[00:26:24] Heather: We love do's and don'ts cause it's so concrete, right? 

[00:26:27] Olivia: It's that's why I love it, indeed.

[00:26:30] Heather: So, wind-down is such a great concept because it's very powerful. When I talked about the fact that sleep is trying to emerge from the body, the body is naturally trying to pull us into sleep. We have to get out of the way in order to let it happen.

[00:26:44] Heather: And the two things that we can do to get out of the way and let sleep take over are lower the lights and lower the stress and engagement. And if you just do those two things, you can do anything you want during wind-down time. Sleep chemistry starts to unfold about one or two hours before we fall asleep.

[00:27:02] Heather: So, in those one or two hours, if you are lowering the lights in the house, if you're starting to put away close held technology so that you don't have light right in your eyes, I go around and turn off. By the time my kids are ready for bed, only one lamp in the house is on literally. 

[00:27:20] Heather: Everybody has a bedside light that's a red sleep-friendly light. And I turn those on and then I start turning everything else off. So, by the time we're going to bed, it's very dim, but your eyes adjust and lowering the stress levels and engagements. We tell teenagers in that one hour, if we can just get them to have one hour of wind-down time, it's amazing.

[00:27:41] Heather: It revolutionizes their sleep. If they have just the one hour before their bedtime, where they turn their phones off and they're not going to engage with friends. Really, the biggest thing for teens is they have to say goodnight to their friends. They have to say goodbye. I will see you tomorrow. And the teen brain has a very hard time doing that because it's so social.

[00:28:00] Heather: So, saying goodnight to friends, no more Facetiming, not texting about things that are happening at school with friendships and stuff like that, not looking at social media, all those things that pull our brains into a state of wondering and trying to puzzle and figure something out or worrying or even getting excited, just any engagement.

[00:28:23] Heather: And using wind-down time to do something fun that's enjoyable that you look forward to, but that doesn't cause you to have to ruminate and think once you close your eyes. So, watching a TV show in the living room is great. That's what my family does for wind-down time. Everybody's individual devices are off and away.

[00:28:43] Heather: And we watch whatever TV show. We've watched so much TV as a family because that's our wind-down time. So, like 30 minutes at least of time on the couch watching TV, like we've watched the internet at this point. We've watched everything because I want everyone on the couch away from their devices, having a little snack and winding down.

[00:29:05] Heather: No more thinking about the reward on the video game or your friend wrote you back about the thing that happened today. No one's thinking about that. And it lets the brain disengage. And that is so key to falling asleep. 

[00:29:18] Olivia: Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea too. And I think especially with reading, the idea of reading, it's hard because I know my younger son has a tent bed.

[00:29:29] Olivia: And so, he always has the head lamp or the head light on himself as a source of light. And now I'm wondering to myself, if that is keeping him up, he seems to zonk pretty quickly, but I don't know, even thinking of those small details. So, you mentioned a red light? What is that? A red lamp?

[00:29:48] Heather: There’s a company that I use that we really like called Hooga (H-O-O-G-A) and they make sleep-friendly lights of all configurations.

[00:29:57] Heather: So, I have like clip-on ones, book lights, I have bedside lamps, and they don't emit blue light, so they do not suppress your melatonin.

[00:30:08] Olivia: This makes sense because under one of the do's: read with red color reading light, and I thought, what in the world is the significance of the red? And now I know, Heather. Thank you very much.

[00:30:18] Olivia: I'd like to shift our conversation to schools and the podcast is called Schoolutions because I try to seek out answers to issues, I'm seeing in public education on the ground level. And something I shared with both of you is that I found your book because I'm working in many middle and high schools these days, and I have been seeing students sleeping - heads down on the desks, and we're focusing so much on engagement, engagement.

[00:30:48] Olivia: How do we get children engaged? And I have a little notebook on my nightstand that I jot ideas for the podcast in as they come to me and I thought, I'm wondering if sleep has something to do with this. So, I Googled sleep deprivation and teens, and your book was the first thing that came up, which is fabulous for both of you, but it was even more fabulous for me because I ordered it and I am excited to just share this knowledge with the world.

[00:31:18] Olivia: So, Heather, I'd love to have you help us understand what the notion of sleep-friendly schools means and how we have to promote systemic changes that help teens get the rest they need. 

[00:31:31] Heather: Sure. So, because the brain clock of a teen is shifted later, if your teen has to wake up at six in the morning and be active in class, having a creative alert brain, it's not going to happen in the early morning because the teen brain clock is shifted later, which means that they are not able to fall asleep as early as they would need to in order to get healthy sleep.

[00:31:53] Heather: So that's number one. Early start times lead to truncated sleep just because teens cannot fall asleep early enough. And then also it's not optimal timing for teenage brains because of how their brain is still in sleep mode in the early morning. So, if you're trying to take a calculus exam at 8 a.m. your brain, it's like us trying to take a calculus exam in, you know, at 5 a.m.

[00:32:17] Heather: You're just not going to be alert and creative. The maximum power of the brain comes out in the later morning and that is the optimal time for learning. So that's the first thing, we know that. And we know that when schools start before 8:30 in the morning, kids are more likely to be sleep deprived.

[00:32:37] Heather: They are more likely to have car accidents. They are more likely to have the trips to the school nurse go up because the immune system is suppressed with sleep deprivation. So, when we move start times to what we would describe as sleep-friendly, which is 8:30 or later, visits to the nurse's office go down.

[00:32:58] Heather: Tardies and absences go down. Overall stress levels go down. Reports of depression and anxiety go down. If they are getting six hours of sleep, they're at least twice as likely to say that they feel depressed, that they feel hopeless and sad. And so, when we shift the start times to 8:30, all of a sudden, we get a jump in mental health.

[00:33:21] Heather: We get a big boost in mental health because kids are getting better sleep and the timing for their brains is better paced. In Jackson Hole, they moved the start time from 7:30 to 8:55 and car crash rates for teenage drivers went down by 70%. 

[00:33:39] Olivia: That's insane. 

[00:33:40] Heather: So, we're just talking about putting sleep-deprived teenagers out into the world on the roads. And then we wonder why they sometimes don't make good decisions and why we have high car crash rates for teenage drivers. We're all sharing the road with teenagers. And I live in Los Angeles where we're...very conscious of road safety. It's terrifying to think about. So, it's the practical application shifting to 8:30 or later is 100% one of the first steps for high schools. 

[00:34:10] Olivia: So, Heather, I can already hear high schools say: We can't do that. The busing is an issue. The sports are going to be impacted. We know sports are big. So, what ideas would you say to that? 

[00:34:21] Heather: So busing is complicated and depends on the districts, but we, we work with an organization called Start School Later.

[00:34:28] Heather: They've helped us understand this whole process really well, and they consult with schools to figure this out because so many districts have done it. And the overall idea is change is hard. There's a little stress involved in figuring out bus schedules, and in the end, most schools can find solutions that don't even increase the cost of busing.

[00:34:50] Heather: So, there are ways to do that, but also sports programs - I know that that's a big concern, but actually in schools where start times have moved to 8:30 or later, what the research has seen is an increase in participation in sports and better competitive wins. 

[00:35:10] Heather: And that's not surprising because sleep increases our athletic performance. Sports teams that have shifted to sleep-friendly hours have seen more championships. They've seen better records. They've seen more participation and coaches are seeing that kids are happier and more active and more alert. Again, I think there's a fear of change. 

[00:35:28] Olivia: Yeah, there is.

[00:35:29] Heather: You know, that's what's driving a lot of the resistance to start time. 

[00:35:33] Olivia: Another aspect of your book that I appreciate so much, it's a global perspective. It's not just research from the States. And so, you do offer research from all over the world. And there was a high school in England, I believe, that shifted the start times and had really amazing results.

[00:35:52] Heather: They shifted the start time if I'm thinking of the one that you are, they shifted it to later than 9:00. It might've been even 9:30 or 10:00. 

[00:36:00] Olivia: It was 10:00. Yeah. 

[00:36:01] Heather: And they just saw that, that the kids didn't get sick. They got half as many colds, and their feelings of positivity went way up. And I think that probably speaks to 9:00 or 10 o'clock is probably an even better time for a teen to be learning. But you know, that's so far from being what we have now. And we have to be reasonable about it. So, I think 8:30 is reasonable.

[00:36:21] Olivia: I think the possibilities are endless. I do appreciate Heather, the reasonable baby steps to just start even considering like, let's all get around a table. Let's read your book as school districts and even legislation.

[00:36:34] Olivia: There are states that are doing this right and adjusting the start times across the board. And I think it's critical. Julie, let's talk academic overload. The research consensus is that homework in elementary school has no academic benefit and leads to more family conflict and negative attitudes towards school, and yet almost every single elementary school assigns homework starting in kindergarten.

[00:37:01] Olivia: Here's what really got me. High school homework has limited use and can be harmful when it takes many hours every evening, raises stress, draws away from family time and downtime, and reduces sleep. So, that are pushing heavy, heavy loads of homework, students taking AP classes, the amount of homework is tremendous.

[00:37:23] Julie: It's such a big part of the problem and, you know, the amount of homework that teens have today is so much greater than it was in the past. It's just increased over time and it, it appears to be directly linked to the relationship with college admissions and the requirements and the expectations and the piling on of activities.

[00:37:44] Julie: So, there's only so many hours in the day for a teenager. And, um, you quoted from the book, um, research only supports that an hour of homework at the teenage level is helpful beyond that. It just creates stress and starts to displace sleep. So, there's a big movement out there to really address this homework issue.

[00:38:04] Julie: And I mean, I remember my son is 26 now and I, I didn't know as much then when he was in high school as I do now. And I remember him taking the AP classes and working for hours and hours and hours a night. And I feel terrible about that because those AP classes didn't do anything for him. They were not helpful.

[00:38:25] Julie: I'm not saying that no AP classes are helpful, but a lot of them are rote learning, a lot of regurgitation of facts, and there's an enormous amount of pressure. And they don't enhance the college experience. And they don't even necessarily, you know, a lot of parents are like, well, it'll save me money because we'll get those college credits out of the way.

[00:38:44] Julie: It doesn't even always work that way. So, there's a lot of myths out there about homework and the AP classes and this idea that the amount of homework teens have has just snowballed over the years. And somebody needs to stop and say: What is going on? Is this really benefiting our teenagers? You know, one of the questions we always want to ask a school is say your teenager has six teachers.

[00:39:09] Julie: Do they talk to each other? Do they know how many hours of homework your son is coming home with each night? It's just unconscionable that our teenagers are so burdened and they feel, for the most part, they feel a lot of pressure. They get a lot of pressure. We want them to do well. We want them to get into the college that's a good fit for them.

[00:39:29] Julie: And we, we want to optimize that. It's a normal high-top priority for a lot of families. So, homework needs to be reduced dramatically so that kids can have time to be social. Heather and I would love for them to be social in person more to be able to go run around a park or play or hang out after school with a friend rather than having to go straight home because it's, you know, all the things that they've done in their homework means they, they just go straight home and they have to do homework.

[00:39:58] Julie: And then at the end of that, of course, they're desperate for some social interaction. And there's that sort of, what's it called? Procrastination revenge, where we just feel like, come on now, I need some time for myself and it's one in the morning and they're texting or gaming with their friends. So, it's just a recipe for disaster and homework plays a big role in it.

[00:40:21] Olivia: Julie, I'm, I'm embarrassed to say that several of the things you just said have fallen out of my mouth as a parent, you know, the notion of AP classes helping with college admission. I was thrilled with your book to see that some college boards are shifting the expectations and lessening the lines on applications for extracurricular activities, that's a shift in itself we can make.

[00:40:47] Olivia: I want to move our conversation to what we can do. We had to really highlight the crisis that we're facing. Sleep could solve so, so, so many issues we're seeing with our tweens and teens. And yet the podcast must inspire listeners to take action. I want to shift our conversation to talking about how we can draw on our understanding of the beautiful research you just spoke to help our Children really understand that they must get more sleep and prioritize this as first for their lives, yet it can't happen with just our children.

[00:41:27] Olivia: It has to happen at the family level. In Chapter 7, the parent fade - that really struck me. As older teens take over more decision-making, you can shift from dictating when and how to appeal to their self-motivation to sleep well and feel good. This means giving them information about sleep and helping them see the role of sleep and what matters to them.

[00:41:51] Olivia: That really got to me. I love that idea of empowering them with information. We've spoken to that. And then this idea: In their book, The Self Driven Child, authors William Stixrud and Ned Johnson refer to this as taking on more of a consultant role.

[00:42:08] Olivia: I love it. An important shift in mindset from over-helping to being there as a support. How beautiful is that, right? So Heather, would you speak to what FOND, F-O-N-D means? What does that acronym stand for? 

[00:42:24] Heather: The FOND family is kind of a way of thinking about a family that prioritizes balance and is thinking about healthy practices on a daily and weekly basis, rather than just crunch, crunch, crunch, and then try to squeeze in.

[00:42:39] Heather: We want people to shift to what we call a sleep-forward mentality and the FOND family practices help you do that. So, we're talking about family rituals, like having dinner together, like doing a wind-down time that's watching a show, having spaces for open play. Unfortunately, that's harder and harder to do with technology, but striving for that idea is so important because teenagers need to “play” too.

[00:43:04] Heather: All people of all ages need to. Nature is extremely important. We haven't talked about morning sun, but morning sun is one of the most important factors for teenage sleep. They have to get morning sun and they have to get it; even in the Northeast, even in Ithaca, even in upstate New York, the sun is thousands of times stronger than indoor light.

[00:43:24] Heather: So, you have to have morning sun and you have to get it on the weekends within an hour or two of your weekday wake up time. And so, nature is extremely important. Like Julie was mentioning, when you're outside and you're out of technology, you will sleep better overall.

[00:43:40] Heather: So, getting outside is extremely important to our sleep. And downtime, that's another way of saying balance. We need balance. We can't just have every single part of our day be scheduled and then sleep is the last thing that happens after all that is done because that won't lead to healthy sleep.

[00:43:58] Heather: We actually have to protect it by talking about what our priorities are as a family, by letting go of certain activities, choose one club, choose one AP class, and let's have balance so that we can take care of our mental and physical health and that's a family priority. 

[00:44:17] Olivia: And I love the idea, the Family Meeting Agenda in the book, it runs from pages 100 to 104. It's absolutely wonderful. Julie, I'd love for you to speak to the two principles, Paleo Sleep and the Sleep Bubble Concept, as well as the five habits of Healthy Sleepers for Families. 

[00:44:36] Julie: Okay. So, Paleo Sleep is just a kind of a fun way to think of what we were talking about earlier, which has been in sync with the natural timing of sunset and sunrise. It's just a kind of a reminder. It's a way to think of ourselves as being out on those camping trips. We're out in nature, we're not being queued by artificial light and all this technology and all this stimulation. We're letting our bodies shift into what they really want to do, which is be in sync with nature.

[00:45:03] Julie: So, paleo sleep is just kind of a fun way to remember what the goal is here. And of course, we're in our homes and we have to simulate this by dimming lights and then making sure that we get our kids outside early in the morning so they can get that natural sunlight. So, we have to manipulate it a little bit.

 

[00:45:21] Julie: And the sleep bubble is a concept that we came up with, you know, Heather's talked a lot about wind-down time. And, and then what we propose in the book is a wind-down routine, which starts one to two hours, you know, reasonable for a teen is an hour before bed, but then it's followed by a bedtime routine and then we have a morning routine.

[00:45:40] Julie: And the goal of this is to create a bubble around sleep because we cannot just crash into sleep like we've been talking about. Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, has this great saying we love and he said, going to sleep at night is like landing a plane. You can't just crash into sleep. You can't get off your game.

[00:46:00] Julie: And then lie in bed because your mom told you to and just say: I can't fall asleep. We've kind of laid this, laid out the groundwork for this. So, the sleep bubble is very carefully designed to give the body time. The body needs time to land that plane. So, the sleepiness hormones like melatonin start to rise.

[00:46:19] Julie: And the body starts to regulate to sleep. And when you pair that with a regularly held bedtime, we haven't really talked about that too much, but we all fall asleep more easily if we hold a regular bedtime because our internal clock does get trained for that time. So, the sleep bubble is protecting at the beginning of the night and the sleep bubble continues into the morning routine because we also need that morning sunlight to tell our melatonin to drop and our cortisol to rise.

[00:46:51] Julie: This is the hormone that wakes us up, that makes us feel alert, that helps us focus, and helps us learn. So, the sleep bubble just helps people with this idea that you can't just say: Oh, my teenager whomever needs to go to bed at 11 o'clock. We need to really protect sleep and provide this little cushioning around it.

[00:47:10] Olivia: I thought it was absolutely critical to learn about the two principles, Paleo Sleep, as well as The Sleep Bubble. But in your book, you also speak to The Five Habits of Happy Sleepers. It's using the sleep acronym: S-set your sleep times; L-lay out your three routines; The first E-extract your sleep stealers, aka unhelpful sleep associations; The second E-eliminate light and make your bedroom a cave. P-practice a sleep-friendly daytime.

[00:47:37] Olivia: These are huge that I think not only are important for our tweens and teens, but they're important for us as adults and even our younger children. You elaborate on each of these habits throughout chapter six.

[00:48:00] Olivia: It's been so lovely to learn from both of you in person and as well as reading your book. The Five Habits of Happy Sleepers. with the sleep acronym was illuminating for me. And I'd love to ask each of you, Heather, kick it off. What are your top tips? What is our call to action that we can start immediately?

[00:48:21] Heather: So, the two things I would say are wake up within one maximum two hours on the weekend of what you have to wake up for for school. And this depends on the kid. If you're extremely sleep deprived, two hours, okay, but really try. It helps enormously to wake up within one or two hours of your weekday wake-up time on the weekend so that we don't confuse the brain clock. 

[00:48:46] Heather: And then get at least 5-15 minutes of morning sunlight outside on the weekdays and the weekends because those two things help to regulate the brain clock. They help to signal the brain it's morning, which helps us then signal our brain at night that it's nighttime. So, we have to queue the morning brain clock, otherwise it gets confused, and it dilutes the power of sleep.

[00:49:09] Heather: So those are my top two takeaways for teens. 

[00:49:12] Olivia: Thank you. Julie, how about you? 

[00:49:14] Julie: Yeah, I think two that are really important. One, you touched on Olivia, which is that parents model their behaviors not only around technology, but around sleep. And the more they cannot let go of family structures like bedtime around sleep too soon.

[00:49:30] Julie: Keep these family rituals going, parking devices, having some kind of wind-down time together, whether it's watching a TV show or baking something or walking the dog, but keeping these rituals going. I think a lot of families are, everyone's in their own corner on their own device and it's very isolating in a lot of ways, but it definitely detracts from sleep.

[00:49:51] Julie: It's our whole chapter, which if you get the book, you'll read about it, which is really how to attune to our teenagers and really listen to the things that they care about because inevitably something that they care about, like performing better at their sport or their drama club or on their musical instrument is going to be enhanced by better sleep.

[00:50:11] Julie: Maybe they just want to feel better. Maybe they don't like the way their skin looks or whatever it is. There's going to be something. And if you listen carefully and help them become self-motivated, that is going to be key as we well know about teenagers. 

[00:50:26] Olivia: And Julie, when you speak to attuning and limit setting, that is the ALP Method where You attune, you limit set, and you problem solve.

[00:50:37] Olivia: It's all-around communication. Communication is so critical within families, especially with our teens. When it sometimes it feels like they're pushing us away, if we really are attuned to their needs, and pause our own triggers or traumas from what's going on in our life, I think it will help connect us all more.

[00:50:57] Olivia: And let's just face it. If we're all getting more sleep, we'll probably be more patient and less reactive with each other in our families. Well, Julie and Heather, you motivated me as a mom, as an educator, as a spouse, just for our family alone to really change our habits drastically because sleep is everything.

[00:51:18] Olivia: It's top priority and it needs to be for all families. I am grateful for your time. I'm grateful for you writing this book. I will include links in the show notes to your resources, your gorgeous, helpful website, and I'm excited, I'm already looking forward to this coming summer and hoping we can get together in Ithaca.

[00:51:38] Heather: I would love to. Let's absolutely do that.

[00:51:41] Olivia: I would love it. I would absolutely love it. Thank you both so much for your time and energy into this really important cause. Take care.  

[00:51:38] Heather: Thank you. 

[00:51:50] Julie: Thanks so much for having us. 

[00:51:54] Olivia: Schoolutions is a podcast created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl. Special thanks to my guests, marriage and family therapists, Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright. Thanks to my older son Benjamin, who created the music that's playing in the background. If you like Schoolutions, please share, rate, review, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @schoolutionspodcast. If you want to reach out, leave me a SpeakPipe voice memo at my website: www.oliviawahl.com/podcast or via email @schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. Don't forget to talk about us nicely on social media, and please keep listening. Let's continue finding inspiration together.