Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi y'all, this is Virginia Lee. Today we are going to talk all things teen, specifically high achieving teens. What are the secrets to their success?
Let's find out on Spill the Tea.
Every one of us needs sleep. But what separates high achievers like Jeff Bezos, Ariana Huffington, LeBron James and Mariah Carey apart is that they have learned how to use sleep to bring their A game. Not only do they get enough hours at night, but they have learned the science of sleep to manipulate their bodies into peak performance. In today's episode, we are going to dive into this science plus detail how a teenage brain is different and what that means for a successful day. So you too can understand how your sleep brain works to get the most out of 24 hours. Like JLo says, sleep is my weapon. So let's learn how to wield it.
I have two different alarms and they have different sounds. Before I used to have like three or four, but then I found that I was like losing track of which alarm I was on. So then I would end up like sleeping in and almost like missing the first class of school. So I only have one alarm. It just wakes me up. There's like a jolt. So now I have around five alarms set. As a society, the United States is generally sleep deprived and rely on environmental cue to jolt us out of our much needed slumber. Sleep deprivation among teenagers is real. In a National Sleep Foundation 2006 poll of 1600 high school students, 38% got six hours or less each night and almost 80% reported insufficient sleep. Definitely not a lot of sleep. Like not the amount of sleep I know I should be getting. But it's just, I feel like it's hard, especially during season to prioritize rest when there's so much other stuff going on. So it is college app season and I will say I have been going to sleep pretty late compared to my friends and my peers. I sleep a lot. And so it's almost like a badge of honor to have less sleep. And so I often get it from my friends that, hey, you're sleeping way too much. Don't complain, when in reality, all of us are sleep deprived. In that same National Sleep foundation poll, they found that sleep deprived teens had higher incidence of risky behavior such as driving while drowsy, not using a seatbelt, and riding with a drunk driver or drunk driving themselves. There are so many other poor outcomes that stem from lack of sleep. Yet we heard that teens prioritize other activities over hitting the snooze button. Some of the world's most accomplished and successful people have learned how to harness the power of sleep to their advantage. And and we can too. To unlock the secrets of these high achievers, we first need to understand the science behind sleep. And for that we have an expert.
Dr. Mayda Chen is a pediatric physician boarded in both pulmonary and sleep medicine. Dr. Chen is a medical director for the Pediatric Sleep center at Seattle Children's Hospital, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and has numerous publications and she has been named a Seattle Top Doc almost every year for the past 14 years, as well as a US News and World Report top doc in 2012. Dr. Chen, thank you for joining us today on Spill the Tea. You're hoping you can walk us through the science of what regulates our sleep.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: The two big driving forces in what regulate our sleep wake cycles. Sleep pressure or process S is something, it's a pretty simple concept. The longer you are awake, the more sleep pressure you have. That is counterbalanced with something we call process C or the circadian process, and that's really our body clock. So the those two processes balance each other and that's what gives us a sleep wake cycle across 24 hours. Every single cell in our bodies actually have a circadian rhythm.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: The circadian rhythm is your body's 24 hour clock, which creates a rhythm that every cell beats to. This clock has alarms tuned to the light of the sun to tell your body be awake. And when the sun has set, it has the hormone melatonin to signal to the body time to sleep.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Melatonin is a hormone. It's a, you know, it's a chemical, a neurotransmitter, so to speak, that all of us make. It helps to signal sleepiness and it starts to trigger this cascade of essentially sleep onset and sleep maintenance.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: I usually wake up around 6:30 and nowadays I'm sleeping around 12 or 12:30. I would say healthy in terms that my sleep schedule is pretty consistent but unhealthy in the amount of sleep. By the time I end up falling asleep, it could be between like one to like two on like a bad day, on a good day, maybe from like 12 to 1. And then I wake up around 6:45, 7ish. If adolescents were allowed to sleep without obligations or alarm clocks, they need eight to nine hours of sleep each night, which is longer than what most adults need. Yet despite knowing what is healthy, teens stay up late and are often groggy the next day. Why are teens staying up so late and should parents be Cracking down on these late nights.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: So teenagers are prone to something called delayed sleep phase syndrome, which is really where their body clocks go to sleep and wake up later than where society wants them to happen. And that's physiologically very challenging when you have this circadian alertness saying, I'm awake, and yet the societal world is telling that same teenager, but you're supposed to be asleep. There's an inherent conflict there.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: So the first reason teens stay up late is that their own body's circadian rhythm are shifted so that instead of wanting to go to sleep when their parents often do, the rhythm has them staying up later and wanting to sleep in. How do teens fit into society? Could you walk us through a typical sleep week for teens going to school.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: In the US in this country, your typically developing teenager has a circadian rhythm that is pretty much sleep around 11 or midnight at night and natural wake around 9 or 10 in the morning. That's where we know, just based on population data, where most teenagers land. If they don't have to be at school, then that teenager, let's say, is going to sleep at midnight. On, uh, most school nights, they have to get up at 6:00 in the morning in order to make a 7:00 bus. That is a time of day that their bodies think they should still be asleep. Their brains are just not ready to go yet. They are not primed for learning. They are not primed for things like fast physical activity at that point in time, because that's kind of like the equivalent of waking up at an adult's 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. That's really hard to do and to be functional at that point in time. So then that teenager, let's say on the weekend, has enough caffeine, enough adrenaline stuff going on Friday night that they don't go to sleep until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. That teenager, who's now had five days of sleep deprivation, essentially the school week, that teenager is probably going to sleep until noon just out of sheer physical need for sleep. Remember, when you binge sleep like that and you sleep until noon, sleep pressure needs a while to build up.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Oh yes, I remember sleep pressure, or the pressure to sleep that goes along with our circadian rhythm. The goal of sleep pressure is to make sure you don't sleep too much or too little, regardless of the sun. Think of it as sand in an hourglass. The longer you are awake, the more sand piles up and the heavier that chamber gets when you sleep. The hourglass flips and all that sand starts to empty. So by morning you don't have any sleep pressure. But if you don't sleep enough, the chamber doesn't fully empty and you'll become.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Sleepier faster when you then wake up at noon. And I'm telling you, a teenager needs about 16 hours of alertness before that sleep pressure starts to kick in. Just do some math. They're not going to sleep at 9pm that night. They're probably going to go to sleep at midnight or 1am and again that just pushes their clock farther and farther back. And so then you are talking about a harsh reality Monday morning when they have to get up at whatever time it is that your high school makes you get up and that already sets your week behind.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: To review, our sleep schedule is defined by two processes. The body's clock that uses melatonin and body temperature and is dependent on light, known as our circadian rhythm. The second process, independent of light, is sleep pressure, where as the day goes on, the pressure to sleep builds higher and higher. Both of these processes are different in teens, leading to their bodies and brains wanting to be awake well past the hours of the rest of their time zone. Society drags them out of bed too early. And thus we have a population of sleep deprived teens turning 16 and learning how to drive. There's a study by the Australia Traffic foundation where they kept individuals up all night, like pulling an all nighter and starting at hour 16 of no sleep, they had the same cognitive impairment and slow reaction times as if they were drunk.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: In school districts where they have done things like delay the start of high school so that it's a little bit later, like after 8, 30 or 9. Certain school districts in Minnesota are good examples of it. Frankly. Seattle Public schools did it as well. We know that things like grades go up, SAT scores go up, graduation rates go up, tardies and absences go down, disciplinary problems at school go down. Teenagers went to sleep at the same time because that was pretty circadian in terms of regulation, but they would just wake up an hour later. So that's where they made up the time. So there's a lot of really concrete evidence out there when kids routinely get an extra hour of sleep.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Now it's time to flip the switch. We're going to stop living in sleepiness and start living in alertness. Let's look at sleep as a tool, a, uh, trick up our sleeve, a secret to help gain the best performance on the volleyball court, fastest running time in the 100 meter dash, or as we heard from the data above a better SAT score. Stay tuned while we learn how to specifically use our own circadian rhythm to our advantage, harness the power of a good nap and wield caffeine at just the right times. At the end, we will share some fun facts about life before the light bulb. How do people know when to wake up without an alarm clock? And what happened when researchers took healthy teens and made them sleep deprived for seven days straight.
You know us as athletes, we are very good about balancing our work and then also balancing our sleep because sleep is huge obviously for athletic performance. I think getting a, ah, good amount of sleep the night before helps me run faster too and makes me feel better while running. The first performance enhancing hack to bring our A game is no secret in the athletic world. There are hundreds of studies showing increased performance in athletes with more sleep and simultaneously plenty showing higher risk of injury and impaired athletic capacity when sleep deprived. Dr. Sherri Ma, an internationally recognized sleep physician and researcher at Stanford University, improved their men's basketball team's three point and free throw accuracy and speed of sprints by simply increasing the amount of sleep the athletes got each night. Dr. Ma was also able to correctly predict the outcome of 42 out of 54 NBA games solely based on the time of day the game occurred and what time zone the teams came from. Otherwise, said she was able to predict who would win based on what point in their circadian rhythm these athletes were playing. That's actually so fire. Sounds like Dr. Ma is combating sleep deprivation to get results, but with the time zones, she's using both circadian rhythm and circadian alertness. Dr. Chen, could you walk us through exactly what is circadian alertness?
[00:11:48] Speaker B: Circadian alertness is the signal that says for the environmental cues you are in, you should be awake. Everybody has a little dip in their circadian alerting signal in the afternoon. That's why we all get a little bit sleepy. It, uh, tends to happen after lunch. It really doesn't have that much to do with eating. It is more so that everybody has a little bit of a dip in their alertness signal at that point in time. Time in cultures outside of the U.S.
many of them will indulge in that and do a siesta or a routine afternoon nap. And we are just a society who doesn't.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: The most energized is probably right after lunch or, yeah, right after lunch. I would say that energy just after an afternoon dip is all part of the circadian alertness. There are bumps of energy and alertness that happen in the hours after waking up, if not sleep deprived, and again in the afternoon. We can also think of these bumps as periods of the brain's peak performance that the body is naturally creating. If a teenager circadian rhythm is different, are their circadian alertness bumps different as well?
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Pertinent to teenagers, they almost have a third bump. So there is yet one more what we call second wind or like a burst of alertness right before their melatonin starts to surge. So this occurs at night. Many parents will tell you that their teenagers don't really wake up until 9 or 10pm that is when they are chattiest. That is when they tend to start doing their homework a little bit more effectively. And of course that's the time that every parent wants their teenager to go to sleep.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Teens have this biology of wanting to stay up later. But in a 2010 study, teens that had a parent that did enforce bedtimes on school nights generally got more sleep, were less fatigued, and importantly were associated with less depression and suicidal ideation. Sounds like the key is to not make bedtime a fight at 10pm but earlier in the day, compromise to find a reasonable time and try to create an evening routine that is more conducive to sleep. We will have tips for teens and parents on how to adjust their evening routine a bit later in the podcast. I think I've noticed two things. One is the impact of social media. I think we've all been there. You're tired. It's almost like escapism. You're just scrolling through endlessly and in the blink of an eye, two, three hours have passed. And that makes you go to sleep later. So often. I find that if I'm in bed, on my phone or on my computer pretty late at night, I don't have a very restful night of sleep. I wake up in the morning feeling incredibly exhausted. I know it's recommended to not look at screens at all maybe 30 minutes to an hour before sleeping. I'm not able to do that because I have homework on my computer and stuff.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: So the impact on sleep of handheld devices really is 1 time displacement, 2 light impact on the circadian rhythm, and 3 the physiologic and psychologic arousal that is created from the content people are viewing. For sleep to occur, a bunch of sleep switches have to turn on, but that also means a bunch of wake switches need to turn off.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: So each of the three things you listed can fuel that third bump of wakefulness in teens and keep those wake switches on. I get time displacement. This is when one minute of scrolling social media turns into 5, then 10, then suddenly an entire hour went by, and I just wasted an hour. I could be sleeping the second one. Light makes sense because we have already learned that circadian rhythms are tailored to the light of the sun.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: The number one disruptor to sleep is light. Light is the biggest regulator of our circadian rhythm. And light is the one thing that really can offset sleep pressure. So even if you have been up for 24, 36 straight hours and your body is begging for sleep, your brain can be tricked into staying awake if it is staring at light. When we talk about light, we talk about the strength of that light in something called lux. And what we know is that any light source that is above 200 light lux, if you are looking at it for more than 10 minutes, will stop or significantly decrease your melatonin production. And that hiatus lasts for at least 30 minutes.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: Can you give me an example of what 200 lux light would be?
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Most office lights are about 300 lux. An outdoor cloudy day in Seattle is probably 10,000 lux. A brilliant day is going to be way more than that, which is why it's so hard to go to sleep on these summer nights. When we get the little lights for things like seasonal affective disorder treatment, those are in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 lux. But what we know is that handheld screen devices are usually in the 300 lux category, so enough to adversely impact melatonin secretion.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: What about LED lights or blue light filters?
[00:17:08] Speaker B: If you just focus on things like blue light filters, it doesn't change the fact that you're scrolling Snapchat or Instagram, because that will hook and that will counteract any blue light filter you have. So the third hook is really content.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: I think the unhealthiest sleep habit that I have, it's thinking to myself, oh, you know, I can scroll through reels just a little longer.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: So media content is designed to keep you engaged. It's designed to evoke a certain amount of social anxiety or fear of missing out fomo. Those are real things. And when you have that sensation, it actually creates a bit of vigilance in your brain that prevents sleep onset. And so go back to my simple analogy of turning sleep on and turning wake off. That vigilance that comes with, I can't oversleep my alarm clock because I'm going to miss my flight, or I can't sleep through my alarm clock because I don't want to be late for this test. All those things evoke a certain level of vigilance in our brains. And it is that vigilance that actually keeps the wake switch on.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: This totally happens to me. I like reading a book before bed because I think it's going to relax me. There's no blue light, no hook of social media. But on one book I was reading, I hit a major plot twist at uh, like 11:30 at night where the love interest epically died. And of course my emotions spiked. And all night I was half awake, half asleep with crazy dreams. My awake switch was definitely on.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: That on a chemical level actually prevents us from getting into as deep of sleep and so it feels much more disrupted. And you can almost put every stressor in a teenager's life into that sort of vigilance category, whether it be academic vigilance, particularly for higher achieving students who also tend to be ones that have lots of other extracurriculars. The challenge of balancing it all, the challenge of making sure that everything has been addressed. All the boxes check. People who have high levels of vigilance are very prone to insomnia. And we know one of the most common characteristics for people who have insomnia is high achievement. It's a type A personality. It's people who need to make sure that those boxes are checked before they go to sleep.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: In a 2003 study of teens with smartphones in their bedroom, teens described not only being intermittently woken up by notifications, but were also more tired during the day and had more insomnia. You can find a media device in almost every single teenage bedroom in the U.S. a 2006 National Sleep foundation poll found that 97% of teens had at least one electronic media device in their bedroom. 40% had video games, 40% were allowed mobile phones, and almost two thirds had a television. In a 2008 study, teens with those devices were more likely to use them before bed, which was associated with later bedtimes, shorter sleep time and more daytime sleepiness. These devices came from well meaning parents, but can clearly trigger the third bump in circadian alertness, keeping the vigilance switches turned on and that both delays and disrupts sleep.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: Parents know their children probably best, but lots of kids who say they can't go to sleep at a certain time really mean it. The conflict that happens between 10pm and midnight when the parents are saying, you need to go to sleep and the teenager is saying, I'm not sleepy again. That's an emotional and physiologic arousal that actually further prevents sleep onset. And for parents to understand the biology of the teenage Brain and body can be really helpful because the negative escalation that occurs in a lot of households before the teenager goes to sleep and then when they can't wake up in the morning, those can be quite additive and quite negatively impactful on both the teenage parent dyad. Uh, and so I think trying to have the grace of understanding that biology and just trying to stay de escalated is actually pretty critical because you can take a kid who has the same issues and you have a choice of whether they're going to sleep at 1:00am Um, a happy camper or a really aggravated angry person. And which one do you think gets better sleep?
[00:21:33] Speaker A: I definitely want to be a happy camper, but we steered off course a bit. Let's get back to how I can use my circadian rhythm and my circadian alertness to get a better free throw average, rock my speech and debate and have great hair. Oh, wait, that's a different episode. Dr. Chen, how can I use these bumps to circadian alertness plus my circadian rhythm to get a better performance?
[00:21:53] Speaker B: If you look at any professional sports team, they spend millions on sleep consultants, people who were in the Olympics, you don't just show up on another continent the day before, you get there weeks before to acclimate to that time zone so that they are not running the race of their lives at a time that their body thought was 2 o'clock in the morning. Peak performance comes in two big chunks. One is in the morning and one is right after that afternoon dip we have. And so if you talk about things like athletics or test taking, that's when those two tend to peak in terms of performance times. So when I'm talking about peak alertness, I'm talking about the time that our bodies would choose to wake up if given no other constraints. That's an important distinction. And so when you look at that clock, for most people that get ingrained into a rhythm, most of them get used to waking up at something like 6:00 in the morning, which means that their peak alertness happens around 8 or so in the morning. They will tend to have another peak somewhere in the afternoons, around three or four.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: So to tailor my natural circadian rhythm and times of peak performance, I need to know when they happen. So I first need to identify when I would naturally wake up. If I am not sleep deprived, then I need to figure out when my own personal afternoon dip is, because one of my peak performance times is right after when I would naturally wake up and just after the afternoon dip. Now that we can use Our own circadian rhythm and circadian alertness. To get our best hours, we could move on to our next secret of high achievers. That's the power of the nap. I found that if I nap, then I don't sleep at the regular time. Mm. Um, I guess when I sometimes I immediately crash, like fall asleep in the car. But I do that for a good 10, 15 minutes. Yeah.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Teenagers love to Napoleon.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: There is a study in 2017 that looked at three different groups of teens. Two of the groups were deprived of sleep over two weeks but allowed to nap. And then compared to the third group that got nine or more hours of sleep each night. Normally we would expect problems with performing tasks, maintaining attention, memory and executive functioning in the sleep deprived teens. However, when given a 90 minute nap every day, each one of these outcomes improved to match the well slept group. So naps can help academics in athletics. The eight time Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt not only sleeps 10 hours a night, but always makes sure he has a 20 minute nap before a race. That's the power of a nap. But Usain bolt's nap was 20 minutes and the nap in the study was 90. This has all to do with the stages of sleep your brain goes through when we sleep. Let's dive in a bit to understand these stages.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Everybody's grandmother told them, right, which is that when you're sleeping, your brain needs to rest. And that is true. But there are parts of your brain during certain stages of sleep, like REM sleep, that are very active and really crucial to overall bodily function. From m A sleep stage standpoint, the big division is between REM and non REM sleep. REM standing for rapid eye movement sleep. In non REM sleep, our brains do look more quiet. The first one, or stage one, or N1 as we call it, is what we call a transitional sleep state where your eyes are slowly rolling, your eyelids are sort of closing. You may still hear that professor lecturing in the background. This is where your head will drop forward and you can sort of very easily wake back up if there's like a loud noise or something. That deepens a little bit from N1 into N2 sleep. N2 sleep. This is a stage that is kind of, uh, basic filler sleep. But if you bypass N2 sleep into this N3 or delta sleep, that is really where we lose contact with the environment. That is where you stop hearing things, you stop feeling things. You definitely don't hear what that teacher is saying in the lecture. And that is when particularly like little kids can do things like sleep through fires or alarms. So those are the three stages of non REM sleep.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: So is this like how in the show Ted Lasso, the character of Roy Kent, teaches us that 4:00am um, is a time when, statistically speaking, people are least prepared to defend themselves.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: This is the phenomenon that if you are a teenager and you fall asleep, like on your book or something, you can stay in that position with a completely numb arm and drool coming out your mouth for an hour or so and not have any awareness that that is happening.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: I will neither confirm nor deny if I have drooled on a library book. So if these are relatively inactive times, our brain is asleep. When do we dream?
[00:26:52] Speaker B: In rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, you actually have a very active brain and just a very quiet body is actually fairly paralyzed. You can't move, which, if you think about it, is a good design. You don't want to act out your dreams. And REM sleep, you actually are able to incorporate a lot of environmental cues. So many people will have the experience of having an alarm clock integrated into their dreams.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: I can relate to that. I had a dream that I was taking a stroll on a cartoon sun, and then I realized that my alarm started playing. Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the waves. Other than dreams, why do we have rem?
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Um, REM is important for memory and learning. We all cycle in and out of REM sleep. And so rem, when it occurs, occurs in clusters that last for, you know, about 90 minutes and occur about every 60 to 120 minutes.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Oh, so that's where the 90 minute comes in. But what about the 20 minutes?
[00:27:53] Speaker B: So naps in my mind come in two flavors, a short nap and a long nap. Short nap being ones that are usually less than 20 minutes in duration and longer naps usually being ones that are longer than about 90 minutes in duration. And the difference to me is whether or not you get into that delta sleep or not delta sleep, that's the.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Deepest stage of non REM sleep with very slow brainwaves.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Remember what I said? It's very difficult to break that really slow brainwaves. A short nap is not long enough then to get into delta sleep. And hence a short nap can feel really refreshing because you essentially hit the sleep pressure reset button and you take that clock back a little bit. But it probably won't rob from your nighttime bank of sleep. A long nap can be very useful if you know for sure you don't have the opportunity for enough hours of sleep at night. You need to be functional like at nighttime, let's say if you are working a later night shift or something. But a longer nap is really meant to substitute for part of your nighttime sleep. Which is ironic because most people think of a nap as an hour and an hour is a really potentially an awkward amount of time because it's too long for a short nap. You're probably in the middle of this delta sleep cycle and a lot of people will tell you they feel groggier.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: So if I just pulled an all nighter, taking a 90 minute nap might be okay. Otherwise stick to the 20 minute power nap and before 3pm but for my fellow teens, really any nap can be dangerous in that pushing our circadian rhythm and delaying our already long hourglass of sleep pressure might keep us up even later. The next secret performance hack that everyone with the Starbucks on their corner knows is caffeine. While you might snicker because caffeine is the world's most commonly used and abused performance enhancing drug, the secret that high achievers have learned lies in the details.
If I drank too much caffeine before a game or something, I feel like that anxiety, while it may motivate some people, I think for me that just makes me worried. I make mistakes and that's not how I really want to feel before a game. Yeah. You know, but I do think it helps me uh, and it helps me focus before a game sometimes. So I feel like in moderation it can be good. Well I don't usually drink that much caffeine. It's just on the days where I don't get too much sleep that I do.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: I'm um, not anti caffeine. I think where we get into trouble though is that most people don't time it or don't take the appropriate amount if you are going to do it. Just knowing how to use it safely and strategically is actually pretty important. So if you have a cup of let's say drip coffee, 8 ounces of drip coffee at 8am M that should last you a fairly good while into the day where hopefully it will help off put some of that natural circadian dip.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: We just learned that one of our peak alertness times is about one to two hours after we wake up because we just slept off most of our sleep pressure. So drinking caffeine right away in the morning probably isn't going to do much for us and isn't the most strategic time to use it as opposed to an hour or so before an afternoon dip or as Dr. Chen described later in the morning that might help Skip the dip altogether. The second key to caffeine is the dose. This is a drug after all.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: Caffeine, just like any other medicine or drug, is dose dependent. So knowing how one reacts to caffeine is important. Teenagers will metabolize caffeine quicker than say, an older adult, where the lingering effects of caffeine can stay there for 12, 16 hours. I think it's also important to know about the amount of caffeine and knowing what goes into the drink that you're ordering at Starbucks. So a shot of espresso, depending on the brew and depending on the roast, is between 30 and 50 milligrams of caffeine at most places. A tall latte has two shots of espresso in it. So you're talking anywhere from 60 to maybe 100 milligrams of caffeine. That's in a 12 ounce cup. A 12 ounce cup of drip coffee will have upwards of double to not even triple the amount of caffeine in it, where that has 250 milligrams easily in it. But let's take that a step farther. And many of the energy drinks that are out there have 3 to 400 milligrams of caffeine in something like an 8 to 12 ounce can.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: But what happens if we don't use it safely and strategically? My brothers swear that they can have a cup of coffee at night and still fall asleep.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: At its root, caffeine is a wake promoting agent. And so remember I talked about the wakes which is needing to turn off for sleep to occur. Caffeine keeps those wake switches on. It keeps up the brain's level of vigilance, of awareness, of focus. And that can be a good thing if you need it. But if you're trying to fall asleep, that's a bad thing. What large amounts of caffeine will do is actually disrupt the later stages of your sleep, where then you may fall asleep and your body simply cannot resist going to sleep because of a large amount of sleep pressure or something. But then what caffeine can do is it turns that sleep into a nap.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: While this makes sense, I know plenty of adults, my dad included, that can't function until they've had their morning coffee.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: When we talk about that inability to even get the day going until we've had our first cup of coffee, there are a couple presumptions there. I think the main presumption there is that if you are well slept, you shouldn't necessarily get that much boost from a cup of coffee right when you wake up. It is when you've not gotten enough sleep or you've not gotten quality sleep or you are just behind on sleep. Over years or months or weeks, we.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Have learned how to use our own circadian rhythm and circadian alertness to our advantage, harness the power of a good nap and wield caffeine at just the right times up. Um, next are tips for good sleep hygiene so we don't get sleep deprived in the first place. And at the end we will share some fun facts like what was a zombie study?
Over time you become adjusted to lack of sleep. But can we really become adjusted? Our fourth performance enhancer is frankly just getting enough sleep.
[00:34:12] Speaker B: There is nothing that off sleeps sleep deprivation other than sleep. So that's the most important take home message here is if you pull an all nighter, you have the benefit of the circadian clock saying to 8:00 in the morning. You're usually awake at this point in time, but neither adrenaline nor typical circadian rhythm will offset the fact that you've just been up for 24 hours. Your performance will never be as good.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: A study in 2016 published in the Journal of Sleep looked at three groups of teens in a high achieving boarding school. One group got nine hours of sleep each night and the other two groups were sleep deprived over two weeks. Not surprising, the sleep deprived teenagers had incremental drops in ability to maintain attention, use their memory and executive functioning and were definitely more cranky. What is notable however, is that the sleep deprived group's level of performance on the assigned tasks never caught up to the well slept group. Students in a high achieving academic school are often sacrificing their sleep in hopes of better test scores, but ironically are actually doing more harm than help. Interestingly, these teens often don't realize that their performance is impaired. Some clues that you indeed are sleep deprived? A first look at total hours slept. Your smartwatch might be telling you the number of steps you got in, but how about the hours of Z's? B Do you need caffeine just to function in the morning? C Do you need to binge sleep on the weekends? D When relaxing in the car or on a bus ride or watching tv, do you easily nod off to sleep?
Keeping these in mind, how do we use good sleep hygiene to help us maximize the hours sleeping? Shower? Um, hop into bed. I usually actually have a diary with me and I just write down any reflections or but I try to avoid going on my devices. That's usually how my routine is. On a good day, this teen nicely described some healthy sleep hygiene steps. Number one she's unwinding before bed, ideally in a cool, dark and quiet room because you don't want to trigger your wake switches with light from screens, social media or an emotionally charged book.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: I think it's important to be able to meet families where they are. I would encourage people to just start a little bit more realistically. Even if you can do 15 minutes off a device before you go to sleep, maybe even 30 minutes. You know, something that doesn't feel as daunting as a full two hours. Can we think about being thoughtful of what content is actually being consumed at that point in time? Right. Social media is by far the biggest offender.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: Number two Maintain the same sleep schedule on both weekdays and weekends. Try to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. Don't sleep binge.
Use caffeine and other stimulants strategically. Remember, one cup of coffee can last you eight hours.
Naps can be both helpful and dangerous. Too long or too late a nap can push your circadian rhythm and screw up your sleep schedule. Number 5 Reserve your bedroom for nocturnal activities. Don't turn on your vigilance switches.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: Wherever it is that you choose to sleep on a habitual basis, make it something that the only thing you do in it is sleep. Don't worry while you're there. Don't think while you're there. Don't plan while you're there. Don't do homework while you're there. And if you want to scroll your phone, that's fine, great. Do it somewhere else, but separate that association.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: Number six Use bright lights in the morning. These will remind your circadian rhythm. It's time to wake up. Number seven Hot baths help. They can drop your temperature and help trigger your circadian rhythm.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: You need your body temperature to drop in order for sort of the next day's chemical reactions and circadian patterns and hormones and things like that to get triggered in your body.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: Number eight get daily exercise, but don't do it within two to three hours before bedtime because they can raise your temperature and stimulate those wake switches. Number nine Avoid alcohol before bedtime. It'll sedate your brain, allows sleep to initiate, but doesn't let you get into the deep stages of sleep, so in the end you didn't get good quality sleep.
Number 10 Avoid large meals before bed because it can cause indigestion to disrupt your sleep time. And it's the same with liquids. You don't want to wake up having to pee all night.
Finally make the sleep room a happy sleep place. Can we take away devices or homework in your sleep room but also allow those stuffies and comfies? Some people need specific items that they associate with comfort and sleeping and so be thoughtful of the stuffies that decorate the bed. The association with sleep the squashmallow may represent is the key to falling and staying asleep.
That is the bulk of our episode. Dr. Mayda Chen taught us about circadian rhythm and circadian alertness and then we learned how teens bodies are different than adults. We heard the secret of how high achievers already use sleep to their advantage, using peak performance times of the day for the most important events, strategically use caffeine, harness the power of the nap and set up their lives to get enough sleep each night. Finally, for those who just want to hear more about sleep, you can click on the next link for a short post. Sleep Episode of Fun Facts about sleep with Dr. Melissa Lee.
Special thanks to Dr. Ameyda Chen of University of Washington in Seattle Children's Hospital Hospital.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Spill the Tea, where we share real stories with real teens. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Special thanks to our producer, Dr. Melissa Lee, our Chief editor, Natalie Light, and the music composed and performed by Stephen Light.
Opinions expressed or views expressed do not necessarily reflect or represent those of the host. Such views are merely opinions expressed. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just a teen. I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.
