
Insufficient Sleep Associated with Risky Teen Behavior - laurex
https://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-teen-behavior-9938/
======
wojtekkru
"Compared to students who reported sleeping eight hours at night, high school
students who slept less than six hours were twice as likely to self-report
using alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or other drugs, and driving after drinking
alcohol. They were also nearly twice as likely to report carrying a weapon or
being in a fight."

Have they established causation? Or could it be that lifestyle including
alcohol and weapons also happens to involve less sleep?

~~~
skadamat
"Compared to students who reported sleeping eight hours at night, high school
students who slept less than six hours were twice as likely to self-report
using alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or other drugs, and driving after drinking
alcohol. They were also nearly twice as likely to report carrying a weapon or
being in a fight. Researchers found the strongest associations were related to
mood and self- harm. Those who slept less than six hours were more than three
times as likely to consider or attempt suicide, and four times as likely to
attempt suicide, resulting in treatment. Only 30 percent of the students in
the study reported averaging more than eight hours of sleep on school nights."

Seems like a lot of data mining to create correlations (hence the use of the
word "association" a lot). This kind of work can be good for problem _finding_
and hypothesis generation. It's unfortunate that we live in a world where:

\- news outlets publish research that is meant to stimulate discussion +
hypothesis exploration

\- readers are unable, undereducated, and / or disempowered to discern the
level of rigorous science examination done

EDIT: The funny thing is that I predict that this HN thread will lead hundreds
of folks to tell stories of confirmation bias.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Nearly every morning one of our local radio station gives "fun" "facts" and
always start with "Scientist say " and end with something ridiculous like
"dogs can't look up", or "purple is the best colour", or something equally
bizarre, and they treat it like because "scientists" say it it has meaning or
value, and then they both discuss it as a fact, and have people phone in and
talk about it. We utterly fail at scientific education and communication in
North America.

~~~
baxtr
I’m not sure if it’s only NA though... just read the chapter 6 “Authority” of
Cialdinis book “Influence”. People take stuff that authorities like scientists
say as given. It’s human nature. The example of how this can be abused as
outlined in the book are quite bizarre.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Oh, yeah, I just didn't want to generalize farther than my own experience.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
Many of these risky behaviors are likely to take place at night. Students who
are out partying and drinking are likely to be doing this at night, which will
cut down into their sleep time.

The implication of this study is that the lack of sleep is causing the risky
behaviors. However, saying that risky behavior caused less sleep could also be
as reasonable an implication.

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manishsharan
I wish high school teachers would take note of this. My kid goes to an
accelerated program high school in Toronto and she is so swamped with homework
and tests, she hardly gets any sleep on weeknights and on some weekends too.

~~~
cbhl
There are lots of options to mitigate this.

You can take them out of the accelerated/gifted program and put them back on
the "normal" university track in high school.

The big risk is that it will cause your kid to get alienated socially among
both the "normal" and the "gifted" kids, so make sure that your kid is
involved in the decision-making process.

If your kid has an IEP, you can also talk to the teacher to get
accommodations. For example, maybe your kid could quietly work on their
homework during their school day, instead of being forced to pay attention to
the teacher's lecture.

You can also just tell the kid that they can decide how much homework they
want to complete. In high school and university, any un-completed work just
gets recorded as a zero; if the kid is already getting 80s and 90s then a few
missed or half-complete assignment questions shouldn't materially affect their
final grade (provided they understand enough of the main concepts to complete
major tests/projects/exams). Having a strategy for deciding what work is
safest to drop/defer when you're overwhelmed is a useful skill both in upper
education and in the workplace.

Source: Went to a high school in York Region.

~~~
manishsharan
Thank you. I found your comments very insightful and helpful.

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sbecker
Part 2 of study: "Insufficient Sleep Associated with Risky Adult Behavior As
Well!"

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jaclaz
I wonder if similar experiments have been done in the military, where you have
a good number of young people that basically sleep as much as you let them
sleep, and that during the day are subject to (extreme) fatigue/training (the
amount of which is anyway under your control), including some (allowed/part of
the training) fights.

~~~
thrower123
The military has a pretty good idea just how long they can keep people awake,
and what the best combinations of stimulants are to keep them in warfighting
condition. The Wehrmacht in WW2 used an awful lot of amphetamines, and
dexedrine has been in common usage for a long time as well.

~~~
EamonnMR
Maybe not: [https://taskandpurpose.com/fitzgerald-mccain-sleep-
deprivati...](https://taskandpurpose.com/fitzgerald-mccain-sleep-deprivation-
navy/)

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cbhl
I would expect the confounding variable in this study to be peer pressure. If
your peers can pressure you into drinking alcohol or using marijuana, they
probably peer pressure you into staying up late -- to do the aforementioned
activities.

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JoeAltmaier
In other news, hunger causes eating and heat makes you sweat!

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blazespin
Common cause, adhd leads to both.

~~~
chillacy
Funny story, insufficient sleep looks a lot like adhd:
[https://www.additudemag.com/symptoms-of-
insomnia/](https://www.additudemag.com/symptoms-of-insomnia/)

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dave1619
I wish Elon would read this article and get some sleep.

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otakucode
And the consequences of insufficient sleep on adult behavior? Child behavior?
Elderly behavior? Perhaps this is a human trait, and not something isolated to
the ever-examined and ever more heavily regulated adolescent?

Not that any of this is news. That adolescents need more sleep than any other
age group, and that they suffer tremendously from being deprived it by adults,
has been known for an extremely long time. When I was in high school in the
90s, there were dozens of studies about it even then. But adults don't care.
The most common resistance to the notion of starting high school later is that
it would interfere with football practice, making it a total non-starter. That
football destroys brains, teaches mob mentality, and other such things doesn't
matter. It is, to our society, far too important to let those other matters
interfere.

~~~
Jedd
> And the consequences of insufficient sleep on ...

Ahh.. the Copenhagen Interpretation of studies.

This particular study is about teenagers - perhaps because 'risky teen
behaviour' is something you're more likely to find in teenagers, or, less
churlishly, because risky behaviour in general is something you find much more
often in teenagers.

Also compare age-segmented stats for depression, suicides, violence, etc - and
they're an obviously higher at-risk demographic.

> Not that any of this is news. That adolescents need more sleep than any
> other age group, and that they suffer tremendously from being deprived it by
> adults, has been known for an extremely long time.

This is not true.

Outside of newborns / toddlers, pretty much everyone needs about 8 hours of
sleep. Changes as you get (much) older make it more difficult to _get_ the
full 8 hours, and adolescents' circadian rhythms means that to the uninformed
it seems like they want more / less / longer / lazier etc.

They don't - all the current research indicates they need ~8 hours too, but
they don't naturally want to fall asleep until 2-3 hours after the average
25+yo.

> But adults don't care.

This is a breathtaking thing to say.

> The most common resistance to the notion of starting high school later is
> that it would interfere with football practice, making it a total non-
> starter.

I'd suggest this courageous hypothesis could _at best_ apply to something less
than 5% of the world.

------
bena
Oh. Twice as much. That's a lot, right?

We could be moving from 1% to 2% here. Technically true, but statistically
meaningless. So while we could say that a teen who engages in risky behavior
is less likely to have adequate sleep, we can't say that a teen that has
inadequate sleep is likely to engage in risky behavior. And if we're looking
to identify teens likely to engage in risky behavior, it's useless.

And there are other things to consider as well. The study was done with 67,615
participants. 70% who are sleep-deprived compared to 30% who are "well-
rested". The population of "sleep-deprived" is much, much larger.

Also, we're looking at self-reporting. A bit unreliable in the best
conditions.

And we're drawing a casual link here that may not actually exist. They both
may be symptoms of a third problem. For instance, students in impoverished
conditions may have more risky behavior regardless of sleep schedules. And if
that was the real reason, forcing more sleep on people is hardly going to fix
the problem.

