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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41582-025-01106-6
Abstract: "Aspects of modern society, such as artificial lighting and rigid schedules, create ‘social jetlag’ — a mismatch between biological chronotypes and societal demands. This circadian misalignment particularly affects evening chronotypes, leading to sleep deprivation, mental health issues and physical disorders. Flexible schedules and environmental modifications could restore natural sleep patterns and improve well-being."
I don’t understand how going to bed early is a problem.
My high school started at 0800hrs. I had to be up by 0630hrs to catch the bus at 0715hrs, and it was a 15-minute walk to get to it. I went to bed some time between 2130hrs and 2230hrs almost every night like clockwork.
Did I get 10hrs of sleep? No. But the ≈8hrs I did get was enough to ensure I was awake and coherent in the morning.
If kids are tired in the morning, what’s stopping them from going to bed earlier? I was never forced to do so. I just did, because I was getting tired shortly after 2100hrs. I listened to my body.
There's tired, and then there's sleepy. For me, if I'm not sleepy, there's about a 5% chance I will be able to fall asleep upon going to bed. I remember plenty of nights in high school going to bed "early" around 10pm, and sure enough I'm still awake at 2am. So first off there's ability to sleep when needed.
Second, the modern perspective contains a lot of blue light in daily lives that prevents melatonin secretion. Few kids have the self control and presence of mind to properly regulate their screen time at night, even if just from TV, not to mention phones.
Realistically just with the second point, the cards are stacked against them.
The parents and their sleep hygiene play a huge role in this. My parents always went to bed around 22h30 and I had my bedtime routine as well. Sleep hygiene was taught to me from a very young age. Turn off screens, brush my teeth, go into bed, read a bit or play with my plush animals. I always slept within minutes.
Structure and consistency is so important to a healthy sleep schedule. Now I can sleep at any time virtually anywhere. It's awesome
Now I can sleep at any time virtually anywhere.
just to chime in, I have the polar opposite of your experience and still can zonk out in 5 mins any time I like. The only consistent thing is that I get a minimum of 6 hours of sleep a night, but my smartwatch still gives me sleep ratings in the high 80s and low 90s almost every night. No idea if this is in any way scientific but people on Reddit seem to value it.
I also am registered as having the stress of a puddle, similarly.
For most people, I think it is more to do with genetics rather than any real habits. I think all you really need to do is make your bedroom completely dark and slightly cold, and exercise a couple of times a week.
I was an incredibly angsty teenager, mad at the world and hostile to just about everyone by default. Apathetic, grumpy, and uninterested in physical activity or the things I liked as a preteen.
After having a baby and getting very little sleep for 6 months I recognized some of my old patterns. Turns out, it wasn't just part of being a teen, I was chronically sleep deprived. I was up at 6am most days back then, when I would sleep until 1pm on weekends. I think a lot of teens are unfairly characterized as angry and defiant when they're operating on half or a quarter of the sleep they need.
Ah yes, I remember those accusations of grumpiness. It’s the classic “MY issues are because of the circumstances around me. YOUR issues are because that’s just who you are.” The lack of empathy so many adults express is truly concerning.
The way I see it, you're probably freest from the ages one to four Around the age of five you're shipped away for your body to be stored They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowest
So much of the education system is centered on child abuse and grooming children to accept abuse as adults
Also it's affordable daycare for kids so parents can work.
That's the real reason it starts early: so two working parents can get the kids out the door and then still have time to get to work themselves
My mental health radically improved my senior year when I was ahead on credits and could skip the first block of classes each morning.
the timings for school and its length were not dictated by health needs nor education needs.
it was chosen to match parents work schedule, and to aclimatize children to factory work.
so its not out of ignorance of the childs well-being, but indifference to it
i highkey think school as it stands is child abuse.
i'm not a pedagogue or educator so i'm not versed on how to really articulate it, just had a constant feeling school was useless for learning, and felt like fucking prisons (and in retrospect i still think that's true).
school 100% stunted my potential big time and i still fucking hate it for doing this and more. free our youth.
I left school around 9th grade, did "homeschool" which amounted to basically just watching documentaries and smoking weed and now I'm one of the highest earners out of everyone I originally went to school with. From being that weird poor kid who always got bullied to being quite comfortable- life is fuckin' weird.
You can't cause delinquency if you're too busy getting 8 hours of sleep.
And god forbid your circadian rhythm doesn't align and you fall asleep in class.
You can get referred for a drug test because only high people fall asleep during the day.
I have always struggled with sleep onset insomnia. In an ideal world, I'd probably sleep from around 5 am until noon, and my best working hours are from 7pm until 11pm, without fail. Even when I am exhausted from forcing myself to get up early for an extended period, I'll still perk up in the late evening, and struggle to sleep before 3am. This combined awfully with school.
I remember once that I was so exhausted, I literally fell asleep while walking, and I didn't wake up when I hit the floor. What's striking in hindsight is how little sympathy there was. I wasn't accused of being a drug user, but there were plenty of comments about laziness, which is absurd given that I was obviously severely exhausted.
A friend was the primary carer for a disabled relative, and this required her to get up at 5am each day, and to get up during the night to administer medication. She would often fall asleep in class, and she frequently got detention for this (which she would then often need to skip, to ensure she could get home in time to pick up siblings from school). Speaking with her years later, she lamented that if teachers had been more sympathetic and actually tried to understand what was going on here, it might've led to there being formal support to care for her relative. The amount of work she was doing was absurd for anyone, let alone a 13 year old, but she didn't know this, let alone that there were support channels to help young carers like her.
We've known this for decades, but almost no districts will make the changes necessary. The youngest grades (K-4 or 5) should be the first schools to start in the morning, and the HS the last.
What happens when that is suggested is people balk at either sports programs needing to be cut or the argument that the older siblings need to be out of school to babysit the younger siblings.
Yep, exactly.
Almost 30 years now we've known that shifting around the school schedule by roughly a max of 2 hours would result in significantly improved learning across the board, for basically 0 cost... and we don't do it.
America is a scam.
In my 30s and I'm still mad about it.
Especially considering how much time at school was an absolute waste.
The real reason is to accomodate for parents' routines. You need the kid in a place where someone can watch them for you by the time you leave for work (or not long after). Plus yeah they gotta learn to follow schedules and have responsibilities and such. Not saying I think it's a perfect system, I too hated getting off bed early in the morning.
One reason for the early starts for high schools is that by staggering the start times for high school, middle school, and elementary school, school districts can use fewer buses and fewer drivers. If all the schools started at the same (more reasonable) time, you'd need three times as many buses and drivers and each driver would only get one or two hours a day (and thus would find something else to do, making the existing shortage of drivers even worse). The district I drive for has a transportation budget of about $3 million a year - we would not be able to afford $9 million a year and still afford our administrators' enormous salaries.
If you just started all schools later by an hour, the elementary school kids would start at 9:30 AM which would not work out very well, either.
It's nuts to me that American schools start so early. Ours had first bell around 8:30. By high school is was closer to nine.
Yea that only happens because capitalism needs your parents to slave their ass off which can only happen if their kids go to school earlier than their already early starting job