The Ironic Importance of Sleep

It is known that teenagers’ body clocks are far from normal. Staying up till early morning is all too common for whatever reason, whether it’s because you are re-watching your favourite TV series again and can’t draw yourself away from the compelling storyline or whether, for some unknown reason, as soon as the clock hit 9pm, you developed the energy of several condensed suns.
Inevitably this causes us to wake up well into the hours of early afternoon the next day, leaving little time for any productivity and ironically, no energy either.

From what I can gather (through some regrettably brief and incomplete research), we need sleep because:

• during sleep, a growth hormone is released
• our body needs a chance to replace tissue and chemicals that are used up or destroyed during the day
• our brain needs a chance to “sort through” the information we have processed during the day

So the firs two reasons are bodily reasons why sleep is so important. It seems to suggest that without sleep we could A) be shorter and B) generally less healthy and happy, which has face validity, considering people don’t tend to be in the best of moods when they’re tired.

However the third bullet point has piqued my interest rather.
If our brain needs sleep to process the day’s information, and teenagers are notorious for getting far less sleep than they need, then perhaps sleep deprivation is the reason why so many of us find it so hard when it comes to revise…

“I am revising, it’s just that nothing’s ‘going in’!” – i’m sure everyone’s said this at one point or another, so perhaps it’s because we don’t give our brains enough time to process the information.

Research appears to suggest that out of the 3 mechanisms involved in learning – Aquisition, Consolidation and Recall – only Aquisition and Recall occur during wakefullness. Therefore consolidation of information must be most effective during sleep.

If you want to go down the neuropsychology route, there is further evidence to suggest sleep deprivation inhibits learning.
Neurons are involved in learning. As you learn new material, neurological pathways are made and the more you rehearse the new material, the stronger these pathways get. For example, during your first driving less, your neurological pathway formed when you first learn how to use the clutch will be very weak, whereas in an adult who has been able to drive for years, the pathway will be strong and clear.
If you are sleep deprived, neurons become overworked, and therefore physically inhibited, making it very difficult for them to work together to create these neurological pathways.

Finally, the policy of “quality not quantity” can be applied to sleep. You may get a full 8 hours of sleep one night but still feel like a zombie the following morning. Recently, scientists have shown that the presence of a mobile phone under your pillow can reduce the amount of “deep” sleep you get every night, and it is during the “deep” sleep stage that your body attempts to repair itself of sleep deprivation.

So it can only be described as ironic that though teenagers require more sleep than any other age group (apart from perhaps newborn babies), we also appear to be the most sleep deprived social group on the planet.
Perhaps small measures like making sure our phone is off and away from our bed, and getting into bed half an hour early actually could make a real difference to the effectiveness of our brains in preparation for annual exams and assessments.

( ***Yawn** I think i’m going to have to stop re-watching Sherlock online every night… oops…)