Earlier bedtime 'cuts teenage depression'

[discocrisco01]

From the Article


A US study of 12 to 18-year-olds found those with bedtimes
after midnight were 24% more likely to have depression than
those who went to bed before 2200.

And those who slept fewer than five hours a night had a 71%
higher risk of depression than those who slept eight hours,
the journal Sleep reports.

It is estimated 80,000 UK children and young people have
depression.

The researchers from Columbia University Medical Center in
New York looked at data from 15,500 teenagers collected in
the 1990s.

One in 15 of those studied were found to have depression.

As well as the higher risk of depression, those who were set
a bedtime by their parents of after midnight were 20% more
likely to think about suicide than those whose bedtime was
2200 or earlier.

Those who had less than five hours sleep a night were thought
to have a 48% higher risk of suicidal thoughts compared with
those who had eight hours of sleep

Source: BBC

[Warpy]

1. Cart before the horse time

Studies of teenagers show their circadian rhythms favor later bedtimes and later rising times in the morning. Teenagers who are listening to their body rhythm and going to bed late and getting dragged out too early are sleep deprived, and that would depress anybody.

I know from experience that going to bed early in a futile attempt to be a morning person simply does not work for those of us who are natural night owls. I gave it three years, honest, and discovered I really do best when I stay up until 2 AM and sleep until 10. If I go to bed earlier, my sleep is fitful and I don't awaken rested.

The same thing is probably happening to a lot of teenagers. A better solution would be to start highschool later in the day to respect their body rhythms. They'll sort themselves into morning people and night owls some time in their 20s.

[Withywindle]

3. Word to everything you just said.

Also, the possibility that depressed people (of any age) are more likely to have insomnia, and not look forward to going to bed because it often means literally hours of tossing and turning while having silent anxiety attacks in the dark with no stimuli to relieve them.

For people who are natural night owls, simply lying down and turning the lights off earlier achieves nothing. Nada. Going to bed and going to sleep are not the same thing.

And for many such people, it's not a matter of habit. It's a matter of the full circadian rhythm package: circulation, body temperature, digestion, hormones. For some people this will change gradually over their lives. For others, it's hard-wired and stays that way.

[Warpy]

5. I've always been a night owl

and did remarkably well working 12 hour night shifts for 18 years, much better than I had trying to work day shifts, arising at 5 to take report at 7.

Morning people got sick as hell when they tried to work nights.

Maybe as the world evolves we can finally shed the tyranny of the clock and get back to listening to what our bodies are telling us.

Mine tells me I need to stay up past midnight, at the earliest, and sleep in the next morning.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Or, increased depression causes later bedtimes.

There's correlation here; the causation, if any, has yet to be established.

[seabeyond]

4. HA. an I AM RIGHT, YOU ARE WRONG to three teenagers in this house right now.

lol lol,

so perfect for me to read. and i really dont care how valid this study is. still works for me.

doing the happy dance