#24 - What's the Worst Night of the Week?

As backed by science, a teenager’s body clock can delay - on average - by 45 minutes from simply sleeping in on both weekend mornings.

When they wake later on Sunday morning, the bad reason that they’ve started their day late is because their ‘sleep pressure’ starts at a later time of the morning.

That ain’t good.

Most teens wake before 8:00 AM on a school morning (in Australia at least), allowing their body to have enough time to build up sleep pressure during the day, so that they fall asleep at a (somewhat) reasonable time at night.

Therefore, if you add a delayed body clock on Sunday morning + a late start to build up sleep pressure on Sunday then this should = Sunday being the worst night of sleep for a teen.

Some may argue it is, because they fall asleep late on Sunday, and then have to get up early to get to school. Therefore they don’t get enough sleep on Sunday night.

Believe it or not - when we asked over 300 teenagers to log their sleep with a sleep diary for one week, Sunday night wasn’t the worst night of sleep - you can download and read the study in more detail here: Short, Gradisar and colleagues (2013).

And this maybe due to Sunday night not being the latest night.

The latest night of the week was … Saturday.

Here we were, sleep scientists - experts at the biological processes of teenager’s sleep. Missing a big part of the picture.

Behaviour.

Teens want to stay up late when they know they can sleep-in the next day. This is why we believe that delaying school start times may not give teens more sleep (in countries other than the USA).

And this is why teens have one of the most interesting sleep patterns of all age groups. Their biology changes so much - as does their behaviour. Yet, as adolescent sleep expert Prof Mary Carskadon states - it’s the Perfect Storm for getting too little sleep.

Thanks to researchers like Mary Carskadon, we know more about the reasons explaining bad sleep in teens. And thankfully, the WINK team have had the privilege to work on the solution … well, solutions.

After all, we need multiple tools to deal with both the biology and behaviour of teen sleep.

p.s. if you need to find the solution for your teen, check out TEEN WINK on our website.