Night owls perform worse

Many of us think that staying up late at night gives us more time to be productive; however, a recent study at UC Berkeley has shown that ‘night owls’ perform worse academically and emotionally in the long run. This study focused on 2,700 US adolescents of whom 30% claimed staying up later than 11:30pm on school nights, and many of them stayed up past 1:30am during holidays. The data for this study were obtained from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, where the records tracked back to 1994. It was found that GPA scores of the ‘night owls’ were significantly lower than their classmates who had earlier bed-times. In addition, sleeping late during summer holidays had an impact on the emotional well-being of these individuals. So, why do so many teens stay up late? It appears that a number of factors affect this behaviour. Hectic school schedules, after-school activities and other academic commitments leave very little time for young students to socialise; thus these students compromise their sleep to make time to interact with their friends. The circadian rhythm is any biological process that involves the ‘human body clock’ and it is involved in regulating physiological and metabolic functions. The researchers hypothesized that adolescents have something called an ‘evening circadian preference’, which gives them a desire to work later at night. In addition, another factor identified which keeps teenagers up so late is the increasing use of various electronic gadgets at younger ages. Studies indicate that bright lights from laptop screens and smart-phones lead to a reduction of melatonin, a key hormone involved in sleep cycle regulation. Finally, the study also suggests that poor parental monitoring could also lead to teens staying up late. This is not the first study to have been published linking sleep with performance, thus it only reinforces that it is increasingly becoming a common problem in young adults. Regular sleep deprivation can have a great impact on the health of an individual; therefore this issue should not be taken so lightly. Most of you may think that this is irrelevant since we have already passed our adolescent stage. But don’t forget that we ourselves could become parents one day, and it would be our responsibility to ensure and motivate our children to follow a regular early bed time to help them perform better academically and emotionally.