Is School Slowly Destroying Your Brain?

this episode is sponsored by kiwiko dear

school

today I want to talk about something that on the surface may seem trivial but is actually very important and that is

school

start times because when I tell you that, you may not only be seriously impacting the mental health of their students. ability and intelligence both now and in the future, but it also impacts

your

physical and mental health. I'm not exaggerating, let me put it bluntly, school should start later, at least for high school and college age students, and I don't mean later as in later in the year, I mean later, not so early in the year. tomorrow, but to understand why we first have to understand sleep before a baby is born and until about the first year of life, babies spend much of their time in Rem sleep, also known as rapid eye movement, is a stage in which we dream and it is during this rem sleep that babies build enormous amounts of neural networks and connections in their

brain

, but shortly after this period there is a sharp decline in rem sleep and an exponential increase in deep non-rem sleep. which continues to increase until around puberty and this non-rem sleep is actually responsible for fine-tuning our

brain

s instead of building more and more neurons and connections, it actually prunes and makes the brain more efficient. and effective, it is basically taking the mold that early life created and sculpting it based on

your

life experiences and interactions, and studies have shown that this non-rem dream is related to the development of critical thinking, reasoning and cognitive skills .

Now some of you might be screaming. reasoning skills critical thinking in genes and you would be right to note that teenagers aren't exactly known for these things but, ironically, brain development during this non-remote surge happens from back to front, literally the back part of the brain that manages Visual and spatial perception develops first and this growth eventually reaches the front of the brain or the frontal lobe last, ultimately allowing for critical and rational thinking. That's why sometimes it feels like children's brains aren't exactly working or keeping up with the pace. The rest of your development, the thing is that when non-rem is minimized or eliminated, things can go really wrong in studies of sleep-deprived mice and cats, brain development stops, in fact, many psychiatric disorders such as Bipolar schizophrenia and major depression are considered abnormal disorders.

Developmental studies on schizophrenia in particular have shown that there is a two- to threefold reduction in non-rem sleep in adolescents who have it. To make matters worse, teenagers actually need more sleep than their adult counterparts, so if they don't get enough hours of sleep. of sleep then they will not get the optimal amount of non-rem sleep, which can hinder development. Now I know what you're asking. How does this correlate to when school starts? Can't teenagers just go to bed early? like the rest of us and get enough sleep and if not, what time should school start before we get to that answer?

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It helps define when you feel tired and want to sleep versus when you feel more alert. This rhythm, of course, is different for each person. We all have our unique chronotype, which is why some people consider themselves early risers and others night owls, but in general. Adults share a propensity to wake up and sleep at about the same time. One of the most important factors defining our circadian rhythm is our age. Young children before puberty not only need more sleep, but they tend to have a very tight schedule. early, they are sleepy early. at night and we get up earlier than adults normally, but as we reach puberty, time moves ahead even beyond its parents by two to four hours, meaning we want to stay up much later and this change It is observed in all adolescents, regardless of culture or geography where a nine-year-old child typically falls asleep around 9 p.m.

At age 16, which is actually usually the time of greatest wakefulness, asking a teenager to go to bed at 10 p.m. It's like asking an adult to go to sleep at 7:00 p.m. Along the same lines, waking up at 7:00 a.m. For a teenager it is the same as waking up around 4 a.m. for an adult and I'm pretty sure none of us want to be seen at 4am. let alone having to use our brain at 4 am many parents believe that teenagers are making a conscious decision to stay up later and that if they went to bed earlier they wouldn't be so tired, but the truth is that even if If they go to bed earlier, there are chances that they will stay awake in bed until their body naturally relaxes, but they won't adopt this biological timing, plus the fact that teenagers need more sleep to begin with, which entails risks of developmental brain abnormalities and mental illness, and do we have experimental evidence to prove this? starting later increasing class attendance reducing psychological and behavioral problems and decreasing substance and alcohol abuse sleeping longer is directly correlated with better grades in adolescents across the board and higher IQs and studies in identical twins show that at the age of 10 the twin with longer sleep pattern has higher intellectual abilities with a larger vocabulary as well and schools that have tested later start times have seen a big change.

A school in Minnesota that changed from a 7:25 a.m. start time m. at 8:30 a.m. m. found that verbal SAT scores increased by more than 150 while math scores increased by more than 50. And while we talk about the importance of quality non-rem sleep in young adults, that doesn't mean that rem sleep isn't really important. Studies conducted in the 1960s that deprived young adults of rem sleep found that by the third day of extreme deprivation, participants began to show signs of psychosis, were anxious, moody, and began to hallucinate and became paranoid. . It has also been shown that the amount of rem gained in life expectancy increases with later start times, which is why the number one cause of death in adolescents is traffic accidents which have been directly linked to lack of sleep when a Wyoming county changed its start time. from 7:25 a.m. to 8:55 a.m.

They saw a 70% decrease in traffic accidents in the affected age group, so why do circadian rhythms drift so much in adolescence? The prevailing socioevolutionary theory at this time is that it allows adolescents and young adults to begin to gain their independence from their parents, but in small increments over several hours a day, children can operate alone or with their peer group away from adults. , but it is not a total elimination of parental supervision during this stage, they can practice to become their own individual, really. Just a century ago in the United States, most schools started around 9:00 a.m. and 95 percent of students woke up without an alarm.

Now in the US, 80 of the schools start before 8:15 a.m. and 50 of them start before 7:20 a.m., not to mention the increase. Impact of televisions, computers and phones in the bedroom. It's no wonder kids are more tired than ever at the end of the day. The evidence is overwhelming that later start times, around 9 a.m., are not only preferred by students, but lead to improvements in basically every metric by which we measure their progress in school, in the words of the Dr. Walker, who wrote the book Why We Sleep, which was the main source for this episode.

Too often we focus on what sleep is taking away from our teens without stopping to think. about what you may be adding I hope we can change I hope we can break the parent-to-child transmission of sleep neglect and eliminate what the exhausted, fatigued brains of our youth are so painfully deprived of when sleep is plentiful, the Minds flourish when it is poor they don't I hope this video was informative and helpful especially if you are a parent, a teacher or someone who runs a school and if you are a student send this to your teachers right now send this to your administrators and let them know that It's not a joke, sleep is a big part of our lives and very important for our intellectual abilities and our physical health, and you would do well to think about that when you start school, thanks again for watching, make sure you like the video, Subscribe if you want more and see you next time for more scientific peace.