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According to research cited in Matthew Walker's excellent book, teenagers shift their sleep schedule later by a couple of hours compared to their younger years. This may be because of evolutionary benefits to a tribe of having some people in a village awake to watch for danger when others sleep. A couple of unsupervised hours at night also provides a chance for teenagers to learn to operate independently from their parents while still being part of the family, village, and tribe. So, if you take a teenager who naturally may go to sleep close to midnight and wake up at 10am, and you force them to wake up a 6am to get to a 7am class, you are disrupting their natural sleep cycle which has all kinds of health an cognitive consequences (since naturally they will still stay up late and will thus get less sleep). Examples in the book include a huge reduction in car accidents in an area among teenagers who are better rested. Studies also show vastly better test scores for well-rested teens. Lack of sleep may also be contributing to the teen obesity crisis, the teen heart disease crisis, teen mental illness -- among other negative health impacts from lack of sleep.

More on this: https://www.sleepfoundation.or...

As an additional complexity, some people are naturally "larks" (early morning risers, about 10%, according to link below) and some are naturally "night owls" (later risers, about 20%) while most others are "hummingbirds" in the middle. There is very little that can be done about this since this sleep preference is genetically determined to a significant degree -- although sleep schedule may change as we age as above. Caffeine may help some night owls get going anyway in the morning -- but there remains a significant health impact of getting too sleep -- since most night owls simply are not going to go to bed earlier even if they are forced to wake up earlier.
https://www.nasw.org/users/lla...

People suffer if their sleep schedule does not reflect their natural cycle. So, forcing a night owl to perform early in the morning is just a bad idea -- whatever the person's age. Similarly, the cognitive performance of someone who stays up a few hours late or who gets a few hours too little sleep is typically similar to that of someone who is drunk -- which is why drowsy driving kills more people than drunk driving. If an early morning school schedule is terrible for a regular teenager, it is going to be even worse for a night owl.

Articles like this give me the impression that the field of study is still very uncertain: Circadian disruption and breast cancer: from melatonin to clock genes. (March, 2005)

Quote: "The global impact of breast cancer is large and growing. It seems clear that something about modern life is the culprit, yet there is thus far a lack of satisfactory explanations for most of the increases in risk as societies industrialize."

I've been experimenting with Melatonin: Schiff Melatonin Ultra 3 mg. 365 Tablets. ($11.94, but now, no one has stock, apparently. I have no idea why.)

Melatonin tablets seem to encourage sleep.

Over many years of having a business, I've developed a preference for working for an hour or 2 early in the morning, maybe 3 am, and later taking a nap in the morning or afternoon. I'm healthy. Do I have a different circadian rhythm?

I've noticed that people often act sure when their thinking is actually extremely sloppy. As quoted above, "... there is thus far a lack of satisfactory explanations..."

If you're impaired, you're impaired. It doesn't matter the cause, nor some arbitrary tests. There are people that can drive fine at over 0.10, and there are people who are entirely dysfunctional at 0.01. There are also people that are wholly impaired at 0.00, generally these would be sleep deprived folks, some even on loads of caffeine or other uppers (witness all those single truck accidents - driver "fell asleep". Note that truckers can only drive 11 hours at a stretch according to federal law .

So is 0.05 ridiculous? Yes, for some it's too high. For the large majority of the population, it's ridiculously low. It's also gender biased. Women are more deeply affected by alcohol so should men be held to the same standard?

What's the real answer to this problem? Making a license a privilege, and losing one meaningful and a much more realistic option.

I was going to say the same thing.

On the other hand, they could just start school an hour later, couldn't they?

Early school is bad anyway

Heh - I hear ya! One of my early asshole doctors gave me a lovely little mix of Seroquel and Trazodone. The first makes you sleep, and the second makes you sleep HARD. It took me 6 months to get my sleep cycle back after I switched out to the current Lamictal/Depakote mix, which works pretty ok for the most part.

You may want to try picking up some OTC Melatonin from the grocery store; pop 3 or 4 of those before bed. They don't make you sleepy, necessarily, but they help a TON in getting good sleep. I've found that taking a few of those, a heartburn med, and my crazy pills (as my daughter likes to call em) I'm sleeping better than I ever have in my life.

http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/sleep-topics/melatonin-and-sleep

You need to be rested, not sleeping in class because youve been up sence midnight.

That's an interesting theory, but the truth is that teens need to sleep in and the entire school schedule is designed around the convenience of adults rather than permitting teenagers to get the proper amount of sleep. In my area kids have to get up at around 5am if they're going to dress, eat, and ride the bus. So maybe you should share your theories with the education system, because it does not share them.

And trasspassing in a cematary is a good reason to get arrested you/they dont belong there and i dought your/there parents knew where you were at.

While this may be true, it's clear you skipped your English classes. What the fuck were you doing when you were supposed to be in school?

please provide some backup for your claim of what "every sleep scientist on the planet" will tell me

A good source for this stuff is the National Sleep Foundation - Lots of good science. To cut to the chase -

http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/how-sleep-works/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need

See "How much sleep do you really need" table 2/3s of the way down.

Quote: Though research cannot pinpoint an exact amount of sleep need by people at different ages, the table identifies the "rule-of-thumb" amounts most experts have agreed upon.

I personally fall within the majority on the bell curve - I need around 8 hours per night. Sounds like you're in the minority and do well with less.

A complete sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes and includes four stages of non-REM sleep and a stage of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. I read a comment saying some people do not experience REM sleep. The fact of the matter is, if you are sleeping normally, part of your sleep cycle does include REM sleep, in which dreams are most realistic and the brains creativity peaks. Do not think that if you can't remember having any dreams, that you did not have any. Everyone has dreams, every sleep cycle, but the brain tends to erase the dreams you have after each one, if you don't wake up after each cycle.

Anyways, it's late, so I'm going to bed... Hopefully I'll have some cool dreams :P.

A thorough one would consist of allergy tests and various biochemical tests or examination of the possibilities. It would also look at things like whether you're sleeping in a dark enough room (melatonin can only be produced by the body under fairly dark conditions). The doctor might even be able to send you to a sleep lab.

As other posters have already mentioned, alcohol might get you to sleep but it will disrupt the quality of sleep, so that while you'll get some psychological relief, it won't provide much physical relief.

A good overview of insomnia and treatment from the sleep foundation.

Sleep apnea is life threatening. Sufferers stop breathing many times while sleeping. Eventually, changes in blood gases (rising CO2 and/or falling O2) become large enough to cause breathing to resume. Sleep apnea is classified into two types, obstructive and central. Obstructive is due to airway blockage. Central is due to some loss of respiratory drive from the central nervous system. More information is here.

I urge you to contact your doctor. You might benefit from subsequent consultation with a sleep specialist. Nobody should force you into modifying your lifestyle if you do not want, but you might benefit greatly from learning more about the various known conditions and about your own problems.

Very few shift workers actually get enough sleep at night^H^H^H^H^Hday ;-); they have to fight their own circadian rhythms and the drudgery that most shift work comprises.

While to the best of my knowledge there haven't been any studies on shift workers in particular, there have been numerous studies in Scandinavia, where the high latitude and short winter days mimic many of the conditions shift workers experience. It's an interesting question to explore, while the human race self-immolates as it slowly descends into a new corporate dark age.

The link between sleeplessness and memory loss has always been intuitively known for eons. We've also known for quite some time that sleeplessness takes a toll on the workforce. According to some reports, 51% of Americans report that sleeplessness interferes with their productivity. People are going to bed late and failing to get up early, and not surprisingly, (according to that same source) a third of the population wishes they could nap on the job (and surprisingly, 16% of employers "endorse naps on the job" -- I wish I had that sort of employer).

Unfortunately, the outlook isn't good for people who fail to get their eight or so hours of sleep per night. Sleeplessness increases stress and raises bloodpressure (which can increase heart attacks), can precipitate ulcers, and can even promote alzhe ime rs. Sadly, very techies and engineers who are designing the technology that will preserve more information in the next few years than has been recorded in the history of humanity won't "be around" to see it happen, as debilitating diseases rob them of the ability to perceive the world they have constructed. What begins with immediate memory loss will ultimately be cemented in their old age.

The solution is clear. OSHA already has standards in place to prev ent RSI injuries in the workplace. Federal laws already exist governing how often and for how long truck drivers must sleep before returning to the road. New guidelines must be set for how much IT workers can be forced to work without sleep. In the footsteps of pioneers of the 10-hour work day of the nineteenth century, we must today pioneer the 8-hour sleep day. The safety of our IT infrastructure and ultimately of our fellow workers demands it.