The switch from daylight saving to standard time offers a reprieve for those who need more sleep.
Clocks fell back an hour on Sunday morning and many people may have enjoyed an extra hour of slumber. Going forward, this change means darker evenings and brighter mornings — and you can take advantage of that morning light to reset your sleep schedule.
This can be especially helpful for teenagers who get chronically little sleep. Three out of four high school students don't get enough shut-eye, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dragging groggy teens out of bed in the morning, or forcing them off their screens and into bed at night can be frustrating for parents. Sleep doctors say a little better understanding of the adolescent biology of bedtime can help your teen sleep more.
Sleep drive and circadian clocks
More than other age groups, teens have to fight to stay on a schedule that doesn't match their biology.
One reason is our internal 24-hour clock, the circadian clock, which you can think of "as the conductor of an orchestra of many clocks throughout the body," says Stephanie Crowley, a chronobiologist at Rush University in Chicago..
At the start of puberty, this orchestra of clocks decides — hey, I want to stay up reeeeally late. This changes again around our late 20s but for teens it means they often just don't feel sleepy as early.
Then there's the homeostatic sleep drive, which is the other major biological mechanism that regulates sleep. It doesn't do teens any favors either. The sleep drive tracks how long you've been awake and tells your body when to shut down. But this physiological process slows down in teens, so they get tired more slowly, explains Crowley.
"You can think about it as a pressure cooker," she says. "So that pressure for sleep to begin just kind of grows much more slowly in the more mature adolescent."
School schedules and pressures
Even experts in sleep medicine struggle with this aspect of parenting, says Dr. Sanjay Patel, a sleep medicine physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and father to 15-year-old twins.
Patel says he and his wife do the best they can to help their daughters get quality rest. For example, the high school sophomores don't have their phones in their bedrooms at night, nor are they allowed to sleep past 8:00 am on weekends since this can throw off their weekday schedule.
"I think that parents and teens need to just be involved in trying to point out how this is affecting them day to day, because otherwise it's just nothing changes," he says.
But there's nothing Patel can do about his daughters' school day starting at 7:28 am, a time that doesn't align with their biology.
School start times are a big problem, but after school demands on teens also steal their sleep, says Mary Carskadon, a sleep researcher at Brown University. Teens' schedules are packed with extracurriculars, parttime jobs, and homework.
Carskadon says all of this contributes to pervasive sleep deprivation. It's why she gets annoyed when people disparage teens for moodiness or poor impulse control since these behaviors are hallmarks of poor sleep.
"I mean, they're really blaming the victim," she says.
For teens to get better rest, Carskadon advocates for the schools to start later and give less homework. And she says extracuriculars shouldn't be allowed to drag far into the evening.
"We have to think full circle," says Carskadon, noting that public health issues like the teen suicide rate and car accidents might be mitigated if adolescents had better rest.
Another systemic change Carskadon, Crowley, and Patel want is an end to daylight saving time and to remain on standard time throughout the year. This would increase exposure to morning light, which is a critical environmental cue that it's time to wake up, and could help teens adapt their circadian clocks to an earlier schedule.
Sleep strategies to try at home
Sleep doctors recommend several strategies parents can use to help teens.
For one, remind teens that quality rest allows them to excel in athletics or academics, says Dr. Rafael Pelayo, who works with adolescents at Stanford Medicine's Sleep Medicine Center.
He also recommends letting them do something they enjoy when they first wake up. For example, if a kid's a gamer, then power up the Xbox at 7:00 am, and, he says, tell them: "The earlier you wake up, the more time you can play the video game. And then you get light into your eyes."
Don't send kids to their bedrooms as a punishment, Pelayo says, because that creates a negative association with the area where they sleep. And parents should model healthy sleep behaviors for their teens, which includes no late-night snacking or doom scrolling.
On the weekends, many teens catch up on missed rest by sleeping in hours past their weekday alarm. Crowley says that this causes a sort of jet lag as it shifts a teen's internal clock by 45 or 50 minutes in just two days.
An hour or so of extra rest is fine, but Crowley agrees with Patel that it's best to get up at about the same time every day — even Saturdays.
And Crowley's research has found that, unfortunately, long naps can exacerbate the problem because it weakens the homeostatic sleep drive by causing teens to feel tired even later. Crowley recommends capping naps at 30 minutes.
A big challenge a lot of teens face is they just don't feel tired at night, though Crowley says the recent change to standard time is a chance to transition into a better schedule.
Say you usually go to bed at midnight. Maybe tonight, turn off the lights at 11 p.m. It will probably still feel like midnight to your body, but you'll wake up with an extra hour of rest.
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