A recent study published in the journal Sleep has found a significant association between irregular sleep schedules and diminished academic performance and increased behavioral issues among adolescents. The research highlights the potential benefits of maintaining consistent sleep timings to enhance educational outcomes and reduce disruptive behaviors in school.
More than 70% of teenagers in the United States get less than the recommended 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night, which is essential for their health and well-being. Previous research has shown that insufficient sleep can lead to poor cognitive function, academic difficulties, and behavioral problems in school, such as anxiety related to academics, skipping classes, and frequent absences.
However, the impact of sleep on academic performance has shown mixed results, with some studies finding no significant effects and others suggesting that less sleep could correlate with better grades. The researchers aimed to explore this relationship further by considering various dimensions of sleep health, which include not only the duration but also the timing, efficiency, and regularity of sleep.
“I’m really interested in the effects of poor sleep health on wellbeing, particularly performance and behavioral issues. It’s also important to investigate these links early in life when sleep interventions may be most successful, such as adolescence,” said study author Gina Marie Mathew, a postdoctoral associate at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.
There’s plenty of research that examines the effects of sleep duration (i.e., how much sleep someone gets) on academic functioning, but not as much on other dimensions of sleep, such as sleep quality and sleep variability across the week. Also, a lot of the research uses self-reported sleep, which can differ from objective measures. Therefore, we examined whether multiple dimensions of sleep measured objectively were linked with academic performance and school-related behavioral problems in a large sample of about 800 adolescents.”
The researchers analyzed data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Participants in this study were asked to wear wrist-worn accelerometers for a week. The accelerometers tracked various aspects of sleep, including duration, onset (when the participants fell asleep), offset (when they woke up), and variability in these measures across the week. Sleep efficiency (time spent asleep compared to the total time spent in bed) and regularity (consistency of sleep patterns over time) were also assessed.
In parallel, academic performance was assessed through a survey administered to both the adolescents and their primary caregivers. The survey included self-reported academic grades in key subjects such as English, mathematics, history/social studies, and science. Behavioral issues were also reported, including instances of skipping school, suspensions, and general trouble in school related to attention, homework completion, and social interactions with teachers and peers.
The researchers found that adolescents who had later sleep onset and offset times tended to have lower grades. Additionally, variability in when adolescents went to sleep and woke up throughout the week correlated negatively with their academic performance, suggesting that inconsistency in sleep schedules could be detrimental to their educational outcomes.
Mathew and her colleagues also uncovered significant links between sleep patterns and behavioral issues in school. Greater variability in sleep duration and timing was associated with an increased likelihood of being suspended or expelled from school. These findings suggest that irregular sleep patterns not only impact cognitive and learning capabilities but also affect behavior management in adolescents, potentially leading to more disciplinary actions in school settings.
Interestingly, while the study found strong associations with sleep timing and variability, it did not find a significant relationship between the total duration of sleep or sleep efficiency and academic or behavioral outcomes. This indicates that the timing and consistency of sleep may be more critical factors in influencing adolescent functioning than merely the amount of sleep.
“The results were that later sleep timing and more variability in sleep duration and timing were linked to poorer grades and more school-related behavioral problems,” Mathew told PsyPost. “It was somewhat surprising that neither sleep duration nor efficiency were linked to academic performance or behavioral problems. These dimensions of sleep are certainly important for a number of aspects of emotional and physical health but were not related to our academic measures of interest in this sample.”
“The findings suggest that it’s really important for parents to keep consistent bedtimes and wake times for their children, even in high school, when adolescents often desire more freedom. This means going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time every day, even on the weekends, to ensure regular sleep across the week.”
“Engaging in good sleep hygiene as a family, such as having a relaxing bedtime routine and staying away from alerting content near bedtime, can help facilitate sleep consistency,” Mathew explained. “For pediatricians, asking about sleep habits and making appropriate recommendations at regular checkups is an important tool in maintaining optimal pediatric sleep health.”
The researchers controlled for age, sex, race/ethnicity, household income, primary caregiver’s education level, adolescent’s living arrangements, and mental health symptoms to isolate the effects of sleep from other influencing factors However, the research has its limitations.
Its cross-sectional nature means it cannot definitively determine whether irregular sleep causes poor academic performance or if other factors might contribute to both. Future studies could look at these relationships over time to establish causality and explore the impact of interventions that encourage consistent sleep schedules.
“In future studies, we intend to obtain academic records directly from schools and measure sleep and academic functioning across time, which will allow us to examine whether good sleep actually predicts better academic functioning within the same adolescent,” Mathew said. “Also, in future interventions, we may directly attempt to improve consistency of sleep across the week and examine if academic functioning subsequently improves.”
“Policy-wise, sleep researchers are promoting the movement for school districts to shift high school start times to 8:30 AM or later, which would allow for sufficient sleep during the school week and for students to perform when at their best. Researchers could subsequently examine if adolescent academic functioning improves following a district’s shift to later school start times.”
The study, “Actigraphic sleep dimensions and associations with academic functioning among adolescents,” was authored by Gina Marie Mathew, David A Reichenberger, Lindsay Master, Orfeu M Buxton, Anne-Marie Chang, and Lauren Hale.
