Make Sleep a Key Goal for Your Students in 2020 and Beyond
Remember January? Remember that feeling of a new year full of new possibilities?
For many people, January means setting New Year’s resolutions - lofty personal-growth aims to guide a year-long metamorphosis into your best you.
It’s July. We are in the middle of a global pandemic, and 2020 is likely not going as any of us had planned. So, are you still sticking to your resolution?
According to modern research, only 8% of people accomplish their New Year’s resolutions (and that’s under normal circumstances).
Let that sink in for a minute.
So, naturally, the question is: why make New Year’s resolutions at all?
The answer: don’t.
Instead, experts suggest transforming the vague fantasy of the New Year’s resolution into goals. Unlike resolutions, goals can be acted upon. Goals can become specific enough to include steps and, ultimately, a finish line.
So rather than coaching your students to make grand declarations of self-improvement, help them set a few attainable goals. From there, help them construct the frameworks to reach those goals and follow up regularly to help keep things on track.
After all, when it comes to college admissions, it will be the small changes your students make (and stick to) that will deliver the biggest results.
Helping your students to understand the importance of sleep should be near the top of the list. Not only is it an important goal in its own right, but it will make accomplishing other goals much easier.
Teenagers Need More Sleep Than They Get
Researchers at both John’s Hopkins and the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center suggest that teenagers need between 9 and 9 ½ hours of quality sleep, per night. It is a safe bet that most of your students fall well short of this number.
It’s no surprise. Teens are busy, which means they spend a lot of time awake. They have earlier school start times than their younger peers. Under normal circumstances, they have schedules jam-packed with priorities like friends, studying, jobs, sports, clubs, test prep, and college applications - to name a few. With so many demands placed on the average teenager’s time, something has to give. Unfortunately, sleep tends to be the first thing to suffer.
The problem is that sleep is one of the few things in life that provides a universal benefit. Being well rested improves the quality of nearly every aspect of life - even during these uncertain times. Getting an adequate amount of sleep is a corner your students can’t afford to cut!
To start with, sleep is when both the body and mind restore themselves. For teens in the throes of puberty, sleep is a crucial part of physical development. More importantly to those of us in the test-prep world, the deep stages of REM sleep are where our brains sort through the day and consolidate memories and learning for future recall. Teens who sleep better will learn better and score better.
Furthermore, a lack of sleep can be dangerous. The independence that comes with being a teenager – driving, a job, increased self-reliance – poses its own set of dangers as is. Facing those dangers in a sleep-deprived state can lead to severe, if not grave, consequences.
Actionable Steps to Help Teens Get More Sleep
While we know sleep matters (and deep down your droopy-eyed, yawning students probably do, too), how do we help teenagers actually improve their sleep habits?
Start with awareness – Buy-in is essential any time you want to try to get a teenager to do anything. Be sure your students have a base-level understanding of what quality sleep is and why it’s important. You don’t need to get into the weeds with studies and sciences – a short, YouTube explanation should do the trick.
Bedtime routines matter – Encourage students to build bedtime into their schedule so that they have enough hours of shut-eye each night. Not only that, have students pay careful attention to the activities that immediately precede bedtime – and high-intensity activities and screen time (which has naturally increased with the rise in computer-dependent distance-learning) can make sleep significantly more challenging and degrade the overall quality of the sleeping hours.
Don’t sleep on dietary choices – A healthy, balanced diet helps the body run smoothly. Encourage students to be mindful of what they eat and when. For example, after-dinner snacking should be low-calorie and sugar and caffeine free so as not to disrupt the bedtime routine. At night, students need to make choices that will fill the belly without revving up the brain.
Make time for exercise – Exercise helps our bodies use up calories and improves just about every aspect of our health – sleep, too!
Get outside – The brain uses sunlight to help set its internal clock. The more time spent outside, the more naturally your body can start winding things down at the appropriate time at night.
Nap responsibly – A 30-45 minute nap during the afternoon may help give a much-needed boost, but longer naps may chip away at the much more essential deep sleep at night. Keep them under an hour.
Weekends aren’t cheat days – You can never make up for lost sleep. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. That includes the weekends. This may be a tough battle with a teenager, but bedtime and waking time should remain relatively constant throughout the week – even on weekends. Disrupting the body’s natural clock always comes with consequences.
Improved Sleep Will Make Future Goals More Attainable
When you step back and realize the wide range of benefits improved sleep can bring, starting with sleep as a key goal for your students makes a lot of sense. The benefits in both productivity and learning will translate into so many other areas of your students’ lives – test scores included!
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