The Silent Killer of Your Teen’s Mental Health: Lack of Sleep. Why Sweet Dreams Make Happy Kids & Teens with Sleep Expert Dr. Jessica Meers

Foreign. Welcome to Finding Noble, a podcast where we climb into the world of young people's mental health and where we provide support for the adults who support them. I'm your host, Carly Red. Welcome to another podcast, Defining Noble. I'm your host, Carly Red, and I'm always with my co host, Dr. Kevin Skinner. Hello, Dr. Skinner.

Hi, Carly. How are you?

So good. And we are really thrilled to announce our special guest today. We have Dr. Jessica Mears, who is on our show talking about sleep health, and specifically sleep health for adolescents, teenagers, how we can improve sleep health, and more importantly, how it's affecting mental health. So, Dr. Skinner, would you mind giving us a quick bio of Dr. Mears? Dr. Jessica, do you have a preference on how we reference you?

Jessica is just fine.

Okay.

All right. So, Dr. Jessica Jessica Mears is a licensed clinical psychologist and a certified sleep medicine specialist. She is Texas native and earned her PhD at the University of Houston, where apparently there was snow this morning. Her background is in the research field. It focuses on treatments for insomnia and other sleep disorders in children and adults. About a year ago, she made a huge career switch, which opened her private practice called Rhythm Wellness, where she focuses on treating sleep disorders in adults and children. Jazz. Dr. Mears, we're so excited to have you with us.

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

I. As a marriage and family therapist, I often tell my clients there's really three things that if you do these three things, I will be a better therapist. Those three things are eating well, exercising, and getting adequate sleep. I'm a much better therapist when my clients are doing those things. So.

And also, those things are so hard to do sometimes for sure.

And we've got into bad habits, right?

Yeah. And we don't even know that some of the things we're doing are not very helpful. So some of our bad habits we're not even aware of.

I think so many of us parents can relate to the anxiety we've experienced since day one of our child's birth surrounding the issue of sleep. I mean, that very first daunting night our child is brought to our arms. We learn very quickly that regular sleep is not something that comes easily from. Yeah. From sleeping through the night to fighting naps, it feels like a game almost that we've been playing with helping our kids sleep from the dawn days of our parenting and maybe overall parentage. I don't know if you guys had little tricks you've done with your kids. One kid loved being rocked in a car seat, and I was so tempted to just make the car seat its crib, which I know is wrong. I know that's not safe, but I was tempted, but they slept so well in there. But I think what we might not have considered as parents is that our teen sleep is still really important. We're better in the younger years, I think, and making sure they're getting it. But it's one of the Most significant factors, Dr. Jessica, that you brought to our attention may be affecting their overall physical and mental health. And it's also really imperative for our own physical and mental health as parents as well. If our teens are getting better sleep, I think our relationship with them, our home, everything, is a lot more, dare I say, peaceful.

Yes. And what makes that challenging too, is that teenagers go through this big biological shift once they hit puberty, and that really sets the stage for sleep difficulties. But many of us aren't aware of that. I didn't know about that until I started studying sleep as a researcher. And I think if we all knew that if parents were more aware of the biological changes adolescents are experiencing, then they'll be better equipped to support their needs. But we all focus, like you said, on younger kids and we kind of forget get. But teenagers have their own needs.

So, Jessica, quick question there. So you're saying as we go through puberty, something changes in the sleep patterns. Can you give us an explanation of what's actually happening there? That is fascinating to me?

Yeah, yeah. So we all have a circadian rhythm. You've probably heard that term before. It's our 24 hour biological clock. And we all have our body systems, our hormones, everything's kind of on this 24 hour pattern. And kids have very strong biological rhythms, the circadian rhythms. But as we turn into adolescence, as we hit puberty, the timing of that biological rhythm shifts to a later point. So how that works for teenagers is they start to feel sleepier later in the evening because that melatonin is that hormone of sleepiness turns on later. So everything in terms of the timing and the rhythm just shifts to a later clock hour. And so kids don't feel sleepy until later in the evening and they don't wake up, they don't feel alert until later in the morning.

No wonder my teens like to sleep in.

Yes, no wonder why we're not getting any sleep at night. My teens love to stay up late and I hate it.

And it's a natural tendency. And it's not just teenagers being oppositional. It's not just teenagers not listening and wanting to kind of Flex their independence. It's partially that for sure. For there's a behavioral component to that. But it is a biological change in their system that makes them really struggle to fall asleep earlier than they used to or at the same time that they used to.

Is there some evolutionary reason as to why theirs would shift in their adolescent years? Have you studied that?

So this finding is relatively new in terms of it's only been around a couple decades and we don't really understand why precisely this would happen. A circadian rhythm shifts across our lifespan, so it gets later in adolescence and then it shifts earlier for the rest of our lives. But we don't totally understand why that happens.

So I have a question here because to me this is fascinating. We know that they're getting additional hormones, right? So as a child goes through puberty, the development of the body, you see more testosterone in the males as they start to grow, probably more estrogen and progesterone in, in the females. And so we see these increasing these hormones. I wonder if it's actually maybe reducing the amount of melatonin. This is just a theory on my mind. Right. Is it? Because we know that melatonin is actually what helps us sleep, but we also know that adolescents need more sleep.

Yeah, yeah. So it's not a difference in the precise levels of melatonin. Melatonin is actually a hormone that tells us it's time for sleep, but it doesn't regulate whether or not we actually sleep. Nor does the amount that we have in our system at any time dictate how deep we sleep or anything like that. It's just a signal to the body that it's time for sleep. So when our melatonin hits a certain point, it says, hey, it is time for sleep. And it allows other systems to kind of turn on the sleep process. And so the hormone itself isn't changing and it's levels, it's changing in the timing. So we can see kind of pattern to it and that whole pattern is shifted.

That's fascinating.

Yeah, it's really interesting. And knowing that we can support better behavior. Sleep habits to help teenagers kind of work with this, this process that's happening in their body.

Yeah, this is a frustration that I talk a lot with parents is that there are external factors that disrupt the natural sleep patterns for specifically teenagers. School starting times. We have extracurricular activities where we live that start at 9:30 at night. Sometimes we'll have basketball games at 9:30, 10:30, you know, we'll be getting home at 11, 11:30 at night, on a weeknight, frequently. And then they are up again at 6:30 the next morning. And I think this isn't enough sleep. Day in, day out, week in week out, year in, year out. It's just a lot. And you can tell it starts to weigh on them.

It completely starts to weigh on them and it puts them in a really tough position and almost that they don't have control over because they want to be involved in extracurriculars. And that's good for them, that's good for their mental health, that's good for them in terms of learning to regulate. And also when you get into bed pretty late and then you are waking up really early in the morning, it's just not fair. You can't behave your best, you can't do your best on such small amount of sleep.

I like the way that Dr. Roy Baumeister called it. He called it ego depletion or energy depletion. So all of us only have so much energy. And when you're deprived of sleep deprivation, there's no way you can function at your optimal levels.

No. And kids already don't function at the highest level because they're still learning these functions. And then they're at a huge disadvantage when they don't sleep enough because it's really hard to regulate your behavior. It's really hard to pay attention in class. It's really hard to get along with others if you're sleep deprived.

I was looking over your teen sleep guide that you had sent over earlier this week and I loved the kind of the opening page you said. Some of the first things that come to people's minds when they think teenager is laziness, rebellion and moodiness. But things aren't always as they seem. The thing is, teens face a lot of unique challenges socially and emotionally. What makes these challenges extra hard to cope with is often the fact that they are utterly exhausted. And I think that's so true. I like that you are talking about the compassion we need to have for them. Just because we may not be experiencing the same circadian rhythms and we may not be fully aware of how this lack of sleep that they are getting is influencing not only emotional but also maybe their intellectual abilities, social abilities, all of it.

Oh, completely, completely. Like I said, it's completely unfair to expect them to be performing at their highest level, especially in the morning. So they get up and go to school 7 8am Their body still thinks it's the middle of the night. And we're expecting them to perform academically, to be Able to learn new things, to regulate their behavior and get along well with others. It's just, it's a high bar that we set for kids and we don't even realize it.

So I had another follow up question to that. What do we do when we know they're sleep deprived because they're not gonna perform as well on tests, they're not gonna perform as well in academia in general, again then getting along with their peers. You just described that really well. So how do we combat that? I'm just curious, just from your research, what are some of the things that you're. Cause you have an insomnia clinic, you help people sleep and or get better sleep and educate them on it. I'm just curious, what are you finding as the solutions?

So when we think about fixing sleep, what I try to tell all of my clients is that we're thinking about sleep long term. We're not thinking night to night, but we're thinking about how do we set the stage for good sleep in the days, weeks, months to come. So there's not a quick fix for sleep usually, unless I just drug you to sleep. So when we're talking about sleep, consistency is the biggest thing, Reg. Having a regular bedtime rise time that allows enough time to sleep in there and that fits with your circadian rhythm is gonna be most important. But some of these can be counterintuitive because we want kids to wake up at the same time every day. And by the way, everybody, not just kids, waking up around the same time every day sets that circadian rhythm in motion and it starts building what we call our sleep drive, which is that accumulating pressure to sleep, that sleepiness that we kind of build throughout the day. If we start that at the same time every day, then we'll be sleepy around the same time every night, and we can get into this really good pattern. What teens struggle with oftentimes is their sleep is restricted during the weekdays. And then they sleep in hours to catch up on Saturday, Sunday morning, and it's great to catch up. But in reality, this further dysregulates their sleep because by Monday morning, well, by Sunday night, they have trouble falling asleep because they've kind of slept in all morning. And then they're fighting against that the whole kind of first half of the week. And then as soon as they get back regulated again, they're doing it again over the weekend. So they're in this kind of back and forth. We actually call it social jet lag, where kids are always feeling a little Bit jet lagged because their bodies are kind of fighting, almost like they're going across time zones perpetually. And that's all because of the social kind of constraints that we put on them. School start times being the biggest one, but extracurriculars too. So they're always a little bit trying to catch up. And the best way to deal with that is find a way for them to get sleep every single night, not try to catch up on the weekends. And that's hard. That's not easy to do.

I assume that's probably true for all of us though, right?

Yes.

Yes.

None. Nothing about any of these tips are limited just to adolescents, but adolescents kind of suffer the most because of the circadian rhythm shift.

Interesting. Do you know of any school districts off the top of your head that may have shifted or experimented with shifting to later start times and what results they've seen?

So there have been so sleep researchers like me have been strong advocates for delayed school start times and they've been seeing some progress across the US I think Colorado is one example. But when they've done studies on academics, on emotional functioning, even risky risk taking behaviors, all of those improved. With a later school start time, on average, kids get 45 minutes more of sleep a night. And that is huge. That's a huge number when we're thinking about total sleep time, 45 minutes more a night means the difference between kind of a good day and a bad day for a teenager. So there's a lot of positive progress, but we have so much more to do. So I'll be talking in February to a the school district down here, the Fort Bend isd, to try to advocate for a later start time. They start at 7:30, I think right now. Not good.

Yeah. I can imagine why you are so passionate about what you do. Because if we're so concerned about adolescent teenage mental health, the mental health crisis in our country, starting with more sleep might be a huge benefit. That feels actually kind of easy. It's like it's a simple solution.

Yeah.

And yet we push our children. I'll give you a very real example. So a few years ago, my daughters were on the high school basketball team. One was playing varsity and the other two were playing as sophomores. And because of the scheduling, they would practice every morning at 5am oh my goodness. And that was start time. You can't be late. It's 5am or you're running ladders. And it was the most difficult season, basketball season, we ever experienced. Because my daughter, when you're a junior in high school, which is really your most difficult courses.

Yeah.

It was absolutely brutal.

Yeah.

And I think about sleep deprivation.

Right.

Cause you're staying up to 11 to 12 o' clock at night getting homework done and then you're getting up early in the morning and you're going to basketball practice. Then you've got a game on an alternate evening that takes you into 9:30, 10 o' clock and then you got homework. It's just, it's incredibly difficult when you start looking at the structure that we're putting on our children and so to speak. And yet that's common occurrence.

Yeah. And we put all this pressure on the teenagers. We're the ones who need to adapt. We're the ones who need to be making the changes to how we plan and organize their day. We have to take ownership of that as the adults.

I love that. Because they're not going to change it. They're going to do what they're teenagers. They're not going to change their schedule. Hey, I'm not going to school till 9:30 moments or dad. It's just not going to happen.

And most kids respond very favorably to later start times. They want to sleep in. And that's not because they're lazy. They want to do what their body is telling them to do. And we have to listen.

And interestingly enough, my children get out of school about 2:30. If we were to push it back and they were to get out of school at 3:30.

Yes.

And they. And they started at 9 instead of 8.

Yes.

That extra, as you say, 45 minutes or whatever it may be. I wonder what that would do for grades, what it would do for their mental health, their overall wellbeing. And yet there's probably a reason why we don't. I just don't know what the don't or the.

And it doesn't make a lot of sense, especially as a parent, to have your kids coming. My kids walk in the door at 2:15. That's pretty early for everybody to be home. It feels like we're living two very separately full days. Like if we have the school hours and then it's a full day after school, there's not a lot of downtime. We just jump right into a full day of extracurriculars after which they're all good things, none of these are bad things. But it is a lot. It does feel like a lot. And sleep definitely is the last thing on the table. It's the last thing we emphasize.

Yes. And I think a lot of the pushback that the school districts give have to do with things like bus schedules, time on the road, traffic. These things matter, but they're not unsolvable problems. We just have to put our heads to it. And so I think a lot of times we are more concerned about the status quo than what actually is good for us and our kids. It's uncomfortable to make these changes especially that's going to affect a lot of people, even if they're positive changes. But you have to kind of convince a school district to go through the mess, to kind of get to the better side of things. And that's hard. That's very challenging to do and it.

Makes sense with schedules and so forth. But if we were really concerned about the mental health and well being of our children, we would give serious consideration to this because I can just tell you I have seen it. We now have two that are in high school and the early morning, the grog, if I. That's typically the phrase I use. It's like this grog. They walk in and they're like, okay, what's going on? And oh yes, it's a day for school and breakfast and everything. They're just tired.

Yeah.

How was school? Well, you know, I fell asleep in class. It's just. And no offense to the teachers, the teachers might be great teachers, but when you're exhausted, you're exhausted.

Right.

And some teachers are very compassionate and kind, but most teachers are very frustrated. Kind of the adjectives you use of laziness and disinterested. We think teenagers are a lot of those things when maybe they're really just running on low steam.

Yes, yes. And they're exhausted and we don't get along very well with others when we are exhausted. So they might be pushing back. They may not be as respectful as they could be and they're losing opportunities to kind of hone those skills because they're too tired to even think and poor care.

Yeah. I would love for you to talk more about the cognitive, the physical, the mental, even academic effects of when we get poor sleep versus good sleep. And maybe you could share some of those with us.

Yeah. And I'll also share too how we call this the perfect storm of sleep risk for kids because this shift in biology is co occurring with their want desire to be more independent and their desire to focus more on social relationships. And so they might be wanting to kind of flex their independence by staying up later anyway and by scrolling their phones and doing all the things that teenagers do. Those are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but create challenges for them. So it's, you know, we're also fighting a little bit against their natural tendencies to want to do these things which they know and delay sleep with, even if they are very tired and could potentially sleep. So we call that the perfect storm. And what this results in is, um, one of the biggest things and one of the scariest things is it's a major safety concern. Teenagers have the highest rates of drowsy driving and get into accidents. You think about these kids who are just barely learning how to drive and then they're on the roads in the dark oftentimes, especially in the winter, 5, 6am and they're exhausted, they get into a lot of accidents because they fall asleep at the wheel. That's very scary and dangerous. We also know that kids are more likely to engage in risk taking behaviors when they haven't slept as well as they should have. And that's because this higher order thinking that comes from the prefrontal cortex, that part of our brain that organizes our behaviors and helps us to regulate it, isn't quite turned on yet for a teenager anyway. And then when you don't give it enough sleep, it really can't function at its peak no matter what. And so kids are more likely to use substances, they're more likely to take risks that they otherwise wouldn't even sexually even just safety wise. And so we think of kids as being people who push the envelope. And that might be true, but part of this could be because they're completely sleep deprived.

But I was just thinking about a toddler. When a toddler has reached, we called it beyond the beyond when they were so tired and they couldn't regulate themselves to fall asleep and they couldn't calm themselves enough to nap. And I, I get like that sometimes. And but for a teenager especially where so much is happening with their development, I imagine the lack of sleep and the drawn out span of time where they're beyond the beyond, a lot of decision making abilities go down the drain. Yeah, and emotional abilities too for sure.

So when you're sleep deprived, the way you even eat food, you cope with maybe unhealthy pastries or sugar to get yourself back into a state where you have a little bit more energy. So it's not uncommon for us to be sleep deprived and coping with unhealthy foods. That's been my experience and the research, I think bears that out. So, so not only that your body's not digesting food as well, then you're eating junk food. I mean it's a perfect storm for bad mental health.

Yeah.

And your reward processing centers of your brain are lighting up differently when you are sleep deprived. And so we are naturally going to pull towards those unhealthy high carbohydrate foods when we haven't slept well. And we metabolize food differently when we are sleep deprived. We metabolize food differently when it's the middle of the night and we're awake in the middle of the night when we otherwise should be sleeping. All of this sets the stage for weight gain. We see a lot of even high blood pressure in young kids these days, high cholesterol. I think sleep has a huge role in that. It's not the only factor, but is a huge factor for the health risks we see in teenagers these days.

That's a great way to look at this. So I wanna go back to a question I asked earlier. So if we were parents, you're talking structure. It seems like one of the core things you're saying is we need consistency if we want to really help them get into a pattern. It's interesting that the time where I have felt the best is when I was in a two year routine when I would go to bed almost every night at 10:30 and wake up at 6:30.

Yeah, routine and modeling that routine and structure. I always tell parents, even in the young children age, but all the way through adolescent, you're really teaching your kid how to sleep well for the rest of their life. And so you have to model that to them as well. So you maintaining a routine, you having a wind down time before bed and modeling that for them so that they can kind of separate daytime activities from nighttime activities. You modeling, putting your phone away before bed, maybe charging it in a different room. All of these things. Learning healthy relationships with the bed and sleep or with us and our smartphones. All of these things are stuff that we have to show them how to do. They're not going to learn it on their own out of the blue.

I hate that. I really hate that. My husband and I, we have a TV in our bedroom. But the other night we caught our 18 year old, he's still in high school. So we're in that fun stage where he's saying I'm an adult and we're saying you're still in high school. But we found him downstairs. We had gone to bed, but we could see from the Netflix accounts or whatever that he was sitting up watching Star wars at 11:30 at night. And I said, what are you doing? Why would you be Doing that. That's never been okay. You used to read every night for hours before you went to bed. Why are you suddenly watching tv? And he just looked at us and said, what do you do at night before you go to bed? And I was like, that's different. It's not different, but it is the worst. Because they hear what we do, not what we say. A thousand percent. And I really hate that part of parenting.

Oh, me too. Yeah. Not fair.

But real quick there, let me. I just want to clarify something. Cause I've read it a few different places. They say that we need to put our devices away about an hour to hour and a half before we go to sleep. Can you explain why?

So there, there's some truth to this. So I'll back up and say the reason why we've all read in the media that we need to be turning off our devices an hour or so before bedtime is that blue light that's emitted from those devices has been found to suppress melatonin. And remember that melatonin is what drives the sleep timing system. So if you suppress it, your body wants to go to sleep later. So there is very good reason to be turning off the devices, turning off the TV before bed. There's also some evidence that teenagers might actually be a little bit more sensitive to this light right before bed than adults are. But I always have a caveat to that, because oftentimes I see with people who develop insomnia is that they have read that they need to turn off the devices before bed and they get so kind of worked up and anxious about, if I don't have a device, what do I do? I don't really enjoy reading, I don't enjoy doing other things. So I sit there and kind of stress for the hour before bed. Cause I don't know how to fill that time in a relaxing way. And that can actually perpetuate anxiety or stress about sleep and make it harder to sleep. So I always have the caveat that yes, those devices likely suppress melatonin. Everybody's a little bit different. And so it affects people a little bit. Some people more than others. And also if you are somebody who really winds down well, when you're watching a sitcom on Netflix before bed, then I encourage you to do that still if it is not going to be disruptive to your sleep. And the only way to know that is to experiment with that. And so I don't have a hard and fast rule against electronics before bed. I have a more of a let's experiment, let's be scientists in our home and decide what's going to be working for us or not. And also, it needs to kind of fit into the general family's rule around electronics, too. So it's a little bit more nuanced than just no screens before bed.

I like that.

I like that, too, because I do like falling asleep to Great British Baking show or Seinfeld or Frasier, which don't make fun of me. Nobody watches Frasier anymore. But I do.

I love Frasier. My mom watches it all the time, too.

I'm glad to hear that.

It's relaxing.

I love it. So that makes me feel a little bit better.

Better. Golden Girls is for me, it's the most fun.

I didn't watch that forever. I'm gonna pick that one up.

Those old sitcoms are the best for relaxation.

I think Dr. Skinner doesn't watch TV. I know you don't watch TV, Dr. Skinner.

No, no, I watch TV. I. I just find it interesting you guys are talking shows that I can actually relate to Seinfeld. I don't know if the upcoming generation understands the value of Seinfeld, but for. For our timeframe, Seinfeld was a. And it was just a national treasure.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah. Love it so much. And I love. I don't think that they'll understand the benefit of reruns and just watching something over and over again and how that's. To me, that's very soothing. And so that's why I say let's not be too structured or too rigid about some of these things. We decide what works best for us and we go with it.

And I like that you talk about the anxiety surrounding it, because I think that's probably the most important factor to pay attention to is what is the anxiety that I'm feeling. Because if you are scrolling through social media, if your child is scrolling through social media, that's usually more anxiety inducing than watching a slow old sitcom. And so I do think that's probably a good test or a good indication of if it's a good thing or a bad thing before bedtime.

And we want to be thinking not just about the. So in the media, it's all about the blue light, which is fair. But I think it's also the mental stimulation. And so if I am having a very stimulating conversation with somebody on social media or I'm thinking about things that get me kind of worked up about social dynamics or how I look or whatever teenagers stress about, that's going to be very alerting and make it really hard to fall asleep too. And that's a huge component of it. Wow.

All right, so can I go back? I got a question on circadian rhythms.

Yeah.

So we understand that there's going to be a time of the day in the afternoon that our natural circadian rhythm says it's probably time for an afternoon siesta.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the people down in South America get it proper.

Take a little nap, a little snooze.

Take a little nap. Tell me your thoughts on the afternoon nap and are there benefits to doing it?

So I have very complex thoughts about that as well. And I always take the approach, find out what works for you. So that is true. We all have a circadian dip is what we call it. It's where we just have a little bit of a dip in alerting signals in the afternoon, usually right after lunch. Many of us think it's because we've had a heavy lunch and that maybe contributes to it. But it's our circadian rhythm kind of taking a step back for a second. And if we are sleep deprived, we're gonna feel really tired during that time and it's gonna be really hard to get through the afternoon. What I see a lot is teenagers coming home and crashing. Especially if they come home, let's say at 2:30, then they don't have extracurriculars until 6, 7, they come home and just crash for a couple hours and then they find that they can't fall asleep that evening. And then it becomes a really negative cycle because the more you laying in bed awake, tossing and turning, the worse your insomnia is going to get over time. And then your timing's really dysregulated too. And so what I suggest is if it's really hard to get through the rest of the day, like you can't get homework done cause you're so exhausted. Maybe a 30 minute nap in the afternoon, but I would never go later than 4pm and really I'd rather it be closer to 3pm and I would really not want to make it any longer than an hour because the longer we sleep, kind of the more we're borrowing from tonight's sleep. And so a quick power nap to kind of get you through, but any more than that, you're going to be stealing from tonight's sleep and then you're not going to be able to get a restful night and you're going to have a terrible day tomorrow and the cycle starts all over again.

So I'm a power napper. I Can take a three to five minute nap, and I feel like I'm good for the rest of the day.

You're unique. That's awesome.

I literally can. I'm like, okay, I'm checking out for a second, and I'm back at it.

You bring up a really good point. More and more, the research is showing we're all different in our ability to nap and whether or not it's helpful for us. So for some people, a quick power nap is great. It's very rejuvenating, and we do better for the rest of the day. Many of us either can't nap or we find that it makes us feel worse. And so usually we can figure out pretty quickly where what camp we fall into. And so that's why I always say nap and then see how it goes. And if you can't sleep or if you feel worse afterwards, then you don't need to nap. And it's a very individual thing for each of us.

Yeah, I'm interested in that as well, because I. I myself found that during that dip, the midday Humphrey, I would find myself trying to push through it or relax in some other way that might be reading or finding something funny to look at or watch or Marco Polo or. It's just something to kind of take a break from the task at hand. And it wasn't helping. And I, like Dr. Skinner, found that when I would close my eyes for 10 minutes and it would be a timer a lot of the time. And now it just. Now it feels like Kramer, who can wake up on his own. Do you know that episode where he can wake up all by himself? Yeah. But I feel like I can do that now. And it is a drastic difference between trying to numb out through a screen versus let me just close my eyes and shut all this down. It feels like mindfulness almost. It feels like allowing my brain to be calm and allowing it to reset. And then when I open my eyes and wake up, it does feel like I'm able to start almost a whole other day, which is so nice. But we live in a place. A lot of people in Utah are highly addicted to caffeine. And funnily enough, not always coffee. It's in. In different forms. And a lot of moms I know cannot get through the day without their. What do they call it? Their dirty sodas. That's what a lot of people in Utah have.

It's like a big caffeine concoction of whatever soda you want.

Yes. And they're huge, and they're horrible for you, but it helps people get through the day. It's synonymous with a cup of coffee. But I wonder what your thoughts are on that. And using stimulants to get you through the day versus taking something like a 5, 10 minute nap to try to reset.

So first of all, caffeine is a slippery slope oftentimes for adolescents and they're not so great at regulating that and oftentimes can get kind of in the habit of overdoing it and then that destroys their sleep and also is not so great for their body. So but I say a cup of coffee in the morning is not a big deal because the half life of caffeine is about five hours. So when, you know, we have a cup of coffee in the morning, five hours later, about half of it is still in our system. And so maybe five hours later it's not quite bedtime, so we're gonna be okay. But if we have it too late in the day, then it doesn't have time to metabolize and then we're gonna be up at night. There's individual differences though in how our bodies process that. And some people do really great and can drink coffee late into the day, other people can't. For teenagers, I just would really hesitate to encourage coffee drinking. And it's like putting a band aid over a problem. I, I would prefer a nap, but it's hard for teenagers to nap because you have to have that wherewithal to force yourself to get up before you really get into a groove. And that for anyone to do, much less adolescence. Yeah.

So can I ask one other follow up question here to maybe the circadian rhythm element, you're saying it's, it's almost individualistic. And that's one of my key takeaways if I understand what you're saying. In most of this, it's understanding yourself individually. Are you an owl or are you a lark? Are you right? Do you need a circadian rhythm afternoon power nap or not? Am I summarizing that properly?

Exactly? Yes. And that is what I spend a lot of time telling my clients all the time because we read something in the media and say, oh, we should try this. And that doesn't work for us. That doesn't jive for our system. And then we really struggle. And that can actually perpetuate anxiety because it's like, this isn't working the way it's supposed to work. We all need to take the stance that like I said before, you're an experimenter, you're going to try new behaviors A little at a time, see what works. And if it doesn't, you pull back on that behavior. So a nap is a great example of that. Another example of that is watching TV before bed. Does it relax me? Does it stress it out? And so it's really about tuning into yourself and learning what works for you. I think that's a lesson in life in general, but especially with sleep, because we're finding more and more research is showing that there is so much variability that comes down to genetics that we're just finding out about. But what it comes down to is just know yourself.

Interesting. I have one more question about circadian rhythms as well. I don't know your thoughts on Andrew Huberman, but he talks a lot about sleep and he talks a lot about matching our sleep wake cycle to the natural light cycle and that you'll feel more energized during the day and you'll sleep better at night. He did like a five point presentation on how to get better sleep. And one of the points he offered was every morning, go outside, even if it's overcast, but be in natural light for 10 minutes. Let your actual eyes, your pupils, see natural daylight. And that can really help restore a natural circadian rhythm. What are your thoughts on that?

So, yes, I will say that I would never speak as strongly as he does about some of these things, but in that respect it is a really good point for most of us, not everyone, but essentially the circadian rhythm is regulated by the light dark cycle. And so when we're exposed to bright light, and that just means outdoor level light, it tells our circadian rhythm that it's daytime and that signals it's time to be alert. And we send out alerting signals through our brains. And then the absence of that light in the evening is what turns on melatonin and tells our bodies it's time for sleep. And so we can really support our system by getting bright light during the day and making sure our light is dim in the evening and the hours before bed. Adolescents naturally have a phase delay. That's what I've been talking about is this later sleep timing. So they really benefit from early morning light. But there's a subset of people who have advanced circadian rhythms and that early morning light would kind of perpetuate this system that they don't really like. If you want to go to bed earlier, bright light in the morning is great. It sets the circadian rhythm and a good time and it tells our brains to turn, be awake so that we'll fall sleepy Later. But if you have the opposite problem and you tend to go to bed really early, then we would want to do the opposite. That's why I'm saying all of these things are highly individualized. And it's really best if you are really struggling with sleep and kind of don't know what to do. To talk to a behavioral sleep medicine specialist who can kind of guide you through things like light boxes and timing of melatonin and all of this stuff. But in general, we want to just think if we want to support our circadian rhythm. Bright light during the day, dim light at night.

Okay, I have one more question for you.

Yeah.

We always tell our kids that the sleep that you get before midnight is like double the amount of sleep you get after midnight. So between 10 and 12 is like four hours of sleep, because it's just good sleep. And I'm sure there is zero science behind that, but it sure feels that way. I feel like when we go to bed after midnight, we're a lot more tired, even if we still get eight hours of sleep, at least in my experience. But is that true at all? Sleep at an earlier hour and waking up at an earlier hour, is that better than sleep at a later hour, waking up at a later hour?

I think that's a great thing to tell kids. It's not 100% accurate, but there is some evidence behind that. So we all cycle through different sleep stages throughout the night. We have stage one, two, three REM sleep, which is dream sleep. And then we do that process all over again kind of repeatedly, four or five times a night. But the time that we're staying in each of these sleep stages varies across the night. And so at the beginning of the night, we spend more time in that stage three sleep, which is actually really deep, really restorative sleep. This is the deepest stage of sleep. And so I don't know if it's synonymous with double the hours of sleep, but we do, in that first third of the night, get most of that really deep restorative sleep kind of out of the way. And so there is a little bit of truth in that we sleep really hard during that time. And that really does help us feel more refreshed the next day. I don't want to say that the rest of the sleep period doesn't matter, because it matters hugely. But that's really deep restorative sleep, which is good for us at the very beginning of the night.

That's fascinating. I'd love to give you some more time, Jessica, to maybe touch on things that we haven't touched on yet. Is there anything that you were hoping that I had asked or Dr. Skinner had asked that you haven't been able to talk about yet?

I guess I will spend some time talking about how, you know, that your teenager maybe needs extra support. The structure is not really doing enough to help them, or they really can't get to sleep no matter how hard they try. This is really common because teenagers go through a lot emotionally, developmentally, and many do struggle with their sleep along with things like anxiety and depression. If you are finding that you are imposing a pretty structured routine, you feel like they have the opportunity to get enough sleep at night and they're still struggling to sleep. I'd encourage you to reach out to somebody and ask for help. There is a specialization which I have, it's a behavioral sleep medicine specialist. We are trained in these disorders like insomnia, as they co occur with things like anxiety and depression and this complex kind of interaction between all of those. And we can support teenagers or really anyone, adults, kids, anyone, through that. Many people don't know we exist, but we're psychologists who train people how to sleep better. And so I really encourage asking for help and knowing that there's support out there.

And can I just add to that real quick? Because so many times we think, well, I should just be able to sleep. Yes, right. We should just be able to figure it out. But it has been my experience that it's not that easy, how many habits, that if we had proper information, I think we could prevent those problems.

Yeah. And so much of my job is about educating about the appropriate habits. And also our thinking patterns around sleep can be really problematic, but we don't know that. So we can have a lot of misconceptions about how we should sleep, how we should be able to cope with a bad night's sleep. The list goes on and on. And we don't even realize that these thinking patterns are actually getting in our way. And that's my job, is to help sort through some of that.

It is so curious that sleep is such an enigma when it's biologically a necessity. Yeah. And I recall just with lying in bed at night thinking, wow, I'm so exhausted. How in the world could I still be awake right now? My brain must be the most powerful thing, that it could keep me awake for this long, that in my mind I cannot calm down enough to go to sleep at night. And I like what you're bringing up, Dr. Skinner, that it should be easy, but it really Isn't.

No, no. The problem is the thinking. We get into these thinking patterns, and it's what differentiates us from other animals and also really gets in our way. And so all that thinking, if we could get rid of it, we'd probably sleep really well.

I like that you talked about creating consistent sleep schedules, establishing bedtime routines, having your version of a way to calm down your mind and your body that works for you and makes an environment conducive to sleep for you. We talk about it on our podcast all the time. The power of momentum. And I think it creates that, that the more it happens, the more you're able to fall asleep and to trust that. That when it's time for bed, you're going to be able to. Because when I had years of not sleeping well, and I'm sure it had to do with young kids, but a lot of it was I couldn't trust that I would sleep through the night. And so it was the anxiety of not being able to sleep through the night. So practicing that ourselves and then with our children, too, which I think is such an important point, because if we talk about the importance of sleep health with our children, how much easier is a curfew? You know, a weekday curfew, that's been a fight we've had for a long time. You need to come home at this time, especially in the summer. Right. Longer summer hours. They want to be out like it's a weekend every single night of the week. But being able to say, hey, look at this. Your sleep is so important. It's best that you have a consistent sleep time. It's best that you follow these guidelines for sleep. It'll help you for the rest of your life. Yeah, I'm just going to start blaming experts like you guys.

I can take it. Blame me all you want. I can take it.

Okay, before we finish, we would Love for you, Dr. Jessica Mears. Tell us where we can find you and find out more of what you have to offer.

Yeah, so you can find me at my website. It's rhythm-well.com or you can find me on Instagram. I'm at she Talks Sleep. And I share all kind. All kinds of tips and everything. And then I also have created a little freebie for anyone who needs help. It's a little teen sleep survival guide. And so it gives you a little bit of the information that we talked about today and some space to sit down with your teenager and work through a good schedule and problem solving around sleep. So I think we can have that in the. A link to that in the show notes, I believe.

I love that you have that little guide because I think it's a great opportunity to sit down, talk about sleep with our kids, with ourselves, and really understand more of why we may be experiencing certain issues in our mental, physical, cognitive health. And maybe experiment. I think that's a great idea. Experiment and say, I'm going to try getting more sleep and see how I feel. How do I feel emotionally, how do I feel physically, how do I feel academically, cognitively, all the things that we're hoping to excel within. Wouldn't that be great if sleep just improved all of it? And it's as simple as that.

It's simple and as complex as that. True.

Okay, Dr. Skinner, is there anything you want to add before we wrap up?

No, just thank you for your time. This is extremely helpful and I'm going to tell our listeners, you know, the things that we talk about, our deepest desire is that you have better connections and relationships. And I would actually advocate for the more effective sleep we have, the better we are going to be in relationships.

Absolutely.

And thank you so much for your time and your wisdom.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. This was a blast.

Thank you all for listening to another episode of Finding Noble. And if you find today's episode helpful, share with a friend and subscribe to more episodes here on Finding Noble. You've been listening to Finding Noble. I'm Carly Redd. Follow Finding Noble on all available podcast directories and find out more on our website, findingnoble.com that's finding noblen o b l e dot com and if you or anyone close to you are looking for further resources on young adult and adolescent mental health, Dr. Skinner and a host of other leading professors working in the mental health world share courses and even answer your questions all on parentguidance.org that is parentguidance.org brought to you by the Cook center for Human Connection.