Robert Whitfield MD explains how early school start times and cultural pressure to sacrifice sleep fuel burnout in young people. Disrupted REM and deep sleep, combined with sugar, caffeine, and rushed mornings, create behavioral changes and chronic sleep loss patterns that carry into adulthood.
So if you already have that limiting belief that you have to not sleep in order to get ahead or you have to not sleep to do the next thing or whatever that is. I think in one of your books you talk about how there is a huge rise in burnout amongst young people. And I think it's. It goes directly back to obviously the things, you know, we're highlighting with sleep because a young person should not be getting up at like 6:00am that's when they're getting in, you know, more REM sleep and things. So the. If you never get into deep sleep and can't then recover, those kids are expected to then get up, you know, get dressed. Unfortunately, if you're unaware of what happens to kids based on the things they eat and drink in the morning, just give somebody who doesn't metabolize sugar and caffeine something sugary and see how their behavior changes on no sleep and a bunch of unprocessed food and sugar and.
Absolutely. I know. I always am so upset that the school systems often that start so early that, you know, it gets. It's causing, you know, kids to have to wake up so early and then they're going through a long day, barely any time to eat. That's another important thing that humans need is to eat in regular intervals. So then it's. And then they're rushing to activities later in the day. And if you think about it, it's like we're teaching them from a young age that you wake up early and you go, go, go all day and you barely eat and you barely rest, and that's what then people can, you know, becomes the norm. And I think that's the thing with, with all of us as humans, is whatever it is familiar to us. It might not be best for our health, but it's familiar. And so then we end up repeating it into our adulthood and next thing we know, we're working long hours or we're parents and we have kids, so we're working or running a business and then taking care of our kids and then not getting enough sleep and it repeats the next day.
