2023-07-05 08:58:27
Updated Wednesday, July 5, 2023 – 08:58
Among the causes, school worries, lack of sleep and negative thoughts, according to an annual survey
47.6% of adolescents go to bed late. EMS Health Do you have insomnia? Learn to recognize it (and the best tips to run away from it)
Among the negative legacy that Covid leaves adolescents is the bad habit of going to bed late, although the next day there is school. The data comes from the 2023 edition of the Survey on the lifestyles of adolescents living in Italy -which has just been presented-, carried out annually by the Adolescence Laboratory Association and the IARD research institute on a representative sample. on a national scale of 5,670 students between the ages of 13 and 19.
Although we have moved away from the peak of night owls recorded in the 2020-2021 survey, at the height of the pandemic, when 58% of adolescents went to bed after 11:00 p.m., we are still a long way from pre-revolutionary levels. Covid (28.1%), placing us at a worrying 47.6%.
To make matters worse, if during the Covid you could recover a few hours of sleep in the morning, because “going to school” meant getting up and -perhaps still in your pajamas- turning on the computer, today the alarm clock went off long before. On the other hand, the percentage of those who state that it is difficult for them to fall asleep is still very high -and has remained substantially unchanged since Covid- (71.9%), where the main reasons for this difficulty are indicated as worry about school (60.7%), negative thoughts (58.1%) and nervousness (57.8%). But also in the “trivial” lack of sleep (60%).
The biological mechanism of sleep
Precisely with regard to sleep deprivation, it is important to know what technically depends on our ability to fall asleep. The one responsible for our sleep is a hormone produced by a gland located at the base of the brain, the melatoninwhich acts on the hypothalamus and has the function of regulating the sleep-wake cycle.
and melatonin occurs naturally in the absence of light, shortly after the onset of darkness – which is why night is the natural time for sleep for humans – and their concentrations in the blood rise rapidly, reaching a maximum between 2 and 4 a.m. and then decreasing progressively as that the morning is coming Therefore, one of the causes of adolescents’ difficulty falling asleep is precisely the use they make of smartphones and computers in the evening and at night, often in bed until a moment before they decide to try to fall asleep, because the light stimulus and the bluish/white light from the monitors are strong inhibitors of melatonin production.
In fact, the night seems more and more, for adolescents, a space destined not to sleep, but to continue -without being disturbed- the activities on social networks or to watch endless series on specialized platforms, or short videos on the ubiquitous Instagram and TikTok. It is no coincidence that the habit of having the smartphone on 24 hours (including at night) affects more than 75% of Generation Z and its environment. And even in this case, the phenomenon, which the Covid had accelerated, has taken root.
Why is this phenomenon worrying?
But why are experts so concerned about lack of sleep? “Lack of sleep, as it’s called in technical jargon,” explains Marina Picca, president of the Italian Society of Primary Care Pediatrics and member of the board of directors of the Adolescence Laboratory, “is a dysfunctional behavior that can have serious repercussions on both the physical and psychological health of the person, with effects ranging from psychophysical fatigue to bad mood and easy irritability, from concentration and learning difficulties to memory loss, altered decision-making capacity and decreased of interest in daily activities.
The earlier they occur, the greater the emotional-behavioral consequences, such as anxiety, depression, and on cognitive processes, as emphasized by the expert. “Increasingly we see more irritability, fatigue, decreased concentration and attention attributable to loss of sleep even in young children, we have documented a lot during the pandemic due to uncertainty, daily routine disruptions, radical changes of life and concern for the health and well-being of the family and loved ones”, he says.
What are the possible remedies?
What can be done, then, to stop these nocturnal adolescents? “Given difficulties in sleeping -explains Giovanni Biggio, emeritus professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at the University of Cagliari-, if the strategic objective should be to seek and act on the causes and lifestyles that determine the situation (above all, lights, cell phones, and computers turned off), it is also necessary to intervene promptly on the effects, because the negative consequences of little and bad sleep manifest very quickly.
“The first and most effective remedy to help the body ‘lock in’ to sleep and restore the precious ‘circadian rhythm’ (wake-sleep) is to take, between an hour and an hour and a half before going to sleep, melatonin from extended release. absolutely natural and harmless solucinso much so that it can be prescribed without problems even to small children in whom sleep problems are frequent”, continues Biggio, “is the supplementation with saffron extracts (which act on irritability and bad mood), equally natural and innocuous” .
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