Just As You Suspected, School Starts Too Early

The only time the alarm clock goes off at our house is on mornings when we have to make a predawn airport run. Some years ago I learned to trust my body’s alarm clock, which lets me snooze until about 7 - excluding fitful nights such as Monday, when a clothes rod in the bedroom closet mysteriously loosened itself and crashed around 4 a.m.

As an adult, I discovered I was a morning person and liberated myself from the odious buzz of an alarm. Yet as teens, my sister and I had an ongoing argument with Mom, who was our alarm clock. We begged her to let us sleep as long as we wanted on Saturdays to offset school days, when the bus arrived at the end of our lane at 7:15 a.m. - an hour that to us forced a miserably early time for both going to bed and getting up.

Now sleep researchers may vindicate (if not change the lives of) teenagers everywhere.

At the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, Dr. Mark W. Mahowald says high-schoolers need an hour or more sleep than do adults. He says teens’ biological clocks are set so that they fall asleep - and awaken - later than people at other stages of life.

In other words, he told a newspaper reporter recently, teens who seem surgically attached to their pillows may not be lazy after all. And their desire to stay up late isn’t necessarily willful rebellion.

So teenagers really are different. And if they seem sleepy at school and crankier than is tolerable, they’re probably sleep-deprived.

Yet Mahowald says most of us should stay in bed an average of 90 minutes more a day than we do, though since the turn of the century, Americans have shaved about 20 percent off the amount of time they spend sleeping.

“The bottom line is, if you use an alarm to get up in the morning, you are sleep-deprived,” Mahowald says. “Virtually all people who work, who have busy family lives and social activities, are.”

Of course, some people not only function but thrive on a few hours of sleep. Reportedly President Clinton rarely sleeps more than four hours. Prosecutor Marcia Clark barely slept at all during the O.J. Simpson trial. Pope Paul II is said to sleep only briefly, and Michelangelo was so passionate about his art that he affixed a candle to the forefront of a hat so he could carve “David” at night.

The argument is that such people are engaged in highly purposeful pursuits and stay alert thanks to adrenaline, stress or the passion of their ideas. Now sleep researchers tell us that those folks are probably just genetically programmed to operate on less sleep fuel. Most of us need seven-and-a-half to eight hours. If we consistently get only six, we’ll be irritable, less able to concentrate and less coordinated, and we’ll have memory lapses and impaired judgment.

The American Sleep Disorders Association said sleep deprivation played a role in the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Three Mile Island nuclear-power-plant crisis, and it’s a huge factor in auto accidents.

Society is only now recognizing the importance of enough sleep. In Minnesota, the state medical association is urging school districts to allow a later starting hour for high school so students can sleep later and be more alert in classes. Teachers back this up, saying lack of sleep is a major problem among teens.

Most high schools begin their classes around 7:30 a.m., and start their elementaries and middle-schools later on in the morning.

That’s apparently backward, biologically. Little kids spring to life faster in the mornings, when teens need more shut-eye. But until schools recognize the emerging science of sleep, maybe nap time and little mats ought to be required long after first grade. xxxx