James Donaldson on Mental Health - How to Help Teenagers Get More Sleep

Set a good example “Parents need to model good sleep habits for their teens,” Dr.

“Staying up all night with your kid to edit their paper or pulling an all-nighter for work yourself isn’t really sending the right message.” Parents who make sleep a priority for themselves show their kids that it’s part of living a healthy lifestyle — like eating right and exercising regularly.

Streamline mornings While there’s not much you can do about your school’s start time, Dr.

Van Gilder says teens should organize their mornings so that they can sleep in “as long as is humanly possible.” Consider showering, picking out clothes, and packing up books before bed so you don’t have to spend time doing it in the morning.

“Ask mom or dad to make you an egg sandwich to eat on the bus.

Whatever it takes to squeeze in as much sleep as possible and arrive one minute before school starts.” Pump up productivity For the first two years of high school Gabriel Levine, now 19, bought into the pervasive attitude at Hunter College High School that he describes as “basically, it’s cool to do really well on as little sleep as possible.” Then at the beginning of junior year he got very interested in the topic of productivity and started reading a lot of studies.

“I discovered that a lot of my academic performance could be better by sleeping a full 8 hours than by staying up all night studying.

Cognitive functioning is just better with sleep and without it, you sacrifice that.” Since then Levine, who just finished his first year at the University of Chicago, has been committed to getting a minimum of 7-8 hours of sleep every night.

He managed this in high school, he says, by using the odd bits of time during the day he’d been inclined to blow off as too short to be fruitful.

“I’d even work during rehearsals when I wasn’t needed on stage,” he says.