Study Shows Teens Don’t Sleep Enough

In a study of 250 teenagers, most got less sleep than they needed. Teens in the study were from low- and middle-income families. They wore a device called an actigraph to measure their sleep for one week. They also kept sleep diaries. They recorded an average of 6.8 hours a night during the week. This rose to 8.7 hours a night during the weekend. But the actigraphs showed they actually slept less. The average nightly total was 6 hours during the week and 7.4 hours during the weekend. Black and male students slept less. The actigraphs showed that blacks and males also tended to wake or shift into a less-deep stage of sleep more often. This is called fragmented sleep. In their diaries, female students were more likely to report poor sleep quality. They also were more likely to say they felt sleepy in the daytime.