The Self-Driven Child
Helping parents raise kids with healthy motivation and resilience in facing life's challenges. Oh, and having more fun while doing it!
The Self-Driven Child
Why We Sleep - The Great Sleep Challenge
In this episode of The Self-Driven Child Podcast, I sit down with my longtime partner, co-author, and neuropsychologist Dr. William Stixrud to dig deep into something hiding in plain sight: sleep. We talk about why so many kids, teens, and frankly adults are walking around chronically exhausted—and what that’s quietly doing to learning, emotional health, and overall well-being. This conversation grew out of a powerful question a student asked us after we issued a real-world “sleep challenge,” and it opened the door to a fascinating look at how sleep actually works in the brain.
Bill and I explore what happens when kids don’t get enough rest, why tired brains struggle with attention, memory, and emotional regulation, and how sleep might be one of the most underestimated tools we have for supporting mental health, learning, and resilience. If you care about helping kids thrive—and about thriving yourself—this is one you won’t want to miss.
Episode Highlights:
[0:00] – Why helping kids thrive is harder than it should be—and why sleep keeps getting overlooked
[2:15] – The student sleep challenge and the big question: what does sleep actually do to the brain?
[4:20] – How chronic sleep deprivation acts like chronic stress on developing brains
[6:00] – Emotional control, anxiety, and why tired brains are more reactive and negative
[9:00] – “Overnight therapy”: how REM sleep helps regulate emotions and perspective
[10:25] – Sleep deprivation, anxiety, and depression: cause, effect, and the vicious cycle
[11:59] – Why sleep regularity matters as much as total hours of sleep
[15:00] – Sleep, physical health, appetite, and injury risk for athletes
[17:20] – Why sleep deprivation mimics ADHD and wrecks attention and organization
[19:55] – The startling study showing how small sleep losses erase years of cognitive growth
[21:40] – How the brain replays and consolidates learning during sleep
[22:30] – Why sleeping more can literally make you better at skills—even without more practice
[27:15] – Practical, realistic strategies families can use to make sleep a shared value
[31:00] – Why we need collective action, not lectures, to help teens get the sleep they need
Links & Resources:
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Hey, folks, Ned here, like me, you want your kids, your students, honestly, all the young people you know, to thrive, and you know how much you can help. But like me, you probably also recognize that you fall short more than you like to, in part because we tend to revert to old ways. We hear a great suggestion or learn a new approach, but to easily fall back into the same darn things that didn't work before, it isn't easy, which is why I'm really excited to share with you that Bill and I have a new book out this spring, the seven principles for raising a self driven child, a workbook. Our goal is to make it easier to put into practice more of the advice from our first two books, the self driven child and what do you say? Full of reflections and exercises to do yourself with your partner and with your children, we want to help make the self driven child way your way, so you can, more often than not, be as effective as you want to be with your kids in ways that we know you want to be if you get a chance order a copy bill, and I and your kids would be grateful. So what
Dr. William R. Stixrud:we're dreaming 75% I'm dreaming about Tetris. You know that replay is
Ned Johnson:what you learn. So this is fantastic. So I'm a video gamer, right? And I want to get really good in my video games, and so I stay up all night practicing. But if I were to practice some and then get more sleep, my brain will continue to operate. I could also be a better gamer, not just a better learner, better gamer, by sleeping more. Welcome to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William stick shirt. Of the books the self driven child the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives and what do you say? How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress, tolerance and a happy home, scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative and makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You'll even feel happier, less depressed and less anxious. Are you interested? We found some students, teens, no less, who sure were, was it enough to change their behavior? It was I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. And with me today is my partner and scribe and neuropsychologist, Dr William Marc sixtree, here to talk a little bit about sleep. So Bill, when we were up visiting this terrific school in Connecticut, we put to students a sleep challenge, aka take Ned's money, where we made the case for more sleep and gently encouraged them, borderline implored them to give it a go of getting four nights in a row of eight hours of sleep or more if they were in high school, eight and a Half if they were in middle school, and by my count, more than 20% of the students took us up on this and shared with us, well how it felt, and thanking us for making the case and encourage them to get to sleep. But one question came back that I'd love your help on where one student wrote, how does this amount of sleep exactly, improve your education and yourself in general. Neurally, like does the brain create new pathways or some sort of new brain mechanism? I love the idea of a new brain mechanism. I'd like one, but I was wondering whether we could sort of blow through all the improve yourself in general, because we talk about this in quite a detail in the self driven child, and then end up with, really the crux of the question put from the student of what exactly is going on neurally, in ways that sleep improves learning that
Dr. William R. Stixrud:cool is cool. And I will say that I'm struck by when we ask kids how much they need, that they're so they're often so wildly inaccurate. You know, especially with high school kids, who often say, Well, I think seven or eight hours where not to feel tired. They need nine to 10, you know. And I think that so many high school students now, like the average, got a height of six to six and a half hours. And even the middle school students we meet with, I think, don't really understand how much sleep they really need not to really function optimally.
Ned Johnson:Well, it's funny, when it was rereading the sleep chapter in the self driven child, a note in there from you of testing kids who are in kindergarten or first grade, who are yawning the whole morning, and even kids that young age who seem to be chronically under arrested. And I'll start with point number one in our book, that sleep deprivation is a form of chronic stress, and we know what chronic stress does to developing brains. So for children to be chronically sleep deprived for years on end, that can't be good for them,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:especially when we figured that insufficient sleep, because it's a form of chronic stress, insufficient sleep has a particularly profound effect. Act on the prefrontal cortex, which is very important in the initial stages of learning, in terms of being able to focus and kind of hold in your working memory what was being presented, what you're studying, and organize what you're learning. And also your hippocampus, which is your major memory center, as if you're tired and stressed, and we know that stress being chronically sleep deprived, shrinks to prefrontal cortex, shrinks the hippocampus. It makes it function less efficiently. It's definitely not good.
Ned Johnson:It's also not good for the second point that we raised, and there are six of these total folks, we'll run through one through five quickly that emotional control. So emotional control is dramatically impaired by sleep deprivation. And because, back to what you're talking about, because the prefrontal cortex is impaired by sleep deprivation, and the prefrontal cortex that work in memory, the ability to hold information in mind, also inhibition, right? So you know, kids are less squirmy, wormy if they're well rested, than if they're not, and then also that cognitive, emotional flexibility, so, you know, someone is, you know, takes my toy or knocks down my blocks, or isn't kind to me on the playground. And do, do I have the ability to be like, well, Bill's such a jerk, or boy, Bill isn't usually like that, you know, I wonder what's going on and, you know, or, you know, he was nice to me later that day. And that ability to refrain things is really at the core of, you know, good mental health. It's not that we never get bent out of shape, but I suppose mental health is how ably, how quickly can we bend ourselves back into shape?
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, and I think that if you're by definition, if you haven't slept well, you're under slept, you're going to be more anxious, which means that you're going to have these thoughts in your head that you don't want that in your want that interfere with paying attention to what you know you should be paying attention to or you want to be paying attention to.
Ned Johnson:I also think about that with students whom I work to coach them to study in ways that are more effective, ideally with a goal of getting more getting more sleep. And adding to your point about when we're tired, we're more anxious, I suspect that also when we're anxious, it's harder to sleep, one because it can be hard to fall asleep if your amygdala is reactive. But also, for a lot of students, they don't know when to give it a rest. They don't know when they've studied enough and that it's, you know, safe to, you know, put the books down so you can put your head down.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:And the point that we've often made, which is that one of the most important prefrontal cortex executive functions is self evaluation. Tired kids don't realize how tired they are, and so it can make sense to them to study from 1030 to 12, and get very little out of it, because they don't realize how tired they are and how how little they're getting out of it. I was always so struck when my kids were in college that they'd come home, and college students are typically profoundly sleep defined. And they come home, they sit down to watch TV and insisting they weren't tired, and they've they'd be asleep in two or three minutes, which is, which is just really extreme sleep deprivation. You shouldn't be you aren't supposed to be able to fall asleep within five minutes, even, even at night that if you sleep, you fall asleep within five minutes. You're really
Ned Johnson:very simplified and in terms of the anxiety and emotional control. We also know that sleep deprivation is a Robert stick gold, who calls a negativity bomb, yeah, this is fascinating to me, that when they've done all these studies and they have folks try to learn, you know, 100 words, you know, positive, negative, neutral, in one group of students, they allow them to get an adequate night's sleep after and then the other group, they really mess with their sleep. The folks who are well rested recall one a lot more words than the folks who are sleep deprived, but also they recall pretty much an even balance of positive, neutral and negative words. But the students who are sleep deprived remember almost none of the positive words and remember a vast preponderance of the negative words, which seems to suggest that if we're paying attention to and remembering all the things that are really negative in our lives, we can end up with a very biased recollection of what our experience has been.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, certainly. And also that point that REM sleep, Matthew Walker calls it overnight therapy, the dream sleep, because when you're dreaming, it's the only time in a 24 hour cycle that the brain is basically stress free in terms of hormonally. And so you're replaying these memories and these emotional associations basically stress free chemical environment. And if we deprive ourselves with that, we seem to really miss out. And it helps to explain why people have always said things look better in the morning. They don't look better if you haven't slept. They look better in part because that you've replayed these memories, that when things perspective physically, this emotional healing takes place, and also that you tend to remember positive things. More than you do otherwise, more than if you're sleep deprived.
Ned Johnson:Can you talk for a minute? Because I know you see so many kids who, in addition to trying to figure themselves out as learners, are often struggling with anxiety and depression and about how sleep deprivation can trigger anxiety and mood disorders in kids who may be vulnerable and protected if they're well rested, but vulnerable if they are not well rested.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, you know, and vision sleep is both a cause and a symptom of anxiety and depression, in the sense that many of the kids that we work with are they? Are they really high achieving kids who are sleeping six and a half hours a night, and most of them are in medicine for anxiety and or depression. Some of that, in fact, these factors, these brain factors that explain why, if you don't sleep, you're going to be more negative. You're going to see yourself more negatively. You are going to perform as well. So you're going to tend to be harder on yourself for not performing as well. One of the things that I've been saying in my reports adolescence is you can't heal from anything if you're chronically tired and stressed. You know that that if you're already anxious and depressed and you're sleeping six hours at night, good luck getting better. You know you don't heal unless you rest. There's a very high correlation between insufficient sleep and both anxiety and mood disorders. And again, this is some of it can be it can be cause and it can be effect. If you're anxious, as you said earlier Ned, it can be harder to fall asleep, or you may sleep too much, and which is not such a good thing either. And if you're depressed, same thing, having a consistent sleep cycle with a reliable bedtime is so useful in terms of emotional regulation, and the first thing that I tell the kids I see who have a lot of anxiety or difficulty regulating their emotions is try to get a kid's consistent bedtime, because the human physiology craves consistency.
Ned Johnson:That regularity is a big deal. There was a study that came out this spring about regular bedtimes and found that even beyond getting adequate sleep, the regularity of sleep was one of the strongest predictors of mortality rates in folks. So jumping all over the place is really not good. I talk with students that use the idea of jet lagging yourself, that if you if you're going to bed at 10 o'clock on a school night, and you stay up to two o'clock on the weekends, then coming back around to Monday, it's just it's brutal to try to get up on Monday, in part because you've jet lagged yourself. And even if you got enough sleep, everything is all out of whack, including, of course, your your emotional regulation.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:It's interesting that I've seen some kids who are really very deeply depressed, and suggested, I'm not a physician and but just suggested, on the recommendation of a couple, that the top psychiatrists in the greater DC area here that the kids take a half a milligram of melatonin they set a bedtime, say, say, 930 or 10 o'clock, and then they take a half a milligram of melatonin six hours before the desired bedtime, which doesn't make them drowsy, but it jump starts the melatonin production, the production of that drowsiness hormone. And then they take whatever they need, the higher dose if necessary, half hour before bedtime to induce drowsiness. And I've seen some kids who are in partial hospitalization programs didn't get much better, and regulating the sleep made a bigger difference than virtually in therapy or medication. Not saying kids should have good therapy and medication, but I am saying that regularity of sleep is amazingly powerful.
Ned Johnson:Yeah, there's a study I saw a few years ago for a whole cohort of adults, I think, who were depressed, as you mentioned before, sleep deprivation is both a cause and a symptom of anxiety, and if you keep going through anxiety long enough, you'll probably end up being depressed as well. And for these folks, where they could attend to the dysregulated sleep and the sleep deprivation when they got that straightened out. For more than 50% of the depressed adults no longer depressed. Let's talk really quickly about some of the health implications, because a lot of people don't connect their physical health as well to their restedness. For me, one of the things that I always find interesting is how sleep deprivation messes with the hormones around appetite, that there's what leptin and ghrelin. And leptin says, Hey, I'm full, we're good, we can stop here. And ghrelin says, let's, let's keep, let's keep going, right? And when you're sleep deprived, you the one that says I'm full never gets turned on, and the one that says I'm hungry never gets turned off you mentioned before about how profoundly under arrested are so many folks in college, and I can't help but wondering that a mythical or real, quote, unquote freshman 15 that so many people experience, how much of that may be that they head off to college with the ability to kind of eat whatever they want without any parent looking over them and. And a sleep schedule that sets them up to want to over consume everything, particularly foods that are unhealthy. I was re reading Matthew Walker's book about this. He found the kids who slept less than eight hours a night had a 300% higher rate of obesity than kids who were getting 10 or more hours of sleep a night. And part of it, if you go back to then, the inhibition that you talked about. And you know, at 11 o'clock at night, inhibition is poor. You might be likely to sort of eat the whole darn pint of ice cream, right? But rarely do people get up at nine o'clock in the morning and suck down a whole pint of Ben and jars, even though it is still delicious in the morning. Kind of, kind of, kind of real, right?
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, as you know, I learned many years ago that to avoid have staying up too late watching TV, I get ready for bed before I watch the last thing wanted, because the tired and we got, the more like getting ready for bed seemed like too much work.
Ned Johnson:And we talked a lot to all the students as well, many of whom were athletes, about that, you know, great study out of Stanford where all of their coordinate coordinated activities, this case, the men's basketball team, but the shooting increased by 9% in terms of their accuracy, their maximum sprinting speed increased by nearly 5% which are really significant deals. I mean, even more than people will get out of anabolic steroids by just getting more sleep. But also, I was again, re reading Matthew Walker's book that he writes for athletes, there is no better risk mitigating insurance policy than sleep. Chronic lack of sleep across the season predicted a massively higher risk of injury for those who slept nine hours a night, there was roughly a 15% chance of injury for those who slept six hours or less, 75% chance of injury. I mean, holy smokes. And since it's seasonal, you're 3.4 times more likely to come down with a cold or flu when you're sleeping high. So let's just
Dr. William R. Stixrud:be this is not so good for your immune system, is it?
Ned Johnson:No, seemingly not, all right. So let's turn our attention to and it strikes me we were talking about this little bit before we hopped on this call that the kind of big picture, things what attention, working memory, ability to organize, freeing up space for learning and consolidating space, consolidating what you've already learned. Other than that, I think you know, has no impact on learning. So tell us about why sleep deprivation affects attention, and why we should care about that.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Well, I think everybody's had the experience. I mean, when you're tired, you're much more likely to misplace your keys or to forget something, because you simply are less present. You're less mindful when you're sleep deprived, because you're less kind of consciously aware of what you're doing. Because sleep deprivation, basically is a form of chronic stress, because stress and sleep deprivation mimic ADHD. If you're less what are the symptoms of ADHD? Distractibility, you're much more distractible when you're tired. Being able to stay focused, it's much harder to stay focused when you're tired. Organizational. It really organizational. Difficulty trying to organize things when you're tired. If I'm in my office, I haven't meditated, I'm kind of tired. It can take me a half hour to get organized, get all my stuff together, to get to come home. If I meditate first and get deep rest, it takes me 10 minutes. So the organization 81. Of the symptoms is forgetfulness. You're much more forgetful when you're tired. It just all the symptoms, all nine symptoms of an attention they're basically you're tired, you're going to show all nine symptoms. And so just that basic level of paying attention. If you're listening to a lecture, or you're reading or listening to a class discussion and you want to remember this stuff, and you aren't going to be as attentive. You'll be more distractible. You won't process and take in as much the language system the brain don't work as well. The working memory systems of the brain that actually holds in memory and try to integrate what you're learning don't work very well. So just the basic processes of trying to get the information into memory, to actually learn and get into your memory. Sleep deprivation impairs those processes?
Ned Johnson:Well, let's talk about the student who asked, is there a new mechanism? Well, there's not a new mechanism, and it isn't precisely new pathways in the brain, but sort of like that. Can we talk about learning, of how sleep prepares the brain for learning, and then how sleep allows the brain to really make permanent and make sense of what it is that it's learned. So in addition to attention and executive functions working well, we also know that sleep really prepares the brain for learning in the same way that brain development prepares the brain for learning. Bill, there's a really fascinating study of what the impact was on young brains that were deprived of sleep, I guess what, 35 minutes for three nights in a row, and how that affected their ability to learn. Can you talk us through that?
Dr. William R. Stixrud:The study was done out of the National Institutes of Mental Health, where kids. Were paid to go to bed later. They're paid later than normally. And lot in some of the kids, they conk out, you know, at their normal bedtime is fourth graders and sixth graders, and on an average, they stayed up an extra 30 minutes, or 35 minutes for three nights in a row. And after these three nights that they give the fourth graders, the sixth graders the sixth graders a bunch of cognitive tests, particularly tests of working memory, processing, speed attention, these processes that relate to how efficiently you learn. And it turns out that the sixth graders who slept 35 minutes once than normally for three nights in a row, their cognitive function was like a fourth grader.
Ned Johnson:So by losing 105 minutes of sleep over three nights, they lost two years of cognitive development.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, and you think about, you think about kids who are routinely who need high school after puberty, where they need on order, on everything, need nine and a quarter hours not to feel tired. These kids are routinely getting three hours less than they need, you know, and just what does that do? So, yeah, in terms of preparing the brain for learning, you know, sleep does so many things that are crucial for the process of actually focusing on something, integrating with the ordinary, know, processing the language, holding what we need to emirate your memory, to make connections, put things in perspective. Or do I already know about that your brain is spontaneously when you're awake, is spontaneously when you're learning stuff, integrating with what you already know.
Ned Johnson:So that's the input, right? That's the input. Tell me about the flip side, what's going on in the brain when we're sleeping, in terms from a learning perspective, what's going on in the brain
Dr. William R. Stixrud:some of the most interesting things that I've seen are studies that Matthew Walker was certainly, arguably one of the two or three top sleep scientists at Berkeley. Did a study some years ago where in rats, where rats they've learned it to navigate a maze, and they looked at what brain circuits were activating while they're learning the maze, and then later they slept, and they saw this the same, the activation, the same brain circuits that were activated during the Learn the maze during sleep, they were replaying, but they were, you know, studies of people paying looking at brain wave activity while people were playing Tetris, and then seeing the exact same brain wave activity during the dream sleep, wake up the participants in the study. So what we're dreaming? 75% I'm dreaming about Tetris. You know, there replays, what you learn.
Ned Johnson:So wait, this is fantastic. So I'm a video gamer, right? And I want to get really good in my video games, and so I stay up all night practicing, but I but if I were to practice some and then get more sleep, my brain will continue to operate. I could be a better gamer like but also be a better gamer, not just a better learner, better gamer by sleeping more.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, people learning. They just studies where you learn, like the type a certain sequence of letters, like the G, B, and you practice that going faster and faster, and you improve your speed. They practice by 50 or 60% and then you plateau. And if you sleep, next morning, you get up, you're even faster than you were before you went
Ned Johnson:to bed. Yeah, I was just looking at that study that that with a good night's sleep that they had just by sleep, had a 20% jump in performance speed and nearly 35% improvement in accuracy. And to quote, Walker, in other words, your brain will continue to improve skill memories in the absence of any further practice. Pretty magical.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:It's so yeah, and also that these we know that when you're learning new information, it's your hippocampus, which the brain systems, that is absolutely crucial for learning new information they encourage for processing new experience and putting into memory that your hippocampus is very involved. And as we said before, stress and sleep deprivation actually impaired the function
Ned Johnson:of hippocampus and the chronic it will actually shrink the hippocampus, right?
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Does that challenge? Yeah, and so. But any case, during sleep, certain points of sleep is stored in your hippocampus, is basically the information gets shuttled up to your prefrontal cortex, where it will eventually be stored. It just happens at various points during sleep where you just this is partly the way that they say the sleep consolidates. It also integrates what you learn is stored in hippocampus. It shuttles up to the cortex, but it goes to the right part of the cortex where there's all information that's related, so that you have something connected so interesting. So it consolidates learning. It integrates what you learn, and you deprive yourself of that shuttling back and forth from the hippocampus to prevent cortex. Memories don't get stored and so much so many studies have showed that if you learn stuff and you just don't sleep at all, not only do you remember negative stuff, but you don't remember much of that either.
Ned Johnson:Well. And what's interesting there is that we need to have that shuttling of information from the hip. Campus cortex back and forth to consolidate that learning in long term storage of the cortex. But back to something we talked about before. This is also the mechanism by which information is pulled from the hippocampus to free up more learning more space, as it were for the next day. Walker makes the point, if we don't do this, then we have a limited kind of short term storage capacity in the hippocampus. And so if we want to free up more space, we need to move stuff from short term to long term. And then your point about things going back and forth, then going to parts of the brain, the information going to parts of brain where it's tied to other things. It's this slow, what Matthew Walker calls it a slow, synchronized chant, connecting the different parts of the brain and really kind of weaving this tapestry of understanding, and I think so often that for for too many students, learning can feel like this short term cramming of information to pass a quiz or a test, and that has its place. I guess, if that's the goal, to perform well on those tests, but in a perfect world, whatever is that we're learning will really consolidate and make connections and so not just facts, but some derived wisdom out of how does what I've learned today connect to what I've learned before, and allow me to then project forward and connect it to things that are coming further along the lines, so that we do really have this tapestry of wisdom, not just random silos of facts.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:So really good point. And just, I'm just remembering these studies that came out in the 1990s where some kind of early 1990s the study was done that found that high school kids forgot 80% of what they learned within two months of being tested, and then a few years later they repeated the studies, it was up to 90% how much of that is related to after adolescence. And the two things that major things that happen related to sleep are the kids need more sleep. They tend to feel tired later become more night owls. You think about that, how much of that is just simply related to the fact that they aren't sleeping and they aren't consolidating memories that they would if they were sleeping out of women?
Ned Johnson:Well, before we turn to a few of the suggestions that we made for students and encourage everyone to take on here, there is a wonderful quote from the Roman Quintilian who wrote in, I don't know, 8065, or something. It is a curious fact, of which the reason is not obvious, that the interval of a single night will greatly increase the strength of the memory, whatever the cause, things which could not be recalled on the spot are easily coordinated the next day and time itself, which is generally counted one of the causes of forgetfulness, actually serves to strengthen the memory. And of course, we now know that that's the sleep. So for those who are curious, what did we ask of students to bribe them into taking us up on the sleep challenge, aka take Ned's money. And it was pretty simple. We simply asked them to try, if they wanted to try an experiment of four nights in a row of eight and a half hours of sleep for middle school kids, eight hours for high school kids, with couple really simple caveats. Actually only one simple caveat. One was their phone charged somewhere outside of their bedroom. It could do, you know, ideally, downstairs in the kitchen, someplace else, if you don't trust your little brother or your parents, maybe in the bathroom, but someplace where it's not right by the bed. Because we know that even if the phone is powered off, turned off and it's just you could have a brick in the shape of a phone because of the intermittent reinforcement and the way that all of us who use these devices become addicted, in small measure or large measure, to them, simply having that phone by the bedside table will really mess with people's ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. And this may be totally throwback, but I will gently make this suggestion for parents, for families across all across the country, to consider, to consider putting back into their households a pot, a plain old telephone line. My family, we have a Plato and telephone line, and we tell our kids, then they memorize cell phone numbers and our home phone number. If you need me, Don't call my cell phone because it's downstairs in the kitchen. I'm going to bed. If you're going out to play with your friends or whatever, call the home line. Call me anytime middle of the night. Doesn't matter. You can call and we will answer that phone, because that phone is right there by our beds. But I will say with quite a deal of certainty, while I, like every other human who uses cell phone, am pretty addicted to my cell phone, I am not addicted to the phone the plane off phone is by my bed.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Also mentioned that there's. Jonathan heights, one of his suggestions about how we help kids not be on their phones all the time is kind of a collective action where kids, I've been recommending this my reports for several years now. We're encouraging parents to talk with their kids about making sleep a family value. In part, because I've tested so many kids, there's constant fighting, but trying to get the kid in the bed. And I asked the parents, how do you sleep? They say, I have terrible insomnia. I said, Well, let's make sleep a family goal, getting it, staying adequately rested. But this idea of collective action, where it's that the point you made about kids say it's so much of their their addiction to phone at the night is exactly what you said. The studies show that they worry about not being available for their friends, right? And I think that agreeing they get getting their friend group to agree that I'm not going to call you in your cell phone, and if I absolutely need you, I'll call in the other line. I love that, or I'll wake up my parent and they'll decide whether something everything to talk to you about. So I mean, I just getting kids to agree that we do better if we get enough sleep, and those kind of support each other in not waking each other up throughout the night.
Ned Johnson:I love it, you know. And the sort of last point on there about collective action, we know that the American Academy of Pediatricians came out with a study more than a decade ago saying that sleep for high school students at least, should not start before 830 in the morning. And this, of course, the work Lisa Lewis and her terrific book, The sleep drive teen and the efforts, the law is actually passed in California for later start times. And so for anyone who's involved in education or parent leadership, we really encourage collective effort to try to move later the school start times, because it's good. It's good for everything that matters in learning such a good one. Bill I recently asked a student how much sleep he understood teens his age needed eight to 10, he says, But that's impossible. Arguably, he was right in both counts. For by and large, teens live in a world made by and for adults, without regard for the needs of teens, including that teens have circadian rhythms that make them more night owls and not awake until an hour later than most school start times, and most kids understand the needs for and want more sleep. Lecturing about a need they already know about is not the winning play. Sadly, while few of us can change school start times, we can help our kids make the best of the systems they're working in, as you noted, but we always start with buy in. And in that recent study that we did, 75% of the students who took up our sleep challenge said it was either a little or a lot easier to get four nights of sleep in a row than they imagined, huge, right? But in my view, it only worked because they were finding the solutions for themselves. As we know to be successful, we want kids to be looking for solutions that work for them, not telling us why our ideas for them won't work. And for me, if I may bill the script that I use is asking kids something like this. If you wanted to, could you be in bed at 10 rather than 11? Wherever they are, I always ask for maybe an hour earlier. If they say yes, we talk about what challenges they could make. And true to form, I play consultant. What are some things that make it hard for you to get in bed by the time? What are some things you might try, and we're off. So here are some of our collective advice for loving parents who are tired of seeing their kids and teens tired, make sleep a family value and set a family goal of sleeping more. Consider a conversation around pay yourself first the principal from financial planning so you need probably 56, to 63, hours of sleep in a week. So how do you think you'll get that on what days? How will you spread it out? Then what's the best way to spend those other hours that you have, rather than doing everything that you want and sleeping with what little is left with your kids? Look at the obstacles you and they have, things like students may shower late and then stay up late, scrolling on their phones, waiting for their hair to dry when, maybe, I don't know, take a shower earlier so your hair dries while you're doing some last bits of homework. Know that many kids want to fall asleep earlier, but they may struggle with that. Assess whether your child has an effective wind down routine before bed, if not read about what experts call good sleep hygiene or sleep habits many people just don't know. Encourage your kids to try getting ready for bed before they're really tired. It can be so much harder to get yourself ready for bed when you're already tired. It's just easier to sit there and watch one more show or scroll one more thing on your phone. When I was a kid, my grandparents would allow me to watch one more show if I brush my teeth and change to my pajamas early and then watch the last show and then just fell into bed, talk as a family about creating technology free zones in the bedroom, yours and theirs, lead by example, people, if your child insists that she needs. Her phone because she uses it as an alarm clock. Go to the store immediately, Amazon, if you have to and buy her an alarm clock. Get the most high end kind she wants. For what it's worth, I buy alarm clocks for a lot of students. Trust me, it's money well spent. Know also that we want kids to learn to calm themselves to fall asleep, but there are some, particularly those with ADHD or anxiety problems where it's really hard. Some of them need to listen to music to fall asleep, but ideally not on the phones. Right? Remember mp three players? Go on go on eBay. Find an iPod for what it's worth. I hear that vinyl is again, somehow all the rage. Last couple of thoughts, ask your teens whether they try an experiment of trying to get four nights in a row of eight hours of sleep or more to see whether they notice in themselves a difference. That's what we did for these students in school up in Connecticut. It was unbelievable. What they shared with us. Kids are often open to try and experiment if they don't think they'll be forced to continue. You know that whole sense of control thing. And lastly, when all conversations around sleep, treat your kids respectfully. Try not to have conversations when they and you are tired, but do it when everybody is more well rested. You'll be more effective in how you communicate to them, and they'll be more effective in how they understand what you're saying. Know that kids don't like to be tired any more than you like them to be tired or like to be tired yourself they like you, are so often burning the candle at both ends to try to meet all the commitments of things they need to do and things they want to do sleep matters. You know that? We know that teens know that, but especially for teens, so do a lot of other things that also matter. So we want sleep, to have a seat at the table in the conversations around how do we spend our hours? We know that we can't make an infant fall asleep, and you can't make a teen go to bed or stay in bed or fall asleep, but we can work with them, not on them to help them be as well rested as you and they and we want them to be. I'm the well rested Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Hey folks, over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school age students who care deeply about their kids education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed, it can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend Bill Stix reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together, please get in touch with us. Visit our website, at prep matters.com, or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person, if so, you can reach us at 301-951-0350