14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new study conducted by investigators at the Brigham Young University, it would appear that 7 hours of sleep per night is the optimal duration for teenagers.
This finding runs contradictory to federally imposed sleep guidelines for this segment of the population, which calls for about 9 hours of sleep per night. The team says that it has data to support its new claims, PsychCentral reports.
The study was conducted on 16- to 18-year-olds. Experts analyzed their academic performances during a trial period, and determined that sleeping 7 hours each night can be directly correlated with increased average performances.
BYU experts are keen to point out that they are not advocating sleep deprivation in any way. They are just saying that 7 hours may represent just the right amount of sleep young adults should get at that age.
“We’re not talking about sleep deprivation. The data simply says that seven hours is optimal at that age,” BYU researcher Eric Eide says. The expert, who is also the author of the new study, says that the findings do not extend to other age ranges.
Together with BYU economics professor Mark Showalter, Eide conducted the new work as the first in a larger series of investigations designed to explain how sleep patterns and duration affect people's health and education.
The team says that current methodologies being used to assess how much people should sleep entail placing test subjects in a room, then asking them to sleep until they are satisfied. But Showalter says that something is wrong with this approach, drawing a parallel to food studies.
“If you used that same approach for a guideline on how much people should eat, you would put them in a well-stocked pantry and just watch how much they ate until they felt satisfied,” he explains.
In the research paper, which appears in the latest issue of the Eastern Economics Journal, the team argues that 10-year-olds should sleep for 9 – 9.5 hours, 12-year-olds for about 8 – 8.5 hours and 16+-year-olds for 7 hours. The team studied data from 1,724 primary and secondary school students.
“From the other end, if a kid is only getting 5.5 hours of sleep a night because he’s overscheduled, he would perform better if he got 90 minutes more each night,” Showalter concludes.