How to sleep well for teenagers

• Different people need different amounts of sleep. Take time to understand how much sleep you actually need before you adjust anything else.
• When you are a teenager, your body clock shifts later, meaning you may find it hard to fall asleep at the same time as the rest of your family. If you are lying awake for hours, trying to fall asleep, try going to bed a bit later, until you are regularly falling asleep quickly. Don’t spend lots of time lying in bed when you’re not trying to sleep.
• Make sure you get as much natural light as possible in the daytime, especially first thing in the morning. If you can add some exercise as well, that might help.
• Make your bedroom as dark, quiet, cool, and non-stimulating as possible.
• Turn the brightness down on any screens in the evening and stop using your phone or tablet at least an hour before bed.
• Charge your phone anywhere but in your bedroom (this applies to the whole family, not just you!).
• Try to sleep and wake up at the same time every day (even at the weekends). Avoid regular, long lie-ins as they can make it harder to fall asleep at night.
• Build a calm bedtime routine and use relaxation strategies to help you wind down.
• Finally, if you can’t get to sleep, try not to give yourself a hard time about it. Get up, do something relaxing for a few minutes, and then try again.

Sleep keeps your brain and body working properly. You might think you’re just lying in bed and not doing very much overnight, but there’s actually a lot going on when you sleep. Getting the right amount of sleep every night helps your brain and body work at their best. It helps with everything, including how you do at school or college, how well you can play games and sports, and your relationships with friends and family. We’re all better versions of ourselves when we’ve had enough sleep.

There are 2 ways we can think about the sleep we get:

• quantity (are we getting the right amount of sleep?)
• quality (is the sleep good enough to do the job?)

 Both are important, but knowing some of the science might help.

This is a hypnogram. It shows you what a typical night’s sleep looks like to sleep scientists:

There are four stages of sleep: Stage N1 and N2 (the lightest stages of sleep) to Stage N3 (the deepest sleep), and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep is shown in red on the diagram above.

• Deep sleep is important for growth, physical healing, and some hormone regulation. It is what ‘recharges your batteries’ to give you energy for the next day.
• REM and light sleep play an important role in memory, learning, and emotional regulation

We cycle through these stages several times each night, going from light sleep to deep sleep, to REM, and back again. We get more deep sleep towards the beginning of the night and more REM sleep towards the end. REM sleep happens when you are close to waking, and not when you are deeply asleep.

We all wake up briefly and fall back to sleep several times a night, usually without remembering that we have woken.

How long it takes you to get to sleep is called sleep latency. Some people find it easier to fall asleep than others, but most people fall asleep within about 30 minutes.

Taking longer than you want to fall asleep is one of the biggest problems teenagers have when getting to sleep. One of the most important reasons for this is one that lots of adults (parents, teachers, and even doctors) often don’t understand – teenage brains get sleepier later than younger children’s and adults’ brains.

Your body clock is the bit of your brain that tells you when you should be awake or asleep (circadian rhythm or circadian drive).

Most adults’ body clock tells them it’s time to go to sleep at about 10-11pm, but everyone is different. Some people naturally have body clocks that are set a bit earlier (morning larks, who tend to wake up and go to bed earlier), and some have later-set clocks (night owls, who tend to wake up and go to bed later).

When you have already been awake for most of the day, your brain and body start to feel tired. To keep you awake in the evening, your body clock sends a very strong ‘stay awake’ signal to the rest of your brain and body to keep you alert. This is why, even if you have felt sleepy in the afternoon, you often start to feel more awake the closer to bedtime it gets. As you approach your natural sleep time, your brain switches off this alerting signal, allowing your sleepiness to take over, which helps you fall asleep.

During puberty, most teenagers’ body clocks shift later. This means your natural ‘best’ time to fall asleep might be a lot later than your parents’ or carers’, usually 11pm-midnight. While you can usually manage to get to sleep a little bit before your natural best sleep time, going to sleep a lot earlier than this is really difficult. This is because your body clock is still sending the strong ‘stay awake’ signal. This is a bit like jet-lag when you travel across time zones – your brain’s clock is set to a different time.

If you go to bed too early for your body clock, you can end up lying in bed feeling cross that everyone is telling you to go to sleep – and that is not good for getting to sleep. For teenagers struggling to get to sleep, one trick is to shift bedtime slightly later (10.30pm is a good start). How easily you fall asleep is more important than the time you fall asleep (although you need to think about both).

When it starts to get dark, your body clock releases a hormone called melatonin from your brain, which sends a signal to the rest of your body that it is time to sleep. Melatonin’s production, and how good it is at encouraging you to fall asleep, is affected by many things (including light levels, the amount of activity before bedtime, and how stressed or worried you might be feeling).

To give your body clock the best chance getting you to sleep at the right time each night, doing these things can all help:

• Get as much natural light throughout the day as you can. Aim for at least 20 minutes of natural light when you first wake up. This helps to set your body clock for the day. Outdoor natural light, even on a grey and cloudy day, is always better for keeping your body clock running smoothly than most indoor light.
• Keep lights at a low level before bedtime. This will help your melatonin to work better.
• Regular exercise helps you sleep. The more active you are in the day, the more naturally sleepy you are likely to be at bedtime. For teenagers especially, getting exercise in the morning means you are more likely to fall asleep at the ‘right’ time at night. Try not to do exercise too close to bedtime though, as this can make it harder to fall asleep.
• Avoid caffeinated or sugary drinks, especially after lunch. Caffeine gives a short-acting buzz that can make you feel more awake, but it hangs around in your body for a long time. This can push your body clock later, and make your night-time sleep quality worse, which makes you feel even more tired the next day. Caffeine can be found in some strange places – did you know chocolate has caffeine in it? Or that green tea has as much caffeine as regular tea?
• Avoid daytime naps. The more sleep you get in the day, the less sleep you will need at night, and the harder it will be to get to sleep at the right time. If you really need a nap, make sure it is for no longer than 20 minutes, and not after 5pm.
• Don’t spend any time on your bed when you aren’t sleeping (no playing games, reading, chatting, or phone use on your bed in the daytime). It stops your brain linking your bed with being asleep, and you want your brain to look at your bed and think ‘sleep’.
• Brains work best for sleep if they are given a regular timetable. If your bedtimes and wake times vary too much, your brain gets confused about when it should be sleeping. As much as possible, keep bedtimes and wake times consistent.
• Avoid regular long lie-ins at the weekend and try to get up by around 9-10am most weekend days. The longer you sleep in the morning, the more difficult it can be to go to sleep on time at night.
• Build a calm bedtime routine that works for you, involving non-screen activities, for at least 1 hour before bed. Your bedroom should be calming, cool, and non-stimulating. You’re looking for things that help your brain relax and wind down. For some people, mindfulness apps like Headspace can teach some great ways to do this. It is best to practice these during the day, so that you can do them easily without using your phone at night. See the ’Tips for cutting down your device use’ section below for more information about why this is important.
• Try not to give yourself a hard time if you don’t fall asleep. Reassure yourself that you will fall asleep eventually. Try not to watch the clock or force yourself to sleep. The more you think about not sleeping, the harder it usually is to sleep. If you can’t fall asleep within about 20-30 minutes, staying in bed means you end up lying there worrying about not getting to sleep. It is best to get out of bed, go and do a calming activity (such as reading or listening to music), and then try again 15-20 minutes later, remembering to do any Headspace exercises again. Think of it as trying to trick your brain by distracting it, to give your natural sleepiness a better chance to help get you back to sleep.

There is no ‘right’ amount of sleep that every teenager should get. This is another things adults often get wrong. The amount of sleep you need is unique to you. Most teenagers need 9-9.5 hours of sleep each night, but the range of ‘normal’ is between 7 and 11 hours. If you are getting less than 7 hours of sleep most nights, you are probably not getting enough.

To understand how much sleep you need, you can do an experiment during the longer holidays from school. Set yourself the task of going to sleep at the same time each night, and let yourself wake up naturally. For the first few nights, you’ll probably over-sleep a bit as you catch up on lost sleep. After a few days, you will probably find that you go to sleep and wake up at roughly the same times each day. Whatever that amount of sleep is, that is your ‘sleep need’.

If you fall asleep at 11pm each night and wake up at 8.30am, it means your sleep need is 9.5 hours.

Imagine that it is school term time, and you need to get up at 7am, to get to school on time. This means your ‘sleep opportunity’ (amount of time your schedule allows for sleep), is only 8 hours. You need 9.5 hours, but you’ve only got time to get 8 hours sleep, and that means you are missing out on a lot of sleep every night.

Making small changes at either end of your sleep time can make a big difference to how you feel for the day. Getting to sleep 15 minutes earlier every night, or changing your morning routine so you can get an extra 15 minutes of sleep in the morning each day, adds up, and could mean you get an extra 2.5 hours sleep a week. If you need more sleep than average, this is even more important.

If getting the perfect amount of sleep is difficult, it is even more important to think about all the things that affect the quality of the sleep you get.

Phones and screens

Screens can affect your sleep. The blue electronic light from screens interferes with the production of melatonin in your brain. This is because the blue light tricks our brains into thinking that it is still daylight. This interferes with our production of melatonin (the sleep hormone). Using the yellow light or night time filters will not help with this.

If you are often on screen devices into the early hours of the morning, your brain eventually thinks the time when it is meant to be light and dark has changed, and rewires your body clock to match. This will push the time your brain thinks you are meant to be going to sleep even later, making getting to sleep between 10 and 11pm harder.

Because most apps and games (and TV programmes) are designed to keep you interested and alert, using screens can make trying to even out your sleep pattern even more difficult.

• Stop using your phone for at least an hour before bedtime. Read a book or listen to some music instead.
• Turn the brightness of your screens down as low as you can in the evening.
• Having your phone on, next to your bed overnight can disrupt your sleep quality. If you briefly wake up, look at your phone, and settle back to sleep (sometimes without remembering that you have), that brief pulse of light can affect the quality of the sleep you get afterwards. If a notification comes in, that might trigger you to wake up. It is best to have no screen devices in your bedroom at night. Leave phones in another room at night, and get your whole family to do the same.
• If you become worried that you are missing out on things because you are not checking your phone, have a look at some of the anxiety/worry tips at the end of this page.

It is normal to wake briefly several times in a night. For some people, these brief wakings turn into full wakings, and it can be hard to get back to sleep again. The important question is not ‘why am I waking up?’, but ‘why am I not falling back to sleep again?’

When you are falling asleep at the beginning of the night, you will have very specific environmental conditions (such as light, noise and temperature levels). These are the conditions that your brain associates with sleep (sleep associations).

When you wake up in the night, your brain looks for the same conditions to fall back to sleep easily. If anything has changed since you first fell asleep (such as a light being turned off, someone leaving the room, a change in temperature) then you are more likely to wake fully and find it harder to get back to sleep again. Keeping your bedroom conditions the same through the night helps reduce this.

We can use how the brain works in a positive way by using:

• White noise. Consistent noise through the night can reassure your brain everything is still safe and secure. This can be as simple as the static noise from a white noise app, or music or sounds (such as rain, or waves) on a Bluetooth speaker (preferably with the phone in another room). Let this play all night and turn it off promptly when you wake up to start your day.
• Fans. Fans can have a double benefit. As well as helping you feel cool (the ideal sleeping temperature is 16-18C), the rhythmic noise acts as white noise.
• Essential oils. Having a consistent smell that we associate with sleep can help. Lavender or bergamot essential oil (placed on some cotton wool in a cup by the bedside and removed promptly in the morning) are often good for this. Lavender also helps some people to relax at the end of the day, which can help with getting to sleep.
• Lights. If you need a light in the bedroom overnight, a red lightbulb is better (as the red spectrum of light does not interfere as much with melatonin), but the most important thing is for it not to be too bright.

A lot of people find that as they relax to go to sleep they start thinking about everything that has happened in the day. There are also less distractions at night, which can make our thoughts seem even ‘louder’. There are more ideas about how to relieve your stress here.

Try these ideas to help calm your thoughts:

• Start by acknowledging your feelings and reassuring yourself that your feelings are valid.
• Make a dedicated time and space during the day to talk about your thoughts and feelings with someone that you trust. This should not be too late as talking through difficult feelings too close to bedtime can raise anxieties, and make getting to sleep more difficult.
• Draw/write out your feelings in the daytime, or reach out to someone who is feeling the same way and let them know how you are doing.  
• If you find that thoughts and feelings are coming up when you are trying to sleep, write them down on a piece of paper and put them in a box away from your bed. The next day, have a look at them. You might find that some of the feelings are less scary in the daytime. If you are still worried, talk them through with an adult that you trust.
• Carry out some body-based relaxation exercises to try and calm your body down before bed. Use an app like Headspace or search the internet for ‘short breathing exercises’ in the daytime to practise, and then repeat them before you go to sleep.
• If you want to read about how to manage thoughts and feelings more, have a look at ‘Mind your head’ by Juno Dawson, or ‘Stuff that sucks’ by Ben Sedley.