By Dr. Geraldo Nunes Vieira Rizzo
Today´s young students have at least two good reasons to remember the North American Thomas Alva Edison. The first reason is the fact that he was a brilliant student and the greatest inventor of all times. Many of his teachers believed that he had a dysfunctional brain disease, since he always wanted to know the reasons of the facts and demanded detailed explanations of what was taught. Besides that, he invented the electric light bulb and introduced on October 21st, 1879 the Modern Age of the Light.

I recalled Edison because, with his huge contributions to science, life has changed immensely. Just to give an example of that change, in 1910 people slept an average of 9 hours per night; currently the sleep average is seven hours of sleep. Today we have almost a hundred television channels, stores that are open for 24 hours, parties that begin in the early morning, we have internet and so on. Today our sleep time has to face many temptations caused by the artificial light. Sometimes they are not just temptations, but necessities, as it is in the case of the shift work. Many industries produce night and day and an average of 30 million workers in the United States are forced to leave their natural rhythms. The teenagers, during the period of lessons, but mainly in their holidays, disadjust (disregulate) their biological clocks, staying awake until late and waking up late too. During the school year they have to wake up around 6 o’clock in the morning to go to school, usually sleepy, tired, and irritated since they went late to bed, many times after midnight. Some recent studies have called the attention of parents and educators to the harms of deprivation of sleep at this age.

The duration of nocturnal sleep varies with the age: children sleep in average 11 hours, adults need 7 to 8 hours and teenagers require more than 9 hours of sleep per night to keep an excellent level of attention. Does that happen during the school year? Scientific studies demonstrate that those kids are not sleeping enough and that they are usually sleeping during the wrong time to their biological clock. While they “work” very well in the evening and in the early night, they can hardly work in the morning. The consequences of taking teenagers to school at a wrong circadian cycle are low efficiency, bad grades, irritability and relationship problems. David Brown, from the Sleep Evaluation Centre in Manchester, NH, found in a group of 166 students, 64% believing that the deprivation of sleep damaged their performance at school.

The parents need to realise the importance of sleep in relation to the children’s performance at school. They need to show their kids how bad it is for the organism going to late parties during the week. Students must realise that they cannot “function” with a few hours of sleep or that the irregular schedule of sleep does intervene in their lives. Teachers should rethink the school schedule in view of the dynamics of our society and should accept the statistics which demonstrate that students in the afternoon learn better than those going to the school in the morning.

If Thomas Edison changed the relation between night and sleep by inventing the electric light bulb, we hope that the return to classes aware our society of the need of an adequate sleep-awake rhythm independently of the lights around us. Observing those guidelines, students will certainly have a better performance at school.

About the Author: Dr. Geraldo Nunes Vieira Rizzo is a Neurologist, with a postgraduate degree in Clinical Neurophysiology, and is a specialist in the Medicine of Sleep. Member of the American and Brazilian Association of Sleep Medicine, Dr. Geraldo Rizzo is one of the Directors of the Institute of Clinical Neurophysiology at both the Moinhos de Vento and Mãe de Deus Hospitals and is also responsible for the SONOLAB – Laboratory of Sleep, all in Porto Allegre, Brazil.

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Tags: sleep cycle, sleep disorder, sleep medicine, sleep study, students and sleep