Abstract
Current research shows that sleeping is a necessity and without it there are many consequences, however there has been debates between whether or not naps are good for neurological health, specifically for adolescents, and if so, there is not a concluded amount of time recommended to sleep for that period. With each person having their own individual lifestyles and genetics, the problem becomes even more complex. In this proposal, we design an experiment for San Francisco Bay Area high school students to follow their sleep schedule for a year as well as their lifestyle, nutrition, exercise, and school performance.
Introduction
Literature Review
From as far back as the 1970s, scientific research has been done on the processes of sleep and how it is regulated (Colten). There are two processes in our bodies for sleep, one to promote sleep (Process S) and the other to promote wakefulness (Process C). Both are part of your body’s biological clock, the circadian rhythm. Process S builds up over the day and it peaks right before bedtime and then goes away while sleeping, and process C builds up over the day to counter the sleepy effects of process S, but it declines a while before bedtime which is to help entice a person to go to sleep. These processes are also affected by environmental cues such as light which will change your circadian rhythm based on how much light your retina senses so that your body’s clock aligns with the external clock. The process your body goes through while asleep is also outlined.
First there are 2 types of sleep, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep which has 4 stages. Your body starts off in stage 1 of NREM sleep where brain activity, eye movement, muscle activity, blood pressure, and breathing goes down slightly. Here you are the easiest to wake, and a few minutes later you transition to the other stages with brain activity, eye movement, muscle activity, blood pressure, and breathing going lower as the stages go on. Stage 3 and 4 are also sometimes considered as one stage called slow wave sleep where you are at the deepest part of sleep where you are hardest to wake, and this is also where the most restorative effects of sleep happen.
After Stages 3 and 4 of your sleep, your body goes into REM sleep where everything goes back up to a higher level but still not as high as being awake. During this time is when dreams occur so your muscles are paralyzed so you don’t act out your dreams. The cycle then repeats itself, with REM sleep lasting longer each time until in the last ⅓ of sleep where it is at its longest and stage 3 and 4 of NREM sleep sometimes going away. This deeper understanding of how the body makes the sleep process happen gives us an explanation as to why the benefits of sleep and detriments of sleep deprivation happens. It can also help us understand how certain sleep disorders such as insomnia, which is related to damaged neurons in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, happen.
Sleep is essential to adolescents specifically as they develop throughout puberty. It was found that short wave sleep gets shorter and stage 2 gets longer as puberty happens likely due to changes in hormones. During puberty, it was also noted that during early stages of puberty daytime sleepiness increases. However, the same research paper shows that despite adolescents seeming to perform the best with 9 to 10 hours of sleep, the average sleep time of an 8th grader is about 7.9 hours. Over ¼ of high school and college students were found to be sleep deprived as well.
However, what is counted as “good sleep” is highly debated. In one literature review, they defined good sleep as sleep with the right duration, right timing and consistency, good quality, no disturbances, and no sleep disorders (Medic, 2017). They also found risk factors of sleep to be lifestyle choices such as drinking caffeine, shift work, or attending university, environmental factors which were excessive noise and light, psychological factors such as anxiety and stress, sleep disorders like insomnia, and medical conditions such as pain, diabetes, and kidney disease. They also found short term consequences of sleep disruption which were an increased reactivity to stress, somatic problems, psychological issues such as trouble dealing with emotions, mood swings, bad memory, and inability to focus, and a reduced quality of life for those who had underlying medical conditions such as chronic kidney disease. Long term consequences were also detailed as cardiovascular issues such as increased blood pressure, increased risk of hypertension, and higher cholesterol, metabolic issues like obesity and type 2 diabetes, increased risk of cancer, as well as an increased mortality rate to all causes.
Another study done by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute on sleep deprivation is done. It explains a few of the positive effects that sleep can have. These effects are an increased ability to learn and retain information or skills, make decisions, solve problems, control behavior, and cope with change. The negative effects of not getting enough sleep included depression, difficulty getting along with others, as well as an increased risk of heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, and obesity. Another effect of not getting enough good sleep was found to be microsleep which are brief moments of falling asleep when you normally would be awake sometimes without the person even realizing they fell asleep.
Sleep duration is also important to one’s health as well as sleep quality; however, how much depends on many different factors, including age. As age increases, it is found that less sleep is required with babies needing the most at 12-16 hours daily and adults needing 7-8 hours of sleep. Sleeping just 1 or 2 hours less each night was found to have similar effects on a person’s ability to function as though they hadn’t slept for a day or two since these seemingly small number of hours lost can add up quickly. They also found that napping is helpful in giving a short increase in alertness and performance, but it doesn’t provide the same time for your body to do the same functions it does when it sleeps so it isn’t able to catch up on sleep like most people think and napping for too long or at the wrong time might affect your circadian rhythm as well. Sleeping in on days off can help make you feel better, it throws off your circadian rhythm. Additionally, napping is made as part of normal life such as siestas in Spanish culture, while in America most people live their lives with naps every so often if they feel more tired than usual on some days (Adler, 2021). As a result, napping has a controversial reputation, with even some countries having differing cultures surrounding it.
As adolescents, we have also seen many things influencing people’s sleep besides biological or environmental factors. These things include electronics becoming more popular, stress, and people wanting to stay up to enjoy time with friends or family. There have also been many things to try and encourage people to sleep more. This involves people telling us how much sleep we actually need and how it can help us, but most people tend to not care too much since they believe they can just put it off until later or ignore it completely.
Rationale
Current research doesn’t have enough information on choosing to sleep for shorter times and napping more during the day, specifically on adolescents in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this research proposal, we apply the research methods, including surveys, checkups, and sleep journals to be able to monitor sleep on teens in our community.
Design & Methodology
In our experiment, we want to focus on adolescents and first survey them to see what their usual sleep schedule is like and how long they nap. After which we would select a certain number of people to then further ask them what their mental state is like, their weight, their blood pressure, and their height. We would also ask people around the subject how they perceive the subject. Next we would assign them to certain groups and each group would have a specific sleeping schedule with one having no naps and the others having varying lengths of naps during the afternoon, and for about a year do a monthly check in to see how they feel and if how others perceive them has changed.
Subjects
The project would be done over the year. The people we would like to look at for this study are adolescents from the San Francisco Bay Area. The World Health Organization considers adolescents as people who are ranging from the age of 10-19.
Procedures
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Make a survey asking to find out their mental status, blood sugar level, blood pressure, and weight
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Ability to focus
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How tired they are throughout the day
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Ability to control behavior
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Ability to solve problems
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How they feel when waking up from napping or sleeping
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Make a second survey to send to their family members about how they think about the subject’s emotional stability and behavior
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Get as many adolescents as we can to take survey 1 and give survey 2 to their friend and family
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Get their consent to take part of the experiment since we would be making them possible make big sleeping changes
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Record the results
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Seperate people into 5 groups with naps always being from 2-3 pm
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Only sleep at night for 9 hours
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Sleep 8 hours and nap 10 min
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Sleep 8 hours and nap 20 min
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Sleep 9 hours and nap 10 min
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Sleep 9 hours and nap 20 min
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Each group follows their group’s sleep schedule
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Every two weeks make subjects take survey 1 again and have their friends and family take survey 2 again
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After 8 months to a year make subjects do survey 1 one more time and have friends and family do survey 2 one more time
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Record final results
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Graph it
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Compare results of survey 1 and 2 over time to see if anything changed in any groups
Data Analysis
Data will be collected by having subject’s and the subject’s friends and families take surveys to find out their mental status, blood pressure, and weight as well as how their close ones consider the subject’s behavior and emotional status. For graphing it, it would be done on scatter plots. There would be 3 scatter plots. They all would have time on the x-axis with intervals of every two weeks with a legend showing 5 different colors and shapes. Each group would be represented by one color and shape. The difference between the three would be the y-axis which would have blood sugar level for one, blood pressure for another, and weight for the final one. This would help us visualize if any group’s blood pressure, sugar level, or weight had any significant changes during the experiment.
There would also be two bar graphs. Both graphs would have the 5 groups with each group having a column for positive or negative change. One graph would have how many participants felt a change in their mental status, behavior, or emotions over the course of the experiment as the y-axis, and the other graph would have how many family members and friends of the participant noticed a change in behavior and emotions. This would help us visualize if there were any significant mental effects that the changed sleep schedule had on these people.
Discussion
This project would result in information that would relate to what we found in the third paper in the literature review as well as the paper by Lana Adler in 2021 on siestas/mid day naps. In our experiment, we would be seeing if lost sleep really can’t be made up through naps routinely as well as if having routine naps can provide positive effects to your weight and heart condition. In 2007, an experiment was also done to find the relation between midday napping with heart disease and death. The difference between our project and this one is that we will be focusing on adolescents instead of on adults so we can see what the effect would be on younger people, especially when they are also going through puberty, but there also likely wouldn’t be any information we could get on the relationship between midday naps and coronary death (Naska et al., 2007). We also would be changing most of the participant’s sleeping schedule and napping amount so that what may happen to your body by suddenly changing your sleep schedule and also so the body isn’t already adjusted to the schedule so we can see more of a change, but a side effect is that some people may not be able to adjust well and as a result can’t follow the schedule they are given.
There are a few problems that might affect the results of our experiment. One of these is if the participants decide to lie about their answers on the survey, this includes the subjects as well as their family and friends. Another issue may be different living environments such as some people living with loud family or neighbors which may result in difficult sleeping in general. Another issue might be that the person isn’t able to adjust to their new sleeping schedule so they can’t sleep the right amount or nap. We may also run into the issue of people choosing to not follow their schedule and pretend like they have been doing it.
At the end of the project, we would have five graphs, three scatter plots and two bar graphs. There would be one scatter plot about the blood pressure of the 5 groups over time, another scatter plot about the sugar levels of the 5 groups over time, and finally a scatter plot about the 5 group members' weight over time. The first bar graph would be how many members in each of the 5 groups expressed a positive or negative change in their mental status over time and another bar graph about how many family members and friends of members in the 5 groups expressed a positive or negative change in the participant’s behavior and emotions. Our hypothesis about the result of our experiment is that group A would notice small levels of change while group B and C would notice multiple negative effects, and group D and E would notice positive effects. These graphs would show us if blood pressure, sugar levels, or weight changes as well as any psychological changes occur due to these changes in sleep schedules which we can analyze and see if any groups noticed significant changes that back up what our hypothesis is.
Informed Decision Making and Confidentiality Consent Forms
Consent is important in this experiment because we would be making them change their sleep schedule into something they may not be used to, and as a result of the experiment they may have health conditions change or increased stress. We would have to let them know that they will have to follow this schedule for up to a year, fill out a survey every two weeks, and that they may experience psychological changes or physical conditions changing throughout the experiment.
Risk-Benefit Assessment
By asking for consent, we risk the individual's mental health as well as physical health worsening. The worst case scenario is that the participant gets depressed, overweight/obese, diabetes, lower academic ability, or a heart disease. The benefit of taking these risks is that we can find out if napping routinely can be a positive thing that more people should participate in. If these risks do not happen then the participant would also notice an improvement in their daily life due to increased awareness, ability to focus and learn, energy, emotional stability, and better social abilities.
Our reason for proposing this is how much the possible benefits of this research can help adolescents cope with rising stress in the San Francisco Bay Area. It can result in better mental and physical health for adolescents around the world who are important for our future. If the results of the experiment are positive then it could also lead to evidence for a reason to change up the current systems we have such as opening up time in school and work to take a nap. Positive or negative effects can also be used to make adolescents follow a proper sleep schedule. If there are negative results, they will start to see that napping to catch up on sleep is a bad idea and that they should instead get more sleep at night consistently, but if there are positive results then they may follow it and be healthier because of it. The worst case scenarios of the experiment are also not likely to happen unless there are underlying health conditions already and if positive results are to come out, it would decrease the risk of children having health conditions such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Bibliography
Adler, L. (2021, June 15). History of the Siesta. Sleep.org. https://www.sleep.org/history-of-siesta/.
Colten, H. R. (1970, January 1). Sleep Physiology. Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation: An Unmet Public Health Problem. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19956/.
Medic, G., Wille, M., & Hemels, M. E. (2017, May 19). Short- and long-term health consequences of sleep disruption. Nature and science of sleep. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5449130/
Naska, A., Oikonomou, E., Trichopoulou, A., Psaltopoulou, T., & Trichopoulos, D. (2007, February 12). Siesta in healthy adults and coronary mortality in the general population. Archives of internal medicine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17296887/.
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. (n.d.). Sleep Deprivation and Deficiency. National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/sleep-deprivation-and-deficiency
