Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (17 page)

By the time Montes moved on from Cleveland to become the head strength and conditioning coach for the Texas Rangers, he had crafted a plan unique among professional sports trainers. From here on out, he decreed, his players would sleep. It was easier said than done. There was no controlling the travel schedule and the painful routine of arriving at hotels at three o’clock in the morning. So Montes set about searching for areas that he could control. He rounded up his pitchers and made each one record what time he went to bed, what time he woke up, and the quality of each night’s sleep on a five-point scale. Hoping to speed the transition of each player’s circadian rhythm to the time zone where the team was competing, Montes told pitchers to leave their curtains open when they went to sleep in their hotel rooms so that they would wake up with sunlight in their eyes. When one reliever seemed to be especially sleepy during home games, Montes cornered him. “Listen, I understand that on the road you like to go out at night. But at home, what’s the problem?” he asked. The pitcher replied that he had young children. Sleeping at home meant giving his wife a break from handling them on her own.

Montes found himself armed with a rare accounting of his players’ bodies over twenty-four hours. But it wasn’t enough. He then decided that the pitching staff would report to the ballpark hours before everyone else. Pitchers arrived at the ballpark early, only to be told exactly when to take a nap and for how long based on the quantity and quality of their sleep over the past week. Like weight lifting, sleep became another part of training that required precision to be effective. “We had to teach them how to take a proper nap,” Montes told me.

Proper naps were twenty minutes long, though each player was allotted thirty minutes to give him time to fall asleep. To make sure napping was easy, Montes set up an iPod to play what he describes as “relaxing meditation music” in a dark room. He made sure that a player’s hands and feet were covered with a blanket, and lectured each man about the importance of keeping warm while asleep. If the head coach wanted to find one of his pitchers in the afternoon before a night game, Montes would tell him that he would have to wait until the naptime was over. Few knew it at the time, but the starting pitchers of the Texas Rangers that season often prepared for games in a dark room in the bowels of the stadium, riding out the dip in their circadian rhythms with a nap.

Baseball players, as a rule, are suspicious of experimenting with their training patterns. But after a week or so of the new sleeping routine, each player told Montes that he felt stronger and more energetic during games. Montes didn’t want to cause friction with other coaches on the team who scoffed at the idea that napping could craft a stronger ballplayer, so he asked that his pitchers keep their new schedules quiet. It soon spread anyway. “One thing about baseball—and it doesn’t matter if you’re a pitcher or a position player—if you’re successful, everyone wants to copy it,” Montes said.

After one extra-innings game that went late into the night, the Rangers were packing up in the visitors’ locker room in Kansas City. A plane would take them to Minneapolis that night. They wouldn’t get into their hotel rooms until five the next morning. After less than ten hours at the hotel, team buses would arrive to shuttle them to the Metrodome for that night’s game against the Twins. Montes went from player to player, recommending that they sleep with their blinds open and plan on getting to the ballpark early the next day to take a nap. It was an experiment to see whether his techniques could make a difference beyond his small circle of pitchers.

The Rangers essentially fielded two teams that night against the Twins. Players who didn’t nap were out of sequence, missing what should have been easy defensive plays and struggling to connect at the plate. Those who arrived early at the ballpark to get extra sleep, meanwhile, performed about as well as they did any other night, and they demonstrated few of the side effects of the long night of travel and the sleep deprivation that had accumulated from the grueling road trip. The recovery plan wasn’t enough to change the outcome of the ballgame—the Rangers lost that night—but the score was certainly closer than it would have been otherwise. The circadian rhythm wasn’t conquered, but it was tamed. For the rest of the season, Montes’s napping room was crowded.

It is all well and good that athletes can throw baseballs faster and speed down mountains quicker because they mastered the circadian rhythm, you might be saying to yourself. But how does this relate to people whose lives don’t involve ball fields or coaches? The answer lies in one group that often spends several years of their lives in a constant state of sleep-deprived jet lag. They most likely live in your town, and may even sleep down the hallway from you. They go by a name coined less than eighty years ago: teenagers.

Edina is a wealthy suburb that sits less than ten miles outside of Minneapolis. Corporate executives and white-collar workers choose to live there in large part because of the quality of its public schools. It didn’t seem like a place that would spark a radical change in education that still reverberates in school districts across the country. In the early 1990s, one of Edina’s school board members attended a medical conference. There, he listened in rapt attention to a sleep researcher describe how teenagers’ circadian rhythms differ from their parents’ and siblings’.

Biology’s cruel joke goes something like this: As a teenage body goes through puberty, its circadian rhythm essentially shifts three hours backward. Suddenly, going to bed at nine or ten o’clock at night isn’t just a drag, but close to a biological impossibility. Studies of teenagers around the globe have found that adolescent brains do not start releasing melatonin until around eleven o’clock at night and keep pumping out the hormone well past sunrise. Adults, meanwhile, have little-to-no melatonin in their bodies when they wake up. With all that melatonin surging through their bloodstream, teenagers who are forced to be awake before eight in the morning are often barely alert and want nothing more than to give in to their body’s demands and fall back asleep. Because of the shift in their circadian rhythm, asking a teenager to perform well in a classroom during the early morning is like asking him or her to fly across the country and instantly adjust to the new time zone—and then do the same thing every night, for four years. If professional football players had to do that, they would be lucky to win one game.

The teenage circadian rhythm has become a problem only in the last hundred years. Teenagers before then were typically seen as young adults who worked to support the family, whether on the farm or in a trade apprenticeship if they lived in a city, and were given more control over their schedule. In 1900, only 8 percent of eighteen-year-olds had a high school diploma. By 1940, the proportion of high school graduates climbed to 30 percent, and by 1960 almost 70 percent U.S. teenagers finished high school. Although the quality of public education has vastly improved over that time, schools haven’t been as kind to the teenage body. Teenagers in the past were expected to spend part of their days in the classroom and then either work at an after-school job or complete a round of chores on the farm. To fit in time for both, the school day started as early as 7:00 a.m. This early start time remained constant despite sweeping cultural changes over the successive decades, including a sharp reduction in the percentage of young adults who work at an after-school job. Band practice, sports teams, drama club, and other activities that add to a college application have taken the place of paid employment for many teenagers.

The teenage body hasn’t kept up with the demands placed on it. A study by researchers at the University of Kentucky found that the average high school senior sleeps only six and a half hours each night, about three-fourths of what sleep researchers consider necessary for adolescents. Many students find themselves falling asleep in 7:00 a.m. classes no matter how early they try to go to sleep the night before. In one telling example of the impact of early start times, a researcher found that most students earned higher grades in classes that started later in the day for the simple reason that they were more likely to stay awake for the entire lesson.

The lack of sleep affects the teenage brain in similar ways to the adult brain, only more so. Chronic sleep deprivation in adolescents diminishes the brain’s ability to learn new information, and can lead to emotional issues like depression and aggression. Researchers now see sleep problems as a cause, and not a side effect, of teenage depression. In one study by researchers at Columbia University, teens who went to bed at 10:00 p.m. or earlier were much less likely to suffer from depression or suicidal thoughts than those who regularly stayed awake well after midnight.

Teenage sleep deprivation appears to be a uniquely American problem. One report found that the average high school in Europe starts at 9:00 a.m., and that far fewer students complain about not getting enough sleep. But back in Minnesota, the first bell at Edina’s high school rang at 7:25 a.m.

That was when Edina’s school board proposed a solution that was radical in its simplicity. Since students who were awake were more likely to learn something than those who were asleep, the board decided to push the high school’s starting time an hour and five minutes later, to 8:30. It was the first time in the nation that a school district changed its schedule to accommodate teenagers’ sleeping habits. The response wasn’t what the board members expected. Some parents complained that the new schedule would take time away from after-school sports or school clubs. Others said that they needed their children home to babysit their siblings. Yet the most persistent complaint was that pushing the starting time back wouldn’t result in better-rested kids, but the opposite. Critics argued that teenagers would simply use the time to stay up even later, compounding the problem and making parents’ lives more difficult.

Nevertheless, Edina’s teenagers started the 1996–1997 school year on the new, later schedule. The same year, Kyla Wahlstrom became a fixture at district high schools. A former elementary-school principal turned university professor, Wahlstrom conducts research into school policies and how they impact students. She had no prior experience with sleep research, but she knew enough about how schools worked to evaluate the effects of the later starting time. She spent her days interviewing parents, sports coaches, teachers, and students to determine whether the new starting time resulted in a meaningful change or whether it was just the impractical academic theory some called it.

She presented her findings a year later. They were unambiguous. Despite the fears of some parents, teenagers did in fact spend their extra hour sleeping, and reported that they came to school feeling rested and alert. At the same time, the number of on-campus fights fell, fewer students reported feeling depressed to their counselors, and the dropout rate slowed. Coaches pushed back practice times until later in the afternoon, and participation in sports didn’t suffer.

The only time that was compromised was the time that teenagers spent being teenagers. “I talked to hundreds of students and the preferred hangout time was always two to four,” Wahlstrom told me. “What this has done has severely limited that time. In a sense, they’ve traded sleeping for hanging out.” The effect was quantifiable. The year before the district shifted its starting time, the top 10 percent of students in Edina’s high school averaged a combined 1,288 out of 1,600 on their SAT scores. The next year, the top 10 percent averaged 1,500. Researchers couldn’t pin the improvement on anything but extra sleep. The head of the College Board, the company the administers that test, called the results “truly flabbergasting.”

Following Edina’s lead, Minneapolis pushed its high school starting times from 7:15 to 8:40. The two districts were essentially opposites. Edina is an affluent town in which 90 percent of the students are white. In Minneapolis, most students were minorities, and three out of every four teenagers in a classroom came from families whose incomes were low enough to qualify them for subsidized school lunches.

The differences between the urban school district and its suburban counterpart gave Wahlstrom an opportunity to test whether extra sleep did more than just improve the already fortunate lives of wealthy students in a good school district. Just like the previous year in Edina, she became a fixture at Minneapolis’s schools, interviewing faculty, parents, and students to collect firsthand data that charted the effects of starting later in the morning. And just like their suburban neighbors, Minneapolis students posted better grades, dropped out less frequently, and attended first-period classes more often following the shift to a later schedule. “The two school districts couldn’t have been more different, but there were identical sleep habits between the kids,” Wahlstrom told me. “If sleep habits aren’t culturally connected, then social, economic, or racial status would have no bearing on them. That patterns were exactly what you would expect if it was biology.”

Wahlstrom’s research led to a boom in studies on the starting times at schools. Other districts followed suit, and found effects that sometimes went beyond scholastics. In Lexington, Kentucky, for instance, pushing the starting time back led to a 16 percent reduction in the number of teenage car accidents during a year in which teenage accident rates rose 9 percent for the state as a whole. In Rhode Island, pushing starting times back a half hour resulted in a forty-five-minute increase in the average amount of time that the average student spent sleeping. “Our mornings are a whole lot nicer now,” the lead researcher of the study, whose daughter was a high school student, said at the time.

Allowing children to get additional sleep may help solve the problem of school bullying as well. A 2011 University of Michigan study tracked nearly 350 elementary school children. About a third of the students regularly bullied their classmates. Researchers found that the children with behavioral issues were twice as likely to have excessive daytime sleepiness or to snore, two symptoms of a persistent sleep disorder. Louise O’Brien, an assistant professor of sleep medicine at the University of Michigan who was part of the research team, argued that “the hypothesis is that impaired sleep does affect areas of the brain. If that’s disrupted, then emotional regulation and decision-making capabilities are impaired.”