Promoting healthy sleep in teenagers who stay up late at night can help them align with school schedules and reduce their risk of depression.
Many schools aren't designed for "night owls," which is why these teens are more likely to experience depression.
Researchers have found a way to help these teenagers adjust to their natural sleep patterns while meeting their school obligations.
How it was tested
This is particularly good news for teenagers with depression, as they often report staying up late.
While 40% of teenagers identify as night owls, around 80% of teenagers with depression have late-night sleep patterns.
The key to this success was teaching these night owls how to structure their lives so they could sleep as late as possible while gradually training their bodies to fall asleep a bit earlier.
This intervention has shown that addressing sleep is crucial for improving depression symptoms in some teenagers, and they need a daily routine that matches their natural sleep-wake cycle.
The study involved 42 teenagers with clinical depression who participated in an intervention called the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian Intervention.
They were compared to another group that received education on leading a healthy lifestyle.
Both groups kept sleep diaries, used devices to measure sleep quality, and had weekly therapy sessions over eight weeks.
It's effective!
At the beginning of the study, all teenagers had clinically significant depression, but after six months of treatment, the intervention group's depression scores improved significantly compared to the control group.
A larger study will be open for enrollment to 200 teenagers in the Bay Area in the near future.
It's essential to recognize that many adolescents with depression who naturally stay up late aren't lazy; it's often their biology at play.
