If you were so tired, why couldn't you just sleep earlier at night? If I'm remembering my own teen years correctly, most of us chose to stay up late not because we couldn't sleep, but because we just wanted to, sleep be damned.
Everyone complains about having to get up early, but the sleep deprivation is self inflicted. If you're tired, you can sleep at 9pm.
Don't take this personally (I really do mean it) but I think this attitude is part of the problem. My best, most alert hours are after ten pm. I can't just will those away, and I've tried. There is enormous social stigma around being a late riser. We're characterized as having low self control or accused of laziness. Perhaps that's deserved in some cases, but morning people can be those things too. I can go to bed at six pm and I'll guarantee you I'll still be a wreck at six am.
Night owls work well in the evening. Even if some of them can force themselves to operate early, is it reasonable to expect them to sacrifice their best hours?
Every body is governed by circadian rhythm. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to be, but the majority tends to overrule the minority in this great experiment we call modern society. Unfortunately, the "majority" are not developing children, but adults in authority who are less affected by disruptions to their sleep and don't have to prioritize the health and wellbeing of their charges and so don't.
The second reason is more artificial. In the US, homework is given without any consideration for work or life schedules, let alone what other classes are assigning. I went to a "school of excellence" where I took eight classes each day, five days a week, and they all assigned roughly an hour's worth of homework each night. I had no time to work and barely any time to participate in extracurriculars without staying up each night until 11pm. Because I lived in a different city, I generally had to leave by 5:45am to make my zero period.
Can you tell me what my younger self could have done differently so they were able to be asleep by 9pm?
Consensus has emerged in the last few years that the circadian rhythm is mostly regulated hormonally, with a strong genetic factor. So that would be akin to telling a black person to "just get whiter skin".
> Everyone complains about having to get up early, but the sleep deprivation is self inflicted. If you're tired, you can sleep at 9pm.
Do you have a reliable way of doing so? If yes, you are sitting on a potential billion-dollar innovation. I'm surprised you haven't monetized it yet.
There's enough artificial light that circadian rhythm barely applies to teens. Yes, I can change my sleep schedule, and have done so multiple times. If you're tired enough to be "sleep deprived" then you're going to be perfectly capable of going to sleep at 10 instead of 1am, barring some insomniac disorder. It's dark outside at both times. Circadian rhythm doesn't overrule real sleep deprivation. If you're tired, you can sleep at night.
> There's enough artificial light that circadian rhythm barely applies to teens.
Citation needed. Circadian rhythm is influenced by a lot more than simply ambiant light.
> If you're tired enough to be "sleep deprived" then you're going to be perfectly capable of going to sleep at 10 instead of 1am, barring some insomniac disorder
Insomniac disorders... like delayed hormonal response causing the circadian rhythm to be out of phase?
> If you're tired, you can sleep at night.
Note that the author eventually sleeps. It's simply out of phase.
I have tried sleeping earlier on times I'm sleep deprived, the only result is me staying in my bed for hours on end without sleeping. As a kid, as I mentioned in my original post, my parents would put me to bed with lights out around 9. I wasn't able to sleep despite being sleep deprived.
Nowadays, I work in a different time zone and due to work and meetings, I sleep around 3am every day. I fall asleep instantly and get my full 7-8 hours of sleep every day. Having the correct rhythm changes everything. I've never been able to do that earlier in the day and I tend to have extreme difficulty adjusting and sleeping earlier if I travel and have to deal with jetlag.
You're lucky but stop assuming that everyone is the same as you and that everyone can sleep early. If you've never known the feeling of being extremely tired and sleep deprived yet not being able to sleep then, I don't see how you can make generalisations and assume that it's the case for everyone else??
At this point, there's plenty of research that shows that your basic understanding is wrong, that circadian rhythm are not only a function of ambient light.
I cannot relate to being sleepy, lying in bed at night, yet unable to sleep. That sounds like the definition of an insomnia disorder. It seems to me that for most of the population, sleeping when sleepy is not going to be an impossible ask. Much of the difficulty goes away when you avoid artificial light, like from phones, in the evenings. It's just that teens would prefer to be sleepy rather than go to bed early and avoid phone.
When I was a teen, I didn't get much artificial light. There was no phones yet to ruin that since it was in the late 90s and iirc incandescent light bulbs do not emit as much of the problematic wavelength as modern lightbulbs. It was also light out in my bedroom between 9 and 9:30pm further reducing how much artificial light I got.
Nowadays, I'm extremely careful to use blue light filters in the evening, I use f.lux or equivalent on any devices I own (due to my work, I cannot avoid using those devices at night) and I make sure to choose appropriate lighting for my house.
It's not insomnia because if I go to sleep at 3am, I fall asleep instantly. When I go to sleep at that time and wake up every day around 10am, 11am (which I luckily can do because as an adult, I work remotely), I can be well rested, having a regular schedule and sleep very quickly. If it were insomnia, then the issue would exist
If, however, I try to go to sleep before midnight, even if I feel tired, I do not fall asleep. I'm pretty much the textbook definition of a night owl and pretty much an extreme one at that. It's not for lack of trying, because, when I first started working, I had to wake up early, had to try to go to sleep early and was unable to. It's been a significant handicap and it's why I had to find ways to get jobs that work with my schedule to improve my quality of life.
You might be right that teens have a tendency to want to push bedtime but there's also been plenty of studies that have shown that teens have better sleep when going to sleep late and waking up late. At this point, it's well established that people have different chronotype and a small minority are "night owls" to varying degrees.
Please read the research and don't make generalisations based on your own experience. I've been told before by acquaintances and family that not going to bed early and waking up early is unhealthy, lazy, name any negative adjectives you can think of. And yes, if I try hard, I can wake up early every weekday, it's just that I'll be exhausted by the end of the week, will need the weekend to recover and will have very poor quality of life.
> Much of the difficulty goes away when you avoid artificial light, like from phones, in the evenings. It's just that teens would prefer to be sleepy rather than go to bed early and avoid phone
Ahh ok, this isn't medical research. It's the good old boomer rant that "phone bad".
No, I couldn't sleep earlier, simple as that. In fact, I went on to have more serious insomnia around the time I left high school, which lasted for a few years.
Everyone complains about having to get up early, but the sleep deprivation is self inflicted. If you're tired, you can sleep at 9pm.