Over the past two years, we’ve published four articles on the role sleep plays in the lives of adolescents. One article was about sleep in a second-hand way. We talked about the impact of school start times on academic performance among teenagers in Seattle. Later start times meant more sleep, which translated into better graders for the teens. Read that article here: Delayed High School Start Times in Seattle: Positive
If you have a teen, you may wonder why they always seem to be sleeping. Or tired. They might have a hard time getting up in the morning, and you’ve heard reports that they’re falling asleep in class. Or they may come straight home from school and take a nap. True, school keeps them busy. And true, they may be involved in many extracurricular activities, which can keep them later
While exercise has not yet been shown to cure any mental health disorder on its own, there are mountains of evidence showing its benefits on mood, self-concept, and work ethic. Exercise has a huge effect on a teen’s emotional wellbeing and even improves cognition. It also has a host of physical benefits: it increases heart rate, reduces stress, improves sleep, lowers blood pressure, and increases energy. How Exercise Helps with
Sports have a host of benefits for teens. From social advantages to academic enrichment to physical health, it seems like there’s nothing better than playing on your high school team. At the same time, there’s a dark underbelly in the world of teen athletics. Research looking at thousands of teen athletes around America has produced some slightly unsettling correlations. This data shows that while high school athletes are at higher
Note: this is just one part of our series on Sports: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where we discuss all the ways athletic participation can influence teens. Read our previous articles here and here. The most aggressive sports player in history might arguably be Jack Tatum. Tatum was a football player with the Oakland Raiders. He was so violent that his nickname was “Assassin.” In 1978, Tatum collided
When Do Kids Stop Liking PE? A group of researchers in Switzerland studied a group of 1,200 kids age 8-12 for two years to determine their feelings about their physical education (PE) classes. The researchers launched the study to examine possible explanations for the worldwide trend in youth obesity and overweight. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were over 41 million children under the age of five who
A story published by National Public Radio (NPR) in May caught our attention. Here’s the headline: “Playing Teen Sports May Protect From Some Damages of Childhood Trauma” Like many things we see in the media that intersect with our specialty – helping adolescents struggling with mental health and/or substance use disorders – we thought to ourselves: “Hmmm. Interesting – if true.” It turns out that this interesting piece of news
Increasing Prevalence of ADHD Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been a hot topic in education, pediatric medicine, and parenting for decades. The condition has been known in various forms by various names for at least a hundred years, but the current definition was crystallized in the year 2000 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in their definitive publication “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition” (DSM-IV)
If you have been diagnosed with depression, there are a number of lifestyle changes you can make that can help your treatment progress. One is diet. Specifically, the Mediterranean diet. A Spanish study analyzed the effects of the Mediterranean diet on almost 10,000 participants. Results found a correlation of the diet to a reduced risk of depression. This diet, inspired by the culinary fares of Italy, Greece, and Spain, emphasizes
Exercise and You If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times: a regular exercise regimen keeps you healthy, strong, emotionally balanced, and adds years to your life. Experts recommend at least an hour of activity a day for children, teenagers, adults, and people of retirement age. No matter how old you are, no matter what point in life you find yourself, you need to keep your body
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