School-based sleep promotion programs: effectiveness, feasibility and insights for future research

Abstract

Adolescent sleep restriction is prevalent in today's society and is associated with major negative consequences for adolescent development and well-being. In the present review, we examine efforts to reduce adolescent sleep restriction via school-based sleep promotion programs. Such programs effectively enhance sleep knowledge but usually do not succeed in maintaining sleep behavioral changes. This may be because insufficient consideration is given to the importance of integrating motivational components into the programs. We suggest that future interventions should consider the use of individually tailored approaches to sleep promotion. We recommend the use of motivational interviewing, which can detect individual differences in the degree of willingness to change, thus allowing motivational barriers to be adequately addressed on an individual basis. Furthermore, we suggest that individually tailored sleep promotion strategies could be delivered to a significant proportion of adolescents via internet-based communication.