Quantifying teenagers' sleep patterns and sex differences in social jetlag using at-home sleep monitoring

Abstract

Sleep plays an important role in the formative developmental processes occurring during the teenage years. At the same time, teenagers' changing bioregulatory mechanisms and psychosocial factors converge into the so-called social jetlag, a sleep timing misalignment between weekdays and weekends. The aim of this study was to quantify the course of day-to-day changes in sleep/wake patterns and sleep stage distributions, and the sex differences in social jetlag among teenagers. We observed the sleep of 156 teenagers (58.3% girls, 15-16 years) using a novel sleep monitor over the course of up to 10 consecutive days. 1323 nights of data were analyzed using multilevel modeling. On average, participants went to bed at 23:41, woke up at 07:48, slept for 7.7 h and had 85.5% sleep efficiency. Sleep stage distributions were in line with normative data. We found later sleep onset and offset, longer time in bed, sleep duration, and sleep onset latency (p = .001), greater proportion of light sleep and lower proportion of deep sleep, and poorer sleep efficiency (all p < .001) on weekend nights starting on Friday and Saturday. On Friday nights, girls had longer time awake after sleep onset (p = .020) than boys. On Friday and Saturday nights, girls fell asleep earlier (p < .001 and p = .006, respectively). On Saturday nights, girls had shorter sleep latency (p = .024), and better sleep efficiency (p = .019) than boys. In sum, teenagers' sleep patterns reflected healthy, albeit somewhat short sleep. There was convincing evidence of social jetlag, and girls exhibited less severe social jetlag than boys.

Keywords: Gender; Recovery; School; School week; Sleep debt; Sleeping; Students; Weekend.