School closures led to more sleep and better quality of life for adolescents

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.

Funny enough in 2014 I almost moved to Austin. I had an offer from a local startup. Thankfully I picked up some bad vibes in the interviews and said no. A couple of months later it turned out that the company had been fraudulently winning contracts from the state with shady connections. I would have been unemployed 3 months after moving there.

My wife and I have talked about moving to Texas but we wouldn't be very close to Austin. We would probably get a big piece of land in a decidedly less hip part of the state.

I love the Hill Country, and if you haven't had a chance you should go check out San Antonio. The Riverwalk is a tourist trap that's fun for kids, but the restaurants in other parts of San Antonio phenomenal. Tejano culture/food is amazing. I really like New Braunfels too.

Colorado as a state is a pretty great place. Our governor has been very good in the pandemic and in my opinion has probably been one of the best Democratic governors. He has a pretty strong background in business and from the very beginning of the pandemic was engaging routinely with business leaders including executives at the company I was working at then. He has that perfect mix of classic liberal values with a dash of libertarianism.

Unfortunately the county we live in has gone a little off the rails when it comes to public health. Although I am an atheist, my wife works at a Christian school and my kids get a big tuition discount, so I enrolled both of them in that school. The academics at the school are top-notch and it's pretty cool that my son's calculus and computer science teacher graduated from MIT a few years ago. The public high school doesn't compare. The fact that it was barely open last year is a whole separate issue. One of the first things I noticed is that the county health department has routinely harassed this school. They never have set foot on the public schools that my kids were at previously. I know some of the principals and confirmed that they have never had a single inspection from the county health department.

I have a strong suspicion but obviously can't prove, that the current county health director doesn't like Christians. I suspect that she has a lot of emotional scars since she is a lesbian and likely spent decades wanting to get married and having people who claim to represent Christianity preventing her from doing so. I don't fault her for that, but I do fault her for allowing her emotional feelings to clearly create a bias that influences her very much targeted and selective enforcement. Another aspect of her that I really dislike is the fact that she is a PhD in sports injuries, but acts as if this education is remotely related to viral epidemiology. She really doesn't appear to know what she's talking about and has aggressively complained in some leaked emails about the governor not "being strict enough because of his libertarian streak". She requires that student athletes wear masks while playing sports. This is insanity to me. The idea that cloth masks are effective pretty much became out of date once Delta hit. With omicron it's just absurd. We are talking about measles level transmissibility and it's been known for decades that cloth masks aren't effective for that kind of virus. The county requires that all of the athletes be vaccinated as well, so the mask requirement on top of that is a bit hard to swallow.

None of this foolishness is going to age well. My subjective opinion after reading the leaked emails is that she has definitely allowed the power to go to her head. The language she uses is very aggressive and indicates a big us versus them mentality when it comes to religious schools.

These kinds of local government officials have increasingly made Texas look good to us.

Have you traveled recently? It's a bit of a shock to go from a place where people are relatively unpanicked and show up on the west coast and realize that people are grossly overestimating their risk and acting out from that. They don't seem to be aware of how normal life is in most of the country. They have this picture of Florida as being a place where body bags are being piled up outside of hospitals. It must be painful for the minority of those folks who stop and look at the data and realize that most of the sacrifices they have made in their lives have been for nothing. Florida is spiking in new cases like many states, but the number per 100,000 is less than New York's is. That really must bother people in NY.

I just wanted to comment on how interesting it is to observe differences in upbringing and culture :)

When reading the parent comment, I naturally assumed they were talking about sleeping in class, as that wasy solution to the sleep problem as well. To this day I routinely meet people that seem to file this possibility away in the "impossible" drawer of their minds or assume that "this person doesn't look like trash that sleeps during class" and conclude that there's been a misunderstanding.

Just to be clear, I am not lashing out at you (or anyone), and just wanted to make this comment more vivid to emphasize how expectations and assumptions make it all too easy to misinterpret a statement as a "typo" of a different statement altogether.

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".

I get it now.