Let Teenagers Sleep In

> A school should serve the houses 1-2 miles around.

This tends to be how suburban elementary schools are, but high schools require more resources per school (for all the facilities for sports and enrichment programs), so there are fewer, larger high schools.

Having one high school serve only a 1-2 mile area would only work out if you have a bunch of 100-story condos in the 1-2 mile area. Otherwise, where are all these kids even coming from?

I grew up in a town of 50,000 people. The population density of it, according to Wikipedia, is 1,082/sq mi. The town has three high schools to serve its population, and they're all just about full. If it had more schools, though, then each school would have less than 200 students apiee. Where would the budget for these schools' facilities come from?

I used to believe like you do. What I believed to be my natural schedule--what I naturally gravitated to--was the nite-owl 1am to between 9-10am or so sleep schedule. In school, I always felt sleep deprived when I had to wake up around 6.

But I recently spent the better part of five months going to bed at 9:30pm and waking up at 4:30am. Despite getting less sleep overall, I've never felt as well rested or alert throughout the day as I did during those five months and I've never had an easier time getting to sleep. The key, for me, was also modifying my eating schedule and screen usage (computer, phone, TV). I often wonder how many people who simply accept that they're naturally nite owls are using blue-light-emitting screens late into the night and eating their last meal of the day so late that their body isn't ready for sleep. Because I know that once I adjusted those aspects of my life, my sleep schedule magically responded.

The difficulty in maintaining that schedule has been societal pressures. Those five months were spent living outside of a city where noise, light and social norms around dinner time all make it very difficult to maintain while having any sort of social life. I'm still searching for a way to reconcile my sleep schedule with my intended lifestyle.

> we've all collectively heard nearly everything that you can suggest

Have you heard it suggested that insomnia is frequently a symptom of ADHD?

I have ADHD. It was undiagnosed until I was 22. And, through my whole life until that point, my sleep was "delicate" in the way you're describing, requiring careful set-up to avoid insomnia.

Then I was diagnosed with, and medicated for, ADHD. Sleep is pretty easy now. No care required.

One reason for that might be the way the medication (which I take in the morning) affects me as it's wearing off in the evening—it creates a feeling which is sort of the opposite of insomnia. With insomnia, there's a grating sensation that comes from the fact that you're still awake and a weariness demanding you sleep, but your brain won't shut up, so you can't. With the stimulant dose end-phase, meanwhile, there's no sensation of tiredness at all, but your brain is very quiet, not spontaneously thinking anything (in fact it's rather hard to spontaneously think), so you can fall asleep, even though there's no compulsion to. You just decide to, and then... you do.

Another reason might be that ADHD is apparently the brain being stuck in a state below the average behavioral-arousal set-point—essentially, being always half-asleep. As such, you don't get tired when you "should", because your brain wasn't working as hard. A car that stays in neutral half the time will still have a half-full gas tank at the end of the day. (This is also why people advise exercise for insomnia, but physical exercise doesn't really cause a brain with ADHD to engage any more than usual.) Whereas, a brain with ADHD that is fed a stimulant, will have its behavioral arousal level modified toward the normal level, expending more metabolic energy throughout the day, generating more waste products, and thereby reaching a point where it demands to enter a maintenance phase (sleep) sooner.

No matter the reason, I have to say that it works.

Interestingly, according to my psychiatrist, even if you don't think you have ADHD, other neurologically-founded sleep disorders (e.g. narcolepsy) are mostly thought to be disorders of behavioural activation as well—and, as such, are treated with stimulants, just like ADHD. They may as well all be different presentations of the same underlying pathology, given that the treatments for them are interchangeable.

This rings so true to me.

Throughout high school I had the worst attendance record in the entire grade. For a few days after having stayed home, though, I was much sharper than the other sleepy kids. Then I started to feel tired again.

Come on.

Condo towers? The suburb I grew up in was all single family homes with 2-car garages, 6,600 people per square mile and 14,000 people total. We have one high school in the center with ~900 students. Walkable for all of them. There are two elementary schools around half that size with even smaller coverage areas.

We were unambiguously a suburb. 1/6th that density would have been nightmarish sprawl. Berkeley, also mostly suburban, is 12,000 per square mile! That’s my point.