I'm sure gaming and screen-time don't help, but it's fairly well known that younger people tend to stay up late and have difficulty waking up in the morning. In high school I never understood why they did certain things like offer AP classes only at 1st period or offer any "difficult" core classes 1st period (well, I knew it was convenient for them, but horrible for the average student). California just passed a law saying schools must start after 8am.
I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.
Sleepiness in humans is driven by the number of hours they remain awake and by time of day, more or less independently. In teens sleep onset as a result of these are both delayed relative to children and adults.
Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
> teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
This is, at least in my experience, completely untrue. When I play Starcraft, I'll easily play till 2-3 am before I start feeling tired. And I'd continue playing, but I'm literally succumbing to exhaustion at that point.
If I force myself to before that, say midnight, I start feeling tired almost immediately. And if I don't play at all, and don't substitute gaming with some equally stimulating activity, I can easily be tired and ready to sleep by 10 or 11 pm.
Not to mention, in addition to the mental stimulation, the impact of staring at bright blue light on natural melatonin production.
Yeah, I'm nearly 50, and I never start a new game of anything after 9 because it wakes me up to much, I can easily find myself still playing and not tired at all after midnight. I need at least an hour of winding down after gaming before bed.
Back when I played MMOs (DAoC and WoW) I thought I was a night person. When I finally quit those games, I realized I wasn't a night person at all. I had just been forcing myself awake. Not only did I start going to be earlier, but sleep came much easier.
Sure. But “Starcraft” in this instance is a metaphor for any activity. And he’s wasn’t staying up until 2-3 but until 1-2, and he wasn’t an adult. I didn’t have Starcraft growing up and I was still up that late, even if I was just lying in bed.
I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.