12 Feb Social Policies protecting Adolescents Sleep Quality.
In a modern-day society, social policies determine many health outcomes and have a greater impact than individual choices alone. A recent article published in Psychology Today highlights the social media ban which has occurred in Australia as a key example of policy change and systems influencing the sleep health of adolescents. Throughout this article, Dr Troxel accentuates the importance of policies on sleep health discussing the detrimental attitudes associated with late night social media use from adolescents. Further, the article significantly highlights the improvements which can come from reformed sleep because of these policy changes.
Social media use can be highly correlated with detrimental behaviours within our modern-day society. For teenagers, late night scrolling is shown to have detrimental effects on one of their most important stages of the day, their sleep time. The health outcomes of adolescents who use social media late at night are harmful including a decrease in sleep quality, increase in depression rates as well as decreased output in schooling environments. For a teenager these impacts are too detrimental to be ignored. Further, individual behaviour choices are not strong enough to limit the effects of these outcomes.
Traditional guidelines based upon large bodies of work recommend having between eight to ten hours of nightly sleep for teenagers, although most on average get less than seven. Furthermore, there is robust evidence which shows that for many teens, night time scrolling consumes the hours meant for rest. Dr Troxel’s work highlights that more than 70 percent of adolescents reported they check their phones after going to bed, and many wake throughout the night to respond to notifications. Physiologically, these habits are harmful in multiple ways, the light emitted from the screens suppresses melatonin secretion and further delays circadian rhythms.
Through policy changes, reformed sleep to adolescents can result in significant improvements in their lives. Sleep is linked to many behavioural conditions, and when one improves their sleep, it is clear that cognitively the individual has advanced as well. Examples of policies influencing this have been seen in the United States of America. A study which analysed the effect of starting school hours revealed that a time which allowed for longer total sleep time led to better schooling outcomes for individuals. This example of a policy change reinforces the argument that for positive health outcomes to be achieved, a change at the system level of communities must be implemented.
References:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/rested-development/202601/teen-sleep-is-affected-not-just-by-parenting-but-by-policy
Hale, L., Hartstein, L. E., & Ceranoglu, T. A. (2025). Social Media and Sleep Health. Pediatric clinics of North America, 72(2), 165–173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pcl.2024.07.032
Troxel, W. M., Hunter, G., & Scharf, D. (2015). Say “GDNT”: Frequency of Adolescent Texting at Night. Sleep health, 1(4), 300–303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleh.2015.09.006