A motivational group-based sleep intervention with regular electronic text reminders may help sleep-deprived adolescents get more sleep on weeknights and improve their daytime alertness, a study in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry has found.
Ngan Yin Chan, Ph.D., of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and colleagues recruited 212 adolescents between 12 and 18 years old who reported getting less than seven hours of sleep per weeknight for the past month for this randomized study. Half of the adolescents received the motivational intervention, which consisted of weekly 60-to-75-minute treatment sessions in groups of six to eight participants for four weeks and three weeks of electronic text reminders provided every night. The sessions included:
- Basic sleep knowledge and motivational enhancement
- Identifying the discrepancy between current maladaptive behavior and their values by reviewing individual sleep habits/sleep diary
- Strategies facilitating the implementation of the targeted behavior
- Setting specific goal behavior/bedtime based on individual sleep habits
Participants kept a sleep diary and wore an actigraphy watch for seven consecutive days at each assessment point. All participants were assessed at baseline, postintervention, three months, and six months.
Among 203 participants included in the final analysis, those in the intervention group reported getting 20 to 35 minutes more sleep per day after the intervention compared with before the intervention. Sleep diary and actigraphy data showed that these participants had earlier weekday bedtimes at postintervention and later wake-up times at the three-month follow-up compared with the control group.
“A delay in wake-up time observed in the intervention group was an unanticipated but somehow reasonable result, which might partly indicate that the motivational-based sleep intervention raised a more lasting awareness about the importance of sleep,” Chan and colleagues wrote.
At the six-month follow-up, participants in the intervention group had maintained their earlier bedtimes and longer sleep duration. They also reported reduced daytime sleepiness and slightly better academic performance. However, even though their sleep duration improved, they were still averaging slightly more than six hours per day after the study, which is not adequate for adolescents.
“The study findings suggested the need to include motivational group-based sleep intervention with regular text reminders into school health intervention with the ultimate aim to improve sleep duration and daytime functioning in school-aged adolescents,” the researchers concluded.
For related information, see the Psychiatric News article “Sleep Problems in Late Childhood, Early Adolescence Linked to Psychiatric Symptoms.”
(Image: Getty Images/iStock/ollaweila)
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