It's hard for Zachary Lane to wake up in time for school every day.
"I have four alarms set and it still takes me a long time to wake me up," says Lane, a 17-year-old high school junior in Zionsville, Ind.
He says he regularly gets detention for being tardy. "I get to school and I'm talked to like I'm attempting to skip school — like I'm attempting to be truant," he says. "I feel terrible. It's awful."
And when Lane does make it to class on time, he has a hard time focusing.
"I feel kind of like lagging behind myself," he says. "I don't feel totally there."
To try to better understand kids like Lane, researchers surveyed 2,017 students in 19 schools in Fairfax County, Va., about a variety of factors related to sleep. They were in seventh to 12th grades.
The researchers wanted to know more about the associations between the amount of sleep students get, how sleepy they are in the daytime and a brain function known as self-regulation — the ability to control emotions, cognitive functions and behavior.
Night owls tend to have the hardest time with self-regulation, the researchers found. These students have more memory problems, are more impulsive, and get irritated and frustrated more easily.
[For more of this story, written by Rob Stein, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...amp;utm_medium=email]
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