FOR KIDS: Making light of sleep2

Figueiro predicted that getting bright light early in the day would help get the melatonin flowing earlier in the evening. If so, the students who wore goggles would get sleepy later. And that’s what she found happened in the experiment.

After five days, the students who wore goggles began producing melatonin 30 minutes later than students in the no-goggles group. Thirty minutes may not sound like much, but the difference could be seen: Kids who wore goggles got sleepy later in the evening and stayed up later. They were also less alert during the day and scored lower on the performance tests.

“That shows that it’s important to get enough light in the morning to make sure you are synchronized with solar day,” Figueiro says. “Especially if you find it hard to get out of bed in the morning or get to sleep at night.”

Finding your rhythm

To get morning light during the school year, researchers suggest, use your morning break — say, sometime around 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. — to go outdoors or look out a window. Also, try to spend a few minutes outside before going to school.

And wearing orange goggles to block out blue light may also be helpful. The trick is to wear them in the evening, not in the morning. Worn in the evening, blue-blocker goggles could protect you from getting too much daylight when your body should be winding down.

Carskadon, the sleep researcher at Brown University, says that’s because adolescents and teens may be less sensitive to light in the morning and more sensitive to light in the evening. Working at the computer or watching TV late at night can make matters worse. Computer screens, TVs and other electronic devices emit some blue light. The extra light input can push your master clock’s sense of night ever later.

In her studies, Carskadon is trying to figure out what’s going on in the brain to produce this delay. She runs a summer sleep camp to study sleep patterns in adolescents and teens. Hers is no ordinary camp with horseback riding and canoeing. It’s a research lab housed underground. In this windowless environment, all outside time cues are eliminated. No sunlight, no clocks, no TV or texting. Teens play, read, eat and, of course, sleep. Monitors record their brain waves,