UCLA CDA Co-Executive Directors, Adriana Galván and Andrew Fuligni, spoke with PBS NewsHour’s William Brangham about why sleep is so important to youth mental health.
How Teenagers’ Lack of Sleep is Taking a Toll on Their Mental Health
How Teenagers’ Lack of Sleep is Taking a Toll on Their Mental Health
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This fact sheet gives an overview of adolescent brain development and explains how access to resources, opportunities, and meaningful relationships during adolescence can build connections within our brains and with the world around us that support us into adulthood.
Brain development during adolescence is fundamentally a story of connections.
Around age 9 or 10, hormonal changes kick off a period of intense learning and development, when brain cells form, strengthen, and streamline connections in response to our experiences more rapidly than in any period of life after early childhood.
Activity increases especially in the brain networks that propel us to explore the world, learn from our mistakes, and connect with others in new ways. In turn, these new experiences prompt our brain cells to connect with other neurons in ways that help us adapt to new events and new information. These neural connections become stronger the more we use them, while unused connections are pruned away, helping the brain become more efficient at acquiring and mastering new skills and new ways of thinking.
This brain-building learning happens through direct experiences in our environments and interactive, responsive relationships—with our families and peers, in our classrooms and neighborhoods, in community activities, and even online. The resources, opportunities, and experiences we as adults provide in and out of school can help young people’s brains build the extensive networks of connections that will manage the complex knowledge and behaviors needed to navigate adulthood.
Learning by Exploring the World Around Us
One of the networks that changes significantly with the increase in hormones and dopamine at the beginning of puberty is the “reward system” in our brain. Heightened activity in this system increases the feeling of reward we get from exploring the world, taking risks, and learning from the results.
Meanwhile, the network of brain regions that make up the “social brain” also changes during adolescence. These changes help us tune into social and emotional cues, like facial expressions or social rejection and approval, and increase our desire to earn respect and contribute to others. It also enables us to learn the nuances of changing social contexts in ways that help prepare us for adult relationships.
The prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain that orchestrates critical thinking and behavioral control) undergoes its most rapid period of development during adolescence. It builds on many other systems within the brain to manage our responses to the flood of new information and intensifying emotions. Engaging with other people and our environment and learning from our successes and our mistakes, known as “action-based learning,” helps shape the prefrontal cortex by strengthening the connections within it and between it and other brain networks. We learn through repeated practice—which includes trying and sometimes failing—what is adaptive and appropriate in different situations and how to guide our behavior accordingly, in ways that equip us to pursue new forward-looking goals.
When adults provide youth with opportunities to try new things, to practice navigating emotions, and to learn from failures along the way, it helps build the brain connections that we all need to grow into healthy, thriving adults.
Policies, Experiences, and Mindsets Shape the Connecting Brain
Although we can continue to learn new skills and behaviors as adults, the adaptability of the brain during adolescence means that these connections are much more likely to form quickly in response to experiences. The extent of these changes make the adolescent years a critical window when investments in the right policies and programs for youth can shape long-term positive development.
Likewise, this makes the adolescent years a time when negative experiences including racism, other forms of discrimination, poverty, or abuse can create steeper hills for young people to climb toward a healthy adulthood. When adults ensure that all young people, especially those who have experienced earlier adversity, have what they need along their journey, they can build the skills and capacities they need to thrive as adults. This includes opportunities to explore and take healthy risks, to connect with and contribute to those around us, to make decisions and learn from the outcomes, to develop a healthy sense of identity, and to rely on support from parents or other caring adults.
Understanding how and why the brain develops during adolescence lets us provide the support young people need to build healthy connections—in their world and within their brains—that will help our youth and our communities thrive.
Four Key Insights to Promote Positive Mental Health During Adolescence
Science Spotlight | Education | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time | Foster Care | Juvenile Justice
This spotlight presents four key insights from developmental science that suggest ways that adults can help young people build positive mental health.
As a result of decades of research into adolescent brain and social development, we know what helps adolescents build positive mental health. There is ample evidence that certain experiences and relationships support adolescents’ well-being. Adults can have a positive impact on young people’s lives by putting in place policies, programs, and practices to support their development during the important years between childhood and adulthood.
We can help more of our young people build positive mental health by drawing on these four key insights from developmental science:
Studies indicate that mental health during adolescence is particularly sensitive to sleep. There is a consistent link between sleep problems and most of the psychiatric disorders that are evident during this period, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and depression. What’s more, recent studies in U.S. students aged 14 to 18 have shown both declines in mental health and reductions in the amount of sleep, although it is hard to show a causal link between the two.
While individual youth differ in the amount of sleep they need, most adolescents need between eight to 10 hours per night. Younger adolescents and those already experiencing mental health issues may require more sleep than the average.
Research (mainly in adults) has shown that regular, sufficient sleep is connected to learning and emotional regulation. For example, sleep-deprived people are more likely to have lapses in attention, deficits in memory, and slower learning in some situations than are control groups. Sleep deprivation also affects the reactivity of certain brain regions in response to experiences, which can lead to greater emotional response to stressors and an increased tendency toward risky behavior.
Policy and Program Insights
➢ Schools, employers, and youth-serving programs should structure schedules to help adolescents prioritize healthy sleep. This could include delaying school start times, limiting the hours that adolescents can work or drive on school nights, or avoiding early-morning or late-evening meetings or practice times.
➢ College admissions processes, secondary schools, and youth-serving programs should set realistic expectations of adolescents so that pressures to excel academically or build an extracurricular resume do not infringe on young people’s ability to get healthy sleep.
➢ Policymakers should fund programs that support family and caregivers’ ability to identify and promote healthy sleep habits in the home, such as quiet times before bed or limitations on technology use at night.
Exploration and risk taking are an important part of healthy development during adolescence. Numerous studies indicate that brain development during adolescence supports a crucial period of learning and discovery that appropriately entails more risk taking than earlier or later periods in our development. Our brain releases more dopamine during adolescence than during childhood or adulthood, so our reward system is more responsive to new experiences during these years than at any other time in our lives. Experimental studies from developmental psychology provide additional evidence that adolescents are more tolerant of uncertainty than adults and are also more likely than adults or younger children to actively explore new solutions when learning to perform a new task.
School-based extracurricular activities, special-interest clubs, sports, or community-based activities such as volunteering can all provide adolescents with healthy outlets for self-directed exploration. But to have the greatest impact, programs must be designed thoughtfully. For example, a 2014 meta-analysis showed,, that community service positively affected a range of measures in young people aged 12 to 20, including participants’ thoughts about themselves and their level of motivation in school. But this happened only if participants were also given an opportunity to process their experiences, such as through keeping a journal or in group discussions.
Policy and Program Insights
➢ Secondary schools and college admissions processes should encourage adolescents to take academic risks. For example, high schools could provide broad access to advanced classes and new subjects for all interested students and college admission offices could value earnest attempts at challenging coursework that may result in lower letter grades.
➢ Identify and eliminate racism and other forms of discrimination. In addition to other negative consequences for young people, such bias can result in young people from different backgrounds facing disparate consequences for taking risks that lead to mistakes. Recognize that racism and bias can cause adults to perceive Black and other minority youth as being more adult-like than their same-aged White peers.
➢ Fund and support an array of opportunities for youth to try new activities at school, at home, in the community, and in the digital world.
The network of areas in our brain that activates in social interactions matures rapidly during our adolescent years, deepening our understanding of the complex feelings, perspectives, and needs of other people. We become better able to determine who needs our help and what kind of help they might need.
Both survey work and experiments in developmental psychology show that adolescents become increasingly attuned to their position and role in the world as they age. This might manifest as a greater concern about their role among peers, or as an increased awareness of how factors such as ethnicity and economic background shape their standing in society. Adolescents also increasingly explore different ways to play a part in society through their jobs, families, and activities.
Work in behavioral psychology, contributing to others has been linked to adolescents having a greater sense of meaning and purpose—which can, in turn, promote better mental health, especially for youth from marginalized groups. Additionally, experimental interventions and surveys have shown that opportunities to contribute to others’ lives can have multiple effects on adolescent well-being. In a 2013 clinical trial, adolescents who spent two months volunteering with children aged 5 to 11 had lower levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 and cholesterol and were less likely to be overweight compared with a control group. Both body weight and biological markers of inflammation have been linked to depression and other mental health problems.
Policy and Program Insights
➢ Provide opportunities for young people to make meaningful contributions to their social groups and communities. Programs that support youth to contribute can have positive effects on their mental and physical health and support their academic success.
➢ Policies and programs should address inequities in adolescents’ opportunities to make meaningful contributions.
➢ Families are typically the first context where youth can contribute to others through common household chores. Youth from many lower-income, ethnic-minority, and immigrant families play significant roles in helping their families, and these contributions should be recognized by colleges and employers.
➢ Time-intensive caregiving can sometimes be a source of stress that negatively impacts mental health. Schools can support caregiving youth by offering flexible course schedules, community service hours for caregiving, and training for teachers and counselors to support these youth. Learn more about how to support caregiving youth.
Data show that adolescents who have secure and supportive relationships with their parents or other carers have lower levels of depression and a stronger sense of identity than do those with insecure relationships. Caring, affectionate and validating parenting behaviors—collectively known as positive parenting—have also been linked to the maturation of certain brain regions that are associated with the regulation of emotions. Despite common misperceptions, empirical research shows that parenting is often a stronger determinant of adolescent health and well-being than peer relationships.
Many studies have shown that interventions to improve relationships in families, introduced by public-health and psychology researchers over the past three decades, can reduce the use of substances and improve mental health in youth. Other studies, largely from behavioral psychology and education research, have shown that relationships with caring adults outside the family home can also be important in shaping the lives of young people. Moreover, studies examining the importance of role models suggest that formal mentoring programs, such as those involving a young adult in the community spending time with an adolescent, can positively affect the mental health of youth.
Policy and Program Insights
➢ Fund policies and programs that seek to strengthen relationships in families. Studies show promising interventions may include providing educational tools to increase parental or caregiver involvement in adolescents’ daily lives or guidance on how to improve communication between adolescents and their caregivers.
➢ Natural mentors—caring adults from youths’ existing social circles—can help support healthy development. Sports, extracurricular activities, and faith- or community-based activities can help introduce youth to natural mentors.
➢ Formal mentoring seems to be particularly important for adolescents who lack stable home environments, such as those who experience homelessness or are in the foster care system.
Young People Who Have Experienced Earlier Adversity Can Thrive with the Right Supports in Place During Adolescence
Science Spotlight | Education | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time | Foster Care | Adversity, Bias, & Discrimination | Juvenile Justice
This spotlight summarizes the impacts of early adversity on development and the interventions during adolescence that can help youth thrive.
Adolescence is a time of remarkable opportunity and growth. Throughout our lives, our brain changes and adapts to new experiences, but there are periods of development when our brain is especially responsive to input from our experiences and our environment. Adolescence—from about age 10 to age 25—is one of these windows.
During our adolescent years, connections between regions in our brains are strengthened and streamlined in response to our experiences, becoming more efficient and effective to support the skills we need for adulthood. Research has shown that crucial brain systems such as the prefrontal cortex develop rapidly during adolescence, and effects of environmental factors on this development are amplified. This makes adolescence a critical period for cognitive and social development. It also makes the adolescent years an important period of opportunity when research-informed interventions can address the impact of earlier adversity.
The Impacts of Early Adversity
When we experience adversity—such as toxic stress, trauma, and neglect—early in life, the ways our brain and body adapt to these traumas can create steeper hills for us to climb toward positive behavioral development and healthy functioning in adolescence and adulthood.
Following are research-based insights about the impact of early adversity on adolescent development.
Altered development is an adaptive response to stressful environments
When we experience stress, our brain and body respond to prepare us to handle the stressor and its consequences. For example, if we lived in an unsafe environment as a child in which we were often exposed to significant threats, we might have a heightened attention and vigilance about potential threats, which could accelerate the maturing of neural emotion circuits in our brain. This vigilance could serve an adaptive purpose, by helping us protect ourselves and avoid danger. However, once we were no longer exposed to the stressful environment, these once adaptive changes could negatively impact our social, emotional, and cognitive functioning. Support through positive relationships and research-informed interventions can help us learn behaviors that would better serve our health and wellbeing.
As adults who want to support young people, we need to understand how early adversity affects development and apply evidence-based interventions and developmentally appropriate support to address these negative impacts and help these young people thrive.
Early adversity can impact behavioral development
- Young people who have experienced early adversity may struggle with regulating their emotions, which can manifest as heightened emotional reactivity and difficulties managing stress.
- Early adversity can also impact social relationships: the disruption of secure attachments in childhood may lead to difficulties maintaining positive relationships with peers and caregivers in adolescence.
- Early adversity can impact academic success by impacting young people’s ability to pay attention, remember information, plan ahead and meet goals, display self-control, or follow multiple-step directions.
- Experiencing early adversity also increases the risk of behavioral issues such as aggression, impulsivity, and conduct disorders.
- Young people who have experienced adversity may face a higher risk of physical health problems such as heart disease and diabetes and may engage in more health risk behaviors such as violence and substance use.
- Early adversity is one of the strongest risk factors for developing mental health disorders in adolescence, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Early adversity has an impact on brain development
- The negative behavioral and health-related outcomes associated with early adversity appear to result from a cascade of intertwined changes in processes within the brain that regulate an individual’s response to threat and reward.
- Early adversity can affect the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—which helps control an individual’s physiological stress response and the release of the stress hormone cortisol.
- Early adversity has been linked to differences in the size and functioning of brain regions such as the hippocampus, amygdala, and striatum that are important for memory, emotion processing, and learning, as well as neural regulatory systems that are important for executive functioning (including the capacity to plan ahead and meet goals, display self-control, follow multiple-step directions even when interrupted, and stay focused despite distractions) and inhibitory control (the ability to suppress or redirect a thought, action, or feeling).
- Adversity may also affect the development of amygdala-prefrontal communication which can contribute to the behavioral and emotional problems often associated with experiencing trauma early in life.
These impacts on development can create steeper paths for youth who have faced earlier adversity. Adolescence offers a window when targeted support from adults could help these youth to navigate their way to a thriving adulthood.
Adolescence Presents a Critical Opportunity for Intervention
The adaptability of our brain to our experiences and relationships during adolescence make these years a time when targeted interventions may have significant impacts on brain and behavioral development, leading to long-term positive effects on development and life outcomes.
The effectiveness of an intervention can vary based on individual differences in trauma response, the nature of the adversity, and the quality of support and resources available to an individual. There are many forms of early adversity, so it is important to focus closely on the nature of the adversity a young person has experienced as well as the unique needs of a specific youth to design the most effective and targeted intervention strategy.
Successful interventions also require adequate resources and support to ensure that youth can access these resources. Programs that increase access to resources and build supportive environments for young people who have experienced adversity are crucial for reducing inequalities and supporting healthy brain and behavioral development for all young people. For example, state-level programs such as cash benefits for low-income families have been shown to mitigate the negative effects of low income on brain development and mental health.
Following are examples of interventions that may be effective for adolescents who experienced early life adversity.
➢ Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a therapeutic approach that focuses on identifying and changing negative thought patterns and behaviors. CBT can help youth who were exposed to trauma regulate their emotions and respond to stress. Trauma-focused CBT that is specifically tailored to address negative responses to childhood trauma and adversity have been shown to be especially effective for treating PTSD in youth who have experienced adversity.
➢ Mindfulness and meditation can be effective in adolescents who have experienced various forms of early adversity and have been shown to support cognitive abilities, mental and physical health, and academic performance. Meditation treatment can help improve attention and academic performance by strengthened communication between frontal brain systems in adolescents who experienced early childhood neglect. Such findings suggest that mindfulness-based interventions may impact adolescents’ regulatory neural systems.
➢ Reward-based therapies can be effective, because adolescents tend to show heightened sensitivity to rewards (including social, monetary, or even sweet-tasting rewards) that provide incentives for engaging in positive behaviors. Research shows that rewards—which can range from delicious food to fun or relaxing activities with friends—may help encourage adolescents to participate in treatment and seek out enjoyable and rewarding activities. Therapies focused on positive reinforcement may be especially effective for improving mood and reducing stress reactivity in vulnerable individuals.
➢ Safety signal learning helps adolescents learn to identify cues that a situation is safe and reduce the perception of threat, which counteracts the hyperarousal and hypervigilance that can develop following trauma exposure. Identifying safety signals can help youth regulate their emotions and decrease their physical and cognitive reactivity to stress when faced with stressors or trauma-related triggers. Safety signal learning may be effective even if other approaches, such as standard exposure therapy, are unsuccessful.
➢ Positive relationships with supportive adults and peers during adolescence are critical for promoting healthy emotional development after a young person has faced earlier adversity. These kinds of developmental relationships can occur through connections with peers, parents, or other caring adults such as teachers or coaches, and can nourish young people and support their healthy development and growth, like a root system supporting a tree.
Research suggests that adolescents who live in high-quality caregiving environments in which their emotional and physical needs are met experience lower levels of anxiety and depression and are better able to plan ahead and meet goals, display self-control, follow multiple-step directions even when interrupted, and stay focused despite distractions—even if they were originally raised in caregiving environments that did not meet their emotional or physical needs, such as institutions. Given the benefits of high-quality caregiving for adolescent resilience, therapies focusing on improving caregiver-adolescent relationships can be useful for promoting positive mental health outcomes in adolescence.
Peer relationships and friendships also play an important role in helping young people process and regulate their emotions. Group therapy sessions and peer support groups can be especially effective and help adolescents connect with other young people with similar lived experiences. Connecting with peers also helps foster a sense of belonging by providing social support and strengthening social networks.
➢ Psychoeducation can help adolescents feel a sense of agency over their situation by providing information about how their experiences may have impacted their brain and behavior. Learning about the effects of early experiences can help empower youth to understand more about themselves and seek appropriate support. Combining psychoeducation with interventions that promote self-awareness, self-esteem, and a positive self-concept can counteract effects of early adversity and promote a positive sense of identity. Interventions that target growth mindset—or the belief that personal characteristics are changeable—may be especially impactful for successfully improving academic performance and mental health.
Similarly, recognizing and uplifting an adolescent’s cultural background can help build a positive
➢ Academic support such as tutoring and educational programs can help young people exposed to adversity catch up academically and develop a sense of self-efficacy if they have experienced negative impacts on academic and cognitive functioning.
➢ Extracurricular activities, hobbies, and/or volunteering are also promising avenues for helping adolescents develop a