An interesting article in today's Boston Globe reveals that many of today's teens are exhausted -- and not just because of the typical demands of high school. Instead, teens are missing out on valuable sleep because they're busy texting at all hours of the night.
Many teens are sleeping with their phones close by, waiting for new messages to arrive. While they do fall asleep, they're often "semi-alert all night as they wait for their phone to vibrate or ring with a text," the article says.
The problem with this is that these kids "don't enter the deep sleep of Stage 4 REM sleep," the article says. It quotes Michael Rich, director of Children's Hospital Boston's Center on Media and Child Health as saying that this type of sleep "is crucial to moving experiences and lessons of the day from short-term into long-term memory -- in other words, completing the learning process."
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