Does Mindfulness Training Improve Children’s Sleep?

According to one study, endangered children slept more than an hour per night after attending a mindfulness curriculum in elementary school. This study, led by Stanford University School of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine..

This is the first time to evaluate how school-based mindfulness training changes a child’s sleep using polysomnography technology that measures brain activity. The curriculum taught children how to relax and manage stress by paying attention to the present, but it did not teach them how to get more sleep.

“Children who received the curriculum slept 74 minutes more per night on average than before the intervention,” said the lead author of the study, sleep expert and professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University. Dr. Ruth O’Hara said. .. “It’s a big change.”

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REM sleep, which helps to integrate memories, including dreaming, has become longer even for children who have learned the technique. “They got almost 30 minutes of REM sleep,” said Lowell W. and Professor Josephine Q. Berry O’Hara.

“It’s really amazing. There is theoretical, animal and human evidence to suggest that it is a very important sleep stage for neuronal development and cognitive and emotional function development,” O’Hara said. I added.

The children surveyed lived in two low-income, predominantly Hispanic communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. One community has been intervened. The other acted as a control. Both had high rates of crime and violence, and families faced stress such as food insecurity and crowded and unstable housing.

These conditions are a recipe for sleep deprivation, said lead researchers in the study, Dr. Victor Karion, MD, John A. Turner, and a donating professor of child and adolescent psychiatry. Karion, who directs Stanford University’s early life stress and resilience program, began research to help young people manage the impact of life in stressful environments.

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But getting the endangered children to sleep better is not just a matter of telling them to sleep better or maintaining normal bedtime. “You have to relax to fall asleep, but they’re having a hard time letting go of their experience,” Karion said. “They don’t feel safe and may have nightmares and fears at night.”

The learning curriculum consisted of training to draw attention to the present. Exercise characterized by slow deep breathing. And yoga-based movements. Yoga instructors and children’s classroom teachers taught the curriculum twice a week for two years at all elementary and junior high schools in the affected areas.

The instructor taught children what stress is and encouraged them to use techniques to help them rest and relax, but they did not teach any sleep-improving techniques such as maintaining consistent bedtime. did not.

The instructor used the PurePower curriculum developed by a non-profit organization called PureEdge. Free access to the school in both Spanish and English. From more than 1,000 third and fifth graders who participated in the study, researchers recruited 58 children who received the curriculum and 57 children from the control group, and three home sleeps one year before the start of the curriculum. I evaluated it. And two years later.

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These assessments measured brain activity during sleep. via Electrode caps placed on the child’s head, respiratory rate, heart rate, blood oxygen levels.

At the beginning of the study, researchers found that children in the control group slept 54 minutes more on average and had 15 minutes of REM sleep per night than children in the later trained group. The children in the control group slept for about 7.5 hours per night and the curriculum group for about 6.6 hours per night. Researchers don’t know why children in the two communities have different average sleep times, despite similar income levels and other demographics.

However, the sleep patterns of the two groups evolved differently. During the two-year study, REM sleep remained stable and total sleep decreased by 63 minutes per night among control children. This is consistent with the loss of sleep normally seen in late childhood and early adolescence. In contrast, the children who participated in the curriculum gained 74 minutes of total sleep and 24 minutes of REM sleep.

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The lead author of the study, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Christina Chick, said, “Based on what we know about children who did not participate in the curriculum would be children of this age. It’s intuitive to understand that I’ve reduced my sleep. ” In the fields of psychiatry and behavioral science.

“Older children may be awake to do homework, talk to friends, or send text messages. Our findings show that the curriculum protects them from sleep loss. I interpret it as protective in that it taught me skills that helped me. ”Tick pointed out that hormonal changes and brain development also contribute to sleep changes at this age.

Nonetheless, the average amount of sleep received by study participants in both groups was low, Chick said, saying that healthy children are recommended to sleep at least 9 hours a night.

Researchers hypothesized that children may experience improved sleep through stress relief. However, the children who slept the most during the study also reported increased stress. This is probably because the curriculum helped us understand what stress is. Nevertheless, they slept better.

Researchers plan to disseminate the findings more widely, including by helping school teachers provide a similar curriculum. They are also planning further research to understand how various elements of the curriculum alter body function to enable better sleep, such as exercise that promotes deep, slow breathing.

“We believe that breathing changes the physiological environment, perhaps increasing the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, which actually results in improved sleep,” Chick said.