More Sleep May Help Teens Cope with Discrimination

By Christina Phillis

A good night’s sleep does wonders for your brain, especially when it comes to dealing with stress. A new study found that sufficient sleep even helps teens cope with racism and ethnic discrimination. It showed that when teens slept better, they were better at dealing with these troubling events.

Recent studies have shown how sleep affects the stresses caused by racist or ethnically biased interactions, but not how individuals are affected from one day to the next. Developmental psychologists Yijie Wang from Michigan State University and Tiffany Yip from Fordham University wanted to determine if better sleep directly affected a teen’s ability to deal with discrimination.

Sleep Tracking

The team worked for two weeks with 256 Black, Asian, and Latinx ninth graders from five high schools in New York City. Each participant was given a digital tablet and an actigraph, a watch-like device, to record activity and track the students’ sleep.

Each night, students used their tablets to answer a series of questions about any discriminatory events they experienced, how much time they spent replaying negative events in their minds, and how focused they were on either problem-solving or reaching out for help. They were also asked to rate their moods and report headaches, nausea, fatigue, and other symptoms of stress. Specific details were recorded in daily electronic diaries.

The Benefits of Sleep

Wang and Yip matched daily reports with sleep data to determine if responses correlated to how much students had slept. They looked for links between being well rested and ability to cope.

Additionally, they looked at the amount of time a person spent awake after initially falling asleep, an important indicator of stress. On average, participants experienced 27 minutes of wakefulness per night.

Data showed that when teens slept well, they spent less time fixating on negative events and were more likely to talk with friends or use other coping mechanisms to address issues. And it appears that only six more minutes of sleep each night is needed to make a difference. 

Coping with Discrimination

When the team looked at whether dealing with discrimination one day made it hard to sleep the next night, they did not find that sleep was interrupted. However, other research suggests that these events make it harder to fall asleep.

“When people have insufficient sleep, their cognitive functioning — or just their social functioning — is impaired,” said Wang in the SciencesNewforStudents article “Sleep helps teens cope with discrimination” by Alison Pearce Stevens.

This study helps us better understand some of the factors that contribute to the well-being of ethnic minority adolescents. While daily stress from racial discrimination is an unfortunate reality for many, it’s important to find ways to cope and adapt that help to improve quality of life.