At-risk children gained more than an hour of sleep per night after participating in a mindfulness curriculum at their elementary schools, a study from the Stanford University School of Medicine found.
The research was published online July 6 in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. The study is the first to use polysomnography techniques, which measure brain activity, to assess how school-based mindfulness training changes children’s sleep. The curriculum taught children how to relax and manage stress by focusing their attention on the present, but it did not instruct them on how to get more sleep.
“The children who received the curriculum slept, on average, 74 minutes more per night than they had before the intervention,” said the study’s senior author, Ruth O’Hara, PhD, a sleep expert and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. “That’s a huge change.”
Rapid eye movement sleep, which includes dreaming and helps consolidate memories, also lengthened in children who learned the techniques.
“They gained almost a half an hour of REM sleep,” said O’Hara, the Lowell W. and Josephine Q. Berry Professor. “That’s really quite striking. There is theoretical, animal and human evidence to suggest it’s a very important phase of sleep for neuronal development and for the development of cognitive and emotional function.”
Helping at-risk kids sleep better
Children in the study lived in two low-income, primarily Hispanic communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. One community received the intervention; the other served as the control. Both had high rates of crime and violence, and families faced such stressors as food insecurity and crowded, unstable housing. These conditions are a recipe for poor sleep, said the study’s principal investigator, Victor Carrion, MD, the John A. Turner, MD, Endowed Professor for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Carrion, who directs the Stanford Early Life Stress and Resilience Program, launched the study to help youngsters manage the effects of living in a stressful environment.
Enabling at-risk kids to sleep better isn’t just a matter of telling them to sleep more or keep regular bedtimes, however.
“To fall asleep you have to relax, but they have a hard time letting their experiences go,” Carrion said. “They don’t feel safe and may have nightmares and fears at night.”
The study curriculum consisted of training in bringing one’s attention to the present; exercises featuring slow, deep breathing; and yoga-based movement. Yoga instructors and the children’s classroom teachers taught the curriculum twice a week, for two years, in all elementary and middle schools in the community that received the intervention. Instructors taught children what stress was and encouraged them to use the techniques to help them rest and relax, but they did not give any instruction on sleep-improvement techniques such as maintaining consistent bedtimes.