Teen sleep is getting wrecked by more than just phones

Teens aren’t getting enough sleep! And a two-decade study suggests it’s getting worse. Scientists found that the number of high schoolers getting insufficient sleep — less than seven hours a night — has increased from 69% to 77%. The throughline? There wasn’t one. Teens had bad sleep habits across most demographics, including race, gender and grade level. The findings were published https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2845759 this week in the journal JAMA. Interested in more science behind recent headlines? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. For more about earthquake science – and the Cascadia Fault in particular – check out our recent episode on the Pacific Northwest’s Big One https://www.npr.org/2025/11/25/nx-s1-5607262/oregon-japan-earthquake-pacific-northwest. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Regina Barber?

  Hey, short wavers. Regina Barber here.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  And Katie Riddle.

• 0:21Regina Barber?

  And today, we have our biweekly Science News Roundup, featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. So here with Katie and I, this time, is Scott Detrow.

• 0:29Speaker 03

  Hello. This is one of my favorite segments to do. I hear we are talking about the fact that apparently teens are still not sleeping enough.

• 0:35Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  And new insights on a potential mega-thrust earthquake in the Pacific Northwest.

• 0:41Regina Barber?

  And ancient recipes discovered in prehistoric pottery.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  All of that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 2:16Regina Barber?

  So Scott, where would you like to start?

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Regina, I feel like usually you're taking me deep out into the cosmos, but let's just start with like, you know, something much closer to home.

• 2:25Regina Barber?

  Right, that teen in my house?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:27Regina Barber?

  That doesn't talk to me?

• 2:28Speaker 03

  The surly one who's apparently not getting enough sleep?

• 2:30Regina Barber?

  Yes, yes. So researchers studied the sleep habits of high school students from 2007 to 2023, and they found that the number of teenagers getting insufficient sleep, that's less than seven hours a night, is on the rise. Now it's more than three quarters of these high school students.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  These bad sleep habits were true across most demographics, races, genders, grades. And Scott, some of these kids are getting less than five hours of sleep a night. The results are in the medical journal JAMA.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Any sense why this is happening?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Well, the researchers tried to get at that. This data is from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey. This is a survey that more than 120,000 US high schoolers take every two years, answering questions about health risk behaviors, like alcohol use, cannabis use, and sexual activity.

• 3:20Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and lack of sleep seemed to be a problem across the study groups in teens with and without behavioral issues. Although the paper noted that the teens who reported depression or suicidal thoughts tended to sleep less than the others in the group.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  I can speak from experience because I shockingly got enough sleep last night, which does not always happen. I assume it is very bad to not get enough sleep, but I'm curious, like, what are pediatricians saying in quantifying this? Like, what specifically are they worried about?

• 3:45Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I was wondering the same thing because I have a teenager in high school. So I reached out to a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital, Dr. Cora Collette Bruner. She didn't work on this study, but she thought this study was fascinating. She told me she'd seen the effects of insufficient sleep firsthand in her practice. She says that if teens don't get enough sleep-

• 4:04Speaker 05

  They're more depressed. They get in more car accidents. They do worse at school. They don't get good jobs. They don't maintain relationships. They don't have happy and productive lives.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  None of that is good. That's bad. So, next question then is like, what specific suggestions do doctors have to try and turn this around on the individual level or the broader level?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Well, the study authors say since insufficient sleep seems to be a problem plaguing most teens, there must be structural, environmental factors at play here. And they suggest broad interventions that could potentially reach most kids.

• 4:37Regina Barber?

  For example, they point out that later school start times are linked to longer sleep and improved mental health. So interventions like that might help students across the board get better sleep.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  All right. Let's shift to the next topic. A mega-thrust earthquake. Sounds kind of metal. Sounds scary. Tell me more.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  It is scary, especially if you're a person like me who lives in the Pacific Northwest, above the Cascadia subduction zone. That's a big fault. It's normal around here to keep a supply of earthquake emergency things in your garage, like bottled water and batteries.

• 5:07Regina Barber?

  Yeah, this is that big one I would always hear about growing up. And that fault, the plates are pushing towards each other and moving closer at a rate of about an inch or more a year. Think of it like a slowly compressing spring that could eventually snap in a massive earthquake.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Seems like we are learning more about how that might unfold, though, if it does happen.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  That's right. Researchers at the University of Washington published a study in the journal Science Advances. They looked at the mechanics of the plates in the Cascadia fault. The challenge is the fault is beneath the seafloor, which makes it hard to access and to study.

• 5:44Speaker 06

  We're talking about going to the moon and Mars, but the ocean, the deep ocean is hard to get to. And it's right next to our coast.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  That's Maureen Denoll, one of the researchers who worked on this. She and her colleagues listened very closely to the earth using sensors that are on the seafloor. The sensors measure tiny changes in seismic signals, and that gives us some idea of what's happening inside the fault.

• 6:08Regina Barber?

  That data was gathered over a decade, and it gives us one of the most nuanced pictures yet of the Cascadia fault. They found that the northern part of the fault may be more tightly locked, and it's storing more stress, while the central section seems to allow more fluid movement along the fault, which means an earthquake along the fault might unfold differently than they originally thought.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  So what does that mean for life and society on the surface, then?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Well, it's probably too early to tell. There's a lot of other factors to think about. Population density and proximity to the ocean, for example. We talked to another earthquake scientist not involved in this study, Chris Goldfinger. He says that the potential for catastrophe because of this earthquake zone wasn't really understood until the mid 1980s. And these kinds of studies will help us better understand and prepare for earthquakes. We just need more of them.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  All right, let's shift to our third and final topic.

• 7:02Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Prehistoric diets.

• 7:03Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I'm excited about this one because scientists know a lot about agricultural societies and like the way they used to eat back then, but not much about what hunter-gatherers used to eat. And a new study in the journal PLOS One takes a look at that. A group of scientists analyzed ancient pots from roughly 4,000 to 8,000 years ago.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  These pots were from all over Northern Europe, from what is now Denmark to Western Russia. And what they were looking at specifically was old food remains caked on the inside of these ancient pots.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  I'm gonna say I feel, I feel better that our ancient, ancient, ancient ancestors were also not washing their dishes.

• 7:36Regina Barber?

  But it's good for science because

• 7:38Speaker 03

  You're welcome.

• 7:39Regina Barber?

  Right. Because the researchers found food crusts left over from a whole bunch of ancient meals. But one of the ones they found the most interesting was a stew of fish mixed with Gelder roseberries. These bright red berries are normally bitter, but they taste totally different. They have a totally different flavor once they're cooked.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  It's a dish that existed even in more recent European history. Crystal Dozier, an archaeologist at Wichita State University, says these berries are an example of how

• 8:08Speaker 07

  There's a lot of plants and even animals that we used to eat in the past as humans that have fallen out of our culinary traditions. And these kinds of studies remind us that sometimes we need to look back to look forward.

• 8:21Regina Barber?

  Case in point, Scott, people might even find these Gelder roseberries in their neighborhood if they live in the northern United States. They often are grown as decorative plants, but these berries are edible once you cook them. Although, like, please, listeners, don't eat random berries unless you know what they are, like, for real.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  I'm wondering, though, did the scientists end up cooking any of these ancient dishes themselves?

• 8:44Speaker 02

  They did. Oliver Craig, a senior author on the paper at the University of York.

• 8:49Regina Barber?

  Felt that while some of the dishes were a bit flavorless, he thought the berries were tasty. But he says-

• 8:55Speaker 06

  What people see as tasty changes massively depending on the cultural context.

• 9:00Regina Barber?

  So true. It brings me back to childhood.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Taste change, minute to minute, day to day.

• 9:05Regina Barber?

  Yeah. And if you want to hear more about this Cascadia Fault earthquake, growing up, we called it the big one. We did a whole episode on the science behind it. We'll link to that in our show notes. And Scott, thank you so much for being on our show.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Anytime. It is always super fun and I learn a lot. Thank you.

• 9:20Regina Barber?

  You can hear more of Scott on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. And for more science stories, just like this one, follow Short Wave on whatever app you're listening to.

• 9:33Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by George Marie Smith, Arun Nayar and Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata and Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Becky Brown and Jimmy Keely were the audio engineers. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Katie Arittel. Thank you so much for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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