Lastly, the RN4CAST study was not designed primarily to investigate shift work and therefore the survey did not include some relevant aspects of shift work, including the number of hours overtime, mode of overtime, the possibility of taking breaks during shifts and opportunity to rest between shifts, sleep patterns and total hours worked per week.
Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, has studied whether humans would revert back to the two-shift sleep pattern if they were not exposed to the longer photoperiod afforded by artificial lighting.
Shifting our sleep patterns on the weekends is such an interruption to our natural cycle, it's akin to jet lag -- traveling across time zones.
People who shifted their sleep patterns were also more likely to gain weight during the study.
We were not able to control for other aspects of shift work, including weekly hours, number of hours overtime, the possibility of taking breaks during shifts and sleep patterns.
Actually, this isn't just your teenagers being difficult, for a subtle biological shift in sleep patterns occurs during puberty, probably to ensure more sleep during rapid growth.
Attention has begun to turn to a wider range of possible environmental or demographic risk factors, such as central heating, shifts in sleep patterns, chronic psychosocial stress, exposure to television screens, later age at first birth, environmental pollutants, etc. (Brunner et al., 2007; Keith et al., 2006).
One solution could be for teens to go to bed earlier, but research points towards a shift in biological sleep patterns towards later times for sleeping during adolescence.
In many other mammals, like baby rodents, sleep patterns shift during the adolescent period.
Why do our sleep patterns shift with age? Between dozing off and the alarm shrieking, our bodies and brains undergo quite a few changes.
