FITeens Toolkit

47 alcohol use, smoking, driving safety, sexual risk-taking, violent/delinquent behaviour and trait risk-taking/sensation seeking. In a more recent review and meta-analysis, Short and her colleagues (2020) demonstrated that shorter sleep duration significantly increased the odds of adolescents experiencing mood deficits by 55%. Mood deficits due to shorter sleep were observed across mood states including depression , anxiety , anger , positive affect and negative affect , indicating that short sleep can lead to a range of mood deficits in otherwise healthy, non-clinical samples of adolescents. Moreover, Chiu et al. (2018) demonstrated that sleep duration plays an important role in the development of youth suicidal behaviours, since both too long and short sleep duration were significantly associated with an increased incident risk of suicidal ideation and attempts. Similarly, the quality of sleep also influences the risk of medical diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and depression (Irwin, 2015). This sleep quality would be defined by a series of indicators such as falling asleep shortly after going to bed (30 minutes or less), sleeping through the night without waking up more than once, sleeping the recommended number of hours for your age, falling back to sleep within 20 minutes if you wake up and feeling rested, recovered and energetic when waking up in the morning (Suni, 2022). Below, you can see our recommendations, based on scientific evidence to support good sleep habits: