Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
How I hated her method of waking me. My adolescent sleeps were long, dark and sullen. Never once in all those years did I wake of my own accord. It was Margaret, always, knocking on my door like some rodent trapped behind a wall. This would bring me to a rage of wakefulness and I would stomp into the bathroom, bad-tempered and clearly in the wrong, while Margaret, who had been up and gone to six o'clock Mass, would watch me with a silent and superior reproach. That would increase my fury; it is impossible to feel the equal of someone who's been awake longer than you.
Mary Gordon, Final PaymentsSleep patterns in humans emerge from a complex interplay of several distinct processes: maturation and development, behavioral phenomena, and intrinsic sleep and circadian regulatory mechanisms. Each factor likely plays an important role during the transition from childhood to adulthood, a time when significant changes in sleep patterns occur. Sleep also affects many facets of waking human life, although a definitive explanation of sleep's function(s) remains undiscovered. Unquestioned, however, is the obligatory nature of sleep and our commonsense intuition that sleep fulfills some vital role in our waking lives, a role that enhances our abilities to think, perform, feel, and interact.
The patterns of sleep that unfold during adolescence differ markedly from those of preadolescents. Our sense is that many adolescents in the United States obtain insufficient and ill-timed sleep and that daytime functioning suffers as a consequence.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.