Last updated on September 24, 2020
Question:
I didn’t sleep during my growth spurt, do you think it’ll affect my adult height or do you think my body would recover the lost growth (inches)? I’m really confused.
Answer:
You may have not slept well, but you did sleep. During the teenage years, the body experiences the same phenomena as jet lag — the skewing of the body’s clock. Many teenagers stay up late and, if possible, sleep late into the following day. The result is often the weekend crash when you try to make up for the lost time.
Optimum health requires good sleep. But whether some lack of sleep impacts growth directly is not known. A part of the problem is there is no way to measure a person’s maximum growth potential. We cannot read people’s DNA and see how tall they should have grown, so guessing whether some event might have had an impact on total growth is not possible. What studies do is measure a large number of boys for their growth and record things like their sleep habits. They then use statistics to see if there is some relation between height and sleep. But what is concluded is vague general trends.