“Air your room”. This parental injunction heard by many teenagers barely out of bed finds more than one scientific justification. Opening the windows for 10 minutes every day allows the indoor air to renew and cleanse itself, thus fighting against the appearance of molds and dust mites. It also reduces the contagious risk of viruses, especially in winter. And also, it eliminates bad odors. This last point would be more important than it seems, especially when it comes to a teenager’s bedroom. A situation which in the long run could harm the health of the young resident …
The case is taken seriously by a researcher at the University of Oxford in Great Britain who draws up a dangerous equation between an unventilated and odorous room, bad sleepand bad grades in school. “Young adolescents never open their windows, their bedrooms are never ventilated,” said Colin Espie, professor of sleep at Oxford Young University, to the Sunday Times. However, an unventilated chamber is “poor in oxygen and rich in nitrogen”. “If you keep breathing the same hot, unventilated air, you’ll wake up from a bad night’s sleep with a headache,” says the expert.
The latter therefore urges adolescents or their parents to open the windows and lower the temperature of the heating to clean the air in the room.
This recommendation comes as a major UK teen sleep survey is being launched. This one, baptized “teen sleep”, intends to study 32,000 young people from 100 British schools to assess the impact of hours of sleep on school work. In particular, the influence of a late start of lessons (at 10 a.m.) on their sleep will be examined. The results of the study will be released in September 2018.
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