With rigorous academic schedules and extracurriculars, students spend high school preparing for college. The competition of the college admissions process leaves many students with the constant urge to be productive — often at the expense of their own health.
When students struggle to complete their tasks in the day, they often stretch waking hours far into the night. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that teenagers should sleep for eight to 10 hours each day. In a study, they determined that 72.7% of American high school students did not get enough sleep on school nights.
To combat this statistic, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends high schools start at 8:30 a.m., giving students the opportunity to sleep longer, especially if they have had a late night. However, later start times would interfere with after-school activities, jobs and bus schedules, so only 17.7% of schools follow this guideline.
Junior Grace Odom-Montbrun plays tennis after school, so she can only begin doing school work around 9:00 p.m. “I feel like when you don’t sleep, it definitely affects your grades at school. But it’s almost impossible to get enough sleep in order to finish your homework and studying, and if you don’t, you won’t do well,” Odom-Montbrun said. She regularly goes to bed after midnight and wakes up at 6:00 a.m.
According to Stanford University, chronic sleep deprivation can cause “an inability to concentrate, poor grades, drowsy-driving incidents, anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide and even suicide attempts.”
Extracurriculars and academics usually determine how much sleep a student gets. Working efficiently and planning out one’s schedule so that he or she is not overworked proves to be useful in going to bed earlier.
Sophomore Amanda Lopez usually does sleep a sufficient amount. She goes to bed between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m. and wakes up at 6:00 a.m. “I do a lot of my work in class and after school on the bus whenever I can so that I don’t have to work so hard when I reach home,” Lopez said. She strives for a healthy sleep schedule since the school day usually leaves her exhausted.
