Sleeping to Succeed

Teens do not get enough sleep.  Most teenagers only get an average of 6 or 7 hours of sleep per night, while the healthy dose is at least 9.  What’s interesting is that 80% of the students I interviewed knew that they were sleep deprived, and those that thought they weren't got at least 8 hours per night.  Our bodies run on an internal clock that wants us to go to sleep around midnight and to wake up around ten in the morning.  This system works well, until you can’t sleep till ten.  This is where society comes in.  Every week day we have to get up way to early to go to school, and sometimes we even have to stay up later to do projects.  Even on the weekends, our parents make some of us wake up, saying we’re lazy for sleeping in.  It’s natural, we can’t control it.  Stress makes us stay up late, and even makes us wake up in the middle of the night.  Stress can be caused by dead lines, problems with friends and family, and just daily struggles.  Whenever we’re tired, the first thing we do is get caffeine, right?  Well, that’s another reason we can’t sleep.  Caffeine keeps us up, we stay up later, and then we are even more tired when we wake up too early.  It’s a dangerous cycle.

 

When you’re tired, you have lots of problems with your mind and body.  You can’t concentrate, and you can fall asleep in school.  You’re memory style shifts throughout the day.  In the morning, you only have short term memory.  This means that it’s a lot harder to remember things in class.  It’s a fact that you’re grumpy when you don’t sleep very well one night. When you don’t sleep well for weeks, however, this irritability turns much harsher and becomes depression.  It’s much more than just discomfort.  When you’re tired, you can’t think straight, and you have slower response time.  This is why driving drowsy is much like driving drunk.



Our goal is to improve Teen well being, mood, and academic performance through increased sleep time and reduced stress.

 

Projects: Study halls, less stressed environment, and later start times

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Study halls are a great opportunity for teens to do all their homework at school, making more time for sleep and fun as well as reducing stress.  A less stressed environment would mean going a step passed study halls and changing due dates around so that everything isn't due on the week of finals.  This would mean that projects would be due earlier, but we would get enough sleep to function the best we could when it matters the most.  Later start times would be pushing back the school start times by as little as half an hour.  This transition has already improved overall student well being and performance in Canada, and we could benefit from it too.