I LOVE to sleep. After a long night of working away at homework, I enjoy cuddling up with my blankets and pillows for what few hours I have until my alarm clock blares before sunrise, signaling the beginning of yet another school day. I’m usually exhausted when I come home in the afternoon, and I head straight for my bed for a nice nap. My sleep addiction has gotten to be so severe that on numerous Friday nights, when I could be enjoying the weekend with friends, I fall asleep at dinnertime and wake up at 3 in the morning. But do I really have an addiction? Am I obsessed with sleep? Truth is, I’m not. In fact, I don’t even get a lot of sleep. I’m just a typical tired teenager who is forced to wake up way too early in the morning for school. Our busy routine of waking up early, going to school, participating in activities, and then sleeping late at night leaves little room for rest and ultimately leads to sleep deprivation. Teens are the most sleep deprived age group. With our busy schedules, pressuring academics, and early start times, it is understandable why we aren’t getting enough sleep. Unfortunately, not getting enough shut-eye has shown to increase depression, drug abuse, and car crashes. Even knowing this, schools still aren’t considering these factors when deciding on school start times. This would be okay if it didn’t accompany such serious health detriments. So let’s uncover the problem of sleep deprivation, crawl into the causes and effects, and finally put our issues to bed by dreaming up some solutions to this widespread predicament.

In the U.S., only 8% of teens achieve the recommended amount of sleep and about 1 in 5 achieve six hours. Less than eight hours is simply not adequate enough, according to the Center for Advancing Health. Sleep is a biological necessity. Medscape Neurology explains that deep sleep causes the body to release hormones, crucial for growing teenagers. As for wellness, sleep plays a big role in that as well. The immune system depends on sleep to function normally, and when not getting enough sleep, one might be more prone to infection. Do you still believe that sleep isn’t a big deal?

The problem is that schools aren’t taking their students’ sleep seriously. In order to get nine hours of sleep and wake up at 6:00 a.m. one would have to sleep as early as 9:00 p.m. Now, this task could easily be achieved by an elementary or even middle school student; however high schoolers have more priorities, activities, and homework. When start times are considered, the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests 8:30 a.m. as a decent start time. Unfortunately, only 17.7% of middle and high schoolers start at this time, leaving the rest of us sleep deprived.

Just like in our nightmares, teenagers are floating farther and farther away from the eight hour requirement. So what are the results from all of this? The National Sleep Foundation states that when sleep deprivation becomes a pattern, academic achievements lower. Along with this disadvantage comes drowsy driving, mental health problems, impaired decision-making, substance abuse, and violence. On the physical side of drawbacks, lack of sleep can cause obesity. People who sleep for less than six hours a night have a 30% more chance of becoming overweight than others who acquire a substantial amount of sleep. Being sleep deprived can lead to an earlier death. It’s difficult to cushion the blow when the effects are so devastating.

Teenagers aren’t the only ones affected by our lack of sleep. Our friends and family suffer the consequences along with us. We commonly yell and get frustrated with our friends and family as a result of not enough sleep, and it’s not always our fault. Being a teenager and striving to be accepted by peers while maintaining good grades and a social life is arguably one of the roughest high school obstacles. Frantically completing homework and sports before the ideal bedtime of 9 p.m. is practically impossible especially when taking challenging classes. Furthermore, students who choose to apply for honors and AP classes have a guaranteed workload of homework in front of them each night. Some may make the argument of “Well, you shouldn’t have signed up for tough classes if you knew you couldn’t handle them.” However, with the rising costs of college tuition it’s not hard to see why so many students are sacrificing their sleep to excel in school.

Lastly, let’s tuck in these issues to one of America’s problems and cuddle up with a solution. There is a range of different approaches to resolving the problem of sleep deprived teenagers. For instance, we could insist that high school students should receive less homework; however, considering that America is behind academically to the rest of the world, it may not be the best solution. What we can do though is implement different school start times. For typical county school bus systems, high school students are picked up the earliest while elementary students are picked up the latest, yet this schedule doesn’t correlate to our biological structure. The National Sleep Foundation states that younger kids can physically go to sleep earlier than teens and also wake up earlier than them. Therefore, directly changing elementary and high school start times could be an adjustment that should be considered by school boards. An alternative idea to avoid this dilemma would be to keep elementary school start times the same and give high schoolers public bus passes for their students. This method of city transportation has often been shown to actually be a cheaper alternative to school buses. Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts changed their start time from 7:55 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. The school had overwhelmingly outstanding results such as higher grades, fewer healthcare center visits, an increase in athletic performance, higher breakfast participation, and more vibrant first period discussions. Clearly, the benefits for switching or delaying start times outweigh the current damage that is being done to American students. Still, people tend to dispute the fact that if schools started later, they would also end later leaving little to no time for outside activities and homework. People need to wake up and realize that in reality, districts have changed their start times and made adjustments. For instance, practice and game times were rescheduled and field lights were installed to play in the evening. Changing their schools start time even sparked an increase in sports participation in Washington and Connecticut. Keeping in mind that sleep benefits mental performance, with more sleep, homework would get completed quicker and more efficiently leaving plenty of time for other activities.

Now that we have analyzed the setbacks to sleep deprivation, it is evident that schools need to reset their alarm clocks for the benefit of their students. Current start times are robbing teenagers of a good night’s sleep and leaving us with long-term impairments. It is our job, as teenagers, to educate ourselves on our bodies and inform others as well. Sleep deprivation is slowly taking a toll on our bodies unless we do something about it.