Sleep and School
Do you feel tired when you're in school? Read this article and find out why.
Remmy Tull, Staff Writer
March 8, 2024
March 8, 2024
In popular scientific opinion, teens need an average of 8 to 10 hours of sleep every night. But it's common knowledge that most teens don't get this. According to the CDC, 70% of high school students in America don’t get enough sleep. That shockingly high number has some pretty serious implications, and the way to solve this problem is not as easy as you might think.
You have to consider what students need from their sleep. It's just that. Sleep. Students need more sleep than adults on average, because of the complex changes and rapid growth occurring at this period of their life. But that shouldn’t make it harder to sleep, other age groups that need more sleep, like elementary schoolers, manage to get it very frequently.
A good reason this happens is because teens’ raging hormones shift their internal clock about 1 to 2 hours forward. They get tired later. For pretty much every adolescent, the body doesn't start secreting melatonin until about 10:45 at night. Horacio de la Iglesia, a University of Washington researcher and professor of biology, says that Teens' biological bedtime is more like midnight, and if parents expect them to go to sleep at 10 p.m., it often doesn't work. "They'll just lay in bed and not fall asleep," he says. Of course, this means teens need to sleep later in the morning to make up for the lost time.
Sleep is a precious thing, it can help improve your mood, increase productivity, think more clearly, make good decisions, and get sick less. However not getting enough of this vital daily time can lead to an increased risk of some more serious consequences, things as strokes, heart attacks, depression, anxiety, and even conditions that involve psychosis like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Despite the scary list of consequences, a more trivial observation of this list is stuff teens are pretty much known for, being lazy, moody, making bad decisions, and never thinking straight. So can more sleep fix all that?
In 2016-2017 schools in Seattle moved start times about an hour forward, to 8:45 am. The shift was studied and documented by researchers at the University of Washington, and their findings were pretty exciting.
The study compared two groups of sophomores at two different high schools in Seattle. The first group of 92 students was measured for two weeks and was taken from both schools. They wore wrist monitors and were required to keep a sleep diary for the duration of the study. This group started school at 7:50. In the second group of 88, the same setup applied, only now they were starting school at 8:45 am.
On average the students got an extra 34 minutes of sleep, bringing their total nightly sleep average from 6 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes. That may not seem like a lot, but when it comes to sleep everything counts. Through the study, scientists found that bedtimes also stayed relatively consistent.
The number of tardy students also decreased. One of the schools they studied students from is a low-income neighborhood, and on average the total engagement and attendance was lower than the other schools in the study. After the time shift, they found it had risen to something on par with students from a higher-income neighborhood.
After this study and many others like it were published, quite a few states have been making bills and trying to get laws in place for later start times. In 2022, California became the first state that mandate a later start time for high schoolers and middle schoolers. Many other states are considering taking similar action, and in places like New York, which are trying to get bills passed for later start times across the board, it may just become a reality.
However, the topic is controversial, like it seems anything that has to do with anything nowadays, and has been receiving quite a bit of pushback and criticism from parents, teachers, and community members alike. The criticism usually comes from concerns about how schedules will have to adjust to the new start times, parents would be inconvenienced by the changing start times, and clubs would have to be moved to later in the day. But shouldn’t the biological necessity of sleep take priority over these surface-level struggles?
The health of students should be first place in the minds of parents, administrators, and states alike when it comes to issues like these. The evidence we have from a multitude of studies, cases, and research proves that teens should be waking up later, and in turn, schools should be starting later. Not only will it improve the overall health of students, but also their performance, attendance, and graduation rates. Introducing a later start time for schools is one big step in the right direction towards a better, more healthy, and safer education system that everyone can benefit from, even the students!
You have to consider what students need from their sleep. It's just that. Sleep. Students need more sleep than adults on average, because of the complex changes and rapid growth occurring at this period of their life. But that shouldn’t make it harder to sleep, other age groups that need more sleep, like elementary schoolers, manage to get it very frequently.
A good reason this happens is because teens’ raging hormones shift their internal clock about 1 to 2 hours forward. They get tired later. For pretty much every adolescent, the body doesn't start secreting melatonin until about 10:45 at night. Horacio de la Iglesia, a University of Washington researcher and professor of biology, says that Teens' biological bedtime is more like midnight, and if parents expect them to go to sleep at 10 p.m., it often doesn't work. "They'll just lay in bed and not fall asleep," he says. Of course, this means teens need to sleep later in the morning to make up for the lost time.
Sleep is a precious thing, it can help improve your mood, increase productivity, think more clearly, make good decisions, and get sick less. However not getting enough of this vital daily time can lead to an increased risk of some more serious consequences, things as strokes, heart attacks, depression, anxiety, and even conditions that involve psychosis like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Despite the scary list of consequences, a more trivial observation of this list is stuff teens are pretty much known for, being lazy, moody, making bad decisions, and never thinking straight. So can more sleep fix all that?
In 2016-2017 schools in Seattle moved start times about an hour forward, to 8:45 am. The shift was studied and documented by researchers at the University of Washington, and their findings were pretty exciting.
The study compared two groups of sophomores at two different high schools in Seattle. The first group of 92 students was measured for two weeks and was taken from both schools. They wore wrist monitors and were required to keep a sleep diary for the duration of the study. This group started school at 7:50. In the second group of 88, the same setup applied, only now they were starting school at 8:45 am.
On average the students got an extra 34 minutes of sleep, bringing their total nightly sleep average from 6 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes. That may not seem like a lot, but when it comes to sleep everything counts. Through the study, scientists found that bedtimes also stayed relatively consistent.
The number of tardy students also decreased. One of the schools they studied students from is a low-income neighborhood, and on average the total engagement and attendance was lower than the other schools in the study. After the time shift, they found it had risen to something on par with students from a higher-income neighborhood.
After this study and many others like it were published, quite a few states have been making bills and trying to get laws in place for later start times. In 2022, California became the first state that mandate a later start time for high schoolers and middle schoolers. Many other states are considering taking similar action, and in places like New York, which are trying to get bills passed for later start times across the board, it may just become a reality.
However, the topic is controversial, like it seems anything that has to do with anything nowadays, and has been receiving quite a bit of pushback and criticism from parents, teachers, and community members alike. The criticism usually comes from concerns about how schedules will have to adjust to the new start times, parents would be inconvenienced by the changing start times, and clubs would have to be moved to later in the day. But shouldn’t the biological necessity of sleep take priority over these surface-level struggles?
The health of students should be first place in the minds of parents, administrators, and states alike when it comes to issues like these. The evidence we have from a multitude of studies, cases, and research proves that teens should be waking up later, and in turn, schools should be starting later. Not only will it improve the overall health of students, but also their performance, attendance, and graduation rates. Introducing a later start time for schools is one big step in the right direction towards a better, more healthy, and safer education system that everyone can benefit from, even the students!