How Sleep Affects Teens

John Steinbeck once said, “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” He makes a good point. Sleep fluctuates the success of your day-to-day life. This especially affects teenagers.

Teens need about nine to ten hours of sleep each night, because they are growing at an intense rate. Not even adults need that much sleep. Studies show that teenagers who do not get enough sleep, also do not do as well in school. This is due to the fact that lack of sleep causes memory loss, depression and discouragement.

The typical day for a teen is extremely busy and sometimes overwhelming. Teens have to juggle their schooling, home life, extra curricular activities,

social life, and then, on top of that, a healthy amount of sleep every day. Sadly, the thing they frequently choose to drop is rest. The other things, such as homework and socializing, seem to have more immediate consequences and an overriding sense of import. This may be true at first, but the lasting results of sleep are worth much more.
Your mental health makes up a large part of your success in life, and, for teens, their success in school. The effects of not sleeping are primarily negative. Lack of sleep affects not only your mood and emotions, but also your concentration and, as mentioned before, memory. It only takes not sleeping for 16 hours for these to hinder your brain functions. The more sleep you miss, the more you can be affected by these symptoms. Teenagers’ brains are still growing, therefore this situation is not healthy for them mentally or physically.
The slower the brain is working, the slower the body will be working. When you do not sleep your body gets hungrier and weaker. Think of a time such as in a class or during an activity, when you have dozed off at an unnatural time of day. Why did that happen? Did you get to bed at a reasonable time the night before? This is called microsleeping. It is a result of not sleeping well or enough and can end in missing out on important activities, experiences, and/or information. When you microsleep, you usually wake up feeling more tired than you did before. You lose physical and emotional strength for the rest of the day. This leads to distraction in school and a decline in progress. Students who are tired are not able to learn or study as well.
To prevent the aftermath of lack of sleep teenagers need to have a routine each day of when to get each task done, and add “go to bed” into it. If we all did that, it would not be quite as hard to get up for school at six o’clock in the morning. It would also benefit teens to not drink caffeine right before bedtime ad to do some sort of exercise each day. These practices would make teens tired enough to go straight to bed when they need it.
The best way to help students succeed in high school is to encourage good sleep habits so they have the physical, emotional, and mental health to go about each pressing, daily task. This would lead to increased attention in classes, more alertness in studying, in addition to expanded understanding and knowledge at home and at school.