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Sleep deprivation and academic performance in high schoolers
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Alarm clocks. The beep-beep-beeping at early hours of the morning signal that it is time to get yourself ready for a long day at school. But that snooze button is so tempting. Just five more minutes, you tell yourself. Next thing you know, you are late to school, left your math homework on the table, and forgot your running shoes for practice after school. Teenagers are the definition of lazy, tired and moody. Though it may seem like it, it mostly isn’t our fault. Biological clocks, early mornings, hours worth of homework, and high grade expectations force teens to stay up late, only to have to wake up early for school and become sleep deprived. Schools need to change first bells to later times, because sleep deprivation in teens affects health, academic performance, and attitude.
Teenagers have biological clocks that make it hard to get up at early hours, making it difficult to get to school on time and more importantly, stay focused. Studies done years ago show that most teens have internal body clocks set to fall asleep around 11 p.m. and wake up around 8am--near the end of first...
There are many ways in which scientists and researchers try to understand the molecular uniqueness and physiology of living organisms. One of these ways is the Circadian clock, this clock transfers the physiology and behaviors of mammalians into rhythms that are coordinated with the 24hr solar system. This system can be affected by environmental factors such as the food, temperature and parasites. The circadian rhythms play a role in gene expression to produce protein. Gene expression is displayed through the central dogma of (DNA RNA protein). How the clock work with the 24hr solar day is that it allows gene expression every 24hr to tell when a physiological process is most active. And any damage made to the DNA is more effective
How many times has this happened to you; it’s six thirty on a Tuesday morning, your alarm has already gone off twice, your still laying in bed and your bus comes in twenty minutes. This is an everyday occurrence at my house. It is a proven statistic that the average high school student does not get enough sleep. While some experts like Dr. Lee Yanku say “It is not the schools starting time that is the problem as to why students don’t get enough sleep, it is because of facebook, myspace and cell phones” The truth behind it is that we can’t budget sports, homework and extracurricular activities into one day and still get nine hours of sleep. This is hurting student’s academic averages and needs to change. Changing the school time will help boost academic averages among students, and isn’t th...
Later school start times are scientifically proven to help teens in many beneficial ways. Teenagers and adolescents have sleep patterns. According to the article,¨ Teens and Sleep¨ Teens bodies naturally
It’s hard to leave a loved one in a hospital bed when night falls. Family members leave with a sense of responsibility, guilt, and sadness. They leave relying on the nurse to watch and care for their sick family member. Therefore, it is heart breaking to find out the next morning your loved one has suffered great brain damage due to nurses failing to check on alarm sounds. Now, the family is put on the spot to continue life support or disconnect their family member. One can only imagine what went wrong; up to the minute that you left the hospital, your loved one was doing fine. You are relying on the health care providers to take care of your loved one, just as you would, while you are gone. Staff made an error by ignoring the alarms sounds, warning them that the patient was deteriorating, and costing the patient’s family a great deal of pain. Jenifer Garcia’s life shattered when this exact event happened to her husband in July, 2010 (Kowalczyk, 2011). She left her husband Friday night, alive, and returned the next morning to find out he was brain dead. Advancements in technology are used to decrease and catch medical errors made by health care providers that can harm or kill patients, but alarm fatigue has proven that even technology cannot fully protect a patient from nursing errors, thus taking the lives of patients.
Teenagers feel more awake when they get at least 1 more hour of sleep than normal. 93% of high schools start before 8:30, 10% of those schools start before 8:10. The chemical that makes you feel tired is called melatonin, melatonin signals to your body that you should go to bed. To wake up, your body releases a hormone called cortisol to let you know, it’s time to wake up. If teens don’t get enough sleep, they still have some melatonin levels in their body when they go to school. Waking up between 6:30 to 7:30 doesn’t give the melatonin time to wear
Lack of sleep of teens is not caused by choice. Many teens do not choose to stay up late at night because they are out or having fun. The body has circadian rhythms. “These rhythms are generated internally and develop without any social or environmental cues. Adolescents experience a natural circadian phase delay and, therefore, tend to stay up later and sleep in later than in preadolescents” (Final Report Summary, 2001). The opening and closing schedules of schools are not based on these rhythms but are based on the business world and what is best for it. “School schedules should be adapted to the unique needs of different sub-populations of pupils. The administrator must not bear the sole responsibility for planning class schedules” (...
Teenagers need more sleep to go throughout the day. It has been proven multiple times that teenagers do not tend to wake up early and go to sleep later. In the article Should School Stay Early it says “They have a biological tendency to
Studies have suggested that the average adolescent brain doesn’t even start to fully function until around 9:30 am. Many schools already use the suggested later arrival time, so students can be ready to learn when they arrive at school. Another thing that everyone knows or remembers about high school, school is all. of the homework that needs to be done for tomorrow. Plus projects that are due.
“Sleep deprivation is epidemic among adolescents, with potentially serious impacts on mental and physical health, safety, and learning. Most teenagers undergo a biological shift to a later sleep-wake up cycle, which can make early school start times particularly challenging.” says Boergers.
In order to avoid sleep deprivation, maintaining a consistent sleep schedule is vital for teenagers. Compared to opposing age groups, teenagers are most easily affected by inconsistent sleep habits (National Sleep Foundation, Adapt). The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) reports that, “For the adolescent’s circadian clock to stay on track, it is essential that teens remain on schedule…(National Sleep Foundation, Adapt).” The NSF also recommends that teens only stay up one hour later on weekends than they would duri...
Were you aware that teens tend to have irregular sleeping patterns that can harm their body and the way it functions? When it comes to sleep, teens are inclined to stay up very late during the week and wake up very early in the morning. On the weekends, they seem to gravitate more towards waking up very late to catch up on the sleep that they missed earlier in the week. Now that you know what the causes of having irregular sleeping patterns can do to a teenager’s body, you will be able to see the positive and negative effects of what not having enough sleep can do to one’s self. These facts will be explored through the articles “Should Schools Start Later” by Justin O’Neill and “Why Schools Should Start Later in the Morning” by Emily Richmond.
First of all, some teens simply don’t get enough sleep. People argue they should just go to sleep earlier, but it’s not that easy. Teens and children have a tendency to go to sleep late and wake up late. They have a life to live outside of school should open at at least ten o’clock.
When children make the transition from primary school to middle school or high school, it affects them a lot when the changing of their own sleep cycle affects the way they actually learn. Dr. Judith Owens, who is the director of the Sleep Medicine Clinic at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., says "adolescents are programmed to fall asleep later,” (2013). She wants to change school start times to later because "we are asking [teens] to be awake and alert at the time in their 24-hour clock when their alertness level is at its very lowest,” (2013). She also says that most teens can’t usually fall asleep until 11 p.m. Sleep expert Amy Wolfson of College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., says that children should try to get eight and a half to nine and a half hours of sleep a night. Waking up at six a.m. leads to bad sleep patterns creating sleep deprivation.
The alarm goes off at six am and the typical high school student is barely able to open their eyes. It is time to get up and prepare for a full day at school, about eight hours. Most teenagers, according to the National Sleep Foundation, will only get about six hours of sleep since they tend to stay up until midnight (“Should schools start later in the day?”). After getting ready, many students look forward to a nap in their first hour class despite the information they will miss. Teenagers seem to always have had trouble getting up in the morning, even earning the title of lazy from their parents. However, recent research on adolescent sleep patterns has produced a biological explanation for this tendency. This raises a serious question: why are high schools starting early in the morning when teenagers are biologically programmed to sleep in? For most cases, school start time has not been conformed to fit student physiological needs simply because of transportation issues.
Everyone seems to have those couple of undesirable patterns that they wish they could get rid of. My two patterns that I chose were snoozing my alarm clock and not being able to get up early, along with letting fear stop me from trying new things.