By Haley Kim
Picture this: Felicia stays up until 3 a.m. to study for her math exam (having a major crying session in between) desperately fighting to stay awake to review her notes one last time. She wakes up at 6 a.m. feeling frustrated with herself for sleeping through the last set of notes, and starts to feel drowsy during her first period. When she finally steps into the class she spent countless tortuous hours studying for the night before, she immediately feels unfocused and disoriented—and fails her exam.
Have you ever been in Felicia’s shoes before? I bet you I have.
A general crisis to teens this generation known as sleep deprivation causes major side effects to students across the globe. While many biological factors during puberty naturally delays melatonin release—making teens less likely to feel tired before 11 p.m—other factors like academics, social media, and gaming is pushing teens away from an often overlooked but crucial necessity for learning and growth.
What many teens do not realize is that sleeping is essential for growth and the brain’s ability to learn, operate and retain information. Without sleep, students can notice lower academic performance and experience concentration difficulties during school. In reality, cramming for an exam late at night has the opposite effect, leaving your brain without the sleep it needs to process and store information. A study by Fred Danner PhD, focusing on 882 high schools about how sleep habits are linked to GPA, concluded, “Each additional hour of sleep on school nights lowered the odds of scoring in the clinically significant range of emotional disturbance and ADHD by 25 percent and 34 percent…” (aasm.org) Teens between the ages 13-18 should be getting 8 to 10 hours of sleep for optimal growth and cognitive function. Without this, we are discovering the increasing mood shifts, behavioral problems, and poor academic performance teens face today.
The root cause in many leading cases of sleep deprivation is school work and the term known as “doom-scrolling.” With students highly addicted to their phones and constantly scrolling social media before they go to bed, they find it harder to fall asleep when they finally turn off the lights. The bluelight in electronics tricks the brain into thinking it’s daylight, suppressing melatonin and amplifying alertness. This artificial lighting disrupts teens’ natural circadian rhythm, our biological clockwork, making them feel groggy and disoriented in the morning. By switching out these bad habits with helpful practices that will encourage melatonin release such as reading and dimming the lights before bed, we can guarantee waking up feeling alert and refreshed.
Ultimately, sleep shouldn’t be something we feel guilty of or something we push away because we think it’s a waste of time. It is crucial for our academic success, more important than staying awake past midnight to study. We need to listen to our body’s call for rest; allow one’s to reset and get its gears ready for the next day. When we prioritize sleep over everything else, we give ourselves the opportunity to start the day with a fresh mind and body not fogged up by the cloudiness of fatigue and confusion. We need to understand that our bodies are not built to withstand a 24 hour working shift and it, of all things, deserves a break the most.