Page 4 - Demo

THE SLEEP PROBLEM
Staying up late and waking up early is Story by: Phoenix Boggs
taken as a natural part of teenage life. Photos by: Johannes Reijm and Phoenix Boggs But does this have a negative effect on
student health?
It is 9:30 at night, and Julia Divalerio, 11, is just leaving drama rehearsal. Practice has been letting out late nearly every night this week. While walking across the parking lot, she says to her friend, “I’m going to pull an all- nighter to get that AP Gov project done. You are too, right?” Her friend nods. With many students, staying up all night to finish work and school projects is an inevitability, especially when extracurriculars are added to the mix.
Everybody knows what it’s like to stay up late doing homework and wake up early the next day. In the life of a teenager, this daily routine is normal. It is taken as an accepted part of high school. A natural consequence of this daily cycle among high schoolers is sleep deprivation.
In fact, according to a survey from the National Foundation of Sleep, nine out of ten teenagers don’t sleep for the recommended number of hours. This means that if you’re in a class of 30, only three of you get enough sleep. In 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics called sleep deprivation among teens a public health epidemic.
While you might think that you don’t need much sleep, sleep is integral to growth and development more during the teenage years than at any other time in a person’s life. According to UCLA Health, teenagers need nine or ten hours of sleep a night to feel well rested.
Before children go through puberty, they start feeling tired around 8:00 or 9:00 PM. After puberty, however, teenagers begin to feel sleepy only at about 10:00 or 11:00 PM, which explains why it is difficult to fall asleep during one’s high school years. This natural change in a teen’s circadian rhythm is called a “sleep phase delay.” It can lead to misunderstandings between teenagers and their parents, because adults get tired earlier in the day.
The average teen does not get enough hours of sleep a night, but this is not the only issue with teenage sleep. By jarring a teen’s natural sleep cycle, the routine of going to sleep late and waking up early can disrupt the rapid eye movement, or REM, stage of sleep.
This is the type of sleep in which dreams
occur. REM sleep is the most productive
stage of the natural sleep cycle, according
to the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic.
Losing REM sleep means losing a
valuable time that is associated with
learning, memory consolidation and
emotional processing.
You probably have
a friend who says that, while they don’t get enough sleep during the week, they simply catch up on weekends. But sleep scientists say that extra weekend sleep, while reducing sleepiness during the day, also throws off a teen’s circadian rhythm and affects their ability to focus and pay attention. Scientists agree that the solution to lack of sleep is adopting a steady, reliable sleep cycle, not extra slumber during the weekends.
Some students feel that they can function perfectly with only a few hours of sleep a night. This belief is a result of an effect where a person who experiences sleep loss over long periods becomes less aware of their objective impairment over time. According to a study from the University of Utah, students who say that they only need a few hours of sleep may be more sleep-deprived than they realize.
Using sleep data from more than 800 people, the study analyzed the links between how much sleep people said they needed and how well they performed on tests of mental cognition. It found that people who say they need less than six hours of sleep suffer from problems with brain functioning.
“Compared to conventional sleepers, both short sleeper subtypes exhibited... signatures consistent with diminished wakefulness, potentially indicating inaccurate perception of functionality among those denying dysfunction,” the results of the study stated.
Essentially, this means that those who “deny dysfunction,” or claim that they only need a few hours of sleep, actually have an inaccurate perception of their brain function; they don’t realize that their cognitive processing is impaired by sleep deprivation. So although you may feel that you can function on only a few hours of sleep a night, you may actually be
suffering from processing problems caused by sleep deprivation without your knowledge.
But even when students want to get enough sleep, they face obstacles. Busy schedules, active social lives, and, most significantly, school, prevent teenagers from getting the sleep they
need.
As upperclassmen, students’ academic
responsibilities can get in the way of good sleep. High schoolers have heavy workloads, and they often feel that they have to stay up late
to get everything done.
“Especially in senior year, there’s a lot of
seniors who have a lot of work they need to do,”