The NHS website recommends a minimum of eight or nine hours of sleep for growing teenagers, but more often than not, my friends come in to school struggling to keep their eyes open after only six or seven hours. Is it because they stayed up late finishing homework or binge-watching the latest season of their favourite tv show? Perhaps. There’s no denying that a good night’s sleep isn’t always on top of our list of priorities, and a reckless refusal to follow the rules is not unheard of when it comes to teenagers. However, there could be another factor causing this epidemic of sleep deprivation among secondary school students.
The typical school day begins at around 8:30. This may not seem very early, but I interviewed my fellow classmates and found out that most have to wake up as early as 6:00 am in order to arrive to school on time. Waking up at 7:30, like my short school journey allows me to do, is considered a luxury. Whether it’s to catch the early bus and avoid traffic, or prepare for their hour-long train journey, these students steal away precious hours of sleep every day simply to come to lessons with a lack of focus and difficulty absorbing new information. Sleep is especially important to teenagers not only because of growth and development, but also for improving brain function, as studies have shown that students who sleep at least eight hours a night find it easier to retain information than those who don’t. The question you may be asking now is: why they don’t just go to bed earlier? It appears to be a fairly simple solution, but the circadian rhythm of young people makes it slightly more complicated.
In order to make you tired and signal the time to sleep, the body releases a hormone called melatonin. In teenagers however, melatonin is released two hours later than adults, meaning they naturally get tired later and so need to wake up later as well. Waking a teenager up at 6:30 is therefore like waking an adult up at 4:30, and this constant disregard of the body’s natural sleeping pattern is detrimental to their level of concentration. It may even lead to issues with mental health, as ongoing sleep problems are linked with depression. The classic moodiness and irritability associated with teenagers could just be a symptom of not enough sleep. With that in mind, is a later start to the school day
the answer?
A study of almost 300 000 participants published in 2017 reviewed the quantity and quality of sleep in high schoolers across the world. The results showed that the amount of sleep students were getting increased by 83.4 minutes on average in schools with later times. There was also a decrease in the number of late students, as a result of over sleeping, and even an increase in overall attendance for some schools, simply because they started an hour later.
So, looking at the facts, what do you think? Would a later start to the school day really be more beneficial to teenagers? Or would it just allow them an excuse to stay up even later going on their phones?
