Junior Yijin Sun aims to go to bed every night at 10 p.m. on the dot. It doesn’t matter if he hasn’t finished all his homework; Sun will wake up earlier, but will still go to bed at 10 p.m. Sophomore Katie Vannah on the other hand, sometimes stays up scrolling on her phone until 11:30 p.m. Vannah only gets around seven hours of sleep a night.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13-18 year-olds need 8-10 hours of sleep a night. The Sleep Foundation found that sleep affects teens’ cognition and academic performance, emotional health and mood and physical health. A survey distributed by The Cypress found that 44.28 percent of students get less than the recommended 8 hours of sleep.
Sun’s advice for students who don’t get enough sleep is to prioritize getting their homework done so they can go to bed at a reasonable time.
“Take advantage of lunch or free blocks, if you have any, or if you’re in the car or on a bus or something,” Sun said. “It’s wonderful to spend that time with friends, but if you’ve got a lot of homework, you just have to get to it, and you have to do it then. And you should set a point where you go to bed every night, no matter what, just so you get to bed then.”
Nurse Jill Seaman-Chandler said that teens benefit from receiving the recommended amount of sleep and are negatively impacted by lack of sleep.
“Having adequate sleep is going to positively impact attention span, energy level, mood. It positively impacts your immune system, so people get sick less, so those are all good things. When people aren’t well rested, the opposite is true. They don’t have the same ability to pay attention in their classes, perform as well academically as they otherwise would. They may be under the weather because their immune system is not as robust because they’re tired,” Seaman-Chandler said.
Nurse Megan Day said that it’s important for teens to get a lot of sleep because they are still developing. She said that students often complain about being tired when they come to the clinic.
“Teenagers need more sleep than a lot of other groups because you’re still developing in your body and in your mind. And so I see the way that lack of sleep really impacts this particular age group because it becomes an obstacle or a barrier for achieving other things. Whether that’s academically or socially, we see sleep being impacted a lot here. Actually, in the clinic, it’s a common complaint that students have,” Day said.
Assistant Head of School and English teacher Hal Mason said he makes long assignments on Canvas due from 6-9 p.m., as he doesn’t want students staying up too late to finish these assignments.
“It’s more a case of the larger number of kids who just wait and wait and wait, and they end up staying up till two, three in the morning, because it’s due the next morning, and they’ll stay up all night long. I’m trying to push kids to make a better decision,” Mason said.
Day said that it’s important to reflect on the amount of sleep you get and try to make sleep a priority.
“[Sleep is] one of those things that gets overlooked as a factor in how someone functions during the day,” Day said. “So I encourage people to reflect on their sleep and to prioritize their sleep in the way they might prioritize social time or academics.”
