Late starts are something that every high school student looks forward to. Wednesdays and Fridays are the days I get to sleep in and feel more refreshed, awake and alert throughout the school day – which is a much better feeling than those Mondays I drag myself out of bed after snoozing my alarm for the fifth time. This tiredness follows me throughout the school day as it also does for 60% of students under the age of 18 who complain daily about being tired, 15% of them admitting they have fallen asleep during a class, according to a study from the National Sleep Foundation.

This tiredness that many students feel greatly affects the way in which they learn in addition to simply feeling tired and drowsy. As we have been taught since middle school, teenagers should get as much as 9-10 hours of sleep per night or they will not be as able to be active and ready to learn throughout the day. However, this is made difficult for many students as 42% of public high schools start at or before 8:00am.

Schools starting this early can cause sleep patterns that disrupt the production of melatonin – an important sleep related hormone. When interrupting this production of melatonin the student is basically forcing their body to get up and be active before it is physically ready, and how are students supposed to be ready and motivated to learn when their bodies are technically supposed to be sleeping?

Each week I probably could not count on two hands the amount of times I hear my peers, and myself, complain about being tired and wanting nothing more than to go back to sleep. This feeling, for me, clouds my mind to the point where I can not concentrate on what I am being taught no matter how much I want to learn the curriculum.

However, on Wednesday late start days I find myself more compelled to want to learn and more able to put all of my energy and focus into what I am being taught. The way my mind acts in each of these situations makes perfect sense scientifically because when people are tired it affects the cognitive process in learning. Along with this cognitive process is a very short teenage attention span. Lack of sleep causes this already short attention span to become even shorter, which greatly affects the rate at which students learn.

Along with the educational downfall that lack of sleep brings, it also greatly affects general health. Nearly everyone knows about the dangers of drunk driving, which causes even the best of drivers to get into easily avoided accidents because their reaction time and judgment are severely lowered. However, what many people do not know is that when you are tired or fatigued your reaction time and reflexes can be even lower than they are for a drunk driver.

This is chilling to me because most mornings I drive to school and feel very tired, ready to go back to sleep – sometimes I even have to open my window and let the cold air hit my face to wake me up. The fact that the reaction time for tired drivers is worse than the reaction time for drunk drivers is truly a scary and dangerous  thought. Statistics prove this theory as well.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, fatigue is the cause of 100,000 car crashes and 1,550 deaths from car accidents in the United States every year – a majority of these individuals being under 25 years old. Yet another extreme health risk to fatigue is depression. This is already unfortunately a common issue among teens, which is most likely being made worse with the early hours schools begin at.

Sleep is one of the most important aspects of life in general, and without it we can not function to our full potential. High school is an important time in our lives and we all want to perform at our best every day, but it is extremely difficult to do this when lacking sleep. Even a half an hour of extra sleep can improve your ability to focus and do well throughout the day, so if schools started at even 8:30am or 9:00am most students’ ability to give their full potential every day would greatly increase.

Creative Commons photo source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/83633410@N07/7658254172/