Martin Huang '24 outlines the benefits of sleeping more!
A National Sleep Foundation poll discovered that 59% of middle-school students and 87% of high-school students don’t get the recommended 8.5 or 9.5 hours of sleep on school days; instead, they get an average of less than 7 hours (“School Start Times for Adolescents”). This sleep deprivation is detrimental for these teenagers as they would lose focus in class fighting the urge to fall asleep, demolishing their academic performance and cognitive abilities. The core cause for these issues is the schedule with which the majority of schools around the world align, which has an unreasonably early start of around 8:00 AM. Therefore, for a more preferable education experience, schools should start the school day much later to build healthy sleep schedules for its students.
Firstly, merely opening the school gates a couple of hours later means one or two extra hours of sleep for countless pupils. The length of a school day won’t be affected because schools can just end later, but the difference this makes is that students don’t need to wake up at unnecessarily early times. For example, a student with numerous extracurricular activities and piling homework on the side might be so busy they sleep at 2 AM and, in order to catch the school bus, must wake up at 7 AM. Setting aside potential sleeping disorders they might have, such as insomnia, the student would be getting only seven hours of sleep a night. Inarguably, this is insufficient for working eight intense hours in school, and the student’s eyelids would be heavy before even picking up a pencil. A day in this student’s life illustrates the how many students suffer from sleep deprivation due to waking up too early in the morning for school, especially for high school and college students where the workload is exceptionally heavier — among university students, 50% suffered from daytime sleepiness (Hershner & Chervin).
Such irregular sleeping schedules decrease concentration during studying, which can be extremely problematic when this lacking focus starts to negatively impact their grades and mood towards learning. Students’ GPAs would be affected, which directly harms their future when they don’t get into the college they want or as much job opportunities. The role of schools in this harmful cycle cannot be ignored because it is their early start times that caused these chains of events. If schools started at 8:30, 9, or even 10 AM, students would be much more comfortable and much more alert with a much healthier sleep routine.
Of course, some might argue that, to solve this problem, students can simply go to bed earlier. This might be feasible for elementary and middle schoolers, but for high schoolers such as myself, getting nine hours of sleep each night is almost impossible with the exponentially increasing workload, especially during finals week. Such demanding studying needs usually means still typing at a desk at 10 PM. The most utilitarian solution is for schools to start later, and problems regarding sleep would instantly evaporate because all students can rest their brains to prepare for the next day, and they wouldn’t be dozing off in the middle of lectures.
Secondly, opening up school later would prevent abundant health risks among students of all ages. According to the American Heart Association, common sleep disorders caused by sleep deprivation include insomnia (inability to fall asleep), sleep apnea (sleep interruption from breathing fluctuations), and even heart diseases along with high blood pressure and strokes (“The dangers of sleep deprivation”). Given that children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to these health risks, starting school early could even be a health hazard for its students. These diseases and disorders seriously affect academic capabilities and also the future of these students because conditions like high blood pressure would cling on for the rest of their lives. Adding on the pressure of studying and grades, some might even collapse under the harms of these diseases caused by sleep deprivation. Schools would be the culprit of these incidents. Furthermore, such an early start to school forces students to develop bad habits like not eating breakfast or consuming unhealthy food to save time, or in some extreme cases, taking addictive medication to sedate their academic stress. It is then the school’s moral obligation to prevent these health perils, or else they are directly responsible for these students’ sufferings. Thus, it is imperative that schools keep their gates closed until a few hours after 8 AM to ensure students maintain healthy sleep schedules and life habits.
Lastly, aside from keeping students healthy, starting school later improves students’ mental health. Ongoing sleep deprivation causes teenagers to experience mood swings or default to hostile behavior, which is often worsened by outside criticism. The reasons for this type of behavior is usually ignored, falsely associated only with the age of these teenagers or even them being “weak”. I knew a girl in a class outside of SAS that was so overwhelmed with upcoming tests that she had a mental breakdown and had to leave her school for months. She suffered several mental problems, but when she came back she was like a new person, because she no longer had an irregular sleep schedule and was able to take her mind off academics for longer periods of time. If these adolescents get enough sleep, their moods could be improved extensively, avoiding potential mental issues like anxiety, social isolation, and/or depression, and this all can start with schools taking a simple step of changing their schedule to protect these young individuals.
As biology professor Horacio de la Iglesia once said, “To ask a teen to be up and alert at 7:30 a.m. is like asking an adult to be active and alert at 5:30 a.m.” (Iglesia). A study conducted by the University of Washington found that a later starting time for schools — which lets teens sleep for longer — allowed students to sleep in longer with healthy sleep behaviors that followed the body’s natural biological rhythm, causing significant upsurges in concentration during school (Urton). Therefore, schools should definitely shift its schedule and start school later to improve students’ sleep, prevent diseases and disorders caused by sleep deprivation, and ensure the mental health of their students to maximize the education experience for their students.
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