In the race to succeed, teens around the world would rather work on homework, squeeze in an extracurricular or scroll on social media until late at night. To them, staying up late is just another part of their lives, but behind the scenes, they lose the ability to focus, express emotions, and maintain mental stability.

The Importance of Sleep

    It may not seem like it, but sleep can affect your overall health during the day. When you are sleeping, your blood pressure and heart rate drop, as your heart doesn’t have to work as hard, during REM which is the time where dreaming occurs, during this time, the heart rate and blood pressure gradually rise to acclimate to almost waking up. If this REM is interrupted, the blood pressure can heart rate can rise rapidly. Over time this leads to side effects such as coronary heart disease, heart attacks, and more. While sleeping, the human body processes fats and proteins, and according to the National heart, lung, and blood institute not getting enough sleep can damage the ability to process and produce insulin, along with affecting the diet of the teen, in most cases, it makes the teen eat sweet or oily foods.

The Teen Sleep Shift

   During puberty, the brains change its circadian rhythm, or its sleep cycle. This often causes teens to feel tired later and wake up in the morning at a later hour. For teens, because of the hormonal changes, sleep at 11 P.M. is the equivalent of an adult sleeping at 9 P.M.

Effects of Activities and School on Sleep

     Aspiring to be successful, most teen take many advanced classes and pick up extracurricular activities. The pressure to do well on all of these can lead to intense stress and buildup of work. For instance, someone who normally gets 3 hours of homework a day might have a sporting event that day, causing them to stay late to finish the work to get a good grade. According to the NCES, 49 out of 50 states reported that schools started at an average of 7:40 A.M, combined with the teen circadian changes and stress from schools worsens the problem.  As stated by an article published by Nationwide Children’s, most teens fall asleep 2 hours later than before puberty, the average being 11 o’ clock. Because the recommended sleep timing for teens is between 9-9.5 hours, a teen waking up for school at 7 will only get 8 hours, this causes teens to lose extremely important REM sleep, the bulk of which is concentrated at late night. The loss of 1 hour of sleep also makes teens prone to substance abuse, emotional instability, and suicide.

The Internet as a Distraction

   Another reason for the falling hours of sleep is the internet, teens are distracted by social media and video games and would rather spend their time on them instead of sleeping. A survey by the NSF found that 70 percent of teens bring their devices into their bedrooms and 2 thirds of teens use the devices at least one hour before sleeping, these teens reported that their sleep was of worse quality. This goes on further to show how sleep is becoming a “secondary” activity, happening when the person is either too tired to do the “main” activities or when they are done with them.

How Parents Can Help

   Parents play a big role in a child’s development. When it comes to sleep, a helpful way to assist is to set bedtimes. For some teens, it might seem like a punishment, but Sleep, a journal published in 2010 proved that students who have a bedtime set to midnight or no bedtime at all are more likely to entertain thoughts of suicide. According to an article published by Stanford families with well rested teens due to bedtimes are more organized and interdependent. All in all, the sleep cycle of teens is being disturbed and could lead to an unsuccessful or unhealthy next generation.