Why you need more sleep than you think

By Junior Levi Kassinove

In our focus on health and healthy living this month, we’ve blogged about good eye health and good diet. Levi reminds us you need a good night’s sleep as well.

Most people in school take sleep for granted. People think that they can just blow off sleep and not face any consequences, justifying it with their school workload. They say it is “because of school” that they stay up so late, to quote Alyna Llapitan, who says she gets “around five hours of sleep” per night. Time management is clearly the real problem. Do we not have time to eat? Do we not have time to drink? The reason why we do it is because we make time for it. We cut time out of our days for food, water, video games, AND SCHOOL. People play on their phones like a bunch of mindless robots rather than going to sleep. You cannot tell me that you stay up every single night doing homework. I’m taking four AP classes, and I still (have the ability to) go to bed by 10 p.m. I’ll admit that I’m also a mindless robot sometimes who stays up until 11 p.m. or even 12 a.m., but that’s still within the range of the recommended daily amount of sleep for teenagers, which is 8-10 hours (cdc.gov). If you go to sleep at 10 p.m., you will get 10 hours of sleep if you wake up for school at 8 a.m. 

The fact of the matter is people should be making more time for sleep. When we disregard our sleep, we get sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation is AWFUL. The world record for longest time spent awake is 11 days and 25 minutes! The man’s name is Randy Gardner, and he “reported experiencing severe insomnia decades after his sleep experiment” (whatasleep.com). I’m sure many of you pull all nighters for no particular reason. (Scarefest, anyone?) I do it, too, but it can lead to severe health problems. The MINIMUM daily hours sleep to live on is four hours (ojp.gov). Lower quality of sleep is also linked to depression, as people with insomnia have been shown to have a “tenfold higher risk of developing depression than people who get a good night’s sleep” (hopkinsmedicine.com). This might be the cause of your low grades, as depression has a strong causal link to poor academic performance (sprc.org). 

The moral of the story is this: sleep is not optional, nor is it quirky no-consequence fun to pull all-nighters. Get sleep. Do your homework when you get home or during Firebird Time. Nobody has THAT much homework.