Many students in today’s world agree that it’s a great struggle to get enough sleep in their schedules. The problem here is – sleep is very, very important. Mentally and physically, sleep can decide your well-being. I would like to argue that the only way for students to get enough sleep is to move the start of school to, at the minimum - the doctor recommended 8:30 a.m. This isn’t just for the sake of students not feeling tired: this is for the sake of their mental health. 

Teenagers seem to complain a lot about being tired and parents seem to complain about their kids sleeping till noon on the weekend. I promise you that it’s not because they’re lazy, well not just because they’re lazy. Teenagers have a different sleep cycle than full grown adults. Michael Bratsis quoted in his article, “The AAP [(American Academy of Pediatrics)] (2014) recommends that high schools delay starting classes until at least 8:30 a.m. to align with ‘the biological sleep rhythms of adolescents, whose sleep-wake cycles begin to shift up to two hours later at the start of puberty’” (12). This means that teens get tired two hours later and should wake up two hours later as well. It’s important to know this, but schools still haven’t caught on to the importance of sleep. They still refuse to consider only the convenience of the rest of the community. 

What exactly is the science behind a teenager’s sleep? Sleep is directly related to the hormone melatonin. The sleep-wake cycle is controlled by the circadian rhythm, otherwise known as the internal body clock. According to The National Sleep Foundation (as cited by Bratsis), “circadian rhythm is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a group of cells in the brain’s hypothalamus that responds to signals from the optic nerve, which senses light and dark.” This system triggers the release of melatonin at night and suppresses its release in the morning when the eyes sense light. The difference with teenagers is that puberty causes a delay of melatonin control in the body (Bratsis 12). That is why teens have a naturally different sleep-wake cycle and that is why school times should be moved to fit it.

Something also important about sleep is what the brain does during this time. It basically performs maintenance during your hours asleep. Teenagers are going to want their brains finely tuned in the morning. Julie Dahl explains it like this:

All night while you sleep - your brain rids you of those unneeded pathways and keeps only the important ones making them nice and strong… It’s a process called Synaptic Pruning so much like you would prune a garden to get rid of the old growth to make room for the healthy new vegetation, that’s what’s happening in your brain every night that you sleep. (6:06).

Everyone knows how good it feels to have your brain well rested in the morning. A rested brain also keeps you from moodiness and depression. Dahl stated that, “There’s actually one study out of Fairfax that actually showed that the less sleep a child got – the more likely they were to talk about suicide and actually more risk of attempted suicide as well” (7:08). This relationship between suicide and should very well be enough to move school times.

It isn’t every day that you hear about sleep related issues in America, in fact they are rarely mentioned, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a hidden problem. A large portion of the country is currently lacking sleep. Gregoire notes, “Teenagers are the least likely of any age group to be getting sufficient rest. Over 90 percent of American high school students are chronically sleep-deprived, according to a 2014 survey.” This is a notable issue by anyone’s standards. If ninety percent of high school students are sleep deprived that means that ninety percent of high school students aren’t able to reach their full learning capacity. This could certainly set us back as a nation. Our education system is lacking because of this heavy hit on students learning ability, and it even impedes the global competitiveness of our students and future work force. The only effective way to get their sleep back is delayed start times.

Not only is it unhealthy to have sleep loss on the weekdays, but when students try to make up for lost sleep on the weekend - it throws off their sleep schedule. Your body likes to wake and fall asleep at the same time daily. Readjusting sleep at the end of each week creates social jetlag. Social jetlag is the misalignment between your bodies clock and the clock set by society. It has been concluded that “[t]here is a negative impact of social jetlag on academic achievement and cognitive ability in school students” (Chandrakar 100). One way to lessen social jetlag is to move school start times back further. This would help students live more in tune with their biological clock and not their social one. Surely your body knows when you should sleep best and if school times are shifted students could then listen to it.

Of course I should mention that Bell times aren’t the only factor to involved with the current sleep deprivation of our country’s teenagers. Because of the technological advancements of our world, we also have to consider television, social media, and video games. High schoolers must put down the electronics after a certain time so that they don’t interfere with their bodies melatonin release. Putting those items down will help teenagers get to bed when their body wants to. This topic can’t be blamed too heavily though for sleep loss. School times still deal most the damage since they just aren’t in tune with teenagers’ biological clock.

 Well, what is sleep important for? We spend one third of our life asleep, so it has to be important for something. As Brody said, “the effects of inadequate sleep can profoundly affect memory, learning, creativity, productivity and emotional stability, as well as your physical health.” He also said that according to sleep specialists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic some of the bodily systems affected by inadequate sleep are, “the heart, lungs and kidneys; appetite, metabolism and weight control; immune function and disease resistance; sensitivity to pain; reaction time; mood; and brain function.” If you put yourself in the shoes of a parent hearing this, the effect it might have on you is alarming. You don’t want something like lack of sleep to damage your child’s life in such a way. Imagine thinking back to how: simply sleeping the right way can keep your child from a shortened life or dreadful health condition. Moving school times can quite literally save the life of someone.

The mental effects of sleep on high schoolers are surprising. Delayed school hours for sleep can be prioritized for one of the greatest reasons of all and stop senseless deaths every year. Caroline Gregoire stated, “A study of nearly 28,000 suburban high school students, published earlier this year in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, found that each hour of lost sleep is associated with a 38 percent increased risk of feeling sad or hopeless and a 58 percent increase in suicide attempts.” Mental health is sometimes fragile, and who feels more fragile than when they were in high school? A person cannot be healthy if they are afflicted with depression and sadly it can lead to physical harm. That is why sleep is so important. It may just be the solution that no one expected with the depression epidemic.

The depression linked to sleep deprivation is the real stuff. This “[d]epression is characterized by a state of low mood and aversion to activities. Depressive disorders are among the most debilitating disorders, causing significant impairments in social, emotional and occupational functioning” (Wong 21, citing Wells). With such a strong concern for this mental disorder - the prevention of a depression prone life style is essential. Depression isn’t just a small side effect of sleep – it is a dangerous thing to have, often leading to suicides. 

A problem with the opposition to the bell delay is that they don’t realize the real threat of anxiety and depression caused by the school system’s early starting times. How are depression and sleep linked? Wong’s group was able to inspect sleep quality and chronotype and found that they are often related to depression (22). That’s solid reasoning for making efforts to get teens more sleep.

Daytime tiredness was associated with more maternal depressive symptoms (Wong 26 citing Dennis). Wong continued on to say: 

One possible explanation for the finding was that neurotic individuals were more were more inclined to attend to the experience of daytime dysfunction, and that they internalized those dissatisfying performance as their own problems leading to self-blame, which might contribute to disrupted mood and development of depressive symptoms (26). 

These kids who are tired in the day, due to the school schedule, can end up just like this. Just another reason we need to get the ball rolling on shifting schools’ bell times.

Even with the staggering amount of teenager’s who are sleep deprived in the U.S. we aren’t on the top of the list for short sleep duration. People in America are concerned with their job’s, their school work, and their social life, but priorities like these can also be found in countries like Japan. This common Western issue is also relevant in Japanese culture and one could say it has evolved into an even worse problem in Japan and other Asian countries. Maki Furutani emphasizes, “According to the report provided by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average length of sleep among Japanese people were 7 h and 42 min, the shortest length of sleep among 26 countries” (81). Clearly that’s not a statistic to be proud of. Overall this study shows that on average Japanese students also lack the right amount of sleep and suffer the direct consequences from it as well.

From his findings, Furutani believes the social value’s in Japan ignore sleep importance, which leads to stressed out children and negatively impacts their physical and mental health. In Japan learning is taken very seriously (81). Students are pushed to the extremes by their communities to study as much as they can and to learn as quickly as possible, but this has visibly led to one of the lowest average national sleep times in the world. 

What’s the problem with Japan and other industrialized nations pushing their kids hard? Don’t they need to prepare for the real world? Some parents think that the more a teenager has to do – the better. They think that a busy kid is a good kid. But where is the line drawn? Where should their sleep begin to become a factor? And how can you be sure later school times will fix anything? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t push kids to work hard or that we take away their responsibilities so that they can sleep. We just need to put their health first and the best way to do that is to delay the first bell for school and let teens get the sleep they need.

Still, with the current wealth of knowledge we have on the human brain and sleep. We have not seen any major changes in school times around the nation. In Montgomery County of Kensington, Maryland the movement for later high school start times was brought to a halt. You see, change is hard, especially when parts of the community don’t see the benefits. There in Montgomery the teachers that spoke didn’t support the time change and the Superintendent, Joshua P. Starr, who had originally backed the proposal, turned his back on it (Zauzmer). According to Julie Zauzmer, the bell shift would cost less than $10 million a year, but the Starr recommended the board only consider no-cost options, and favored a plan that only moved the start times by twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is better than no change, but it really isn’t enough for the teens.

What the teenagers really need is for their school times to be moved by at least an hour. There’s no way they can get the sleep their body needs, with a start time that forces them to get on a bus at 6:45 a.m. To be ready for school at 6:45 students need to be up at least some forty-five minutes before that, which means they need to be asleep by 10:00 pm, which is wholly unnatural for a teenager. And that eight hours of sleep is the bare minimum for the average teen and the amount of sleep for a them varies from one teenager to another.

The teachers however, believe that fixing this problem isn’t worth the hassle. They believe it will cause problems with the students’ after school schedule. A large concern was for the lower income families who in which students had after school jobs or had to take care of siblings (Zauzmer). With an issue like that there needs to be a strong plan that can delay school start times as well as keep a balance between students and their life. The problems that sleep deprivation creates are more than serious. Regardless of what shifting the bell does to after school schedules; it needs to be done so that the health of teenagers can be preserved. 

Teacher’s and other members of the education system who are against this movement need to back down. There isn’t another reason that can outweigh the importance of reducing depression, anxiety, suicides, and car crashes. School times can’t just be left the way they are. America like it has always done, needs to progress and use science and technology to better the people of this country. While Japan takes small steps towards sleep education, we need to take a full leap and show students just how important school times are. I guarantee that the positive effects will weigh out the negative in all communities that start to respect a high schooler’s circadian rhythm. It’s about time we get serious about our sleep in America and move school start times past 8:30 a.m.
