With their crowded schedules, many high school students agree that it’s a struggle to get enough sleep. The problem is sleep should be one of a student’s top priorities. Even for those that are aware of the importance, they can only sacrifice so much of their schedule for sleep while remaining competitive. Mentally and physically, sleep plays a major role in every person’s well-being. 

Many parents blame sleep loss on the current flux of technological distractions, however, even with those gone, the established times still don’t cooperate with teens. The only way for students to get enough of their precious 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 future. 

Parents often complain about their kids sleeping till noon on the weekend. The reason students sleep in on the weekend is: the body wants to catch up on the maintenance their brain missed out on during the week and sleep is also aimed at regulating their biological clock. The sleep cycle that teenagers have is different than that of 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, who naturally get tired two hours later, should also wake up two hours later as well. It’s important to know about this, but schools still haven’t caught on to the importance of sleep. They end up concerned with the short-term cost of high school bell changes, instead of the long-term consequences it has on their developing teenagers.

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, you might immediately be concerned. 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 reason that school times must be moved later is: a teenager’s sleep is controlled by their biology not by their will. Sleep that teens are losing is directly related to the hormone melatonin something that they have no control over. 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). Because of this shift it’s very difficult for them to work with the given sleep schedule that they have. They need change so that they can re-aligned with their biological clock.

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).

Due to the maintenance that your brain performs on itself at night, a well-rested person will think more clearly and have better problem solving skills than someone who didn’t. This is evident for sleep deprived drivers in the case that someone who is tired at the wheel can be just as dangerous to the public as a drunk driver. Sleep is directly related to a lot of daily activities and if you aren’t getting enough sleep you just simply won’t learn as well. 

Getting enough sleep is also related to your lively hood. A rested brain 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). Since sleep is connected to suicide, shouldn’t people be a little more concerned about its importance? What kind of mood do you find yourself in when you get little to no sleep? Don’t you just want the day to end. It’s hard to be happy when you’re tired and those who are vulnerable to depression can get dragged down by the early 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’s no data to prove their suffering. 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 can’t 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.

 Well, what is sleep important for? We spend one third of our life asleep, so it must 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, you might immediately be concerned. 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.

A problem with opposition to the bell delay is that the threat of anxiety and depression on students is not realized. 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). Again, this proves the prominent connection of sleep and depression.

The depression linked to sleep deprivation is of major concern. It is known that “[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. 

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 sleep deprivation. 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). Overall this study concludes that even students in Japan, students can’t get the right amount of sleep and suffer the consequences as well.

From his findings, Furutani believes that social values which ignore sleep importance, lead to stressed out children and it negatively impacts their physical and mental health. In Japan learning is taken very seriously (81). Students who are pushed to the extremes by their communities have visibly shown the damages of social jetlag. 

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 entirely 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 and administrators, 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 any other 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. The positive effects will outweigh the negatives in all communities that start to respect a high schooler’s circadian rhythm. It’s time we seriously consider moving school start times past 8:30 a.m. in America, it’s for the children’s future.
