High school can be stressful and often students have a lot on their minds and their plates. Studies have shown that getting enough sleep is a huge factor that plays into how you perform during day-to-day activities (like school). 

According to uclahealth.org, an average teenager needs around eight to ten hours of sleep each night. Sometimes it’s harder to get that sleep than it should be, but there’s a reason behind it—stress. During the school days, it can feel like teachers are constantly piling on the assignments and making them due sooner and sooner. A lot of students go home and immediately get to work on their projects, often working late into the night. Freshman Harper Osburn said, “I normally go to bed around eleven o’clock and I go home with homework almost every single day.” 

There are plenty of students who can relate. According to threepennypress.org, high schoolers spend about 2.7 hours on homework each weeknight. Brooklynn Dorrance, a senior, says, “It takes me at least two hours if I have homework from all of my classes. If only a couple classes have given me homework, maybe an hour, hour and a half.”  Most students still have their own things that they would like to do after they finish their homework, and due to the late hour, they won’t get to bed until hours later. If a student goes to bed at 11 and wakes up at 6 am, that is only seven hours of sleep which is less than prescribed for an average teen. Freshman Marley Winters said, “I get around five hours of sleep each night because stress about assignments keeps me up.”

This can happen multiple nights in a row, or even continue throughout the school year. Repeated sleep deprivation like this can result in many different outcomes. For example, not getting enough sleep prior to a school day can lead to a shortened attention span and poor decision-making. Teachers expect students to stay awake and engaged during class but that becomes especially difficult when they keep mentally “drifting off” during class because they were up too late doing homework the night before. This can drastically affect grades and test scores. Maddy Menendez, a freshman, said “It is hard to focus in school because I get distracted with other things, usually because I get stressed about other upcoming assignments.”

Test scores are crucial to understanding how a student has comprehended learning material and if they have met the requirements to graduate. A study was done on freshman students at University of the Republic which showed the difference in students’ sleep patterns when preparing for a test. The results of this study showed that students’ regular sleep duration decreased when preparing for a test which led to a decrease in performance on test day. The university also found that the students with better grades were not the ones pulling all-night study sessions. Junior Nikolle Atkinson says, “I usually go to bed between 9:30 and 11 and wake up around 6.” This adds up to around eight hours of sleep, the perfect amount for a teenager. Nikolle goes on to say that she doesn’t believe school would be harder with less sleep, showing that a good amount of sleep can also benefit your mindset.

Another side effect of sleep deprivation is depression. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated five million adolescents in the United States have experienced at least one depressive episode. Multiple studies have found that shortened sleep increased risk for school problems, low life satisfaction, poor perceived health, depressed mood, drug use, and poor grades. Schools put so much pressure on students that it has started to impact their mental health. While most schools in the United States offer help to these students, many of them don’t ask for help which, in the end, can be detrimental to the students’ school performance, and their life outside of school.

There are so many factors that sleep deprivation leads to, all of which have bad outcomes. Graduating high school is a critical step that will help get people successful careers later in life. It gets harder when the workload piles up and students become short on sleep. In order to lift the weight of stress off, or at least ease it a little, the key is to quit procrastinating, get homework done first thing, and get to bed on time, so you can wake up the next morning ready to attack the day.