Hello!
So
recently I’ve begun to notice how many of my friends and acquaintances have
been complaining of a lack of sleep. “Yeah, I was up ‘til three in the morning”
isn’t uncommon to hear in the hallway. On the flip side of this, I have also
heard that teenagers are most likely to sleep the most, and need the most sleep
overall. So in the spirit of my research posts from earlier this week, I’ve
compiled a list of questions that I found interesting, and their answers from
various online sources.
How
much sleep does the average teenager need?
According
to research done by this
group, the average teenager needs 9 hours and fifteen minutes until they’re an
adult, and then they need eight hours and fifteen minutes.
How
much sleep does the average teenager get?
This was actually the hardest piece of information to find,
and there wasn’t any definitive answer. Teenagers are all different, and polls
of big groups were inconclusive because teens get anywhere from 4 to 14 hours
of sleep a night. Teenagers also tend to sleep on odd schedules, sleeping less
on school nights and making up for it on the weekends.
How does a lack of sleep actually
affect you?
Lack of sleep can hurt a teenager
in many ways. The same
group says that lack of sleep causes learning to be more difficult. It also
affects your physical performance, making it harder to perform well. You look
worse, you feel worse, you become more moody. You also can develop some more
dangerous side-effects, like drowsiness while driving. There are over 100,000
sleep-deprivation related deaths every year in the United States. So the real deal is, what’s more important to
you – texting your friends for an extra hour or performing well in life?
What
percentage of teens have sleeping disorders, and what disorders are most
common?
Almost all teens have what’s
called delayed sleep phase syndrome according to this site. That
means that they go to sleep later and want to wake up later too. Besides this,
a very small percentage (below 1%) of teens have sleep apnea or chronic
insomnia.
So overall, I
was not very surprised with the information that not many teens actually have
chronic insomnia. Us teens just tend to have pretty screwed up sleep schedules,
which is not abnormal. So, to all of you who have gotten very little sleep in
the last few days, fret not! It’s normal.
Thanks
for reading
Matt Finley
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