Uni High Gargoyle Staff Blog

Earlier today, fellow Gargoyle staff member Alan Liang posted an entry about two hot topics of high school: sleep and homework. “What can be done?” he asks at the end.

Well, really — what can be done? After reading quite a few news articles and studies about school start times and adolescents’ sleep issues, I definitely think that sleep deprivation in high schoolers is a serious problem, and that not enough is being done to address it. Abolishing homework entirely would probably make a huge difference, but that’s not a viable option at the moment. (Or is it?)

Instead, one solution that’s commonly suggested — both by students and medical professionals — is that schools should start later.

But wouldn’t starting school later just entice students to sleep later in the night as well? Yeah, probably. But because teens’ biological sleep patterns naturally favor later sleep and wake times, seven hours of sleep from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. doesn’t feel the same as seven hours from 2 a.m. to 9 a.m. You might have even figured that out just from personal experience.

Take a moment to think about it, though. Uni students are actually quite lucky. Our first period begins at 8 a.m. — some schools start way earlier. But, especially after staying up late at night, I often feel that 8 isn’t early enough — 9 would be much better. Of course, even later than that would be more ideal, but with an eight-hour school day, we’d have to pack or bring money for both lunch and dinner if that were the case.

Alas, when all’s said and done, it’s unlikely that Uni’s schedule will change before my (expected) graduation two years from now. But that doesn’t mean that alleviating the sleep deprivation problem is out of the question. The Mayo Clinic has a few suggestions.

One of those is to reset your circadian clock. “It takes a little effort,” they say — I suppose the difficulty of doing this will depend on your willingness and desire to feel less tired during the day.

The resetting process in itself isn’t too hard. Here’s what the Mayo Clinic says:

Exposing your child to bright light in the mornings will help his or her body realize that it is time to wake up. A device called a light box can provide enough light to enhance early morning alertness. At the opposite extreme, being in subdued light or darkness at bedtime signals the body that it’s time to sleep.

Actually, there are even products out there to do this for you — but they’re not cheap.

The Mayo Clinic continues:

Another method of readjusting a malfunctioning biological clock is called chronotherapy. In a teenager, this most often involves delaying bedtime by two or three hours every night for a progression of nights. For example, if your teen regularly goes to bed at 3 a.m., the first night he or she would stay up until 6 a.m. The next night, he or she would stay up until 9 a.m. This continues until a socially acceptable bedtime is reached.

Products containing melatonin, a sleep-inducing hormone, help some people reset their circadian clocks. Taking the product about five hours before bedtime usually produces the best results. While these supplements can be purchased without a prescription, they should be taken under the supervision of a doctor.

The Mayo Clinic experts also add that it helps to sleep and wake up on the same time during weekends and holidays as you do on school days, but that’s probably even harder to accomplish for various reasons. But again, it’s something that those individuals determined to synchronize their biological sleep patterns with Uni’s start time will do ….

Obviously, if you do the same amount of stuff in a day after you change your sleeping habits, then resetting your circadian clock won’t make you sleep longer. But it should certainly help daytime sleepiness — aka falling asleep in class.

And it also means that to get the same amount of sleep as you normally do, you’re going to have to sleep earlier at night — which means that you’d need to spend some time before school to finish up homework (or whatever, really). Some people have told me that it’s better to finish up homework or studying early in the morning before school than late at night, but I don’t know what their sleeping patterns are like.

All in all, if you actually manage to sync your sleep schedule with Uni’s school schedule, you should feel much more energetic during the day. And especially during the first couple of days, I’m sure that that would be a very pleasant feeling. Even if it somehow doesn’t have much of an effect on you, at least it’s worth a try — isn’t it?

— Jason He