Argument Of Inquiry: Sleep-Deprived Teens

Argument of Inquiry – Sleep-deprived teens

The loud horn buzzed through my ears, as I woke up from my unintended sleep, only to find out that the bus I was riding had almost hit the car up front. I walked out from the bus at the next stop, half-sleepy. The street was unfamiliar and I could not recognize where I was. I had fallen asleep in a public bus and had missed my bus stop about 45 minutes earlier, while trying to get to school. This had happened to me before, falling asleep in a bus was quite common for me, but I had always woken up before arriving at my bus stop. It had been few days since I had not have enough sleep. My school’s starting time was 7:50 am and I had gone to bed around 1 am. I had tried sleeping earlier that night, but

According to Emily Richmond from The Atlantic, adolescents’ circadian rhythms, also known as the “internal clocks” works differently than other age groups. The circadian rhythm controls a human’s responses to stimuli and regulates sleeping patterns. She asserts that it is hard for adolescent to fall asleep earlier in the evening than other age groups (Richmond). According to the Sleep Center of the University of California Los Angeles, most teens in general do not get enough (CDC). Teens are at their important stage of growth and development, therefore they require more sleep than adults. The average teens requires an average of 9 hours of sleep each night to be fully awake and well rested. There are many factors that keep teens from getting enough sleep. Some of the reasons includes, busy schedules, social lives, and a wrong view of sleep. Many high school students take AP classes, participates in extra curricular activities, and some people just likes to be around with other people and socialize. All of these require time, and in the eyes of the teenagers, sleeping takes their valuable time. Therefore, they try to fight the sleep; it becomes the enemy of teenagers’ willingness to do other things that seems fun at the time. Teens basically neglect the idea of sleep, not realizing that everything they do the next day will be based on how much sleep

Although I often got full 8 hours of sleep, it was still hard for me to wake up in the morning. At the time I was living with my brother, who had to leave for work around 7: 30 am, and since no one would be at home, it was my responsibility to wake myself up. Most of the time I had to drag myself, even thought I mostly hated it, it was something I had to do. 8 hours of sleep per night barely worked for me, then time came for me to transition into high school. It was tough, my high school’s starting time was even earlier than my middle school. To make it even worst, by that time I had developed my daily sleeping pattern to even later in the night. I often went to bed around 1 am and woke up at 6 am to get ready and catch a bus. It was disastrous; I did not like a single minute of it. It was already hard for me to go about my day with 8 hours of sleep, now I was getting only 5 hours of sleep. I thought maybe if I go to sleep earlier, I would be able to get full amount of sleep. I tried sleeping earlier in the night but I was unsuccessful. According to the Sleep Center of UCLA, teen sleep problem can begin before a person turns 13, and once the sleep patterns are set, it becomes extremely hard for them to change (UCLA). It seems like I was having the same problem, I had already set my sleeping patterns. When I finally realized that my sleeping patterns were