Let me start off by introducing myself, I am Professor Ciara Collister from the National Sleep Foundation, I was the founder of NSF 25 years ago and I am here to talk to you about the amount of sleep you are getting and how this can adversely affect your body and behaviour and how we can prevent this. Most of you can probably picture yourselves trying to get out of bed and it probably goes like this: The alarm clock beeps, it is another exhausting morning that follows with you grudgingly getting dressed and quickly scoffing down something that resembles “breakfast” before leaving just after 7 am to catch a bus, or if you are lucky get dropped off at school, and by 8 am you are sitting in class wishing you had just another hour of sleep. Most …show more content…
Templestowe College in Melbourne has allowed teens the opportunity to choose what time they start and finish school: they were able to choose between three options which lasted throughout a whole school year. The options were the current 8:50- 3:15, an earlier option 7:15-1:15 and a later 10:30-5:00. The School discovered that the 10:30 start time was the most popular by 70%. Those who picked 7:15-1:15 said that they came to this decision because they played at a higher level of sport and very few chose the current start …show more content…
The high level of thinking that is required in high school becomes impaired with sleep loss and returns with an extra one and a half to two hours of sleep. Yet, there are more vulnerabilities forced on teenagers with insufficient sleep than just academic performance. As students are exposed sleep deprivation, they increase the possibilities of becoming physically and mentally ill. Teens develop habits that continue to hurt their body so they can cope with sleep deprivation. These habits can be the consumption of alcoholic and caffeine to smoking cigarettes. There has been a huge increase over the past 10 years of teenagers developing depression. Sleep deprivation is a serious medical concern and leads to harmful short term and long term issues for example: Memory