English 101
Research Paper
December 5, 2016
Why Schools Should Have a Later Start Time
Sleep is a fundamental priority next to hydration and nourishment. Sleep, hydration, and nourishment all have one thing in common, humans need them to function and survive. Most people don’t think of sleep as being just as important as eating and drinking, but it is. Just like humans need a certain amount of food and water to be healthy, they also require a certain amount of sleep. Sleep is the mechanism that not only recharges and rejuvenates our minds and bodies but also keeps our immune system strong to avoid infection, keeps our reflexes sharp when operating machinery, and helps us absorb and maintain all the information we learn at school …show more content…
It is recommended by most health care professionals that teenagers need a minimum of nine hours of sleep every night to feel revitalized and energetic. (Sleep and Teens, 1). As spoken about in a previous paragraph, teenagers like Tristan do not get the amount of sleep that they physically need go about their everyday lives on the road, at school, at work and even during after school extra-curricular activities such as sports. Sleep deprivation can come from many things like poor sleep hygiene. This is where teenagers use electronics right before bed which causes brain activity to heighten and prolongs the inability to fall asleep. Stress caused by the ambition to do well in school also causes sleep deprivation. It is common knowledge to recognize that when adolescents don’t receive enough sleep they will either doze off during class or not commemorate anything they learned during class time. According to Jan Farrington, “One of the primary activities of the brain is to organize new information we acquire during waking hours—and sleep plays a part in how well new information is “fixed” in the memory.” Sleep deprivation is a domino effect going downhill. It will negatively affect teenager’s grades which will lower their GPA, lessen their chances of get into the college they want, and could even prohibit them from conquering their future goals and careers. Sleep is so …show more content…
According to Russel Foster, “The suggestion is that long-term sleep deprivation might be an important factor in predisposing people to conditions such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension.” The concept that lack of sleep can cause obesity makes a lot of sense if people actually thought about it. When a person is tired and then they eat something, they are too tired to get up to burn off the calories they just ate. If someone does that every day due to chronic sleep deprivation, then they will gain weight. Another thing that happens when your body lacks sleep is it will go into a survival mode where it will try to conserve all of the energy it has which means instead of burning calories, it will save all of the ones that the person consumes to get energy that they are depriving their body of when they don’t get enough sleep. According to H. Noland el al, “For each hour of lost sleep, the adolescents’ odds of developing obesity increased 80%.” Hormone production also occurs when humans sleep. This is crucial to growth and development during puberty in teens. The hormone cortisol, which is responsible for stress, is highly increased when sleep is interrupted (Forster 2). It is also common sense that when any human is stressed, that itself could cause problems. Stress can cause humans to overeat which leads to obesity, it can cause humans to under eat