In today’s society, stress is one of the hardest things a teenager has to deal with. Almost every negative thing that happens to someone in high school causes stress. Academics, bullying, peer pressure and relationships are just some of the things that relates back to stress. I personally believe that, as long as they meet a certain criteria, students should be allowed a “Personal Health Day” every once in awhile to just relax and escape from all the stress.

It is hard for teens these days to meet the standards that are set for us. We are supposed to find a way to get seven or more hours of sleep, go to school for seven hours a day, be involved in extracurricular activities, go to work, be social, stay in shape and complete all of our homework and study for tests and quizzes which can last anywhere from 30 minutes to five or six hours. It’s hard to be able to complete all of that in one day.

Getting the sleep we are suppose to get and just going to school alone adds up to 14 hours. That leaves 10 hours left in one day. Homework is, most of the time, only going to take an hour or two, so that leaves eight hours left. I work five to six hour shifts so that only leaves two hours. Staying in shape takes at least an hour at the gym. That gives you just one short hour to socialize and take time for yourself to relax.

It’s just not possible to meet these standards due to the fact that a wrench can be thrown into any one of those. There is a possibility that homework and studying can take a few more hours than usual, so what are they gonna do with that? What other activity are teens going to take time out of to balance everything out? Most of the time it is sleep.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), 36 percent out of the 1,018 teenagers surveyed reported feeling fatigued. Which, as previously mentioned in the paragraph above, is most likely the outcome of having to take time out of one category in their lives to make up for another.

Also, APA states that teens reported stress level is a 5.8 out of a 10-point scale which far exceeds the healthy level of 3.9 and the 5.8 level teens report is higher than the 5.1 level the 1,950 adults surveyed reported. It blows my mind that teens are more stressed out than adults when adults are usually the ones saying that us, teenagers, don’t have anything to stress out about.

As I was trying to look for a source, I came across something very interesting. If you search in Google “Why students should have a mental health day?” about 48.2 million websites come up in less than half a second with different articles and blogs on why it is okay for a student to have a mental health day. But I don’t know any school that actually has this. All I want to know is why? If there are over 48 million articles saying yes to it, why haven’t schools taken a look at it and considered a student mental health day an option?