As children, almost all of us had to be in bed by a certain time. There was no forgetting to shower after day of exhaustion, feeling overworked or waking up more tired than before you went to sleep. Things have changed, nevertheless, and as time progresses, it seems that getting a full night’s rest is next to impossible.

The truth of it is, it can be incredibly difficult to maintain a healthy sleep routine given the challenging task of balancing your academic, social and athletic life. On behalf of this, a substantial amount of students just aren’t getting a healthy amount of sleep. This has become a subject of concern among teenagers everywhere, including those at SHS.

By the time we actually get home from school, there’s hours of homework assigned by teachers who think their class is the only one that exists. In addition to that is self-maintenance, which becomes a scary factor when ignored in the grand scheme of a teenager’s life. Two weeks pass and you’ve been taking two minute showers before jumping into bed, unintentionally paying no heed to the fact that a forest has grown on your legs, or some other unfortunate case. As this continues, free time becomes a precious gem, and hours of sleep begin to be sacrificed for a moment of time to breathe.

“Personally, I wouldn’t say that I or any of my friends sleep enough from night to night,” said sophomore Brontie Wright. “It’s partly due to having a huge homework load, and partly because I want to enjoy a life of my own. On days that I can’t get to bed until late, I always wake up feeling like a zombie. It’s hard to function.”

According to the National Sleeping Foundation, the average teenage adolescent functions best after getting somewhere between eight to ten hours of sleep per night. That number, however, becomes unrealistic as the responsibilities and previous commitments that come with high school begin to add up. There seems to just not be a sufficient numbers of hours in a day to complete everything that is demanded from teachers while also upkeeping our social lives.

“Teens tend to have irregular sleep patterns across the week – they typically stay up late and sleep in late on the weekends, which can affect their biological clocks and hurt the quality of their sleep,” said an article by the National Sleeping Foundation.

Apart from this, a lack of sleep can impair your learning ability, negatively affect your mood and most importantly, make us more prone to acne and other skin irritation. All together, sleep deprivation not only takes away from our academic ability, but also makes us irritable and in dramatic cases, unstable.