Biology’s cruel joke goes something like this: As a teenage body goes through puberty, its circadian rhythm essentially shifts three hours backward. Suddenly, going to bed at nine or ten o’clock at night isn’t just a drag, but close to a biological impossibility. Studies of teenagers around the globe have found that adolescent brains do not start releasing melatonin until around eleven o’clock at night and keep pumping out the hormone well past sunrise. Adults, meanwhile, have little-to-no melatonin in their bodies when they wake up. With all that melatonin surging through their bloodstream, teenagers who are forced to be awake before eight in the morning are often barely alert and want nothing more than to give in to their body’s demands and fall back asleep. Because of the shift in their circadian rhythm, asking a teenager to perform well in a classroom during the early morning is like asking him or her to fly across the country and instantly adjust to the new time zone — and then do the same thing every night, for four years.
—
Sleep and the teenage brain (via explore-blog)
This is why you have every right to be tired.
(via lookrainbows)
And, in defiance of every medical study on the subject that’s been run, they keep pushing the start time of high school earlier and earlier.
#child abuse #systematic child abuse
(via transquesting)
I used to sleep through my first period class every morning. I’m really lucky that the year I had the most trouble staying awake, I was taking creative writing with a teacher I’d made friends with: she knew it was no reflection on her and I did extra projects to make up for it.
Still, shit ain’t right.
(via huggablekaiju)
My last year of school, because I was doing weekend sport, taking morning classes and had a train commute, I was getting up at 5:30 and 6:30 am six days a week. If I was lucky, I managed four or five hours of sleep a night. I have vivid memories - hell, I have diary entries - of getting into bed before 10pm, so tired I could barely function, and then just lying awake until 1, 2, 3am, crying as I counted down the sleep I’d lost and knowing I had to go to school anyway, even if I was exhausted to the point of feeling physically sick, because “I didn’t sleep well” wasn’t considered a valid reason to take a day off.
I was depressed and stressed for other reasons, but the insomnia nearly killed me. I slept on the train, I slept in class, I slept under library desks at lunch - the only day I could ever sleep in was Sunday, and if I spent it at home, then invariably, one or both of my parents would be in my room by 10am, telling me to wake up and use the day. Getting stupidly drunk at weekend parties became something I did on purpose, because blacking out meant deep, restful sleep, and I was so. fucking. tired. Like, I would reach a point in the evening where I knew I was drunk, and think to myself, But if I keep going, I’ll pass out. And so I’d keep going. And not only was that normal, it was a twisted form of self-care, and the only one available to me.
Because when I told adults how tired I was, how little sleep I was getting, almost universally, their response was that it was my fault for staying up late in the first place. I was lazy for sleeping in; I had bad sleep habits; I just needed to go to bed earlier; I shouldn’t read in bed; I had to stop procrastinating, get my homework done earlier in the evening so I could get to sleep by nine, and it didn’t matter if I said, I’ve tried that, I go to bed early and I just lie awake for hours - it was still my fault for managing my time badly, because if I was really doing it properly, whatever ‘it’ was, then I wouldn’t have had a problem in the first place.
And I just. There is a fucking reason why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. You want to know why so many teenagers are depressed and killing themselves, or contemplating suicide? On top of everything else they’re maybe dealing with - hormones, romance, bullying, school, uncertainty, family problems - ask them how much sleep they’re getting, and compare it with how much they should be getting. Because I guarantee, those numbers do not fucking match.
(Source: explore-blog, via seananmcguire)
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But on the plus side my high school years all started at 6:45 am.Actually that doesn’t include waking, dressing, eating,...
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summerclover34 said:
I feel like I was different- I have always gone to bed at 8pm and woken up feeling rested at 6am even when I was a teenager! But then I do have autism so I think that is probably the cause of it and it should 100% be changed because the majority of teenagers experience it like this post says they do joan-of-heart liked this
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