Lack of sleep causes 266 teens to struggle focusing on academics

With various factors causing students to not get enough sleep, more students are beginning to fall behind in their courses.

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Photo by Ava Doyle

A little over 50% of the 126 student polled credited homework and studying as the primary reason they were losing sleep at night and tired in the mornings.

Ava Doyle and Ivy Clark

If you were to walk around 1st Block at our 266 high schools, you would see students with their heads down, people sleeping on desks, kids rushing to finish their homework and even some kids not in the chairs at all.

Students at Maize and Maize South High School have been experiencing extreme tiredness during class.  The main causes for the lack of sleep appear to be caused by many different reasons including numbers of hours at work, sports, social media, family issues, and the amount of homework/studying required for more difficult classes.

Maize South junior Tory Homan believes that because of basketball practices and the abundance of homework he gets, he’s simply not getting enough sleep.

 

Surprisingly, social media was only 14.5% of the reason that students aren’t getting enough sleep. Work appears to be the smallest reason why teens are tired in the morning classes. (Visual by Ava Doyle)

“I would say sports overlap my time doing homework because I have practice after school for 2 hours and if I want to get extra shots in I don’t get home until really late,” Homan said. “I’m always staying up late finishing my assignments and don’t go to bed until around 11-12 just because I’m constantly doing homework.”

Maize High senior Joseph Warkins says because he works so late and then has homework after, he arrives home right before midnight and doesn’t get enough sleep for the day. 

“I normally stay out till 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. for work, then after work, I normally stay up till 12-1 to do my homework,” Warkins said. “I’ve missed a deadline once because of work in my junior year because I had a lot of classes to take.”

Maize High sophomore Tristin Combs thinks social media affects her sleep because she catches herself on it often, even when she wakes up in the middle of the night.

“Social media definitely does affect my sleep because I get myself in a loop every time I get on my phone, I tell myself it’s gonna be a five minute thing and it ends up being 30 minutes or an hour,” Combs said. “ When I wake up late at night the first thing I do is check my phone, it’s kinda a bad habit. I wish I could take time off of social media but it’s so addicting.”