Last weekend, I had the great fortune to accompany three teenaged girls on a horrific bus ride from our town in Western North Carolina to Raleigh, about five hours drive to the east.
I won’t go into all the details, but the painful journey began with meeting them and their mothers at 2:45 a.m. That is an inhuman hour if there ever was one. We got home about 7:30 that night.
Needless to say, we were all exhausted, but the girls were zombies the entire day. They never really woke up.
Here’s why:
There is actually a biological reason for teenage zombies:
Teenagers need more sleep than adults (a minimum of 8 hours and some need as much as 10) because of their sleep patterns naturally shifting to a later bedtime and a later rising time during their teen years. Their rapidly developing bodies and hormonal fluctuations offer continual physiological challenges.
There could be a simple answer.
Schools that have shifted to later start times, say from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., says the National Sleep Foundation, find measurable positive results:
Better academic performance
Less absenteeism
Fewer car accidents
Experts say the later start time doesn’t mean that teens get to bed later (typical teen bedtime is 11 p.m. on school nights), but that they get an hour extra sleep each night. That extra five hours of sleep a week can make a big difference in health and alertness.
“Most high school students need an alarm clock or a parent to wake them on school days. They are like zombies getting ready for school and find it hard to be alert and pay attention in class. Because they are sleep deprived, they are sleepy all day and cannot do their best,” says the National Sleep Foundation.
So if your teen goes to bed at 10:30 or 11 p.m., letting her sleep until 7:30 a.m. could make everyone’s life easier.
