2/14 "The Lost Hour"

Take out your reading from Friday: “The Lost Hour." What specific impacts does a lack of sleep have on the teenage mind and body? What surprised and/or shocked you in this chapter? How do you think this overall lack of sleep has impacted you and your peers? Be sure to quote several specific examples from the reading, along with your comments.

"Only about 5% of high school seniors actually get eight hours of sleep per night and 60% of high schoolers report extreme daytime sleepiness". It has been discovered that during sleep the brain shifts what it learned that day to more efficient storage regions of the brain. A lack of sleep does not allow this to occur. Memories are also processed during REM sleep. In addition, sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus the hardest and this is where positive or neutral memories are processed. Therefore, with a lack of sleep the brain can only recall negative memories. Overall sleep deprivation makes a teenager much less alert and positively functional in school. Our brains need this time to recuperate and prepare for the next day. I found it surprising that lack of sleep is also connected to obesity. It is also very interesting that our tiredness during first period is not our fault, melatonin is actually still being produced making us sleepy. I think the lack of sleep definitely impacts my understanding of material learned in school because I really feel the difference in alertness. I find that on days that I went to bed late the night before I am unable to concentrate on hard subjects such as calculus and statistics and cannot understand what is being taught to me. I think this is a huge problem for most people my age especially because with our full schedules and technology accessibility allows us to stay up later and later at night.

2/10 Sleep

Why do you think that so many people (both teens and adults) have so much trouble getting enough sleep these days? Talk about yourself, your friends and peers, and your family members. Get specific!

I think now the goal in life is to get to as many things as possible. Everyone rushes from one place to another throughout their day and we rarely have any down time. With such busy schedules it is hard to find time to do anything, and that includes sleep. I think with teens specifically schools now expect so much more out of us. Homework loads and study hours are so excessive that we often spend too much time awake completely it all. I know for me personally and a lot of my friends in the same classes as me many of us have been up past midnight just to get an essay written or prepared for a test. We also involve ourselves in so many extracurricular activities from clubs to sports that there just really isn't enough time in the day. As a result of the busy lives of children and teen, parents must then adapt to this lifestyle. They spend a lot of time chauffeuring their kids around any helping them complete homework or watch sports or other activities. This is also a generation where technology is at its most advanced. Therefore we all have a lot of distractions, iPods, cell phones, computers, TV, etc., that end up being huge distractions. I can admit that a lot of the time I stay up laying in bed texting friends even though I know I need the sleep I allow my phone to become a distraction. All in all I think the underlying reason for lack of sleep nowadays is the ridiculous amount of obligations that we all take on and the number of things that go on around us. We fill our schedules and even our free time so much that we don't even have enough time for the proper amount of sleep.