Sleep Articles

This is an article written by "Science Daily", speaking about sleep. The school started class exactly one hour later than the usual time. The study showed that kids who got atleast 8 hours of sleep increased from a 35% to a 50%, this is a very big number, half of the kids in the school are getting their needed sleep, although this number could be larger, it is a significant increase. Students get a "catch up sleep" on the weekends, and this involves more crashes with teenage driving when the school started later. By starting classes later, the crash rate reduced significantly in teenage students, so by starting school later kids got more sleep and less "catch up" sleep on the week ends and therefore less crashes were reported. I find this very interesting, me being a student who drives to school knowing that the more I sleep, the more aware I will be when driving and the less chance I have of getting into a collission.

The second article I read was also poster by Science Daily. This study was related to teenage sleep and depression and fatigued students. A rhode island school delayed their entrance time by just 30 minutes, and the number of students who got 7 hour of sleep or less decreased by 80%. That is a drastic number, 80% of students get more than 7 hours of sleep daily with just a 30 minute delay entrance time. This is a very important study relating that our school enstead of starting 30 min later, they actually cut the entrance time by 30 minutes, and students feel more fatigued, tired, less motivated to participate in anything in any class because we are all just so tired. Our school should do this, it would help greatly.

The last study is one found in Neurology®, they found that people with a certain sleep dissorder called narcolepsy suffer from excesive drowsiness or feel more tired during the day. The study also showed that people with this sleep dissorder also woke up about 5 times during the night when an average person woke up only about twice. Also people with this sleep dissorder spent less time in deep sleep according to this article in Neurology®. I think this is very interesting becuase sleep dissorders are very interesting and my thought is that many people in the world suffer from sleep dissorders.