Being a high school student there is a variety of different classes that each student must balance in one school day.

According to the new law, Texas Education Code says the requirement is minimum of 75,600 minutes of instruction each year so about 420 minutes daily. That’s about seven hours of school for five days a week at minimum. All these statistics are in general to give you a big picture of how much time we invest into school alone.

Now let us focus on how many hours a teenager should average every night. According to Nationwide Children’s adolescents should average about seven and one/fourth hours a night, but teenagers need at least nine and one/fourth hours of sleep to function overall. Having said that there is 24 hours in a day, now subtract the 7.25 hours we spend in school and the 9.25 hours that we should be asleep. That leaves approximately 7.5 hours left in the day, now subtract the time it takes you get home, hours you spend at practice, chores you have to get done, time spent with friends, homework, work and all the things that come with your daily routine. There are priorities in life and many fail to put sleep as one of them.

Getting the right amount of sleep is crucial because of the negative affects it can have. Including memory issues, mood changes, issue with thinking and concentrating, weakened immunity, high blood pressure, higher risk of diabetes, weight gain, and poor balance. All together it can ruin the quality of life because your body is not functioning the way it normally does. When your asleep your body heals itself and restores the chemical imbalance within itself. With our day to day life things can get stressful and cause lots of issues alone and without the proper and natural fixer upper.

Being a busy teenager there is one to many reasons to lose sleep, there is no set solution to fixing the problem but there is many suggestions to help. For all schools there should be a limit of how much work can be assigned in one week especially because every student has more than one class to do work for. Coaches should be limited to so many hours for practice whether it be before school or after, giving student athletes time to commit themselves to their academics as well as their sport.

Lots of people come with the counterargument that it is about time management, but how can someone manage time if they reasonably do not have enough to begin with. There is this stereotypical idea that teenage years are the most difficult years in one’s life. Being in that age group myself I can personally say that in the moment it is hard to balance school, sports, family, friends, relationships, and still finding a way to get just enough hours of sleep. My energy level goes down by at least 50%, sleep deprivation is a serious issue and more people should be aware of the consequences before it becomes even a bigger problem. It is better to solve the problem before it gets any bigger.