Imagine going to bed at 10:30pm every night, but not being able to fall asleep until 1:30am. You must wake up at 6:00am to catch the bus in time for school which starts at 7:15am. You've had four and a half hours of sleep, and this is all too evident in your inadequate performance throughout the day. By the time you think you"re ready to go to bed that night, your biological clock doesn't allow you to be tired. You have no control over this, and you have no control over how much sleep you will get that night, therefore the torturing cycle will continue. This all too common problem of sleep deprivation in teenage students can be diminished as soon as we take action against it. Students must be given a chance to be the best they can be. Regular public school hours need to be put into sync with student's biological hours because these current schedules are making it impossible for students to perform at the best of their ability.
Sleep is a term that is most often used loosely. When talking about getting enough sleep, it is necessary to understand what enough sleep really is. "Sufficient sleep is defined as "the amount necessary to permit optimal daytime functioning"" (Dahl, R). While most of us think that any type of sleep is acceptable, we assume that a few hours of resting is the equivalent to sleep. The fact is that sleep and rest are completely different from each other. Rest is not as beneficial for you as sleep. The basic difference is that sleep puts you in a state of "loss of awareness and responsiveness to the external world" (Dahl, R). In order to gain the full advantages of sleep, it is necessary to achieve this state (Dahl, R).
Sleep is made up of many active phases. For this reason, sleep is classified as an active process like breathing or thinking. This means that not completing the sleep process and skipping out on certain parts of it will mean that you will not have actually slept and will not receive sleep's benefits.