Teens aren’t getting enough sleep. However, sleep is vital to your happiness, health, and growth. Many people blame it on the teenagers for wanting to stay up later than their parents tell them to, but it is the fault of our genetics, or more specifically, our circadian rhythm. Our circadian rhythm is the internal clock that controls when to release melatonin, a hormone that makes people sleepy, based on light levels and temperature. Our school schedule is so skewed that many people need to take melatonin supplement to completely change their circadian rhythms. School should start at 9:30 and go until 4:30 because teens will be more awake, lowering the number of deaths, causing them to learn more, and helping them be happier.

The average circadian rhythm of a teenager is from 11 pm to around 8:00 am, probably not quite what you were expecting. However, our school schedules force us to wake up around 6:00 am - 2 hours off of our natural wake up times. Teenagers will get only 7 hours of sleep, while the National Sleep Foundation recommends 9 hours. Changing school start times would make teens much more awake and alert for school.

Sleep is essential to our health, as it helps prevent many heart diseases as well as diabetes and stroke. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, causing over 633,000 deaths in 2015. Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death, and diabetes is the seventh. If we changed school start times, it would prevent many deaths by protecting against stroke, diabetes and heart disease.

Sleep loss can lower your grade by up to 14% in math and 8% in english. Everyone's grade dropping that severely would dramatically hurt a schools overall success, and also can affect your college application. If we changed school start times, students would learn so much more.

The link between sleep and mood has been studied by many scientists, and they have found that sleep loss leads to depression and anxiety. This affects dropout rates and suicide rates. It also affects your enjoyment of life. We can help change this by making sure teenagers get enough sleep.