With the many activities that high schoolers are involved in, getting sleep each night is growing more and more difficult. Day after day, teens are asked to do numerous different things in a certain time span, which causes sleep deprivation.
“It’s really hard for me to find anytime to sleep with school and everything [I do after school],” junior Kassi Hylton said.

High school students, on average, get five to six hours of sleep. However, according to WebMD.com, high schoolers are supposed to get at least eight hours of sleep every night.
There are a lot of places in the brain that are affected when sleep is lost. Sleep deprivation causes the frontal lobe, which controls speech, reading compatibility and creative thinking and is located in the anterior portion of the cerebral cortex, to not be as active as it should be. Sleep deprivation also affects the parietal lobes. The parietal lobes, which are located behind the frontal lobe, control reaction time and how well a person can associate with numbers, affecting accuracy. Lastly, loss of sleep affects the pre-frontal cortex, which controls judgment, impulse control, attention span, and what is registered when seeing objects.
Sleep deprivation also effects the amount of new brain cells our brain creates every day. It can also effect the .0, which is the part of the brain that controls your memory. Due to lack of activity in the hippocampus, teens are more likely to do bad on tests.
Doing simple things to fix sleep deprivation, including taking power naps in the middle of the day or, obviously, going to bed earlier, allow teens to succeed in their day-to-day activities.
“[High schoolers] could try organizing time to get homework done and not stay up all night on the computer,” school nurse Sally Polley said. “They have to want to go to sleep to get up and go to school in the morning. I don’t think there is that ‘want’ anymore.”