Sacrificing Sleep Deprives Teens of More Than Rest

In trying to maintain his sanity, social life and 4.67 GPA, Troy High School sophomore Walid Gardezi has found that there aren’t enough hours in each day.

His solution: don’t sleep.

“My life is like a balancing act. I try to make time for football, school and family. I’m lucky if I get three hours of sleep each night,” Gardezi said. “It makes me want to scream. I don’t think most parents realize how much sleep students lose due to stress, homework and extracurricular activities. It’s a formula for chaos.”

Gardezi is not alone in the attempt to extend his day by cutting his sleep. A poll of 100 Troy High School students showed that 43% get less than six hours of sleep a night.

The impact on the mind and body due to such an irregular nocturnal pattern, which is defined as sleep deprivation, range in severity, said Jeff Ching, an emergency room doctor at Placentia Linda Hospital.

Ching said that emotional symptoms are accompanied by many physical problems, such as intestinal disorders, a higher chance of ulcers, diarrhea and nausea. Women can lose their menstrual cycle, and changes in weight can occur. All illnesses are slightly more common, and there is more of a tendency to take stimulants, which can lead to an addiction to drugs.

“After getting only four hours of sleep one night, I can remember coming to school not only groggy but extremely irritable,” Troy senior Catherine Oelschig said. “I forgot most of my books and notebooks. I snapped at my friends and was easily frustrated with people in my classes. I was also really confused with the simplest things. My concentration was completely gone.”

The number of hours a teen needs to sleep each night to avoid such problems differs depending upon the person, Ching said.

“It’s somewhat variable. . . . . The average is between seven to nine (hours). Teens going through growth spurts will need more sleep because growth cells are regenerating at night,” Ching said.

“Everyone’s tolerance is a little different; the average teen can go without any sleep no more than 30 hours without any drugs. After that, they’ll probably fall asleep standing.”

One way of compensating for a lack of sleep on a day-to-day basis is by napping. But this cannot substitute for a full night’s rest, because it takes at least five hours to achieve a decent amount of REM (rapid eye movement) during deep sleep, Ching said.

Clinical psychologist Sandy Friefeld said that it is during the REM cycle of sleep, the last of five levels, that dreams occur, relieving some of the stress accumulated during the day.

“Dreams aren’t the only way to work through your unconscious. But if someone is not allowing for any kind of dreaming, it contributes to their becoming more irritable. And if you increase your anxiety due to a lack of sleep, you will react to stressful situations even worse,” Friefeld said.

Friefeld’s advice to teens who have poor sleeping patterns is to decide why the patterns have developed. If it is due to overcommitting themselves, then they simply need to “weigh the pros and cons.”

“There are different types of people whose genetic makeup is such that they don’t need eight hours sleep,” Friefeld said. “But if you’re not that type of person, and your level of overcommitment makes you sleep-deprive yourself, and that gets you overwhelmed, you need to decide if your getting a sense of satisfaction from achieving is worth it.”