Getting Enough Sleep?

"Darn it! It's 12AM again?  How does this even happen!"

I look at my planner.  One more assignment left.  I do a mental calculation in my head of how much sleep I'll get if I go to bed right now--6 hours.  Seems pretty decent for a teenager, right?

Wrong.

According to Nationwide Children's, in a perfect world adolescents should be getting 9 hours of sleep a night. 9 hours.  How do they honestly expect us to do that?  Say you want to wake up at 6AM; then you would have to go to bed at 9PM. Many of us have after school activities or sports after school, getting home from 4-7PM, leaving us with around 2 to 5 hours for schoolwork, family time, hobbies, relaxing, and some dawdling in between.

An AsapSCIENCE video explained that in a study where a group of people only slept 6 hours of sleep for 2 weeks, they showed a similar reaction time to a person with a blood alcohol level of 0.1%, which is legally drunk.  That
sounds is pretty frightening because 40% of Americans are getting less than 6 hours of sleep and probably driving to work.

Well, against all my science instincts, I'm want to disagree. As a practically nocturnal person, I would like to prove this wrong. I want to say I am perfectly fine after getting 6 hours of sleep. But sadly, I'm just in denial.  I misread the signs.  When I randomly walk into furniture, I don't think twice about it because it happens so often.   I've never considered it as one of the side effects of sleep deprivation: slower and less precise motor skills. Another one is impairment of judgement, especially about sleep, which begs the question: where do I draw the line between just clumsiness and actual lack of sleep and how do I know that I'm actually make the right choice?

After reading a lot of articles about sleep to write this, I'll have to admit that sleep deprivation is the culprit.                                                                        

But there is some good news! Even if you don't sleep as much, you can still make the most out of it.  The National Sleep Foundation conducted a poll that has shown that exercise improves the quality of sleep.  Even something as little as a 10-minute walk counts.  So even if you don't get 9 hours of sleep because your working on the last bit of those Gov notes, you can still try to get some quality sleep.