Once upon a time, kids weren’t getting enough sleep. Every night they went to bed late and woke up early, stumbling through their days half asleep. It had gotten so bad that eventually, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called it the Insufficient Sleep Epidemic. They blamed it on the adolescents themselves, not that their internal biological clocks were resetting, telling them to go to bed later or that they had whole piles of tedious homework.

Despite what the adults of the world sometimes like to think, it’s not exactly fun being half asleep during a school day only to find that later, I have a test on something I missed in a daze. Seeing as how enjoyable that is, most teenagers try to get enough sleep to last through the day without zoning out. However, many factors can keep us up into the late hours including insomnia. In most cases, insomnia is caused by stress and I’m absolutely sure that schoolwork does nothing to add stress to our theoretical plates.  In other cases, insomnia can be caused by emotional distress or a simply uncomfortable environment.

Homework is the bane of my existence and I am completely serious when I say so. Some days, it is mere hours before school starts that I finally finish and even then, there is always something that is not completely finished. According to the CDC, teenagers are supposed to, on average, get 9 to 10 hours of sleep every night. Typically, I get six or seven hours of sleep and during the middle of class when everyone is discussing their sleep, the most common answer is five or so hours.

Sleep is time where the body is meant to repair and relax, but we’re just not getting enough of it. Between the homework and several types of sleep preventers, teenagers just aren’t going to bed early. Now that we’ve reached high school, sleep just seems like a childhood fairy tale.