Especially high school students. We had to get up at 5:55 am everyday in the early 2000s, with class starting promptly at 7:35 am. It definitely affected our attention span for the first few classes each day. I count my blessings that nowadays, my first real meeting at work doesn't start until 10:30 am.
Lack of sleep was definitely the cause of my terrible grades in highschool mathematics. I would stay up late (1-2 am) to play in starcraft tournaments, to have 8 am classes in mathematics. (There's a neat inverse correlation between my highschool grades and starcraft rank)
It's crazy to me just how terrible school systems are at optimizing for learning. I would get terrible headaches from classrooms that had too many people and too little fresh air. I thought it was just me dreading my lessons, but in reality it was from co2 ppm reaching levels that humans can't properly function in.
We wake up students too early, put them in rooms that kill cognitive performance and then have the audacity to complain when they can't follow along!
>By that logic, if we moved school to 5 am, he would have simply only stayed up until 10 pm.
I believe that.
>Is that particularly realistic?
The only issue is that at 5am, there won't be daylight during the winter. Lack of daylight presents safety issues and makes it more difficult to wake up.
It's pretty well studied that most teenagers stay up late.
My freshman year of high school my school was under construction so I was bussed across town. Which meant I had to wake up close to 5am. I don't remember staying up especially late, but I was perpetually tired. Id sleep on the bus both ways.
In college I had a semester when I had a 5am class. I found it much easier to stay up all night and crash after than to wake up for class.
This "most teenagers stay up late" must be unique to U.S./European teenagers with access to computers, video games, mobile phones, internet and lax parental supervision. As someone who went to boarding school from age 14-18 years where sleep and wake up time was well regulated I can tell you for a fact that we all looked forward to sleep time. Most students preferred waking up earlier to study to take advantage of the quiet and focus.
I've never lived somewhere that had decent daylight in the morning. When I lived in the states, it wasn't light outside until 8am or something in the winter. I now live in Norway, and december days are less than 5 hours long where I am - and the light isn't very strong.
YMMV, but I'm not sure that would be the case. As a teen, I had early morning seminary before high school each morning with other teens for church and we all had to get up between 4:30 and 5:00 but very few of us would go to bed before midnight. It was rough, but this anecdata fuels my bias for believing that most people feel like there aren't enough hours in the day and will stay up as late as they can in order to do what they please with whatever small amount of time is afforded to them each day.
To be clear, this wasn't just my seminary class- this is the way teens in the seminary program have handled it for years and years, so it may not be the biggest but it's definitely not the smallest sample size available.
Again, YMMV. I openly admit that I'm biased in my thinking because of the anecdata.
This is going back a fair few years for me, but I always thought school was too early! Perhaps you just didn't stay in bed for long enough? If you just wake up later, your bedtime will naturally end up later to compensate.
"All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined -- but the time at which they wake up is socially determined"
I don't think this is true. When I was younger, I only could fall asleep at ~2am. I went to multiple schools with starting times varying from 5am to 12pm, it never made a difference.
Wouldn't one assume the folks use artificial light? People have been doing this well before electricity, especially during the winter. Doubly so up north. There simply isn't enough day here during the winter to do otherwise. Heck, my sunset time today is estimated at 16:22. I'll not have eaten dinner yet.
Maybe you're one of the very few genetic outliers. If you're never tired until 2am, and got up at say 6am for school then you're never tired on 4 hours sleep? I wish I was good on 4 hours sleep and never tired.
That's why I think it's unfair to assume the cause of said headaches is CO2, when other explanations - like OP's acknowledged sleep deprivation - suffice.
Not at all, we should not judge against the OP. Both conclusions are perfectly reasonable, have precedent, and could both be true simultaneously.
‘The essence of critical thinking is suspended judgement; the essence of this suspense is inquiry to determine the nature of the problem before proceeding.’
Unless you will conduct further inquiry, you should stop at suspending judgement.
It appears to me that your judgement is based on prejudice against teenage behaviour rather than evidence.
I didn't test it back then, it was only much later I made the connection when I started getting the same headaches from university, where I got proper sleep, enjoyed the coursework etc.
A co2 monitor confirmed my suspicion. The problem with co2 monitors, is that it's really impractical to pull one out to check. I'm actually in the process of building one myself that instead sends descrete notifications to my phone if the co2 ppm gets too high.
How did you end up getting permission to test this? It's hard to believe some high school would allow a random alum to invade their school and leave devices (that could literally be anything. Hell, maybe it's a time-release mustard gas distribution system or [even worse!] recording devices meant to fabricate and embroil the school in some kind of scandal!) in classrooms all over their campus.
I later confirmed it, by carrying a co2 monitor with me and noticing every time I get that type of headache, it's because the co2 was too high.
The device I'm building will be attacked to my backpack and connected to my phone via bluetooth so it can push notifications descretely, allowing me to get out of a place where the co2 levels will give me a headache, without the social cost of taking out a co2 monitor everywhere you go.
I stayed up til the same time reading books for the same reason OP stayed up, not being tired. Teenagers have a delayed sleep cycle compared to adults, it’s not a matter of choice, it’s when your body says to wake up or sleep autonomously, same as my baby wakes at 5am and sleeps at 8pm, because that’s what his body is telling him to do.
Sleepiness in humans is driven by the number of hours they remain awake and by time of day, more or less independently. In teens sleep onset as a result of these are both delayed relative to children and adults.
Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
> teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
This is, at least in my experience, completely untrue. When I play Starcraft, I'll easily play till 2-3 am before I start feeling tired. And I'd continue playing, but I'm literally succumbing to exhaustion at that point.
If I force myself to before that, say midnight, I start feeling tired almost immediately. And if I don't play at all, and don't substitute gaming with some equally stimulating activity, I can easily be tired and ready to sleep by 10 or 11 pm.
Not to mention, in addition to the mental stimulation, the impact of staring at bright blue light on natural melatonin production.
Yeah, I'm nearly 50, and I never start a new game of anything after 9 because it wakes me up to much, I can easily find myself still playing and not tired at all after midnight. I need at least an hour of winding down after gaming before bed.
Back when I played MMOs (DAoC and WoW) I thought I was a night person. When I finally quit those games, I realized I wasn't a night person at all. I had just been forcing myself awake. Not only did I start going to be earlier, but sleep came much easier.
Sure. But “Starcraft” in this instance is a metaphor for any activity. And he’s wasn’t staying up until 2-3 but until 1-2, and he wasn’t an adult. I didn’t have Starcraft growing up and I was still up that late, even if I was just lying in bed.
I'm sure gaming and screen-time don't help, but it's fairly well known that younger people tend to stay up late and have difficulty waking up in the morning. In high school I never understood why they did certain things like offer AP classes only at 1st period or offer any "difficult" core classes 1st period (well, I knew it was convenient for them, but horrible for the average student). California just passed a law saying schools must start after 8am.
I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.
Babies dont wake up at 5 not go to sleep at 8. Their sleep can be highly irregular or regular, may be affected by light or not. And when it is affected by light, you can make the room dark in the morning.
I didn’t say babies do anything. I was talking about one specific child, with whose behavior I have intimate experience. His sleep and wake patterns are definitely not precise enough to set a clock by them but he really does generally go to sleep around eight and he’s awake between five and six in the morning, dark or bright, usually closer to five.
I played football all Highschool, started school at 8am (so bus at 7-715), done with football by 6pm.
This leaves you 4-5 hours depending on how long it takes you to get ready. This is more than enough to do homework, though some days definitely sucked more than others. In my opinion it helped develop valuable time management skills.
In my opinion, that leaves you no time to do anything "unstructured". No time to socialize with family or neighbors, no time to just go explore and wander or experiment, no time to learn to cook with one's parents or participate in cultural activities that may not be reflected in the school year.
I don't mind sports, but the way it's placed on a pedestal in the US above all other activities is ridiculous to me. Not keen on homework that takes over after school hours either.
It's hard to argue you don't develop social skills in football, and it'd be really hard to put in 3 hours a day for 4 months (8 hours a day for the month of August) and not make friends. The teamwork aspect of any sport is difficult to teach in a school setting.
Also, why the fuck is it "impossible" to socialize with family and neighbors at 6pm? They are probably at work until 5pm anyways. By the time someone is old enough to play football they should already know how to cook.
> By the time someone is old enough to play football they should already know how to cook.
I started playing football (a different one to what OP meant, I'm guessing), at the age of... 2. Definitely not old enough to cook then.
Good luck convincing most male teenagers that they need to learn to cook for themselves, too. I've only picked up those skills in the last few years, and I'm almost done with university!
We could argue the merits of paying video games against something like chess club, but that's not the argument I'm making. I'm only saying that, if you stay up until 1-2am, you're going to have a hard time pretty much anywhere unless they let you roll in at 10.
For my part, I still play video games, slept through most of school, got kicked out, taught myself to program at 22, and have been working in the field for 14 years now. I won't take a job with a strict in-time because I know I have a hard time getting to bed early.
I'm not bashing video games, but you have to take some responsibility. School at 10 wouldn't work well for a variety of reasons, even if I wish it were possible.
I agree with you. Move start time to 10 and people will stay up until 3-4. The underlying point is people are trying to find extra time in their day to do with as they please.
I also stayed up until 1-2am, regularly, starting around junior high. I performed a great many tasks, mostly teaching myself various programming languages, always at the relative expense of my concentration in the next day's classes. Two things were the primary motivating factors in developing this habit:
- My parents wouldn't leave me alone for very long in the evenings, so I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to really concentrate until they were off to bed
- My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus.
The first trait was obviously correctable and probably circumstantial, but the second feels far more innate. I just focus better right after the sun goes down, and I'm not really sure why. It's like all the stress from the day melts away, and I get a chance to finally be myself for a few hours. So, I work an evening shift (my work day starts at noon and gets out quite late) and I couldn't be happier for it.
It's a shame that this combination is both common, and regarded as lazy by society at large, because it seems to be quite the opposite. I get my best work done in the evenings, and so do lots of other people. I wish that we were generally more accepting of these traits, because if I hadn't had the good fortune to stumble into a job with such a well-aligned shift, I would still be struggling to sleep properly most nights.
> My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus.
Not saying this isn't your natural predisposition, but FWIW this is pretty much exactly what happens to everyone with a disrupted sleep schedule. Or any disrupted normal cycle, really[1]. Probably the large majority of people have experienced this.
[1]: Fasting is one example- you will be starving by lunch or dinner, but if you wait a few hours longer the hunger will go away pretty much entirely. You may feel sluggish and slow when you're hungry, but once your brain realizes you aren't going to eat you will feel lighter and more energetic. If your body needs to go past its normal cycles, your brain will give you the resources to do so. The hunger and tiredness you feel normally are more like periodic maintenance reminders.
In high school, this is probably what it was. My body wanted to fall asleep well after hours due to timing but I still had to get up at 7am for school. Being shorted on sleep sucks.
My current adult strategy is to simply plan for 7.5 hours of sleep each night; this gets me well rested consistently and doesn't appear to have any negative side effects. So long as I get the sleep in at some point, it doesn't seem to matter all that much when in the day it is. I could shift to mornings (and worked retail this way for years), but it's harder to maintain; 2am just feels "normal" to me. So, given the choice, I'll start the day later and wake up rested.
> I get my best work done in the evenings, and so do lots of other people.
Have you ever tried shifting to mornings? I used to think as you and started getting up early (and going to bed earlier), and was much more productive. My focus in particular was much higher because there so much fewer distractions.
Not saying this is you, but I had an old boss who thought he did his best work at night. Except, I had to come in every morning and fix all the bugs he introduced during his late night coding sessions. Being tired made him think he was making better decisions than he was which is inline with the adage that driving tired is like driving under the influence.
Not OP, but I had a very similar high school experience. I basically have two "stable" sleep rhythms: Go to sleep at 4 am, wake up at ~1 pm (the "lazy person" cycle), or got to sleep at 6 pm, wake up at ~3 am (the "I can't categorize this" cycle) - unfortunately, neither are very compatible with normal people. The second one is alright for work, but tends to kill every last bit of your social life for obvious reasons. So I'm kinda stuck with a daily ritual of trying to fall asleep at 11 pm and trying to somehow get out of bed after an hour long struggle at 8 am. Also I'm about 3 times as productive at work after 2 pm, because before that, I just feel like a zombie.
On the plus side, if something has to get done, I don't mind staying until 10 pm too much.
The same is true for me, however, I'm also quite productive early mornings. My "down" time is 2-10pm, so I often feel like it's a shame I have to sleep at all.
Part of the problem is adolescents tend to have a later internal clock. Ideally we would structure school around a later day to compensate for this. This doesn’t only apply to Starcraft players ;)
Whether my choices were wise is not too important. What's important is that I almost failed mathematics because of my poor choices.
If every other teenager makes equally stupid choices, causing them to not learn vital skills, we should still change up the system. Teenagers will teenage, build the system around it!
I never had access to co2 meters when I was a teenager, but I had the same suspicion. Some rooms regularly left me feeling stifled & drowsy, and the first breath of fresh air out the door would rouse me in an instant. I plan on sending my own kids to school with a meter one day just to see.
The reason I don't believe it was just boredom is the worst offender was always choir- a class I loved, and a class with obviously elevated production of co2.
This one is actually backed up by a few studies like this [0] one. There's not enough studies to actually say conclusively that it's common or the usual cause, but there's enough to suggest it should be under consideration.
I have a CO2 meter in my classroom. It would get up to 2000 ppm if the fan was off. At that level you might feel some very mild effects on energy and focus.
A co-author of the study recommends establishing regular bedtime routines.
I wager the lack of a regular routine is the source of the problem. The school I went to had split shifts. I was on the early shift, and had to be up at 5AM. It wasn't a big deal because I had to be in bed by 9PM or it was my ass.
Perhaps kids would get more sleep if their parents had rules and enforced them.
Some parents actively prevent their children from sleeping enough. Eg your brother will bother us if you don’t let him play on his computer in your shared bedroom until 3am and we are too tired to deal with it, so figure it out yourself.
Why We Sleep[1] is a pretty complete look at what we know about sleep today and implies that many of the things I thought like being able to catch up on sleep is just wrong. Did confirm my belief that there are some people that just can operate on less, but they are fewer than might be imagined.
There have been quite a few studies popping up recently regarding this and there does appear to be genetic mutations that account for being a "night owl".
That does not factor in genetic predisposition to sensitivity to the circadian stimulating effects of blue light.
Some people aren't much affected by screen time at night, and some people can readily get up before dawn. I for one have to be very careful to limit my exposure at night, and waking up before sunrise (artificial or natural) is excruciating. I have been diagnosed with DPSD. I vastly prefer to go to bed and wake up later than average
Everyone, not just kids. Go the fuck to bed. In my experience, it's the same parents that struggle to make it to 930 standups that also let their kids stay up too late.
That is of course always an option. I said "any time", and 9:30 am is certainly a time.
But what about holding it at, say, 11 am, or 12 pm, or some other time that's later in the day and doesn't conflict with the lunch period? Then perhaps it would be OK for everybody, early risers and late risers alike. It's not like the day absolutely has to start with a meeting.
(If I wanted to punish people that like to get up early, I'd suggest holding it at 6 pm or something. That ought to cause maximum annoyance to people that are good at getting up early: not so late that it's an unreasonable demand, any more than 9:30 am is, but still late enough that it's probably going to mess about with how you'd naturally structure your work day.)
I don't much like standups, but I've noticed that they tend to end up being a hard start to the day. When we had them at 9:30, people would tend to always get in to the office by at least 9:15. When we kick them back to 10:30, people tend to straggle in up to 10, 10:15. Generally, people adjust to whatever the time is, so they have some minutes to get settled and triage their email; you usually can't actually get anything done unless you come in a couple hours before in the morning, and trying to start anything and pause for the meeting is a mess, because of the risk of getting diverted onto something else as a result of the standup.
As one of those people, it's because, as a developer, I hate knowing I'm going to be interrupted in X amount of time. Obviously if it was something like 11, 1130, it'd be different. But if with no standup I'd get to the office at 915, but the standup is at 10, I don't think I'd get any valuable piece of work done in that 45 minutes.
I agree completely. I'm certainly far more productive in the morning if there is not a standup or some recurring daily meeting scheduled...
That defined interruption imposes a big cost in productivity beforehand. It squeezes everything.
Why standups couldn't just be a handful of bullet points from each person when they spin up for the day in a Slack channel is something I have never quite understood.
No standups where I work. If I need to know what my coworkers are up to, I just ask them. If they need to know what I'm up to, they ask me. Works great. We rarely need to ask. If there is an issue that affects multiple people, we can talk about it on the issue tracker, where we see commits too.
I've watched how the morning standups are abused. The people with the authority to call them have wasted countless COUNTLESS hours of productivity going in circles about non-issues, just to flex their authority. If I'm upper management and I see daily meetings being called, I'm going to be quick to shut that down. Weekly is fine, but daily seems to me a misrepresentation of the amount of work that can be accomplished in one afternoon.
Not everyone can just 'go to bed'. Circadian rhythms are a thing, as are a wide variety of sleeping disorders and psychological disorders with sleep comorbidities.
Many of these affect simply the time of day when you can fall asleep.
My kids are only 6 and 7 but they are up first and can mostly do they rest themselves. I just have to work out how to get them to carry that through to the teenage years.
Another cause is believing that, in order to compensate for too-short a night, one only has to sleep more the next day, or even afterwards. AFAIK this is false, sleep doesn't work this way and we all have to sleep adequately each and every day.
In college, I remember just dropping on my bed on Fridays at 5 PM and sleeping for a couple of hours. It’s not that I was overworked, I just didn’t take care to get enough sleep during the week.
I really don't think it has anything to do with the hours. Children/teenagers will try to get away with as much as they can. It's more about being rebellious.
My elementary, high school, and middle school all started at different times (and my senior year of high school started much later because I completed enough credits).
Regardless of how late school started, I would just stay up later, the later school started. I usually got around 6 hours of sleep/night and would be very tired during the day. I now know that I need at least 7 hours to be functional.
Now I do think everyone has a different level of sleep they can function on, but the time a person goes to bed has little to do with it.
This is just another excuse that today's parents are giving because they don't want to take screens away or discipline their children.
"Research to date has shown that the circadian rhythms of adolescents are simply fundamentally different from those of adults and children,"
"All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined -- but the time at which they wake up is socially determined,"
On timezones, doesn't matter. On daylight savings time, absolutely, though not necessarily just for teenagers but because daylight savings is idiotic and is of no benefit to 99% of the population.
Kids need a more sleep than adults, sometimes a lot more sleep. I don't think adults realize this sometimes, and kids can silently suffer as a result (and not even really understand they are suffering).
It absolutely amazes me when I see young children out and about late at night because I had a very strict early bedtime as a child - 8pm early in life, 9pm starting my tween years. It was very much to my disdain at the time, but now I strongly believe being well rested served me well in all aspects of my life.
Falling asleep that early is unnatural and very difficult at that age. I recall many nights trying to go to sleep early and lying in bed, stressing about not being able to sleep (making it even harder to sleep).
I had the same routine and was fine. I think having a consistent sleep routine is key.
What makes it unnatural? If you want to appeal to nature, how about turn off all the electricity in your house and see how late kids stay up with just a fire going.
Lately I'm trying to avoid being a "night owl" because I think it's affecting my short but also long term memory. I can't often remember things that I deem simple, like, "who's the lead singer of a band that I love" or I can have a more than normal difficult to remember the name of a colleague.
Or maybe it's my brain developing some Alzheimer like disease.
Long story short, parents need to consistently enforce strong rules regarding lights out time at an early age and eliminate excessive external stimuli as the day winds down. This idea that teenagers who can't make responsible choices are left to define their sleep time as well as other rules borders on child abuse.
109 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadIt's crazy to me just how terrible school systems are at optimizing for learning. I would get terrible headaches from classrooms that had too many people and too little fresh air. I thought it was just me dreading my lessons, but in reality it was from co2 ppm reaching levels that humans can't properly function in.
We wake up students too early, put them in rooms that kill cognitive performance and then have the audacity to complain when they can't follow along!
Based on what you just said, if we moved school to 10am, you would just stay up until 4am playing StarCraft.
I don't think school is too early. I think you just stayed up too late.
I believe that.
>Is that particularly realistic?
The only issue is that at 5am, there won't be daylight during the winter. Lack of daylight presents safety issues and makes it more difficult to wake up.
My freshman year of high school my school was under construction so I was bussed across town. Which meant I had to wake up close to 5am. I don't remember staying up especially late, but I was perpetually tired. Id sleep on the bus both ways.
In college I had a semester when I had a 5am class. I found it much easier to stay up all night and crash after than to wake up for class.
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/teens-and-sleep
Perhaps 5am is just a difficult time to wake up.
To be clear, this wasn't just my seminary class- this is the way teens in the seminary program have handled it for years and years, so it may not be the biggest but it's definitely not the smallest sample size available.
Again, YMMV. I openly admit that I'm biased in my thinking because of the anecdata.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181212140741.h...
I just wasn't tired until 2am no matter what.
Did you test this hypothesis at the time with a CO2 monitor? Lack of sleep causes headaches, too.
It appears to me that your judgement is based on prejudice against teenage behaviour rather than evidence.
> Both conclusions are perfectly reasonable, have precedent, and could both be true simultaneously.
This is exactly why I object to the statement "in reality it was from co2 ppm" without evidence from a CO2 monitor.
A co2 monitor confirmed my suspicion. The problem with co2 monitors, is that it's really impractical to pull one out to check. I'm actually in the process of building one myself that instead sends descrete notifications to my phone if the co2 ppm gets too high.
I later confirmed it, by carrying a co2 monitor with me and noticing every time I get that type of headache, it's because the co2 was too high.
The device I'm building will be attacked to my backpack and connected to my phone via bluetooth so it can push notifications descretely, allowing me to get out of a place where the co2 levels will give me a headache, without the social cost of taking out a co2 monitor everywhere you go.
I agree, but... you were staying up until 1-2am playing video games. C'mon.
It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.
Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
This is, at least in my experience, completely untrue. When I play Starcraft, I'll easily play till 2-3 am before I start feeling tired. And I'd continue playing, but I'm literally succumbing to exhaustion at that point.
If I force myself to before that, say midnight, I start feeling tired almost immediately. And if I don't play at all, and don't substitute gaming with some equally stimulating activity, I can easily be tired and ready to sleep by 10 or 11 pm.
Not to mention, in addition to the mental stimulation, the impact of staring at bright blue light on natural melatonin production.
I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.
Babies don't have a clock.
If you do a sport in highschool you basically have to be able to get 4 hours of sleep and deal with it
This leaves you 4-5 hours depending on how long it takes you to get ready. This is more than enough to do homework, though some days definitely sucked more than others. In my opinion it helped develop valuable time management skills.
I don't mind sports, but the way it's placed on a pedestal in the US above all other activities is ridiculous to me. Not keen on homework that takes over after school hours either.
After football season I got out of school at 3.
Also, why the fuck is it "impossible" to socialize with family and neighbors at 6pm? They are probably at work until 5pm anyways. By the time someone is old enough to play football they should already know how to cook.
I started playing football (a different one to what OP meant, I'm guessing), at the age of... 2. Definitely not old enough to cook then.
Good luck convincing most male teenagers that they need to learn to cook for themselves, too. I've only picked up those skills in the last few years, and I'm almost done with university!
News reports claim high school students are assigned 3.5 hours of homework per weeknight.
(e.g. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2014-mar-01-la-ol-too... )
For my part, I still play video games, slept through most of school, got kicked out, taught myself to program at 22, and have been working in the field for 14 years now. I won't take a job with a strict in-time because I know I have a hard time getting to bed early.
I'm not bashing video games, but you have to take some responsibility. School at 10 wouldn't work well for a variety of reasons, even if I wish it were possible.
- My parents wouldn't leave me alone for very long in the evenings, so I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to really concentrate until they were off to bed - My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus.
The first trait was obviously correctable and probably circumstantial, but the second feels far more innate. I just focus better right after the sun goes down, and I'm not really sure why. It's like all the stress from the day melts away, and I get a chance to finally be myself for a few hours. So, I work an evening shift (my work day starts at noon and gets out quite late) and I couldn't be happier for it.
It's a shame that this combination is both common, and regarded as lazy by society at large, because it seems to be quite the opposite. I get my best work done in the evenings, and so do lots of other people. I wish that we were generally more accepting of these traits, because if I hadn't had the good fortune to stumble into a job with such a well-aligned shift, I would still be struggling to sleep properly most nights.
Not saying this isn't your natural predisposition, but FWIW this is pretty much exactly what happens to everyone with a disrupted sleep schedule. Or any disrupted normal cycle, really[1]. Probably the large majority of people have experienced this.
[1]: Fasting is one example- you will be starving by lunch or dinner, but if you wait a few hours longer the hunger will go away pretty much entirely. You may feel sluggish and slow when you're hungry, but once your brain realizes you aren't going to eat you will feel lighter and more energetic. If your body needs to go past its normal cycles, your brain will give you the resources to do so. The hunger and tiredness you feel normally are more like periodic maintenance reminders.
My current adult strategy is to simply plan for 7.5 hours of sleep each night; this gets me well rested consistently and doesn't appear to have any negative side effects. So long as I get the sleep in at some point, it doesn't seem to matter all that much when in the day it is. I could shift to mornings (and worked retail this way for years), but it's harder to maintain; 2am just feels "normal" to me. So, given the choice, I'll start the day later and wake up rested.
Have you ever tried shifting to mornings? I used to think as you and started getting up early (and going to bed earlier), and was much more productive. My focus in particular was much higher because there so much fewer distractions.
Not saying this is you, but I had an old boss who thought he did his best work at night. Except, I had to come in every morning and fix all the bugs he introduced during his late night coding sessions. Being tired made him think he was making better decisions than he was which is inline with the adage that driving tired is like driving under the influence.
On the plus side, if something has to get done, I don't mind staying until 10 pm too much.
Whether my choices were wise is not too important. What's important is that I almost failed mathematics because of my poor choices.
If every other teenager makes equally stupid choices, causing them to not learn vital skills, we should still change up the system. Teenagers will teenage, build the system around it!
The reason I don't believe it was just boredom is the worst offender was always choir- a class I loved, and a class with obviously elevated production of co2.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/ina.12042
I keep the air intake on always now.
Source: studied math till 2 AM, played some TF till 4 AM, had math classes at 9 AM in highschool. Did not have bad grades in math classes.
I wager the lack of a regular routine is the source of the problem. The school I went to had split shifts. I was on the early shift, and had to be up at 5AM. It wasn't a big deal because I had to be in bed by 9PM or it was my ass.
Perhaps kids would get more sleep if their parents had rules and enforced them.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/the-genetics-of-be...
DSPD is also seen far more frequently in adolescents.
Some people aren't much affected by screen time at night, and some people can readily get up before dawn. I for one have to be very careful to limit my exposure at night, and waking up before sunrise (artificial or natural) is excruciating. I have been diagnosed with DPSD. I vastly prefer to go to bed and wake up later than average
But what about holding it at, say, 11 am, or 12 pm, or some other time that's later in the day and doesn't conflict with the lunch period? Then perhaps it would be OK for everybody, early risers and late risers alike. It's not like the day absolutely has to start with a meeting.
(If I wanted to punish people that like to get up early, I'd suggest holding it at 6 pm or something. That ought to cause maximum annoyance to people that are good at getting up early: not so late that it's an unreasonable demand, any more than 9:30 am is, but still late enough that it's probably going to mess about with how you'd naturally structure your work day.)
I find it's a glorified catch-up session and can be held equally successfully at 2pm. People can generally use their morning productively without it.
I also find written form of standup more valuable than the verbal one.
That defined interruption imposes a big cost in productivity beforehand. It squeezes everything.
Why standups couldn't just be a handful of bullet points from each person when they spin up for the day in a Slack channel is something I have never quite understood.
Many of these affect simply the time of day when you can fall asleep.
My elementary, high school, and middle school all started at different times (and my senior year of high school started much later because I completed enough credits).
Regardless of how late school started, I would just stay up later, the later school started. I usually got around 6 hours of sleep/night and would be very tired during the day. I now know that I need at least 7 hours to be functional.
Now I do think everyone has a different level of sleep they can function on, but the time a person goes to bed has little to do with it.
This is just another excuse that today's parents are giving because they don't want to take screens away or discipline their children.
"All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined -- but the time at which they wake up is socially determined,"
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181212140741.h...
Should we abolish timezones and daylight savings as to not interfere with the immutable teenage sleeping patterns?
On timezones, doesn't matter. On daylight savings time, absolutely, though not necessarily just for teenagers but because daylight savings is idiotic and is of no benefit to 99% of the population.
It absolutely amazes me when I see young children out and about late at night because I had a very strict early bedtime as a child - 8pm early in life, 9pm starting my tween years. It was very much to my disdain at the time, but now I strongly believe being well rested served me well in all aspects of my life.
What makes it unnatural? If you want to appeal to nature, how about turn off all the electricity in your house and see how late kids stay up with just a fire going.
Or maybe it's my brain developing some Alzheimer like disease.
I'm 36