Psych. Blog Post # 4

I listened to the one radio program called Teens and Sleep. It was about how teens now a days are getting less sleep than is what is required. Some possibilities are that teens are biological more alert and active in the evenings. The people on the radio also stated that teens don't render the thought that the day begins in the morning they actually think the day begins at four in the afternoon; due to the fact of school hours and extracurricular activities. It's like your brain works on a clock. Also the new electronics are a big impact on when we go to bed, especially if the electronics (like computers and TVs) are in the bedrooms of teens. Of course all of this is relevant to me because I'm a teen. This information is based off of people in my age group so I can relate more to these statements.

I learned many different things. I've learned that teens should get at least nine hours of sleep at night, and that eight or less is considered inefficient. The fact was brought up in a survey that was done was that about twenty-eight percent of the students said they fell asleep at least once a week. That was then estimated to be 737,000 students falling asleep a day. Which is a lot even considering that this was a nationwide survey. Also it was stated that teens that got eight or less hours of sleep tended to get B's and lower, where as those that got more than that had a higher tendency to get more A's. I thought the more you stayed up and studied the better your grades to be, but according to this that isn't the case. So basically if I get an efficient amount of sleep my grades might improve a little bit.

What suprised me the most was that trying to catch up on sleep on weekends doesn't necessarly work. The reason being that our brains are set more like clocks so if we sleep in til noon on the weekends our brains will actually reset and during the week we will think that we should still be sleeping during school. So if you try and catch up on sleep on weekends you should only extend your sleeping time by two hours.

I completely agree that technology has a great affect on when we go to bed and how much sleep we get. One clear fact to this reasoning is that if you look on facebook or any other type of website you will see people that post things or are on at like eleven or twelve o'clock at night. Another example is of people who stay up to watch a show that is later at night, and some delay getting their homework done because of this. I'm for sure one of those types of people.