Sleep is a term that is most often used loosely. When talking about getting enough sleep, it is necessary to understand what enough sleep really is. “Sufficient sleep is defined as ‘the amount necessary to permit optimal daytime functioning’” (Dahl, R). While most of us think that

Until the Minneapolis study, we did not know how changing the high school start times would directly affect students. These findings are a terrific indicator of how much benefit there may be to align school start times with the biological sleep patterns of teens who get too little sleep when their school days start too early.

Most scientists and researchers say that there are 4 phases of sleep. Some would call wakefulness stage zero. In stage one, the person is somewhat conscious. In tests, when subjects were told to indicate faint tones that were played during this phase, they successfully indicated about half of the tones. Phase 2 is described as being the first phase of actual sleep. When the same test was done on subjects in phase 2, no response was given. Phase 3 and phase 4 are the deepest phases of sleep. Phase 3 is moderate, and phase 4 is extremely deep sleep. These are the hardest to wake someone up from and they only occupy about 20% of our sleep time. They are the phases that must be reached to achieve sufficient sleep (Coren 30-31).

A few administrations have recognized the damaging effects of sleep deprivation on students and have taken action against it. High schools in Minneapolis put later start times into effect and studies show that students are in-fact getting more sleep. In 1997, the Minneapolis School District changed their high school start times from 7:15am to 8:40am and the beneficial effects are showing. Students are “getting an average of one hour more sleep a night than students in high schools with earlier start times” (Stein, M). Other benefits including better attendance rates being seen (Stein, M).

Sleep is made up of many active phases. For this reason, sleep is classified as an active process like breathing or thinking. This means that not completing the sleep process and skipping out on certain parts of it will mean that you will not have actually slept and will not receive sleep’s benefits. People were tested to see how this principle works. The subjects were woken up every 15 minutes, or one phase of sleep was taken away. The following day, they reported the usual emotional and physical symptoms of sleep loss (Dahl, R).

One account of how severe sleep deprivation can be extremely dangerous is a doctor’s experience with a mentally unstable teenage student. Starting in about 7th grade Jay, a classified gifted student, was showing signs of sleep deprivation. He

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