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Why Am I Sleepy During The School Year And Not In The Summer?

by Kirstin
(Utah)

In the school year I go to bed at 11pm and wake up at 5am and most of the time I am still sleepy and I want to go to sleep at school; I also do take a nap in the school after I get done with homework because I am so sleepy. But in the summer time I go to sleep around 2am and wake up at 9am and am not sleepy at all.


I have no idea why I do not have any energy in the school year when I get 7 hours of sleep, where in the summer time I get 8 hours and am fine.


Kevin: Hey Kirstin, thanks for writing in. There are two main things I'd like to point out before handing it over to visitor comments. One is that 1 hour less of sleep per night can be hugely significant when stretched over a week, let alone an entire school year. If, for instance, you have a sleep need of 8 hours you'd be accumulating 1 hour of sleep debt per weekday. In a week you'd have a sleep debt of roughly 5 hours, over 20 hours of debt in a month, and nearly 70 hours of debt in 3 months. That's enough to seriously slow you down and make you super sleepy during the day. Go here for more on understanding sleep debt.

(Note: Individual sleep need varies. The 8 I used above was just an example. Your sleep need could also be something like 8.5 or 9 hours as well, which would lead to a faster accumulating sleep debt.)

Another point to consider is that at 5 am (when you wake up during the school year) your body is at a completely different point in its circadian rhythms than at 9 am (when you wake up during the summer). Different alertness-inducing or sleep-inducing hormones are being released at 5 am (and 6 am and 7 am, for that matter) than are being released later in the morning. Being awake (and struggling to stay awake at school perhaps) for the 4 hours before the 9 am alerting hormones kick in can give you an entirely different perception of how tired you feel during the day. These alertness and sleepiness hormones are known as part of a process called Clock-Dependent Alerting (CDA), and we should have some articles about it soon.

All the best!
Kevin

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Welcome! This site is continuously being created by students of Dr. William C. Dement's Sleep And Dreams course at Stanford University.

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