SNOOZING & ZOOMING On student sleep schedules before and after COVID-19 Caroline Schafer
T
he pandemic has led students to sleeping in, staying up late, forming new hobbies, wasting time, and spending time in new ways that change student sleep schedules. The Tower sent out a survey that 176 students responded to about their sleep schedules. In the survey, 41 percent of students reported that they are sleeping less during quarantine than during a regular school year.Before the pandemic, 25% of students reported getting more than 8 hours of sleep. This is solid because the CDC says 8-10 hours of sleep is optimal for teenage years. However, since the pandemic, only 15.7% say they’re getting over 8 hours. Teenagers who don’t get enough sleep are less able to concentrate, experience increased anxiety levels, and depression. That 10% actually decreased their amount of sleep into the 6-8 hours range. A shocking 72 percent of students say they feel tired during Zoom
Are you sleeping more or less hours per night than you did before quarantine due to COVID-19?
classes; in comparison, less than half feel tired during in-person learning. Students identified the driving force behind these changes as the fact that their teachers have been assigning too much work. The second biggest problem that students identified was procrastination. Students at Bishop’s are mostly sleepy over Zoom and get less sleep during this pandemic. Some students who have found themselves with a worse sleep schedule after quarantine blame both the online situation and the amount of free time on their hands. Ali Pittal (‘21) said, “I’d say I’m not getting enough sleep as I was before COVID, just because being at home all the time makes me work a lot slower.” Gabe Quade (‘21) spoke further on this, “I think what’s most contributing to its problems is having so much time, and I’m home all the time, so I just watch movies and stay up,” he explained. He also mentioned new quarantine video games like Among Us
How many hours of sleep per night have you received since the pandemic/ quarantine started?
Which of the following habits impact your sleep schedule?
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keep him up sometimes. “I play Among us with all my friends at night,” he reported. “We start late and it ends like, around 11:30 p.m., then I’ll chill for like two hours before going to sleep.” Others explained that their issues with sleep predate the pandemic. “I don’t have a healthy sleep schedule,” Victory Johnson (‘23) said “I chose that, though, because I wanted to be successful in both sports and school. I want to get As, and I want to work out everyday. I do both, so I guess I do it to myself.” Gabby Scott (‘21) shared, “It’s really hard to balance all the work for colleges: sharing all your personal info into different systems, writing and rewriting supplementals, finding resources to help with revisions, etc. On top of that, my academics are still at a very high level, and although many of my teachers assign work past the time limit for their class, I’m still forced to do it in an attempt to keep up.”
