Six o’clock.

Bright and early.

High schoolers are at a weird stage in their life when they are figuring everything out: college, their future, relationships–the list goes on. It doesn’t help that high schoolers are also at the busiest stage in their life. 

Grades, relationships, future, anxiety, and depression; all of these factors result in stress that leads to sleep deprivation. Now, sleep deprivation is as normal as breathing. This sleep deprivation is an “easy thing” to push aside to make way for schoolwork and relationships.

Why do we sacrifice our well being of rest for measly things that do not even measure up to sleep? 

Sleep is the main element and solution to succeeding at most things in life; without proper sleep, we are disoriented and prone to falling asleep at the worst times. Most teens finally fall asleep at midnight or later; that does not bode well because high schools usually start around six or seven o’clock, and teens need eight to nine hours of sleep each night. 

When teens come home from school, they are exhausted after seven to eight hours of school, but what tags along with them is homework. Even after hours and hours of school, they have to suffocate from this extension of more school. The suffocation of homework results in them procrastinating and leaving it to do late at night. They use the few daylight hours to wind down alone or to hang out with friends; the stress of knowing you have homework while doing another unrelated personal thing is straining. 

When parents know their teens are doing their homework last minute, it is not because they are lazy. It is because they use the earlier hours of the day to work if they have a job, or they use it to hang out with friends because without letting themselves have downtime, they will go insane. Teens are not really “lazy,” they are just trying to keep themselves intact and together by granting themselves downtime from the constant nagging of school.

It is their only get away from it. 

This continuous strain of schedule, from work to school, personal life, family life, and after school extracurriculars and sports, is not suitable for this new generation of teens. Most teens put up with throwing away their sleep for completing homework or studying for a test because even though sometimes their parents think they are idle, they are just trying to impress them. This generation Z is one of the most hardworking and dedicated generations because of their populated and stress-filled lives. Depression and anxiety are alive much more in this generation because of the everyday life today’s teens live. 

Teens of generation Z might be seen as “lazy,” but they are juggling more than a typical teen should have to.