Insomnia in the School

Insomnia is the inability of a person to fall asleep or stay asleep during the night. Insomnia is sometimes considered a psychological or a physiological disorder. According to the National Sleep Foundation, insomnia can cause a person to experience a variety of symptoms including fatigue, low energy, difficulty concentrating, mood disturbances, and decreased performance at work or school.

These symptoms would certainly affect student performance at school, and considering the rising number of people in our community who fall asleep during class or require coffee every day, it is clear that people are not getting enough sleep. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have insomnia, I personally know some who do indeed experience insomnia almost chronically. In a study on insomnia conducted with 4,175 teens, around 25% of teens reported one or more symptoms of insomnia. This number is quite concerning, so I wanted to give some advice to prevent students from experiencing acute insomnia. To do this, I researched online and interviewed two teachers for extra information on this sleep condition.

One of the questions I wanted to resolve was whether bad sleeping habits might induce insomnia. In theory, when your body adapts to your sleeping schedule, you will automatically want to sleep and wake up even without an alarm clock. Mrs. Owen had suspected that this could be the case. Before experiencing insomnia, she used to wake up to her family members moving around the house near midnight. On the contrary, Mr. Beckway thought that his younger sleeping habits during his youth had limited effects on his insomnia, though he doesn’t remember what his sleep habits were.

To help get rid of his own insomnia, Mr. Beckway “sought out medical help, and went to get some prescription drugs.” He took medication for almost two years before he was certain that he no longer had chronic insomnia, but he hopes students will not have to go this route, as drugs are ultimately unhealthy over a long period of time. So aside from drug therapy, what other methods can help a person deal with insomnia?

After doing some research, it would seem that healthy sleeping habits can help a person overcome insomnia. Some of these habits include keeping to a strict sleeping schedule, reducing the consumption of caffeine, and exercising regularly. When you find yourself lying in bed unable to fall asleep, try getting up to tire yourself out, but make sure the activities are not too stimulating. This method is recommended both in research and by Mr. Beckway. Mr. Beckway believes that being an early riser helped with his sleeping disorder. When he was still in graduate school, he would “get up super early and do a bunch of reading, a bunch of work, before I even went to class or started work….” By waking up early, a person would also start to feel sleepy earlier at night as they have been awake for longer periods of time. Whether you awaken early or late, though, it would be good to have a standardized sleeping schedule.

Regardless of the role of bad sleeping habits, stress is usually considered to be a critical cause of insomnia for high school students. Stress can cause a student to be anxious and worry about unfinished work or upcoming tests. This feeling of having unresolved tasks can leave them unable to fall asleep at night. A way of dealing with this is to create a list of things to do before going to bed. This way you will know exactly what it is you need to get done, so you can worry less during the night. Making yourself relaxed before going to bed by reading or listening to music can also help a person deal with stress. But this process is different for each person from a psychological perspective. For Mr. Beckway, he said that “One of the things that I’ve been able to force myself to do is to not care.” He added, “When I can’t sleep, I look at it as an opportunity to do something that I like.” A healthy mindset would be important in dealing with stress and insomnia, but not worrying is not an easy thing to do in an environment where all the pressure is forced onto the student.

It was also recommended by Mr. Beckway to not look at an electronic screen one to two hours before going to bed, though this is definitely a hard thing to do for people in modern times. So maybe you can try to not look at electronic screens for a prolonged period of time before going to sleep, which can also help.

Other causes for insomnia include a long episode of depression, which hopefully no student at our school has experienced. Depression is a complicated mental illness and a topic for another time. In the meantime, feel free to try out some of the sleeping habits included in this article and leave your comments if there is anything you want to say on the topic. If you are reading this and have experienced symptoms of insomnia, I hope this helps.