It’s a nightmare. Once you start it, you can’t stop. The falling grades, the uncontrollable stress, the depression, the feeling that everything is faded in the background while the lights blur and the sounds ebb. Many teens know what I’m talking about.

   At least 25 percent of teens sleep less than 6.5 hours a night — even though the required amount of sleep for an adolescent is 9.5 hours. 21 percent of teens go to bed at 11 p.m. or later. Staying up for 24 hours straight can give you impairments equivalent to those of having a blood alcohol level of 0.1. Repeatedly staying up past 10:00 p.m. increases a teen’s amount of suicidal thoughts by 30 percent, according to adolescent-mood-disorders.com, webmd and the APA.

   Each time I go to the doctor, I mention my blurred vision and high stress and frequent illness. The doctor says the same thing to me every appointment. The fact is: I’m sleep-deprived, and have been for years now. I know it because I can even identify that my personality has changed because I’m so tired. I used to be an attentive listener and a hopeful person. Now I’m deeply pessimistic and, admittedly, I tend to tune out of quite a bit of my conversations. The bags under my eyes have gotten so dark I can’t cover them with makeup anymore. I forget things easily. I find myself getting sleepier and sleepier in class.

   And I’m nowhere near the worst case. I haven’t fallen asleep at the wheel, or anything else drastic — at least, not yet.

   There are ways for me to combat this, like cutting back on my homework time, finding a blow-off class to nap in and setting my alarm for half an hour later in the mornings. But… I can’t do it. Not without sacrificing something else, like my grades, my pride or the time it takes for me to wrestle with my crazy hair. Maybe I’m just stupid or unlucky because otherwise I can’t tell what I’m doing wrong. In all my classes there are students who have to deal with the same issues and more, but many of them aren’t sleepy or miserable at all — it boggles my mind! (That, or they do a better job of hiding their exhaustion.)

   I used to think that it’d be okay to work almost sleeplessly throughout the week and then catch up on the weekends by sleeping in a few extra hours in the morning. The logic seems pretty good, right? Except it doesn’t work that way. It has to be consistent full nights of sleep. And caffeine — I tried that, too: black tea, anyone? — only temporarily hides the feeling. It doesn’t fix it in any legitimate way. So even with all the tea and Saturdays I use, I’m still stuck in this sleepiness rut.

   It has been reported that high schools that move their starts to a later time, such as 8:30, have more attentive students, generally higher grades, less delinquency and less students involved in car accidents. Although I have to say I would have mixed feelings about starting later, because starting later means ending later and I kind of like getting out at 2:30. There’s still enough time left in the day to actually do things unrelated to school.

   Perhaps lessening the homework loads in all the classes (advanced classes especially), encouraging parents to set strict curfews or educating teens more on what they’re doing to themselves when they cut back on one or two hours of sleep every single night would also be effective. But I can’t account for personal choices in the end.