With Christmas done and the new year upon us, CHS has to fight their sleep schedules and regain their routines after a two-week-long winter break. CHS does not have positive ratings when it comes to their first week back at school.
“Probably like a four or three [out of ten] because I just have been exhausted and kind of out of it,” freshman Monroe Rose said.
This problem is not just an isolated event; other students are facing the struggles of winter break throwing their sleep schedule off, and many students have faced the trouble of too much time on their hands. Some students who used this extra time over winter break to sleep in later are now dealing with fatigue and lack of focus now that CHS students have returned to school.
“I had more free time and I was trying to use it to the best of my ability,” sophomore Conner Dennis said.
The Child Mind Institute has stated that the sleep hormone called melatonin is cut back when a child enters puberty and becomes a teenager. Winter break allows teenagers to let their hormones tell them when their natural sleep schedule is. This is why the teens at CHS find themselves staying up late into the night and waking up in the afternoon during winter break.
“I was up until the late hours of the morning during winter break, but then it’s just like a snap back to sleeping 11 to seven,” Dennis said.
Sophomore Kyle Ellis rates her first week back from winter break a low four out of ten. She’s been tired and struggling to fix her schedule after going to sleep at three o’clock in the morning. Her struggles with exhaustion have been made a little bit easier by the workload supplied by CHS staff.
“I feel like we haven’t done a ton of work, and it [school] has just been really calming,” Ellis said.
Despite the challenges that both Ellis and Dennis are facing with the early morning and lack of sleep, CHS has brought a slight bit of relief to these students and the atmosphere they enter every day.
“All the people here are nice, all the teachers are great, just as usual,” Dennis said
