By Margarita Garcia, Courier Staff Writer

sleepSleep is the food for your brain. According to The Sleep Foundation having little to no sleep may be “even deadly, particularly if you are behind the wheel. You can look bad, you may feel moody, and you perform poorly.”

So staying up too late to study for a test can cause you to perform poorly. Alex Ledesma has said “ I sleep at 12 because I study for tests”. However, an dangerous example can be when “drowsiness and falling asleep at the wheel cause more than 100,000 car crashes every year”. You can be a danger to society and to the community.

The consequences of not sleeping enough or not sleeping in general can limit your learning ability and can cause more pimples and acne on other skin. It may lead to aggressive behavior and the increase of caffeine and nicotine.

The brain goes through 5 stages in its sleep. According to “Kids Healthy” the first two periods are light sleep where the person can be easily woken up. Then stages 3 and 4 is a deeper stage of sleep which cause confusion for a few minutes. These stages are the stages that make you feel refreshed and where the body releases growth and development hormones. And finally the 5th stage or the REM is where everything goes rapid. For example, “breathing is rapid, the heart beats faster, and the limb muscles don’t move” and where the most vivid dreams occur.

The average amount of sleep that teens need is 8 ½ to 9 ½ hours of sleep on the daily according to teens.webmd.com. When a student falls asleep late like the Logan student Eric Chow, you are having less sleep than the required amount which, as mentioned before, can cause you to perform badly at school.

Some students are night owls like Jhoana Mendoza  who enjoys doing other actives but doesn’t have time to do it due to the amount of homework given to her.