The fuel to every academic and athletic pursuit, we as students and teachers have become dependent on caffeine. The craving for an energetic boost throughout the school day fills our minds, and even a day without it creates a ripple of exhausting withdrawals, making work nearly impossible.
Without caffeine, 3:05 pm seems years away. By the third period, our eyes droop and our minds begin to dream. Focus is completely lost, and the whiteboard becomes a blur of gibberish. How do we as students get to this point of fatigue?
Hours of homework and extracurriculars force high schoolers to stay awake hours into the night. Trading vital hours of sleep for last-minute studying and finishing up class work.
Junior Scout Dennis expresses her struggle, as a year-round athlete and an active member in several clubs, while also juggling a job and many difficult classes, she struggles to find time to complete all her responsibilities.
“I typically have 2-4 hours of homework a day. I finish it all after my daily practices and in the mornings before school starts.” Dennis explains. “So during the week I only get six hours of sleep a night. On weekends it’s the same because I have work in the mornings and more homework in the afternoon.”
To combat the loss of sleep, students turn to external sources of energy. Drinks such as Celsius, Starbucks, Dutch Bros, and Red Bull are all used to keep everyone functioning. With caffeine levels reaching 200mg, teens throughout high school put their bodies at risk simply to survive the school day without falling asleep.
The Cleveland Clinic, a non-profit academic medical center, recommends that teens don’t consume over 100mg of caffeine a day. However, Dennis states she has “anywhere between 500-700mg of caffeine a day, but at least 400 mg because I always have two Celsius a day.”
Even teachers within Wilsonville utilize drinks to help themselves throughout the day, as they too have similar schedules to the students. Getting early to school and staying late after meetings, one-on-one teaching aids, and grading.
Mr. Arden Eby notes how “I enjoy things like English breakfast tea and diet coke. They help me wake up in the morning, but throughout the day I find myself having these drinks less for the caffeine and more simply because I enjoy the taste.”
While we wish we could only blame our packed school schedules for our lack of sleep, social media and television take up a shameful amount of our time. Screen times soar as teenagers get swept up in an unending cycle of scrolling and liking.
Senior Charlie Middleton explains he uses his phone, “ranging anywhere from one to five hours a night, depending on if I am hanging out with my buddies or not.” Ayoub Laouamri, a junior, has slightly less screen time, with a daily average of five hours.
Assimilated into our nightly routines, the “calming” use of our phones as our bodies work to fall asleep does more harm than good. Blue light strains our eyes and superficial entertainment rewards our thoughtless minds with dopamine with each five-second clip we scroll by on TikTok.
With a lack of substance and easily addicting; phone usage further takes away the sleep that we all claim nonstop to cherish so much. Consequently, students’ downtime after all the sports and homework is filled with unbeneficial consumption, rather than rest.
So then begs the question, why do we allow our phones to continue to chip away at our sleep? Annika Martin, a junior, states her opinion on this addiction, noting how the draw often feels uncontrollable.
“I think it’s a way to regain a sense of control and retain a sense of connection with friends when homework and extracurriculars dominate our day, but since most apps are designed to be addictive, I usually end up being on my phone much later than I intend.”
As we lay in our beds on the phone, 11:00 slips into midnight, until suddenly we wake from our sleep in the morning. Desperately we hit the snooze button. Our bodies beg for ten more minutes of rest, and we are unfortunately the cause of our caffeine addiction.