The Tired Teen: 5 Unexpected Causes

The time of kids going to bed at first sign of dark is long gone. The teen barricaded in his room tends to stay up late even on school days. If you let them, they could sleep through midday. Bad habits are part of the reason why teens feel tired all the time. 

It’s not unusual for a young person to look like a zombie over breakfast, and tiredness will go away once they accept more disciplined sleep patterns. But there are other causes for fatigued teens, and you should look into them.

Five causes for tired teens

Teen years are challenging with teenagers trying to balance a booming social life, first love, friendships and often overwhelming schedule of classes, studying, and various extracurricular activities ranging from learning how to play guitar to the basketball team. With all these tasks, it’s hard to concentrate on one thing. 

Studious approach and maybe help from task manager apps could help with better organization. For a good night sleep that is essential to well-rested kids, they could contact EduBirdie, online service or hire a freelancer on one of many platforms that can help with writing tasks, and essays when things go south.

To understand why are teens so tired, we made a list of five causes.

Too little sleep

Most teenagers need from 8 ½ to 10 hours of sleep every night. That means if they need to get up by 7 AM, and often it’s even earlier, they should be in bed by 10 PM. It’s hard to make younger kids in bed by 10, and teens with their vibrant social life, smartphone, and distractions in the form of social media, television, streaming services, gaming and other are almost always waked long past the ideal sleep time. It doesn’t even have to be a distraction. Excessive homework can also factor in on the sleep deprivation. To make things worse, adolescents try to catch up on sleep with naps, caffeine intake, and long weekend sleeping. All that makes this problem worse. The best solution would be to adopt a healthier sleep pattern.

Body clock out of rhythm

Moving natural sleep schedule further away from the usual circle could cause disorder of teens inner body clock. It’s ok sometimes to go to bed at 4 AM and sleep half of a day on the weekend, but if this behavior continues and become prevalent, it will be hard for the young ones to function normally. They could develop delayed sleep phase syndrome. 

Depression 

Adolescents are often moody and not a stranger to the high-low state of mind. Depression is a more severe disease and should not be taken lightly. It’s also one of the leading reasons for lack of sleep, and insomnia is one of the signs of depression, just like the other extreme of too much sleeping.

Medical conditions

Many serious diseases and conditions can cause a sleep disorder. Anemia, heart problem, cancer, a chronical illness like asthma or some infections. More common sleep disorder is caused by obstructive sleep apnea. Throat muscle is not performing as it should, and it interferes with breathing, which is causing disruptive sleep, and it is followed by snoring.

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Narcolepsy, sudden daytime sleep is not that common, but can also lead to tired teen. 

Restless legs

When you have the need to move the legs, and you can’t get into the right position for sleeping, you could have restless legs syndrome. Teens could get unpleasant sensation of pins and needles, itchy or creepy crawly feelings in legs which could disrupt sleep.

As if the hormones and tough schedule are not enough for adolescents, if you add sleeping disorder, you could get a fatigued teen. Some of the best advice to avoid this condition would be:

• Develop a relaxing bedtime routine

• Try to catch at least 8 hours of sleep

• Try to go to bed at the same time

• Don’t exercise in the evening

• Avoid caffeine after 5 PM

• Keep naps short or avoid them entirely

Conclusion

Lack of good night sleep can be devastating to school success, social interaction, and quality of everyday life. The problem with tiredness in adolescent is how to recognize sleep problems. Teens often have about behavior; they could hold grudges, withdraw to their personal space, and act weird. If you follow closely and talk to the young ones, you will probably detect the cause of fatigue. Encourage positive sleep patterns, don’t make it worse with coffee drinking late, develop mobile phone free bedtime zone, and try to establish an environment without distractions along with the reasonable bedtime curfew. 
Guest article written by Alvin Franklin is a creative professional, long time freelance blog post and article writer. With educational, health, and cultural topic in his inner circle of interest, he thrives in school, literature, fine arts, and other similar topics. Alvin is ready to take the challenge of presenting the most difficult topics and turn them into highly readable articles