Finals week isn’t the only time when Big Sky students feel worn out in school. Anyone who spends five minutes in the hallway knows that year-round, conversations center around I’m tired, I’m overwhelmed, or I’m behind on work. When exhaustion becomes a constant part of student life, the question arises of why so many students feel drained before the day begins. While classes, sports, and jobs all contribute to the student stress levels, one factor is quietly intensifying for almost every student: we’re not getting enough sleep. And our phones aren’t helping.
For many students, nightly routines follow a pattern of getting home exhausted, procrastinating homework because our brains are fried, scrolling through social media for “just a few minutes,” and all of a sudden, it’s 2 am.
Five hours later, we wake up sluggish and behind before the day has started. It’s a cycle we excuse as a normal teenage schedule, but there are solutions quite literally at our fingertips.
What makes this vicious cycle so dangerous is how overlooked it is. As a high school student, I know that watching videos on the internet doesn’t feel bad, FaceTiming friends feels comforting, and checking notifications doesn’t feel harmful. But the science doesn’t lie: studies from the National Institute of Health show that late-night screen usage delays the brain’s release of melatonin, which increases the difficulty of falling asleep. When scrolling pushes sleep back by even 30 minutes, it compounds into a long-term sleep deficiency. Research from a news article from PsychPlus shows that over time, the missed sleep makes every aspect of school more overwhelming, from assignments to social interactions.
At Big Sky, fatigue isn’t abstract. You can see it in the heads resting on desks during the first period, in the number of students asking teachers for deadline extensions, in the quiet “sorry, I’m just so tired” before a class presentation. We’ve normalized being exhausted, but exhaustion is less of a sign of hard work and more of a product of an unsustainable, cyclical system: when we’re tired, we’re more likely to procrastinate. When we procrastinate, we stay up later. When we stay up later, we reach for the easiest distraction: our phones. Then the next day, we feel even more tired. The loop repeats and repeats.
But this is a problem we can fix.
No one is asking students to give up their phones or pretend we live in a pre-internet world. But small changes make a real impact. According to Butler Hospital, turning off your phone for the night just 20 minutes before going to sleep helps the brain wind down, and charging your phone across the room or in another part of the house keeps late-night doomscrolling from becoming automatic. I was skeptical at first, but last month, I started routinely turning off my phone for the night before I brushed my teeth, and now I’ve been consistently getting the most sleep since ninth grade.
This is because this reduces blue light exposure before sleep. You may be wondering what blue light actually is. Blue light consists of short-wavelengths emitted by the sun and artificial sources like our phones and laptops. According to Harvard, while blue light may have beneficial impacts on us during the day, including boosted attention, reaction time, and mood, unfortunately, it does disrupt our sleep. This exposure at night is not limited to phones, a level of around eight lux can have an impact–eqivalent to around a lamp. To reduce blue light exposure, students can use red lights, enable settings that limit blue wavelengths on devices, wear blue-light-blocking glasses, and increase exposure to bright lights during daylight hours.
To increase attendance, student engagement, and mental well-being, students need to feel awake in class. We should feel capable and focused when going about our schedules. Big Sky could foster an environment where students walk into first period feeling rested, where homework doesn’t feel like climbing a mountain every night, where our ability to focus doesn’t define our days. I’d recommend starting with strategies that make phones less stimulating, like turning on greyscale mode after 9 pm, or designating your bedroom as a no-phone zone.
Student stress won’t disappear overnight. But if we want to make school a more welcoming environment for mental health, one of the simplest places to start is by choosing sleep over scrolling.
Brooke Wiswell and Rex Rhodes are both members of Big Sky’s Health Science Academy (HSA) and HOSA.
