The stress and competition of school can often result in students battling for a high rank and GPA. As a result, students often stay up late to finish their work to get ahead of the competition.

“I sacrifice sleep because school work for me takes a long time,” junior Vinayak Chatterjee said. “I’m pretty slow at doing these things. So, it keeps me up at night. The whole reason I stay up to get my work done is to get good grades, and I do that because I want to go to a good college and to pay for all the expenses I need to get a good scholarship because my mom is a single mom, and I don’t want her to pay for all of that.”

However, this comes with many problems.

“As a student there are a few things you have to pay attention to when you are doing extra work and pulling in long hours,” family physician Dr. Harini Meda said. “One thing, the most important thing, is making sure you get enough sleep. Sleep is very essential, it keeps your memory going, clears your head when you wake up in the morning, you don’t wake up with a headache, you can concentrate better. Those are the things that you got to pay attention to. I see a lot of kids cramming overnight, sleeping very late in the night, and those are all not good signs if you want to be more effective during the school day.”

For many students, staying up late at night due to school work is a normal routine they fall into without realizing it. Even though school plays a vital role in a student’s life, their overall health is equally as important.

“Things that a student can do better to organize the day is to make sure you have a proper goal of what you need to achieve in a particular evening. Write down everything and say ‘how am I going to achieve it.’ Do your work for two hours, take a ten minute break in between, get up, exercise, walk around, do what you need to do in terms of entertainment,” Meda said. “A lot of the time I see kids doing 2-3 hours of entertainment, and then they start their work late in the evening, which obviously gets into your sleep time and you’re sleeping at 2:oo a.m. in the night. So try to avoid that. Make sure you eat healthy, make sure you hydrate yourself well, eat more fruits and stuff. Those are the things I want kids to pay attention to when they’re doing school work. Yes, you want to achieve things in life, but do it in a way that also helps your health, not just your school.”

I’m Neha Perumalla reporting for WTV.