Four hours is all I need. A few days of four hours and I’ll be good, but hit the fifth day and I can’t function — functioning might be overrated.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, teens need about a little over nine hours of sleep each night to function best (for some, eight and a half hours is enough).

Nine hours? Really? Even eight is asking for too much. Where am I supposed to find hours for sleep?

So much is expected from 24 hours: eight hours of school, couple hours of homework, couple of hours of sports/other extracurriculars, a shift at work, and maybe an hour for a quick dinner with the family. Throw in a social life, stressing about college, and then we’re expected to sleep? No wonder our generation is fueled by energy drinks and coffee; we have no time to power up.

In a recent study published in the Journal of School Health they reported that more than 90 percent of teens sleep less than the recommended nine hours a night. In the same study, 10 percent of teens reported sleeping less than six hours a night.

In addition to the studies already stated, researches writing in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics found that students in lower socioeconomic community sleep an average of six hours a night (that includes the time they tried to go to sleep).

No one disagrees with the importance of sleep in a teen’s life, but it’s hard to keep up with everything while being exhausted. We all think, ‘Oh, I’ll just catch up on sleep during the weekend.” Well, apparently doing that messed up your internal clock and does more harm than good.

A study done in 2008 by scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that when subjects slept four hours a night over five days, and then “caught up” with eight hours a night over the following week, they still showed slight residual cognitive impairments a week later, even though they reported no sleepiness.

Some schools make the effort to start school a little later for students to get more sleep, but since Mehlville starts at 7:20 a.m. students are left to their own devices.

The only way to fix sleep deprivation is to sleep.

So my advice to everyone barely getting through the day, speeding to the new Starbucks, and downing some chemical cocktail called an “energy drink” is to put it down — by it, I mean your head. Find a class to sleep in. Have a busy class schedule? Find a staircase or an empty chair during lunch and snooze. Seize the opportunities for napping.

Now if you’d excuse me, I took a melatonin tablet twenty minutes ago and I am ready to let these heavy eyelids rest.

In the words of Edgar Allan Poe, “Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”