Similar experience, had 15ish years of a terrible relationship with sleep starting when high school started, with a side order of seasonal depression. I blame a

Similar experience, had 15ish years of a terrible relationship with sleep starting when high school started, with a side order of seasonal depression. I blame a combination of: 1) puberty, 2) putting the long break in Summer rather than Winter plus a very early start time with the result that for several months I'd only see the Sun for at most 2.5 hours in the afternoon (walked into the building with the stars still out), 3) a homework load + butt-in-seat time that had more of my hours spoken for than I even came close to reaching again until I had multiple young kids of my own plus a full time job, plus the conditions being a hell of a lot closer to prison than to either college or working adult life (college was harder in some ways, of course, but less time consuming and way less stressful, I found, thanks to the much lower in-class time per week and more flexibility scheduling homework/study time, and consequently felt like a vacation after four years of high school), 4) glowing screens and the opportunity to reclaim some time for myself late at night with highly-engaging entertainment (by which I mean video games and screwing around on computers, the latter of which actually ended up being the most valuable thing I did in high school bar none, admittedly) Oh and there's a good chance, according to current research, that the whole Winter-is-school-time thing plus younger grades not getting us outside enough in those low-sunlight-per-day months was a major contributor to my being nearsighted by 7th grade. IOW K-12 school broke me both physically and psychologically for no good reason, with consequences lasting between a two-digit count of years and a lifetime, and I had it pretty easy, relatively speaking.