Adolescents in Nigeria tend to report feelings of mental, physical and general fatigue without having correspondingly exerted themselves to trigger this. This tiredness has been observed to also affect their sleep habits.

We set out to investigate how the report of tiredness by in-school adolescents tends to affect their sleep habits both on weekdays and weekends.

The Tripartite Fatigue Scale (TFS) and a modified version of the School Sleep Habits Survey (SSHS) were administered on 606 (272 males and 334 females) secondary school adolescents in Lagos and Ogun states of Nigeria aged between 12–19 years (χ2 = 15.24; SD = 1.42) in their classrooms.

A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to analyse the effect of fatigue on the sleep habits of adolescents. The result shows that fatigue significantly affects the sleep habits of adolescents during weekends and weekdays, F (3, 602) = 20.068, P ≤ 0.01; Pillai's Trace = 0.91, partial η2 = 0.91. The adolescents also reported general inadequate sleep (χ2 = 6.29 SD = 2.32), less than the required amount of adequate sleep their age. Additional Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) result showed that fatigue significantly affected the students self-reported grade F (3, 605) = 5.32, P = 0.01.

The present study has empirically highlighted that the consistent complaint of tiredness by secondary school adolescents in Nigeria emanates from fatigue marked mostly by insufficient sleep.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.