Maintaining Your Tuftsanity: Catch z's, not disease

It is hard for me to believe that there was ever a day when I protested going to bed. Like most kids, I fought against it as though my life depended on it. I screamed, fussed and found corners of the house to hide in so I couldn’t be forced to sleep. When closing my eyes wasn’t enough to trick my parents, I faked sleep until the coast was clear and I could hop out of bed to run rampant around my room for hours. Heck, I might as well have made posters and bought a megaphone to top my boycotting efforts off.

The idea that I used to detest something as beautiful as sleep pains my 19-year-old heart. My current relationship with sleep feels like a long-distance one. I long for it nearly 24/7, and it feels like there are light years between us. I daydream about closing my eyes just for a minute or two, and wish for the days when I had ten hours in a night to spare for sleep. Once reunited for whatever short amount of time we have, we are an inseparable duo. No alarm clock can pull me away.

Cue myself in a mid-semester craze: I’ve got the classic head-bob-and-eyelid-droop-combo down to a science. I’ve also discovered that it is indeed possible to take an entire lecture’s worth of notes only to look back and not recall learning a single concept. An endless cycle begins: I stay up late to study, suffer through a bleary-eyed next day, fall behind on work because my 15-minute power nap that afternoon turned into an eight-hour nap. The moral of these sleep escapades? Lack of sleep is only the first domino in a terrible chain of semester-destroying effects.

I write all of this because I believe my struggles are fairly universal. As I look around at fellow classmates during classes and in the library, I can tell I’m not alone in my exhaustion. We’ve reached a point of no return in the semester, and as we get down to the wire we may as well find the energy to finish strong. But as our immune systems fail us and late nights only seem to get later, this becomes nearly impossible to do.

So the next time you’re using a Tisch desk as a makeshift pillow, consider just going to bed instead. I was going to relay all sorts of information about how sleep deprivation impairs brain functioning, how you become significantly more vulnerable to sickness when you need sleep, yada yada yada, but that has never stopped us from pulling an all-nighter. Instead, consider this a permission slip of sorts to take a night or three to crash at 9:00 p.m. Take a weekend, three or four nights of quality sleep, to start getting back on track. Though the toddler in all of us will protest, it will truly be more worthwhile to just go to bed.