For most of us, going away to college for four (or more) years has been about letting loose just as much as receiving a higher education. At no other point in most of our lives will we live among a general population of our own select age group in extremely close quarters while living minutes away from several bars and a multitude of house parties, having no parental authority hovering over our heads.
But hard play must be balanced with hard work, which fills most of our schedules to capacity. Between excessive amounts of homework and studying, being social and having fun and every other extracurricular activity from working out to philanthropy efforts, we have no time left for anything else. Something has to give and since college students are young, immature and lack wisdom that only comes with age, sleep is the first thing we cut from our overwhelmed schedule.
College students are always exhausted. Whenever we don’t want to do something, the first excuse we use is, “I’m too tired.” Whether or not we’re simply lying through our teeth to get out of our responsibilities is irrelevant because we’ve all been there (some of us more times than we can count), and we understand the feeling of being too tired to function. Too often college students try to just charge onward covered by a fog of caffeine. I’d bet almost every single student here at UF has pulled at least one all-nighter. The irony of such extreme effort is that they don’t help all that much.
Somewhere in a research facility, doctors determined eight to be the number of hours of sleep every person should try to get each night. I can honestly say that since my arrival to UF, I’ve probably averaged closer to seven and maybe even a little under. Not only am I not sleeping as much as I should, but I’ve become semi-nocturnal too. Like most college students, I don’t wake up when I don’t have to and if I sleep to 2 or 3 p.m., then so be it. That’s just how life on campus works. A big chunk of the student population stays awake hours past midnight and wake up late enough to treat lunch as breakfast. My parents hate this particular sleeping schedule. They wake up only a few hours after I go to bed and give me an earful when I wake up, saying how I need to be more responsible and go to bed earlier. Of course, I never do.
One of my favorite Kevin Spacey quotes as Frank Underwood in the hit Netflix series, House of Cards, is “I’ve always loathed the necessity of sleep. Like death, it puts even the most powerful men on their backs.” While I’m not powerful in any way, I too despise how necessary sleep is. Just think of how much more time we would have to do stuff if we didn’t need sleep. One day when I graduate and get a job in the real world, I’ll re-adjust my sleeping cycle. I’ll wake up early and go to bed at a reasonable hour but today is not that day. Until that time, I’m going to live the college life and, like it or not, part of that life is going to bed at four and getting up at two.
