It’s the best and the worst of times. Almost every food item involves a generous dose of peppermint, dozens of holiday sales are gearing up, and the ground is plastered in a bronze mosaic of fallen leaves. The mornings are also way too cold, stress acne is reaching pandemic levels on campus, and the only exercise I’ve gotten is walking to the bathroom every half hour thanks to all the coffee I’ve been drinking.
That’s a long way of saying: Happy finals week, everyone!
By now, studying for your exams might have driven you to adopt some unconventional behaviors, possibly involving reckless amounts of caffeine and little to no sleep. I’m not here to exactly discourage that kind of new lifestyle (you do you, pal), since these are some desperate times indeed, but science says differently.
A key concept we've covered in my physiology class is that of homeostasis: that your body is very interested in keeping things in a certain way that's conducive to not killing itself, and it achieves this via a whole bunch of complicated mechanisms. It’s just too bad that the process of studying these mechanisms is not making my own survival a walk in the park.
While the academia of physiology widely agrees that humans require 7 hours of sleep, my exam on Monday says to mix two cans of Red Bull and 7 shots of espresso in a fishbowl and slam it down until I forget that sleep as a concept ever existed.
It’s a little amusing to see how the concepts I’m reviewing and relearning are applied in full force during this downward spiral of cramming.
My stress levels have my hormones (the very ones that I’ve been trying to memorize!) confused about the general state of affairs as they hurtle through my bloodstream. The gloomy weather and the fact that I haven't gone outside in the past two days means that one, I've forgotten what the sky looks like, and two, my bones are becoming as brittle as uncooked spaghetti.
Homeostasis is not happy with this situation: This kind of self-destruction isn’t sustainable. Hot Cheetos and microwave mac-n-cheese can only go so far in providing crucial nutrients, and I’m sure this is all severely compromising my immune system, too. It gets harder to harder to keep this up because my body is trying desperately to keep me alive (which again, I appreciate).
But so what if staying up for ungodly hours at a time is making my brain poison itself with metabolic wastes until I speak in tongues and astral project into a different realm? This far down to the wire, it'd be a shame if I didn't give it my all. Am I running my body into the ground? Yes. But it’s now or never.
And I now have to get back to the grind.
