I’ve always been the kind of person who needs the recommended eight hours of sleep to function properly. That is, until this semester of college. I don’t know what happened, but the last few months, I’ve been averaging about four and a half hours of sleep per night. Somehow, I’m able to pass classes without physically passing out. How do I do it? Allow me to let you in on a few of my secrets on how to never sleep:
1. Friends
All right, you have 200 pages to read, an essay due and a test to study for, and you maybe didn’t manage your time well. Accept it. You’re going to be up most of the night doing work.
First thing's first, grab some friends who are in the same boat. My mistake first semester was that I always tried to study alone. If you try that technique, good luck making it past one in the morning before falling face-first on your textbook.
Friends keep each other accountable. If I’m falling asleep, I can count on my friends to throw a book at me or offer food to keep me awake. Friends also just make it easier to stay awake. You can’t fall asleep when you’re too busy laughing and talking. I often fall into a cycle of studying for a couple minutes, then talking for a couple minutes. It may or may not take me twice as long to get through my work, but at least, I’m awake.
2. Coffee
Once upon a time, I drank coffee because I "liked the taste" and caffeine "didn’t really affect me.” But now, I’ve learned the hard way that coffee can become a necessary drug when you need to convince your body to run on fewer hours of sleep than you have fingers on one hand. Unless you’re one of those super-humans who never has caffeine, just accept that you’ll need a few shots of espresso or something to make it through.
Here’s my strategy for coffee drinking (probably zero out of 10 doctors would recommend this, so be careful): Drink a cup in the morning since you most likely stayed up late the night before, and you’ll need that extra motivation to even get out of bed. Have another cup with lunch to help make your daylight hours as pleasant as possible for you and the people around you. Then, if it’s gonna be another long night, brew up a pot around eight or nine o’ clock, and you should be set. You might get shaky, and you might begin to feel emotionally unstable, but you’ll make it through. I promise.
3. Want it.
I’ll give you the advice any generic coach gives his high school team in a pep talk — if there’s one thing this is about, it’s commitment. At 11 p.m., if you find yourself saying, “I’m so tired,” then you are weak. And sleep is for the weak, so just go to sleep. Deal with your homework situation in the morning, and consider changing your study habits so you can consistently get a full night’s sleep.
However, if you’re aiming for a life of procrastination while still staying afloat academically, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. On these long nights, you aren’t allowed to complain about exhaustion until 3 a.m. at the earliest. You have to want it.
4. Admit it's unhealthy
Understand that this way of life is probably not healthy. But admitting the problem is the first step to solving it.
If you hang out with any psychology majors, expect them to consistently, but politely, remind you that you’re racking up a sleep debt and your “sleep-deprivation high” isn’t going to last forever. I suggest keeping a stockpile of comebacks for those comments, such as: “Whatever, I’m an adult” or “Joke’s on you, I’m so caffeinated I’ll fly forever,” or perhaps just snore at them since you’ve probably already fallen asleep.
Also, understand that no matter what you do, your mental state declines at a certain point in the night. Don’t be surprised if you end up brushing your teeth while sprawled out across the sinks in the dorm bathroom or if you start crying because the piece of chocolate you are trying to eat keeps falling out of your mouth. (These completely general and universal examples have obviously never happened to me in real life.) Be prepared for lack-of-sleep-inspired mental breakdowns, and try to keep a good friend around who can take care of you once you’ve slipped over the edge.
5. Naps
I have to admit, the title of this article is slightly deceiving: realistically, you can't just never sleep. More accurately, you just have to know when and how to sleep, and that’s where the art of napping comes in.
Here’s my crash course on naps:
- If you need one (and have time for one), take one.
- If you take one, be careful.
- Don’t expect to have control over the duration of the nap. You might wake up 15 minutes or five hours later. There’s no way to tell.
- Results may vary. It’s possible that you wake up feeling as fresh as if you’d gotten a full eight hours the night before, but it’s just as possible that you wake up confused, angry and more tired than you were before. Either way, prepare post-nap coffee.
With this lifestyle, don’t be surprised if you end up going to bed earlier on weekends than you do on weeknights. And let yourself sleep in a little bit on those weekend mornings. Charge up with 8-14 hours of sleep — pay off that sleep debt, then rub it in the face of your psychology major friends. You’ll definitely need the memory of those double-digit hours of sleep to get you through the next week when you once again procrastinate on all of your work and have to stay up until sunrise.
