Naps: your childhood enemy and your adult best friend. Every time you heard the words "nap time" as a child you cringed. Naps were the worst. Fast forward several years, and now all you want to do is nap. Honestly, the school systems are doing it all wrong. Now, you would give anything just to have nap time again.

According to many studies, the normal human body requires at least around 8 hours of sleep for optimal functioning. College students however, are not normal human beings and we need about two times that amount of sleep every night, but we most definitely do not get it.

People always talk about how hard it is to balance your schedule, and it is true. Somehow we are all expected to go to class, do our homework, work out, be involved in as many clubs and organizations as possible, eat relatively healthy, maintain a social life, and all the while try to get enough sleep and stay healthy. I don’t care who you ask but there are not enough hours in a day to complete all of these tasks. College students don’t run on sleep, they run on coffee and any other form of caffeine they can get their hands on. Every day is a struggle to stay awake.

Naps are necessary for survival. They are always a good idea. Whenever you are debating whether or not to take one, always take on. Even if it is a shitty nap, it is still extra sleep, and who doesn’t need that. And naps can happen any time and anywhere, some places less desirable than others. You can always find people sleeping in class, on the bus, in the library, but the best spot of a nap is always bundled up in your blankets.

The art of napping is a tricky one however, and no one can ever seem to master it. A full REM cycle is approximately 30 minutes while a full sleep cycle is 90 minutes. The hardest part of a nap is getting up. And if you're like most people, you do not have the luxury of sleeping forever. While sleeping through class always seems like a good idea, it never is. Still, there is nothing worse than hearing the terrible blaring sound of your alarm. Whenever I hear my alarm sound I cringe, even if I am not waking up.

You either have a great nap and you wake up feeling refreshed, or you wake up feeling even more dead than you did before the nap. Supposedly, (never works for me) if you sleep for one of those amounts of time, or follow the time incriminates of the sleep cycle, you will wake up feeling refreshed. But if you’re like me, you’ll end up sleeping for four hours and wake up wondering what year it was.

In the end, no nap is ever long enough.