I’ve never really been the type of person to get a lot of sleep. Not only was it because I grew up in a family of night owls, but also because I got in the habit of staying up all night to study (and “study”).

Of course, sleeping late every single night and pulling a crazy number of all-nighters can lead to some adverse effects -- falling asleep in class, inability to focus, swollen lymph nodes, increased stress levels, and nightly sleep paralyses. But, these things didn’t stop me from sleeping late -- any time before 3 AM just seemed way too early and wrong. “The night is still so young. And there’s so much that can be done” is pretty much what I told myself all the time.

However, a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d test something out -- I wanted to see whether sleeping early would help improve the quality of my life (or something like that). I told myself that no matter what, I was going to sleep before 1 AM every night for a month (excluding weekends because duh).

So far I’ve slept before 1 AM for seven days, and here’s how it’s going so far:

1. Four hours of sleep or seven hours of sleep, I’m still sleepy as hell in the mornings.

2. I feel more energized during the day, though.

3. My skin looks a little bit better than before (and it’s been consistently looking bad since I got to Berkeley).

4. I actually get kind of sleepy past 1 AM now.

I can’t see any major changes yet but hopefully by the end of this month-long self experiment, I’ll be able to feel better about sleeping early.