College is an exhausting experience for most of us, but if you're extremely fortunate you got blessed with a sleep disorder called insomnia. Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep easily, and stay asleep on a regular schedule. So let's just take a quick look at the life of the average nocturnal college student.
To start on a positive note, we are extremely creative. When the mind is sleep deprived, it limits the mental filter. This allows us to think outside of the box to become better problem solvers, painters, writers, etc. Another plus to being a natural night-owl is our ability to procrastinate at least 70 percent better than you. We account for the extra full 24 hours we will have the day before a deadline is due. (This isn't necessarily a good thing, depending on your quality of work under pressure but for most we've developed that talent too.) We also tend to know an excess of things. Since we have free time in the late hours, we read, watch documentaries, or perfect our interests.
However, sleep is a luxury for us, and we definitely know it. You might be complaining about receiving just four or five hours a night. Whereas for us, that's a blessing. Not just any blessing, but a bonafide gift from god, mother nature, what have you, BLESSING. Knowing this also makes us pretty sick of hearing our friends and family whine about their enviable sleep schedule. So don't mind our eye rolls and looks of disgust when you tell us six hours isn't enough.
When we do fall asleep, it's completely accidental and sometimes like an episode of full on narcolepsy. (Narcolepsy is when individuals suffer from daytime drowsiness or in severe cases fall asleep at random.) So if you happen to see us curled up on a chair during midday in the student union with papers splayed about us, please excuse our cat napping. Chances are we didn't even mean to take one in the first place. The act of sleeping for us is sacred, and if you're going to wake us up, you better do it nicely (tip: having food at the ready helps).
Medication doesn't always work for us. Most of us can get a prescription to help, but sometimes it's not always as effective as we hoped. We can go through phases of moodiness, depression, and mania because lack of sleep makes people, well.... a little crazy. If we've gone three or so days without a wink, chances are our tempers are red-hot and we have no patience.
Sleep has a role in just about everything in a human's life, and not having a dependable sleep schedule isn't just hard—it's maddening. So, be considerate because chances are you know one of us. About 30 percent of Americans say they suffer from insomnia according to the American Thoracic Society.
But finally, we appreciate our condition and all it's allowed us to accomplish. Those late night essays, poems, songwriting sessions, or even realizing the solution to an extra credit problem.
