Let me ask you a question. How do you people sleep at night?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m serious \u2014 and not just at night. More and more, I\u2019m noticing students sleeping at school\u2026 during the day! Some of you guys seem able to fall asleep anywhere: in the Library, in the Building 13 Atrium, waiting for academic advisors in Building 11 and pretty much anywhere else there are chairs on campus.<\/p>\n
So, how do you do it? What\u2019s the secret?<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve suffered from long nights, maybe mild insomnia, for most of my life. I need at least 18 hours of activity under my belt before I even begin to feel that I should turn in. Even after I climb into bed, I still have another three hours ahead of me before I (might) pass out.<\/p>\n
I spend most of my schooldays punching myself in the head, trying to jumpstart my brain before an exam or speech. But the second I lay my head down on the pillow that night, my mind is in full-swing and turns into a Ringling Brothers cirucs\u00a0 of random thoughts.<\/p>\n
Right now, I\u2019m averaging about three hours of sleep a night. And I\u2019ve tried everything \u2014 reading in bed, watching TV, keeping a cool bedroom and avoiding late-night food and caffeine. Nothing helps.<\/p>\n
I spend most of my goofing around on the \u201cweird side of the Internet,\u201d getting caught up in YouTube\u2019s suggested videos, clicking deeper and deeper into Wikipedia (did you know that Persepolis is 43 miles northeast of Shiraz in the Fars Province?) and to top it all off, I\u2019ve recently become a Redditor.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m midway through three books (not including textbooks), made my way through entire seasons of television shows, memorized dialogue from recently released movies and have begun noticing patterns on my iPod\u2019s shuffle setting.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve started having a couple beers before bed and that helps a little, but that\u2019s not a healthy, long-term solution.<\/p>\n
I go to school full-time, I work two jobs and I just took up skateboarding again to help stay active during the day.<\/p>\n
And this brings me back to you guys snoozing around campus \u2014 what are you doing all day long to burn so much energy? How many credit hours are you taking? Do you jog to school or something?<\/p>\n
Or is it simply that you have a long break between classes, you\u2019ve decided to stay on campus and you\u2019re bored to tears.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know how you do it and I\u2019m jealous. I\u2019ve only dozed off once at school and that was after roughly 48 hours of no sleep.<\/p>\n
I believe this is what the online masses refer to as \u201cfirst world problems.\u201d There\u2019s even a popular meme of the same title. A good example of this might be a distraught woman boohooing, \u201cmy diamond earrings keep scratching my iPhone.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that I can\u2019t fall asleep because bombs are exploding by my home near the Gaza Strip, or because I\u2019m an infected child born into an epidemic of over 5,600,000 fellow HIV-positive South Africans or because my grandmother is within range of a North Korean Taepodong-2 ballistic missile.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t lie awake at night with hunger pains or wonder how I\u2019m going to pay the heating bill.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a haunting Pulitzer-winning photograph by Kevin Carter, who has since committed suicide, of a starving, collapsed Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. That photo depicts a real problem.<\/p>\n
This is nothing. This is boredom.<\/p>\n
Of course, true insomnia isn\u2019t a pretend problem for the privileged by any means. Sleep disorders are very real, painful medical conditions that, according to The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, affects 40 percent of Americans.<\/p>\n
But in my case, I don\u2019t think this is a neurological disorder. I think this is dispassion.<\/p>\n
Is that fair? Is it fair to be so lazy and comfortable in my life that I can\u2019t find enough to do to make myself tired by the end of the day?<\/p>\n
I shouldn\u2019t be content as just another American, waiting around for the return of the McRib.<\/p>\n
I should be taking advantage of how fortunate I am to be this free, with this much time and opportunity on my hands.<\/p>\n
If I\u2019m not tired at the end of the day, then maybe I haven\u2019t done enough with my day.<\/p>\n
I could get up with the sun and leap out of bed. I could skip the \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d marathon and volunteer somewhere. I could learn to play a musical instrument. I could learn a second language. I could read not to fall asleep, but to be awoken \u2014 I could do anything I wanted with my day.<\/p>\n
I should wake up and make myself tired. I should give every ounce of energy to everything I do, everyday.<\/p>\n
I shouldn\u2019t let that opportunity slip away to apathy.<\/p>\n
I should feel bad about my laziness and my tendency to waste entire days. And maybe, deep down, I do. Maybe remedying this and truly seizing each day will yield a solution: a clear conscious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let me ask you a question. How do you people sleep at night? I\u2019m serious \u2014 and not just at night. More and more, I\u2019m noticing students sleeping at school\u2026 during the day! Some of you guys seem able to fall asleep anywhere: in the Library, in the Building 13 Atrium, waiting for academic advisors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3031,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tartan-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-2kA","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3031"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8965,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8964\/revisions\/8965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}