Sleeping Habits

[Yoshi63]

i have a pretty annoying problem that I almost NEVER can get to sleep earlier than I did the night before. Similar to what hyper_dermic posted above me, if unchecked I would probably sleep for about 10 hours and stay up for 16-18. Unfortunately this doesn't coincide with the Earth's rotation.

In high-school, I would go to be around midnight and wake up at 7:30. Then on friday night I would stay up til 1-2 am hanging out with friends, waking up the next morning at like 10 am. Saturday night would usually be a little later (3am), waking up at 11am. So Sunday night I would attempt to get to sleep around midnight, but would just lay in bed with thoughts running around in my head, but no sleep till 3 am. Since I had to attend class at 8am, I'd end up forcing awake and be in a semi-concious state for the first few periods. However, at least this would result in being able to get to sleep at a reasonable time that night.

In college, this hasn't worked well. In the dorms it was very easy to find someone awake at 2am if I wanted on weekdays. And there was stuff (read: drinking) going on until even later on weekends. Combine this with the fact that attending class is not "required" like it was at my high-school, and I started sleeping through my 9am class almost every day. I ended up in such bad shape in that class, that I ended up just skipping the final - because I figured my grade was hopeless, and I didn't want to wake up for it.

This same kind of thing went on for another 3 semisters. Trying to scrape by with decent grades proved difficult and frustrating when constantly missing classes and/or showing up on < 5 hrs sleep. Even when I found the motivation to wake up and drag myself to campus, it would basically ammount to sleepwalking through the first couple hours - retaining little information and hating it. For some reason my brain just HAAAATES itself for a few hours when woken up prematurely. Everything would suck during that time, I hated everying and just wanted to sleep. If I wasn't physically closing my eyes, I would usually just sit in class imagining how amazing it would be to just lay in bed. Eventually I would begin waking up, but at the same time start getting antsy from all the previous classes that day - focusing on anything but the professor/material. Thus it is no surprise that it became more and more difficult to complete homework, and I'd spend the last 13 weeks (of a 16 week semister) walking the line between passing and failing in several classes.

I didn't like this at all. This past summer I stayed at school and took a single course (Calc 2). I wasn't working or anything else, so the single 75 minute lecture 5 days a week was my only committment. Despite all this, I still managed to routinely miss class. At one point I missed 7 or 8 straight lectures, simply because I had stayed up too late the prevoius day and didn't want to wake up on limited sleep. I ended up managing a "C", which I'm not even sure I deserved.

At this point I realized how significant a role my sleep issues were playing into my lack of success at school. I couldn't even fathom the idea of going through another semister like this, so this last Fall I decided to take a semister off. I'm still living at school, and my roomates are taking classes. I haven't been working, so I just fill my day however I feel. This has been both liberating, and unstimulating to a point bordering on insanity (not really, but sometimes it feels like it). I would very much like to begin taking classes again this Spring, but I'm finding it difficult to believe things will go any better.