In case you were wondering, the snooze button is a terrible invention that only makes you more tired. Though this was initially a terrible and sad discovery, it makes sense, if you think about it. When you wake up naturally, your body starts doing its wake-up thing about an hour before you actually open your eyes. When you are jolted awake by a blaring alarm clock, you don’t get all those nice wake-up hormones, and you feel sleepy. So you hit the snooze button, which only serves to make you more tired because you’re falling back asleep, which restarts your sleep cycle, and then consequently makes it harder to wake up 10 minutes later when the alarm goes off again.
After viewing a lovely YouTube video that explained all this with whiteboard drawings and paper cutouts, I resolved to no longer hit the snooze button. I still use an alarm, because I am not the kind of person who goes to bed at the same time every night. Seriously, what college student can manage that? Especially when you only have class three days a week and have no need to get up before 10 the other four days. Even though my bedtime fluctuates quite a bit from night to night, I still find myself waking up slightly before my alarm every day.
Instead of looking at the clock and seeing that I have 10 extra minutes, I get up and ultimately feel less tired than if I had slept those extra minutes. I don’t know if I somehow psychosomatically convinced my body to wake up before the alarm due to my faith in that helpful YouTube video from some internet blog, but whatever, it works. And the human body is marvelously complicated, so it’s not a complete impossibility that belief in a YouTube video is powerful enough to reset your circadian rhythm.
At Dartmouth, sleep can be a precious commodity. There’s that cliched saying that you can only pick two out of the three possible choices -— academic success, social life or sleep. I, for one, usually pick options one and three, because nothing good happens after 2 a.m. on a Friday night anyway.
Yet despite the glorification of all-nighters, I find it hard to believe that every student is so overworked that the only possible time they have to write that 20-page paper that was assigned three weeks ago is in the 36 hours before it’s due. I love procrastination as much as the next girl — I start writing these columns about three hours before they’re due. But I don’t usually use my sleep deprivation caused by a lack of poor time management skills as a badge of how AWESOME and BUSY and SOCIALLY SUCCESSFUL I am. Usually because when I am sleep deprived I am grumpy, and I don’t want to talk anyway.
Despite the previous section describing how I have successfully conquered my alarm clock, I have a confession to make: I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been sleeping well lately. It’s not like I’m doing anything fun or productive while not getting enough sleep. I don’t have a boyfriend, and I’m not playing seven games of pong a night (looking at you, freshmen who don’t have majors yet). Nor am I studying for the MCAT or taking organic chemistry. Usually, I spend a lot of time reading the Internet and watching Netflix, which actually isn’t a complete waste of time, since half of my column ideas generate from something I read on the Internet.
There’s certainly some element of projection involved. My sudden desire to compare athletic clothes prices is probably not because I’m a bargain-hunting jock, but because I don’t want to think about getting a job or where I want to eat dinner after graduation. I don’t know about you, but even though I have no idea where I’ll be living come June 9, I know that I will dining at Simon Pierce on June 6, a sorority banquet on June 7, and Pine on June 8. If there’s one thing we Sinclairs do well, it’s eat. That’s scary enough to keep anyone up at night.
I’d prefer to say that my sleeplessness is due to my being a restless, troubled genius, having profound, angsty thoughts deep into the night and then writing bad poetry about it. But I think the real answer may be more mundane. The light from the computer screen messes with your brain, which makes it harder to fall asleep.
I know most of you tune in weekly for a dash of brilliant insight and biting wit, but I hope these healthy living tips are also useful. Full disclosure: I am not pre-med, but I have watched every single episode of House and all eight seasons of Scrubs not once but twice (thanks, Netflix), so I think I’m as well informed as any other random person on the Internet. Last October, I wrote a column about how everyone should get a flu shot, and hey, guess what? The news is reporting that this flu season is going to be awful, with a possible resurgence of the dreaded swine flu. Get your flu shots, people. Turn off your computer and get some sleep. And, whatever you do, don’t hit that snooze button.
