Five tips to get more sleep in school
Very few people get enough sleep. Whether you’re busy with school, work, extracurriculars, or procrastination, that statement doesn’t change much.
Despite the general lack of it, I think we can all agree that sleep is a vital part of our lives, and for any who don’t, there are countless studies on sleep out there to change your mind.
In fact, sleep has tons of benefits that a lot of people aren’t even aware of — being well rested makes you more emotionally intelligent, increases memory formation and retention, and keeps your body healthy–just to name a few.
The thing is, most people don’t dislike sleep. We just don’t have enough time in the day to accomplish everything we want/need to do. That’s especially true while you’re in school. I get it. But there are a few ways that you can make sure you are getting a healthy and sustainable amount of sleep despite all of the work you have on your plate.
5 tips to get more sleep
- Take the time to plan out what you need to do. Get a planner or use a calendar app (personally, I use Google Calendar). Every week you should sit down, think about everything that you need to do in the next few days, and decide when you are going to do each thing. You can make it a checklist! There’s nothing more satisfying than crossing things off a to-do list. If you commit to doing four specific things on Wednesday, then you’ll be more likely to finish those four things rather than pushing something off and being overwhelmed on Thursday. As a result you’ll be able to maintain a more consistent workload, and your sleep schedule will be more regular.
- Sleep when you’re tired. When you get sleepy just go to bed. And don’t put yourself to bed when you’re not sleepy. If you plan on going to sleep at 1 am and waking up at 8 am to go to class, but you get tired at 11pm, you might as well just sleep at 11 pm and wake up at 6 am — it’s the same amount of sleep, but your body will feel much better, and you’ll actually be more productive in the morning after having rested.
- Use short pockets of free time effectively. It’s easy to spend short breaks in your schedule scrolling on your phone. A 30 minute break spent perusing Instagram and Facebook flies by. But if you check social media fewer times a day you’ll still be up to date on everything that happened over the course of the day, it will just be absorbed in a shorter time. If you have a break between classes, then sit down and get some work done! Study what you just learned from your previous classes (you’ll save time by not having to study it again later). Send some emails for your club! Do a couple problems from your homework that’s due on Friday. 30 minutes to an hour may even seem too short to accomplish any schoolwork. But trust me, it is, and each little break adds up.
- Don’t study with your friends. It’s nice to spend time with your friends. It’d be ideal to spend time with them and get your work done simultaneously. But it rarely works out. You end up distracting each other and being unproductive. There’s nothing wrong with study groups, and group review sessions can be great, but there is no reason that you should be working with friends if you are studying bio, Johnny is writing an essay, and Sara is coding — you’re just going to distract each other and then have to spend even more time doing the work later, resulting in lost sleep. If you just get your work done independently you’ll still have plenty of time to see friends, and the time spent together will be more fun anyway.
- Prioritize. Decide which things are truly important to you. It’s impossible to do absolutely everything. So figure out what you value the most, and then dedicate yourself to your most highly valued things first. But just know, even if sleep isn’t a priority in your life you need to get it anyway, otherwise other aspects of your life will suffer.
I used to not value sleep. I would aim to only sleep four hours per night because I thought that I was surely missing out on things going on in the world. I thought that if I slept less then I would have more meaningful experiences, be able to do more schoolwork, and waste less time in life. I went through one month of extreme sleep deprivation; I consistently went to bed at four, five, or six in the morning because I didn’t want to miss out on anything. But that didn’t last. I crashed — hard. Suddenly I wasn’t capable of sleeping any less than ten hours at a time, and it was more often 12–13 hours. That lasted for a couple weeks as my body recovered. I later realized that even though I was awake and doing more things while I was foregoing sleep, the quality of each and every one of those things had declined.
If you’re interested in the many arguments to sleep more, then I highly recommend Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep — it changed my entire outlook on sleep and school, it helped me start to prioritize good sleep patterns, and it helped me get more sleep in school.
This blog is written by Mark, who is a content creator at Mascot. Mark studies Economics and Mathematics at the University of Southern California (USC), where he received a generous scholarship package.
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