Sleep is fundamental to human existence and affects our life more than we realize. Often our sleep is erratic, irregular, and unrestful, which seeps into our waking lives. If we want to excel and succeed while faced with the complexities of campus life, we need better sleep. Better sleep looks like around 8 hours of sleep regularly. We all need 8 hours of sleep to be our highest selves (CBD will not get us there). Let u discuss, How can a student sleep 8 hours?
We must regularly give ourselves an 8-hour sleeping opportunity, but we need to manage our waking life to receive the full benefits of sleep to achieve that. So give yourself an 8-hour sleeping opportunity, manage Your Walking Life by Managing Your Time, and Make Up For Lost Sleep.
Give Yourself An 8-Hour Sleeping Opportunity
You need to be in your bed for 8 hours to sleep 8 hours. That might sound superfluous, but it is the beginning of everything. It would help if you protected your 8-hour sleeping opportunity:
Have a bedtime
No, you’re not in grade school but think about it, most of us wake up at the same time every morning, right? So, it’s simple math that if we want to sleep for 8 hours, we should go to sleep 8 hours before.
Put your phone to bed
If you want to go to sleep your phone needs to go first. Put it to bed around 30 mins before you go to sleep, somewhere out of reach. Honestly, how many times have you stayed up, late at night, scrolling on Tik Tok watching random stuff?
Avoid Caffeine and Alcohol
Caffeine is scientifically proven to keep you awake so that’s a no before bedtime. And I hear you already thinking about that one night where you slept soundly because of one too many tequilas? Newsflash, not all sleep is equal, and you need healthy non-substance-induced sleep.
But these are the initial steps, after you’ve taken out distractions from your sleeping life you need to give the same treatment to your waking life and learn to manage your time.
Manage Your Walking Life By Managing Your Time
Your sleep is only as good as your time management and last-minute assignments are probably the most common culprit of disrupting your time and sleep. These steps will help you combat being the guy or gal who submits 1 minute before the deadline.
Make Artificial Deadlines
The best way to combat all-nighters is to do things before they are due (crazy idea, I know.) Get into the habit of setting your own personal, artificial deadline 3-7 days before it’s actually due. Be a rebel, who says you have to submit when a lecturer says you should.
Schedule Your Work
Your waking life won’t become organized by accident. You need to fundamentally change how you live, study and plan. Download something like Todoist and read a top time management book (or audiobook.) Then set at least 2-4 hours a day to go deep into studying and assignments.
Learn “Deep Work”
I want to recommend two books, first Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success in a Distracted World and second Jordan Raynor’s Redeeming My Time. Cal defines Deep Work as a ‘’Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” You need this, here’s a summary.
College can be the best years of your life and if you follow the steps above, they’ll also be your most productive. But life isn’t really ever that simple so next, let’s learn how to make up for our lost Zzzs.
Make Up For Lost Sleep
Sleep is quite a well-explored and well-studied science, but occasionally, there may be ways to cheat the code. Beyond that, achieving healthy sleep takes time.
Afternoon Naps
Have you ever taken a nap and then stayed up until 2 am? Then why not do that on days you know you’ll come back at 2 am? That’ll at least prepare your body to face the night like a real vampire.
Learn to Sleep 8 Hours
If you’ve been sleeping for 5-6 hours the last couple of months, then your body has gotten used to it. Therefore, you have to develop better sleeping over time. It’ll take time, but it’s worth it.
Conclusion
And that’s all folks, these 8 simple steps will get you 8 hours of sleep. Try implementing one or two every month and you’ll look back and comfortably hit the hay. At that moment, hopefully, I can confidently say sweet dreams and good luck with Finals, you’ve got this. Please note that sleeping outside of your routine will interrupt your sleep cycle and sleeping longer the next day won’t make up for that.
