You are naked, sitting in a crowded lecture hall. Your professor is wearing a clown suit and riding on top of a donkey. As he begins to sing the opening verse of "Tinga Layo," he reaches into his clown pants and pulls out a - BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ!
Your alarm clock screams at you with a series of piercing rings. You slap blindly at the snooze bar - it's 7:30 a.m. You decide to skip your morning shower and fall back asleep.
The wailing re-starts at 7:38 a.m. You slap blindly at the snooze bar again.
You think, "I have 22 minutes until class, and it only takes me 10 minutes to walk to North Quad. I can pack my books in two minutes, and I'll just wear the fashionable high school T-shirt and zebra-striped sweatpants I have on, which will save me ... oh, screw it."
You stop solving the extensive story problem and fall back asleep.
It's 7:46 a.m. when the screeching resumes. You rip your alarm clock off your night stand and chuck it against the wall.
It stops ringing - forever.
Now you've overslept another class, and you wish you'd gone to bed earlier.
With finals week looming just a few weeks away, there is no more important time to start getting better sleep. A study presented last week at the American Medical Association's Science Reporters Conference found that students who got fewer than eight hours of sleep performed significantly worse than students who got more than eight hours. This might not sound surprising, but in a 2004 interview, Omar Burschtin of The New York University School of Medicine Sleep Disorders Center estimated that an astonishing 90 percent of college students suffer from sleep deprivation.
Sleep deprivation is often broadly defined as being robbed of sleep by other activities or getting fewer than seven hours of sleep in a 24-hour period. By not getting at least seven hours of sleep, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
An overload of classes, social commitments and work might make a good night's sleep seem out of reach. The key, however, is effective time management.
One solution that experts recommend is to change the way we think about time. We traditionally think about a 24-hour day, but we should try planning our days around 17 hours instead. Block off the chunk between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m., for example, then simply pretend it doesn't exist. It is essential that we do not let anything interfere with this time; we will plan to shut ourselves completely off from the world and just sleep.
To block off seven hours, you might need to figure out where you are currently spending time inefficiently. If you do the math, you'll discover you could have more extra time than you think.
There are 168 hours in a week. Even if you subtract seven hours a night for sleep, 20 hours a week for time spent in class, 20 hours for studying, 20 hours for a part-time job and 20 more hours for meals, you're still left with 39 hours - more than 5.5 hours a day to fulfill social obligations, relax and have fun.
If you still find it impossible to get seven hours of sleep all at one time, experts advise you to squeeze in an afternoon nap. While napping is less than ideal - as it might throw off your regular sleep schedule - all sleep is at least somewhat regenerative.
So as the tryptophan from the turkey takes its toll this Thanksgiving Break, roll with it and get some good sleep. Develop a regular sleep schedule over the vacation, and promise yourself that you'll stick with it - at least through the last month of classes.
You will be pleasantly surprised with how this regular sleep affects your learning ability in class, your grades, your physical appearance and, ultimately, your life. Plus, you'll save money on replacing broken alarm clocks.
Write to Brian at bggorrell@yahoo.com
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