On November 21st, the university library was open until 3:00 a.m. We all know procrastination can be a bad thing, but sometimes it can be a superpower, so the idea of being in opposition to procrastination is fine. You might be wondering then, “what is the problem then?”, the answer to this is often greatly overlooked by not just students, it is overlooked by almost everyone! What I am talking about is sleep.
Sleep is by far the most important thing next to eating and drinking water. It is a common misconception that getting less than seven hours of sleep will not have harmful effects on your mind and body. The research on sleep deprivation has found that lack of sleep can: decrease hormone levels needed for your immune system to function properly, increase the level of cortisol, a stress hormone, which negatively affects learning and memory, increase the number of car accidents because people fall asleep at the wheel, negatively affect concentration and focus, weaken cancer-fighting immune cells and age you quicker.
That is clearly a long list of negative things just from not getting at least more the seven hours of sleep. Perhaps, you might ask why do we sleep? When we sleep, our brain tissues get restored and repaired, having proper amounts of sleep allow neurons to repair themselves, but by far one of the main reasons why we sleep, is because it helps us remember and improves our problem-solving abilities. When we sleep the brain restores and rebuilds our memories of our day’s experiences. I am sure all of us have heard the saying “sleep on it”, that is not a cheap cliché. When Dimitri Mendeleev was trying to figure out the pattern of the elements and arrange the elements in a meaningful way, he would stay up for hours on end searching for the pattern. When he finally fell asleep, he dreamt of a table of elements, and when he awoke, he solved the problem. Another example is Kukele’s Benzene ring, Auguste Kukele was trying to come up the structure for Benzene, when he fell asleep in his chair, he dreamt he saw a snake eating its own tail. This is where he got the idea of the closed ring.
Conclusively, it is far more efficient, and effective to get proper amounts of sleep rather than study most of the night. You should try to aim for at least 8 hours of sleep every night, that way your mind and body have time to repair and rebuild.
Here are some sleep tips to help you out: 1. Keep the room cool at night 2. Don’t eat anything two hours before you sleep 3. Take your phone out of the bedroom 4. Remove all light one hour before you go to sleep 5. Don’t take your stress and problems to the bed; think about relaxing things 6. Use a diffuser; lavender has been known to aid sleep as well as tea tree oil. And lastly 7. Stop thinking so much! Just take deep breaths and relax.