We really can’t have it all

Ashley Major

Columnist

I recently heard that in college you have three options: social life, good grades or sleep, from which you can only pick two.

As coined and college-humoresque as it may seem, I can attest this is indeed a vicious love triangle college students are struggling to resolve. Likewise, these three options are by all means the most basic of what modern-day students must jam into their valuable days. We have to fit in workouts, internships, part-time jobs, extracurricular activities, student-clubs and the 45-minute standard time to find parking on campus. Something has to give out of our many options, and in most cases sleep is the first to be sacrificed in the name of all things fun and productive.

Richmond is an exciting place to attend college, as it seems something is always happening in our city: fashion week, sporting events, downtown weekends and Final Four celebrations.

It’s often hard to focus on what we really came to college to accomplish – earning an education. After the weekend settles down and Sunday rolls around, pulling an all-nighter seems to be the only way to accomplish the amount of work glaring at you from your daunting to-do list. One night won’t hurt, you think, as you down a Redbull and a double-shot espresso.

But this quick fix is habit forming, and you soon find yourself caught in a dangerous cycle. You sacrifice sleep in the name of productivity but in reality, your lack of recharging is hurting your capacity to excel.

While we claim youth and agility allow us to maintain this lifestyle, we need to recognize that this unhealthy pattern will inevitably affect our future.

Our young, resilient and energetic selves unfortunately do not give us the leeway we would like to imagine we have. Studies have shown that long-term sleep deprivation can lead to depression and symptoms of psychosis, creating an inability to distinguish appropriate emotional responses leaving one prone to mood swings and irritability.

Chronic sleep deprivation can also cause damage to various cognitive functions such as attention and memory, which are extremely important to academic success.

Like other strains we place on our bodies, often ignoring what we know better, we don’t realize the magnitude of the consequences these seemingly harmless choices can entail. The development of chronic sleep deprivation is something many college students fail to recognize and often attribute its symptoms to other things.

Difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, headaches, bloodshot eyes, depression and muscle aches are all symptoms that come from our self-induced medical condition and the likewise chosen lifestyle of many college students. All this leads us to become physically unable to focus on our studies, let alone make it through the day.

As the year is drawing to a close, and many of us are preparing our schedule for next year, I believe we owe it to ourselves to reconsider what we are willing to give up in order to live a more balanced life.

If we place sleep slightly higher on our list of priorities, it is guaranteed our health, vitality and GPA will correlate.