How to sleep through high school

Sleep is that one thing that tends to get thrown out the window the fastest when we have high workloads. In fact, sleep is the sort of thing that kids think is cool to have less of. I bet you there have been countless times when others try to flex on you their lowered levels of sleep.

“I only slept 4 hours last night!”, “I’m running on 2 RedBulls and an espresso shot”, “yo imma take a nap real quick wake me up in 15”.

Those phrase’s are heard all too commonly amongst students nowadays, and usually for the worse off. I’ll be the first one to put my hand up and acknowledge I used to be guilty of that. My relationship with sleep has gone up and down throughout the years, from regularly scheduled bedtimes to staying up late and taking naps through the day. I’ve experienced it all, good or bad, and I’m going to be the first one to try give you an idea of the importance of getting your schedule right for high school.

The reason

The first step to establish is why sleep? I get it, the all too cliche good for your body, you won’t get sick, resets your mind might be repeated over and over again many, many times. But, the reason you might be bored of hearing it, is because you’re yet to experience the true power of sleep. And I don’t mean 24 hour naps, or sleeping in on a weekend just to feel drowsy and lay in bed scrolling reels. I mean sleep that wakes you up at the right time, makes you feel fresh, gets you down the stairs or into the kitchen, ready to eat breakfast, ready to go for the day.

From my personal experience, when I’ve set a routine to sleep at 11pm, wake up at 7am in Year 10 and 11, it was so easy to get out of bed, even if the only thing to look forward to was school. Contrast to my sleep around the middle of Year 12, I was sleeping at 3am, waking up at 8am, late for class, sleeping at 5pm waking up at 8pm after a nap. It ruined my schedule, it ruined my parents’ schedules and it ruined my friends’ schedules. They were all brought along for the sleepless ride, and certainly it took a toll on them as well.

Another key point is staying up late, you’re much less effective than you think you are. I was sane enough to keep a mental note of what I did from the hours of around 1-3am every night. Probably 40% reels, 30% actually looking at some work and another 30% yawning while scrolling through my work, making silly mistakes and what not on past papers.

I 100% fell for the “sleep if for the weak” sorta idea. It’s like a drug, you get that euphoric sensation of “i’m doing work when they’re not”, only to get slapped in the face and realise “they’re doing work when you’re not” AND “you’re not doing the work as well as you could be”. It slaps you in the face, leaving you with dark circles under your eyes, a saggy face and an overall much worse level of everything you can imagine.

Hopefully I’m not scaring you, but the point is that by sleeping well, you avoid all those pitfalls and navigate your way through high school with a lot more ease than you’d imagine. Your mind is going to stay fresh in class, no matter what you’re doing, even outside playing sports, getting sunlight, listening to speeches: sleep makes it all work.

The problem

It’s all fun and easy to talk the talk, I mean now I’ve told you about the benefits of sleeping vs the drawbacks of not, you’ve probably made a resolute promise to sleep earlier. But 99/100 times, a resolute promise is just as good as no promise, after all, you’re comfortable with your life right now, why change?

The problem, lies with the fact that it’s hard to see the reward of something like sleep, because it affects you in subtle ways. It’s not the dopamine rush of watching sports, nor is it the guilt of eating something unhealthy, the reward of sleep is clarity and attitude, two things hard to obtain with such ease.

When I was stuck in my cursed sleep schedule, I couldn’t see how much difference it would make. I would tell myself, If I skip my nap and sleep 3 hours earlier, I still get the same amount of sleep, what difference would it make?

Likewise, me telling you is the closest sensation you’ll get to what having good sleep feels like, but you actually following through and getting into a positive feedback loop is the only true motivation that can get you there.

The action

What you need, is a week. A week is all you need to turn something around. No compromises though, a solid week of good sleep. A week is enough for you to feel the effects of good sleep, to rewire your mind into treating sleeping early as a reward, not a hinderance to your studies.

If you’re reading this at night, go to sleep right now, don’t even bother reading the rest. I know there’s nothing important for you to do, given you’re reading this anyways.

If you’re reading this in the morning or the afternoon, I’d ask you to read through it again at night, and once you get to this part, shut yourself to sleep. There’s nothing worse than reading something, getting inspired, but getting distracted by the passing of time and eventually forgetting what you’ve read and losing that tiny bit of hope you got from it.

But as an exercise right now, I commend you to ask yourself: what did you really do when you stayed up late? Try answer it to yourself in full detail, write it down, e.g. I played 30 mins of games, I watched reels whilst looking at practice papers for 40 mins, etc, got through only 1 paper when I planned to do 2.

You’ll probably be amazed at the many inefficiencies you have as a result of working late at night. Fundamentally, understand that 3 hours during the day > 3 hours during the night, your return is greatest, no matter if you’re playing games or studying, during the day, not at night running on 3 monsters or something.

Maybe read this every day for a week straight; get in bed by 11pm, awake by 7am should be the latest your schedule is set. 8 hours of sleep, right when it’s night, wake up fresh and early, ready to go. Then that habit just builds and builds, and you’ll know what you’ve been missing out on.

The maintenance

Now that you’re on the path (or even better already have) to correcting your sleep, how do you maintain it?

It’s the stage we always hit, that euphoric feeling that we’ve achieved ago, yet the true achievers are the ones who maintain it day after day, not letting anything compromise it. It’s all to easy to hit that goal of 11pm to 7am, but then slowly let that slip and slip and slip away. After a month, you’ll be back to a 12am night, then a 1am and your hard work will have been all undone.

From my experience, the best way to counteract any wobbles is to balance it the other way. If you were x minutes late for your bed time last night, get yourself x minutes early to bed tonight. Or set moving targets throughout the weeks to keep you fresh, like a window between 10pm-11pm of possible times to get into bed before.

Anyways, I hope with some dedication, motivation and re-reading of this insight, your sleep can be fixed back to what’s good for you, not what you find normal.