I want to paint you a picture of a student.
They are sitting on their bed; the room is only lit by the blue of their laptop screen. Next to them, on the bedside table, is their fourth cup of coffee, growing cold. Under the 1am light the bags under their eyes look like bruises. They are tapping away at an assignment due in three-days’ time, scrolling through JSTOR and Google Scholar and the online library database. They are exhausted.
Sleep is an integral part of our body and mind’s health, as the NHS puts it ‘The odd bad night's sleep can make you feel tired and irritable the next day, but it won't harm your health. However, regular poor-quality sleep can have a huge effect on your health, putting you at risk of developing serious medical conditions and can affect your body, thoughts, emotions and behaviour.’. Yet, for students, it has been totally normalised for us to skip nights of sleep for both study and socialising. For most students, in the juggling act that can include classes, revision, assessments, eating healthy, socialising, work experience, volunteering, exercise, relationships and more, the easiest thing to give up is sleep. Despite most adults needing between 6-9 hours of sleep a night, it often feels like there are not enough hours in the day, so we try and create them. However, it is an endless cycle where lack of sleep causes you to feel less productive the next day, so you feel more behind and therefore skip more sleep to catch up.
The truth is, despite the picture of a student I painted at the beginning of this article being a recognisable image, it’s not a happy one.
I suffer from bad sleep, even when I try to sleep well. I’m unfortunate enough to get anxiety dreams and nightmares on the majority of nights, as well as waking up at the smallest noises or disturbances. On top of this, I often have issues with falling asleep, lying awake for hours staring at the ceiling. With a lot of trial and error, talking to doctors and learning to listen to my body, I can now get enough rest that on most days I feel functional. The issue with being a student and also struggling to sleep, is that routine is basically not existent (especially in our currently online world). You spend the whole day staring at screens and, on an MA like mine, teaching time can vary from 5 to 0 hours a day meaning it’s hard to settle into study habits. This means it’s easier to get into the bad ones, where you watch asynchronous lectures at 11pm, or don’t bother getting out of bed until noon because you never have a class before then anyway. Sleep issues aside, students are almost expected to ignore their body in favour of their other experiences.
I remember in my first term of first year, regularly having less than 4 hours sleep because I wanted to socialise but not miss classes the next morning.
I remember staying up for over 48 hours because I was trying to get an assessment done, being ill for days after because my body had been pushed too far.
I remember writing an entire formative essay after a night out, in the early hours of the morning, because I hadn’t yet found my feet and nobody taught us routine was important.
I remember nobody ever telling me that doing all of these things was not only going to leave me feeling drained, but lonely, depressed and anxious all the time.
Luckily, I had friends and a support system of people around me who noticed this and began to check in. I started to find a way to balance my life better and learnt more about good sleep hygiene. No screens an hour before bed. No caffeine after 6pm. Don’t study from bed. Drink enough water. Find ways to relax in the evening – baths, calm music, candles, ambient sounds, sleep spray, warm caffeine-free drinks. All of these things helped, but nothing helped as much as realising that tableau of the tired student wasn’t something to aim for. People laughing and getting into those bickers ‘I’m so tired I got 5 hours sleep last night’ ‘Gosh me too, I only got four!’ ‘Count yourselves lucky I didn’t sleep a wink!’ was not something to become. I had to listen to my body, maybe forsake a night out or two (even if my flatmates kept asking), start my essays earlier and ignore the FOMO of what I expected my student years to be, to keep my mind okay.
I want to paint you a picture of a student.
It’s 10pm, they’ve just closed their laptop and put their phone on charge. The room smells of the lavender candle burning in the corner. They can hear rain pattering lightly against the window. A cup of chamomile tea is steaming next to the soft glow of the bedside lamp, and they get out a book that they’re going to read (just for fun, not for study). They lay back and read for a while, then switch off the lamp. Eight hours later, they wake up, ready for the day.
-Lizzie