This is a guest post by Molly Cornfield, a senior at UCLA.
Most of us have our advice to live by. For some, it’s an all-encompassing quote by a well-known author, for others, it’s nothing more than a silly pun that can’t be traced back to any real source. My college experience has been guided by a quote from my father: “better well rested than well read,” an elegant phrase meaning that “if it’s 1 am the morning before your final and you haven’t finished reviewing the material, you should probably just give it up and head to bed.”
While many college students choose to cozy up in the library with a pot of coffee for the night, I’d prefer to heed my father’s sage advice and rest my mind for a decent eight hours. This may sound like nothing more than a convenient excuse to halt all efforts to learn and sleep away the stress, but these invaluable words have benefitted me tremendously throughout my university time.
Sometimes, it’s hard to find the time to knock-out at all, let alone for an entire night of blissful, uninterrupted sleep. Between school-work, extra curricular, social activities and physical exercise, eight hours of unconscious life may be low on your list of priorities, if even within the realm of possibility.
However, I write from the first-hand perspective of a part-time victim of this unfortunate, self-inflicted phenomenon. At various points throughout my college career, I’ve entangled myself in time-consuming extra-curricular activities, social commitments, and tedious schoolwork, and resorted to relegating sleep to my leftover downtime.
Through these self-subjected, (accidental) sleep deprivation experiments I’ve learned that I, personally, am incapable of even holding an everyday conversation on minimal shut-eye. As one might expect, my capacity for productive thought shuts down even before my social awareness, and a test on any material will not go well with my brain functioning on back-up generators.
After years of trial and error testing of my dad’s rest hypothesis, I’ve determined its thorough usefulness. From my in-depth studies (on myself), I’ve drawn the conclusion that school is a much more enjoyable (not to mention, doable) experience when I’m not struggling to keep my eyes open.
Hence, I have taken to doling out this advice myself, often warning my friends and classmates of the eminent dangers and unnecessary risks in mixing sleep deprivation with schoolwork. Even real scientific studies other than my own, one-girl experiment have proven the truth in my father’s timeless saying, showing that academic performance is enhanced on a complete night of rejuvenating rest.
So even if I don’t have the time to balance, I always make sure that sleep is high on the list of priorities. After all, what good is a night of studying with a clouded mind? Better to be well rested and maintain my analytical abilities, than to be well read up on materials I’ll likely forget before the test.
Photo credit: umjanedoan
