I’ve got 99 problems and they’re all due this week.
The fourth week of spring semester is done—not like I’m counting or anything. If I wasn’t feeling slightly overwhelmed two weeks ago, I’m definitely feeling it now. My classes have evolved from PowerPoint presentations and endless textbook chapters into quizzes, tests and papers. Throw in endless amounts of homework, a job and the responsibilities of personal life, and I’m ready to resign from adulthood. Thank you for the opportunity, but it’s just not for me. If anyone needs me, I will be hiding in my blanket fort coloring and watching Netflix.
College life for me is like playing a multiplayer video game with a bunch of people on normal. Everyone playing has struggles, but over time their gameplay slowly improves. Although I’m technically on the same level as everyone, I feel like I’m playing on expert with a map in another language, no ammo, crappy vision and a controller with sticky buttons.
I’ve heard the college survival tips, “eat healthy, exercise and get enough sleep” so many times I’m starting to wonder if the people that can do those things on top of their classes are even human.
How do you expect me to eat healthy when a salad costs twice as much as a McDonald’s cheeseburger and isn’t as easy to eat on-the-go? I don’t cook at my apartment because I pretty much live at the school. When I try to eat healthy and buy produce, I forget I bought it and it sits in the crisper drawer molding into something worthy of any science class experiment.
Coffee and Red Bull are my best friends. My diet usually consists of coffee, Red Bull, more coffee, a couple hurried bites of a granola bar I found swimming around in the black hole that is my backpack, followed by more coffee. By the end of the afternoon on a school day, my body is shaking like a scared Chihuahua. The amount of caffeine I have in my body could quite possibly kill a small animal.
Exercise? I count running late to all my morning classes because I snoozed the 20 alarms I have set on my phone as cardio, so I’m covered there.
Sleep? What’s that? Is that a college term for a really long blink? Every time I close my eyes, I can’t stop thinking about how I need to get my act together and figure out what I actually want to do with my life. I’m fairly decent at math now from the endless nights of calculating the possible hours of sleep I could get, and it didn’t cost me $100 for an access code!
I’m so sleep deprived I accidentally fell asleep on the couch and woke up around two hours later wondering where I was and hoping I’d slept through the Donald Trump Presidency. You can imagine my disappointment when I checked my phone and saw the same drama on Facebook. I’ve come to the realization that being tired is just a part of my personality at this point.
I’ve learned that sleep is religious and my roommates know that if they wake me up, it had better be because the apartment is on fire. College is about learning things, not just about the world but about yourself. Learning how to survive college sounds humorous, but we all struggle with one thing or another. If sleep is one of your struggles, find out what is causing the problem. Is it stress? Too much caffeine late at night? Existential dread? Are you taking too many naps during the day? The Health and Wellness Center at DSU can help you. They have therapists you can talk to if you’re feeling overly stressed and nurse practitioners to help you find a way to get more sleep.
We’re all adults in college, but sometimes we need an “adult” adult—a person with more life experience—to help us.
We could always petition the school to create a nap class that teaches students on how to take effective naps. I could pass that class with my eyes closed!
