Why I Choose to Wake Up at 5:30 AM
As university students, we tend to further stray away from structured sleep schedules every single year through this journey. In first year, most of us are placed in 8:30 classes, and for the years after that, you might have one day off, and your classes not be till noon, hence, why students, especially those in the upper years, might not regard any structured schedule when it comes to sleep and may wake up past 11AM. As a fourth-year student who is trying to get some extracurriculars done to stand out in applications, it is very challenging to find time throughout the day to write out an application, or perhaps anything that isn’t studying. To do the things I have no time for, I figured that I had to make time for them. Over a period of a week, I tracked my activity and how I spent my time throughout the day, and I found out that past 10PM, I am either not being productive, or I am paying the price of not being productive earlier, as in writing a last-minute essay, or last-minute cramming for an exam. After that finding, I decided to set my alarm clock to 15 minutes less than the prior day, which started off at 8:15AM, and now it is set to 5:30 AM, to give me the 7 and a half hours of sleep if I slept at 10, which was the time where I stopped being productive.
What has changed, you may ask? I now wake up without the expectation to see emails that may ruin my plans for the day, or even get distracted by text messages and social media, as no one is awake at that time. In fact, I have enough time to study, workout, and even write this, in which I had never written voluntarily before. Though it is great to wake up and feel like you’re on top of the world, it was not an easy task to adjust my sleep schedule by any means. I had to turn off my phone and laptop at 9PM, an hour before I sleep to limit my eyes’ contact with blue light, which is known to demolish the homeostasis in melatonin, the hormone pertaining to sleep. Instead of studying that last hour on my laptop, I would print out the notes I would want to review, or I would keep the papers that are assigned for reading at the very end of my checklist, as reading most papers makes me want to sleep. On top of that, I had to endure a couple of days with suboptimal sleep levels, but I would have changed my alarm to get optimal sleep if I did have an exam or an assessment that day, as sleep is very important for your test performance. Though it was a tough task, feeling like you can conquer the world when you wake up, and having time just to work on yourself, is indeed worth every single challenge this task presented.
Written by: Said Awawda
