How to Succeed in School 101 - sleep
With the 2024 school year kicking into full gear, students are definitely starting to feel the pressure. From the unrealistic expectations of parents, the seemingly endless homework assignments, and juggling extracurriculars on top of all that: it’s no mystery that school can get stressful.
While trying to manage all of the chaos that emerges, one of the most important things a student can do to remain sane and as stress free as a highschooler can be is maintain a good sleep schedule. Although the highschool years are when adolescents mature and become adults so stress levels are naturally on the rise, we can still do our best to minimize stress by resting properly. After all, how can you focus in a class if you are falling asleep every 5 minutes? Today, I will be giving you tips and tricks on how to manage your sleep schedule so you don’t end up becoming sleep deprived.
As a person who has always had the worst sleep schedule, I often find myself getting dragged out of bed and sometimes dozing off in class. I have devised two ways to fix this issue: 1. Fix your horrendous sleep schedule or 2. Chug copious amounts of caffeine daily. Obviously, one solution is superior. You may find yourself asking: “but I have so much homework, how can I finish everything?”. One of the best solutions to stressful situations like this is to avoid them in the first place by having good time management. According to a study by the NIH, “48% of adolescents spent a mean of 5h per day on social media and 12% spent more than 10 h [1].” If you are spending more than 1-2 hours a day after school on social media and find yourself awake at 2 AM finishing your homework, it may be time to change things up. A good way to prevent yourself from doom scrolling on TikTok or binge watching all nine seasons of The Office in one sitting is by setting a time limit for yourself. Personally, limiting my screen time has made me much more productive and the same applies to anyone else who does so. For example, one way you could limit your screen time is by keeping all of your social media apps to a maximum of 1 hour, in TOTAL. Yes, you will be tempted to click that little “ignore limit” button at the bottom of your screen, but you must endure. The only one suffering will be you. Ultimately, you are forced to complete all of your school work and maximize your productivity because you’re not wasting that time watching cat videos on your phone (no matter how cute they might be).
If you think this solution is insane, you could try to improve your time management skills. Restricting your screen time may be useful, but it might not be enough to get you to start working; you could still find yourself procrastinating until 11 PM before starting any work. A good way to improve your time management skills is by creating a schedule for yourself or having a defined list of tasks. The lead cause for procrastination is not knowing where to begin. This makes it harder for you to procrastinate because you know exactly what to work on. If you are able to use your time wisely, setting a designated time for each assignment, it leaves little reason for you to still be snoozing in the homeroom. Some applications that help you manage your time wisely include Google To Do, Notion, or even just a timer that can help you focus while doing assignments. For example, you could set a timer for one hour and designate all of that time into completing your math homework. One issue that I’ve found while studying is that if I don’t set a boundary for how long my homework should take, and therefore spend hours on end completing one assignment due to distractions.
If you want to succeed academically and maintain a decent sleep schedule, you need to develop good habits and hone your time management skills. Good habits, however, are not easily learned. You may find yourself even more unmotivated to do your homework in the first few weeks of implementing these tactics. I should also admit that there are some days where you just have a lot of homework that you can’t finish. There were some days where I found myself, completely focused without any distractions, and still sleeping late at night. Days like this happen, and that's just a part of life. You must try to thrive in the chaos rather than let it consume you.
References:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9407706/
Jane Hu - Editor
Jane Hu - Author
